Baltasar and Blimunda

As far as I can tell, Baltasar and Blimunda is the earliest of Jose Saramago's novels to be translated into English, a pattern which followed from then 1987 until his death two years ago. I'm basing this solely off of the fact that every book before this on his Wikipedia page has a Portuguese title, while all after have English titles- that's about as much research as I feel the subject needs. Anyway, as such, I assume this is sort of the beginning of Saramago's Western canon, and I wondered if he'd struggle to find his style and deliver a solid novel. Well, the style seems to have been figured out at this point (again, Saramago was on his eighth book by now) but the boring subject matter just couldn't hold my interest. We have two lovers- Baltasar, a veteran who lost his arm in the recent war, and Blimunda, a heretical clairvoyant, who join up with a priest attempting to build a flying machine in order to escape from the Spanish Inquisition. This was alright, I suppose, but by the time they escape the book quickly switches to a long narration of the construction of the Mafra National Palace in Portugal. At this point the characters lost all focus for me and there were just way too many references to the history of Portugal for me to bother understanding. Since this post lacks much content, I'm gonna take a little time to give a preliminary rank'ems to see where Saramago stands for me as I attempt to finish his English-translated books:

1. The Double
2. Blindness
3. All The Names
4. The Cave
5. Seeing
6. The Stone Raft
7. The History of the Siege of Lisbon
8. Baltasar and Blimunda

How about that, only four remain- The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, Death With Interruptions, and The Elephant's Journey. Will I have read all of Jose Saramago's novels before 2013? Stay tuned to find out!

A Game of Thrones

Just over two months ago, I watched the ten-hour first season of Game of Thrones in two nights. And now I've finished the 800-page book on which that season was based in barely more than a week. Chalk it up to George R. R. Martin; he's made quite a compelling story here. I've tried to get into the fantasy genre many times before, and honestly it shouldn't have been a difficult thing to do; I spent a lot of my first twelve years playing Final Fantasy games and Magic: The Gathering, and I was always fascinated by medieval times. But while I read like seven or eight Redwall books, I can't pretend in hindsight that I ever really liked them, and while I managed to enjoy the final two Lord of the Rings books just a few years ago, I found them much less entertaining and compelling than the movies. Some of my problems with the genre, ironically enough, stem from the very nature of "fantasy" itself; with magic spells and monsters and demons popping in and out of the narrative, how was anyone to make any sense of it all? And what was with all the merry singing and archaic language? I was amazed, when finally reading those Tolkien books, at just how much of them were dedicated to non-action. I mean, character development can only go so far, right? Once Pippin hits that fifth song at a bountiful feast, you kind of get the idea that he's a fun and happy guy. But I'm not here to bash other fantastical works of fiction; I'm only doing so to set up a contrast with A Song of Fire and Ice. Martin wastes no words on dancing and flute music and he doesn't bother pitting ogres and elves against each other; his characters are all human beings, mortal and flawed, and they struggle for power on the continent of Westeros primarily through warring and politics. There are still a few fantastical elements, for sure - dragons and zombies and an occult shaman or two spring to mind - but the vast bulk of the story (so far) has involved knights and archers and horsemen and vassalage and so forth. It really feels a lot more like historical fiction in an alternate universe than "fantasy." And most importantly, the characters in this world don't spend much time singing songs and drinking mead; they're always doing, learning, or plotting something, allowing for the book to be surprisingly action-packed. Most 800-page books contain a fair amount of filler, but I can't think of many paragraphs among these thousands that didn't contribute to the story and advance the pot in some way. Martin's biggest strength may be the way he alternates writing chapters from different characters' points of view. He just nails so many different tones and styles, whether writing from the perspective of a naive child, a hormonal teenage girl, an honorable and stoic warrior, or a rich and quick-witted playboy of a dwarf. I was already familiar with the events of this first book thanks to the HBO series staying so true to the original writing, but I look forward to continuing the series and finding out both where the show has diverged from the second book and, more importantly, how the series continues after the second book and season. I'm hooked! Follow my lead and you will be too.

