End-of-the-Month Update

Writing

This month got off to a slow start, but after a couple of weeks I was able to pick up the pace and the last two weeks have been pretty productive. I had to backtrack some in the current novel because I realized I had fouled a few things up and gotten off the track stylistically. Fixing the stuff that had gone wrong didn’t take too long, and I expect the rest of the book to roll along at a normal rate of speed. I was also able to figure out the plots for a couple of upcoming books and get short outlines done for them. That’s always a good feeling.

Reading

I read the following books in July (as usual, they’re listed in the order in which I read them):

EASY COMPANY AND THE MEDICINE GUN , John Wesley Howard (Stephen Winston)
EMPIRE, Orson Scott Card
THE NEW AVENGERS: SENTRY, Brian Michael Bendis
THE VENGEFUL VIRGIN, Gil Brewer
THE SONG IS YOU, Megan Abbott
NOTHING PERSONAL, Jason Starr
THE NEW AVENGERS: SECRETS & LIES, Brian Michael Bendis
ROBBIE’S WIFE, Russell Hill
THE NEW AVENGERS: THE COLLECTIVE, Brian Michael Bendis
THE CASE OF THE SUN BATHER’S DIARY, Erle Stanley Gardner
EASY COMPANY AND THE BLOOD FEUD, John Wesley Howard (Paul Lederer)
DATE WITH DARKNESS, Donald Hamilton
WARHAMMER: SWORDS OF THE EMPIRE, Marc Gascoigne and Christian Dunn, eds.
RAINTREE: INFERNO, Linda Howard
THE FARMERS HOTEL, John O’Hara

Movies

These are the movies we watched in July:

BANDIDAS
HALF PAST DEAD
THE LAST MIMZY
THE PRIZE WINNER OF DEFIANCE, OHIO
THE QUIET AMERICAN
MAN OF THE HOUSE
THE CORE
THE PRESTIGE
FACING THE GIANTS
BLACK SNAKE MOAN

A mixed bag, to be sure. By the way, we’ve pretty much given up on being able to understand all the dialogue in modern movies and now turn the captions on just as a matter of habit. It’s amazing how much more sense some movies make when you know what they’re saying. Of course, in some it still doesn’t help all that much.

Black Snake Moan

Look up the word “lurid” in the dictionary and you’re liable to find one of the posters for the movie BLACK SNAKE MOAN. Most of you have probably either seen the movie already or at least know what it’s about: a blues-playing farmer in the South, played by Samuel L. Jackson, chains the local slut, played by Christina Ricci, to his radiator so that he can break her from her sinful behavior. It’s a pretty far-fetched premise, but writer-director Craig Brewer and his cast make it seem perfectly reasonable. There’s some scenery-chewing, but everybody plays it pretty much straight, which goes a long way toward making the audience believe in what’s going on.

This movie is part updated Gold Medal backwoods novel, part Southern gothic, and part country noir. It actually reminded me of Daniel Woodrell’s novels more than anything else. The music plays a large part in it, too. I’m not a big fan of the blues, but the songs really work here. Maybe I’m just a sucker for redemption stories, but at its heart, even with all the sex, violence, and cussin’, I think BLACK SNAKE MOAN is more of a Christian movie than, say, FACING THE GIANTS (although I’m sure the folks at Sherwood Baptist Church would disagree with me). This is a very good movie, maybe even a great movie, and easily the best new film I’ve seen so far this year.

(In the spirit of fairness, I should add that I’m the only one in the Reasoner household who feels this way. But I’ve been the oddball many times before, and I’m sure I will be again in the future.)

The Farmers Hotel -- John O'Hara

A lot of authors have used the old plot of having a group of strangers thrown together by circumstances and then seeing what happens among them. John O’Hara does it in a short novel from 1951 called THE FARMERS HOTEL. Set in a small town in Pennsylvania, the story finds a rich couple from Philadelphia who are married (but not to each other), a trio of small-time entertainers (a couple of strippers and their piano player), and a sullen truck driver who drinks too much all forced by a blizzard to stop at the hotel of the title, which, as it happens, has just reopened under new ownership. The middle-aged hotel owner, the cook, the black bellman/bartender (who has an adventurous history involving World War I and gangsters), and the local doctor are also on hand.

As usual with O’Hara, there’s lots of dialogue, most of it very well-written. The story gets darker as it goes on, and the ending is downright bleak. I gather from what I’ve read that this isn’t regarded as one of O’Hara’s better novels; in fact, some critics at the time called it his worst. I haven’t read enough of his work to make any judgments of that sort. But I can say that I enjoyed THE FARMERS HOTEL quite a bit, and it only makes me want to read more of O’Hara’s books.

