Tuesday, January 06, 2004
Somewhere out there, there's an Office Depot delivery person who owes me one day of vacation.
We spent much of yesterday waiting on the delivery of a bookcase that never came. All day, a customer service recording told us we were number three of some large number of deliveries, and that the driver was currently on his first stop. All day. So, we sat here and watched it rain. Today, I'm going to the botanical gardens and the bookshelf be damned. Maybe it'll show up someday. I suppose this is why so many Americans drive gigantic, gas-guzzling, eco-devastating vehicles. So they can pick up their own frelling bookcases.
Last night, once the recording had been changed to say that the delivery would come today (now we're scheduled as 31 of 44 - sounds like a Borg name), we had burgers at Johnny Rocket's and then caught a 7:15 showing of Paycheck. I knew it was getting bad and lukewarm reviews, but I went anyway. And, well, it was entertainment for a couple of hours, but not much more. It was sort of a big, slobbering dog of a movie. I could almost forgive all the handwaving necessary to dismiss the assbackwards science, if so much of it hadn't felt formulaic. This is John Woo's fault, far as I can tell, not Philp K. Dick's. Ben Affleck doesn't help matters (Harrison Ford would have been far better in the role of Jennings). Mostly, I kept thinking what a better (or at least more interested) director could have done with a better draft of the script, one that focused on the film's mystery instead of the box-office appeal of obligatory action scenes. What Hitchcock could have done with this film, or M. Night Shyamalan. The usually delightful Uma Thurman sleepwalks through her role. And it has a perfectly dopey "happy ending" epilogue. Paycheck is a bit like eating too much cotton candy. Sweet while it lasts, maybe even too sweet, but as soon as it's over you wish you'd had a candy apple instead. Not so bad I'd want my money back, but were I you, I'd wait for the DVD. It's a shame that Dick's work doesn't fare better in Hollywood. I mean, if Hollywood's going to frell about with it, they might try just a little harder. Sure, Blade Runner great, and Minority Report was pretty good, but Total Recall sucked ass, Imposter was, at best, indifferent, and now there's Paycheck.
And thanks to Leh'agvoi, who not only draws a mean Nebari, but may have cued me into to my Low Red Moon is getting a somewhat cooler reception from "horror" readers and reviewers than did Threshold. To quote a post he made to my online phorum, "There is a definite difference in flavour between the two books. I found Threshold to be more sinister and Low Red Moon to be more sorrowful. There's sinister and sorrow in both books, but they seem more dominant in that way to me. Threshold had a stronger sense of chaos, a greater feeling of the natural order of things being ripped asunder, while Low Red Moon was about the natural order of things exacting its toll on the players. Low Red Moon had a greater feeling of sorrow because some, like Narcissa, were caught and didn't know it and some, like Starling Jane, were caught and knew it. The heartbreaking thing was the irrelevancy of delusions." I think that hits the nail on the head. Blam. Blam. Blam. I suspect that horror readers are much happier with "sinister" than "sorrowful," though they are of at least equal importance to the composition of that emotion we call horror. As I said on the phorum, where does the greater portion of horror lie? In the murderous details of a serial killer's actions? Or in the loss of the woman you love more than your own life?
If forced to take my pick, I'd choose to suffer the merely sinister over sorrow any day of the week.
There's not much else to be said for yesterday, except that the December '03 issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology arrived.. The vacation is 132 hrs., 23 minutes old. This counting of hours has replaced my usual word count.
Have you read Chapter One of The Girl Who Sold the World (just click Chronicles)?
Good news. How often do I say that? Not only did Spirit survive its descent to the Martian surface, but sperm counts have dropped by almost a third in 10 years. At least, they've dropped in England. I'm sure Americans wouldn't fare much better. At least I hope Americans wouldn't fare better. At this rate, in a century or so there might be some faint hope of getting the population under control. And by the way, I'm not one of those shrill childfree sorts that Poppy's been complaining about in her livejournal. I think kids are wonderful, in moderation. But humanity doesn't do very well with moderation. Whatever they can do, they do until the frelling wheel's fall off. In this case, the case of reproduction, until the world is clogged with their stinking, consuming bodies, pushing the planet ever closer to a monospecific biosphere (at least in terms of megafaunal elements).
Yep. Happy is my middle name.
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