Facing the Giants

We love our inspirational, heart-warming football movies around here. It’s even better when they’re based on a true story, which, as far as I know, FACING THE GIANTS isn’t. Or maybe it is. From the looks of it, the fine folks at Sherwood Baptist Church in Georgia got together and said, “Hey, let’s make a movie.” Many of the young actors playing members of the football team from the fictional “Shiloh Christian Academy” are actually members of the Sherwood Christian Academy team. The actress playing the head coach’s wife is the wife of the real head coach. Alex Kendrick, the actor playing the head coach, also co-wrote and directed the movie, and the closing credits include a lot of other people whose last name is Kendrick. In other words, this is a pretty low-budget, backyard production with a heavy emphasis on religious values in addition to the usual sports movie elements.

It’s also, perhaps surprisingly, a pretty entertaining film. The production values are very good, the script has some nice humorous lines to offset the preachy moments, the small-town setting is absolutely authentic, and the acting, while not smooth and polished by any means, has enough realism to it to make it effective. These people aren’t just delivering lines, they’re tapping into things that come right out of their own lives. And the football scenes are nicely realistic, something I always pay attention to in movies like this, except for one last-minute plot twist that would never happen in real life. I wouldn’t recommend FACING THE GIANTS for everybody, but if you like sports movies and aren’t bothered by the religious angle, it’s worth watching.

Raintree: Inferno -- Linda Howard

Paranormal novels are hugely popular in the romance genre right now, as some of you probably know already. I suppose this boom was prompted by the success of TV shows like BUFFY, ANGEL, CHARMED, etc., plus the best-selling status of novels by Laurell K. Hamilton, Charlaine Harris, and others. Silhouette Books has started an entire line of paranormal romance novels, the Nocturne series.

RAINTREE: INFERNO is the first book in a trilogy within the Nocturne line, about a centuries-long war between two rival clans of wizards, the Raintree and the Ansara, who have varying powers, most of them somehow connected to the elements. Dante Raintree, the hero of this novel, is a Fire Master, able to start and control fires, heat, smoke, etc. The heroine is Lorna Clay, a “stray” wizard, not aligned with either side in the war and in fact unaware of it -- and her own powers -- until she stumbles into an attempt on Dante’s life by agents of the Ansara.

There’s enough sexual tension here for the book to qualify as a romance, but for the most part it’s actually more of an urban fantasy/suspense novel. The author, Linda Howard, is a veteran romance writer who has produced work in several different sub-genres, including some mainstream romantic suspense novels that I’ve read and enjoyed. She’s a very smooth storyteller and keeps the pace rolling along in this book until it reaches a cliffhanger ending that has me thinking I’ll probably read the other two books in the trilogy.

I’ve read quite a few romance novels over the years, mostly of the historical and romantic suspense varieties. Teresa Medeiros and Marsha Canham are probably my favorite romance authors. Medeiros’s BREATH OF MAGIC is one of the best-plotted time travel novels I’ve read, and Canham’s medieval adventures are full of well-written action. So it’s not surprising that I would read some of these Silhouette Nocturne books, but in the spirit of full disclosure, I admit that I have an ulterior motive. Livia’s going to be writing a book for the line, which means that sooner or later I’ll be reading and editing the manuscript. So I want to get a good feel for the style and pacing of the novels they publish. RAINTREE: INFERNO was the second Nocturne I’ve read. The other was BLOOD SON, a vampire novel by Erica Orloff, which I also enjoyed quite a bit. I’m sure I’ll be reading more.

Longarm and the Hell Riders -- Tabor Evans

This is the August release in the series, and it features an outlaw gang with blazing skulls where their heads should be. I'm just guessing, of course, but I'd say that the author of this one must have been heavily influenced by Western pulps, Three Mesquiteers movies, comic books, and things like that.

The Prestige

THE PRESTIGE is one of the magician movies that came out fairly close together a while back, THE ILLUSIONIST being the other. I liked THE ILLUSIONIST fairly well. While THE PRESTIGE got better reviews, as far as I remember, I didn’t think it was as good.

It’s certainly clever, well-written, and well-directed, with good performances from Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale as feuding stage magicians and Michael Caine as the designer and builder of the illusions used in Jackman’s act. I found the story extremely difficult to follow, though, as the plot kept jumping around in time. And I’m still not sure I understand the ending. But maybe I was just too tired to keep up with all of it. Normally, I like movies (and books) where nothing is what it appears to be at first, so I’m inclined to give THE PRESTIGE the benefit of the doubt and say that it’s probably a better movie than I thought it was. This may be one of those I have to watch again sometime, just to see if it improves on a second viewing even though I’ll already know the plot twists.

Or maybe not. There’s a lot out there to watch that I haven’t seen yet.

New Avengers Trade Paperbacks

Between other books over the past few weeks, I’ve been reading trade paperbacks reprinting various story arcs from the NEW AVENGERS comic book: SENTRY, SECRETS & LIES, and THE COLLECTIVE. A year or so ago I read the first New Avengers collection, and these volumes represent about the next year and a half’s worth of issues from the comic book series.

Now, the Avengers and I go ’way back . . . to Christmas Day, 1963, in fact, when a couple of my girl cousins gave me a stack of comic books they didn’t want. Included in that stack was a copy of AVENGERS #1, which I thoroughly enjoyed. When I went to the drugstore the next week, the fourth issue, which featured the return of Captain America, was on the spinner rack. So I bought it regularly from then on, until I pretty much gave up reading comics in the mid-Nineties.

When I read these collections from current comics series, I’m a little lost sometimes because of that gap in my reading, but luckily nearly all the characters in NEW AVENGERS are ones with whom I’m familiar, like Cap, Iron Man, Spider-Man, and Luke Cage, so I was able to pick up the storyline fairly well. All of these volumes were written by Brian Michael Bendis, one of this era’s top comics writers, and while his plotting has the same slow pace most modern comics do, he writes really good dialogue and overall I enjoy his stories. SENTRY, which is about the introduction of a superhero who seems to have a long history in the Marvel Universe, even though nobody really remembers him, is the best of these three volumes in my opinion, but I liked them all. The art is by various hands, and reactionary curmudgeon that I am, I still think most modern comics artists just aren’t very good storytellers, at least not on a par with the ones from the Golden and Silver Ages. But I was able to follow what was going on in these stories, at least most of the time.

I’ll never be the fan of modern comics that I was back in the Sixties and Seventies (which is why I read so many reprints from that era), but I can recommend these NEW AVENGERS reprint volumes. I enjoyed all three of them quite a bit.

The Core

We missed this movie when it came out a few years ago, so when we came across a copy of the DVD at the library we decided to go ahead and watch it. It’s a near-future scientific thriller about how the earth’s outer core stops rotating for some reason, which causes the electro-magnetic field around the planet to start dissipating, which is going to lead to all sorts of disasters and ultimate destruction unless an intrepid team of scientist/adventurers can bore down to the earth’s core in a special vessel made of Unobtainium (to quote Dave Barry, I am not making this up) and restart the core’s rotation by setting off a series of nuclear explosions.

Now, Mr. Wizard I’m not. But if that plot description sounds pretty far-fetched to you, well, it does to me, too. This is definitely a movie that requires a large amount of suspension of disbelief. If you can shrug your shoulders, though, and say, “Okay, I’ll buy that”, it’s fairly entertaining. Lots of special effects and lots of dialogue like “We’re approaching the core/mantle interface!” Aaron Eckhart is a brilliant, ruggedly handsome scientist. (Brilliant scientists in movies are always ruggedly handsome, although it’s acceptable for them to have brilliant scientist sidekicks who are semi-nerdish. Unless of course the brilliant scientist is female, in which case she’s intelligent-looking but still hot.) Hilary Swank is the former astronaut who pilots the ship going to the earth’s core. She’s very capable and intelligent-looking -- but still hot. As for the rest of the crew . . . well, you can pretty much figure out what’s going to happen to them.

Which is another problem that THE CORE has. If you’ve ever seen any other movies in the near-future scientific thriller genre, or read any books like that, you’ll know everything that’s going to happen ’way before it does. There was one minor twist near the end that I didn’t see coming, but I should have.

Despite my sarcasm, I did enjoy this movie. It’s silly and predictable, but there are some nice lines of dialogue and I was able to accept the spirit of the whole thing. I was a little disappointed that they went all the way to the Earth’s core and back, though, and didn’t stop even once in Pellucidar.

Warhammer: Swords of the Empire

For a while now I’ve been reading this anthology of heroic fantasy stories set in the universe of the Warhammer role-playing game, using the stories as breaks between novels. It’s a good collection of tales, and as usual with Warhammer, you get a variety of stories ranging from pure sword-and-sorcery (the title story “Swords of the Empire” by Dan Abnett and “The Nagenhof Bell” by Jonathan Green) to fairly-clued mystery (“The Case of the Scarlet Cell” by Gordon Rennie) to a Western with fantasy trappings (“Meat Wagon” by C.L. Werner). I enjoyed all of them. Abnett’s yarn is probably the best-written of the bunch, with a nice plot twist. From what I can tell he seems to be the superstar of the Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 authors, but this is the first thing I’ve read by him. I’ll probably get around to reading one of his novels before too much longer.