Aesop's Fables

You've all certainly heard of Aesop, that ancient Greek slave who told all kinds of decent animal-based stories with morals. You've also no doubt heard or read many of these famous fables of his. I was always a fan of the little one-paragraph stories and the simple lessons they taught, so I went into this collection of nearly 300 such fables with high hopes. Sadly, those hopes weren't met. I guess there's a reason that Aesop's ten or twenty most well-known fables are, you know, ten or twenty in number. Most of these were just plain garbage, and what's more, many weren't really "fables" in the sense I knew that genre to be; instead, plenty of these little stories seemed like bad jokes with bad punchlines, dark stories with no real moral to them, or creation myths. Like apparently all ants used to be men but then Zeus turned them into ants and... nope, that's just one of these "fables" in a nutshell. Or how about the one where the snake gets stung on the head by a wasp and decides to fling his head under a wagon wheel to kill them both? That's just a tale of reckless revenge, right? Or the one where a guy's wig blows away and he asks, with a chuckle, "why should I have expected it to stay on my head when it didn't stay on its original owner's head?" That's not poignant, clever, or funny. (Is it? Am I missing something?) Furthermore, many of the fables directly contradict one another; there's one where the gods punish a dishonest man, and its moral is that "honesty is the best policy," but there's another where a man gives a king his honest and unflattering opinion and is killed on the spot - the moral, this time around, is that sometimes it's best to lie. Yes, plenty of these fables were groan-inducing, if not downright pointless. One involves a farmer starving in the winter to the point where he eats his sheep, and then his goats, and then his oxen. And then his dogs say, "we should get out of here; we're next." The fable ends there. There's no twist ending. There's no dramatic irony. This is just basic pattern recognition and a group of characters using common sense. Maybe something was lost in translation from the Greek in a number of these stinkers. I don't know. What I do know is that I came away from these hundreds of fables with far less an appreciation for Aesop and his tonal inconsistencies and moral contradictions. So I did a little research, and it turns out - and maybe I should have known this all along - that "Aesop" probably wasn't even a real guy, and that what I'd just spent hours reading was no cohesive work by a single author with a single vision, but instead just a hodgepodge collection of popular stories from ancient Greece. Blech. I always figured that we were in our modern era probably falsely attributing a number of "Aesop's fables" to Aesop, but I at least figured he was like Shakespeare - definitely a real person who may be falsely credited for too many works - and not so much like fucking Mother Goose. Oh well. The joke's on me. Maybe someone can write a fable about my follies and cram it into the next edition of "Aesop's" works. The simple one-sentence moral? "Stick with the ten or twenty popular fables you already know and stay away from the collection at large."

That '70s Show: Season 2

Can you think of a better way to kick off a birthday than by completing a season of a sitcom and posting about it on this blog? I clearly couldn't! At any rate, I've now finished the second season of That '70s Show. I mentioned (I think) while reviewing the first season that I was amazed how many episodes I'd seen, albeit out of order, and definitely in syndication. This season was familiar in a different way; I think I saw some of these episodes back when they originally aired, but there were plenty I hadn't seen before at all. I think Season 1 had more memorably classic episodes than this one did, but it was clear that there was a bit more direction and planning put into Season 2. Some mutli-episodic story arcs took place; Donna's parents fought a lot and separated before getting back together, Kelso tried juggling two girlfriends at once before getting dumped by both, and by season's end Jackie was falling for Hyde. The characters' physical appearances, the ones they'd have for the rest of the show's run, must have been ironed out after Season 1; their personalities, too, became more well-defined. Really, this was just a textbook second season of a long-running sitcom; the kinks have been ironed out, the potential has been mostly realized, and going forward it's just time to tell some stories with a writing staff and ensemble cast that know how to work well together. Oh, and Tommy Chong! Tommy Chong began guest-starring this season and pretty much stole every scene he was in.

The Sopranos: Season 6, Part 2

I knew how The Sopranos ended before I had ever watched a single episode. I knew all about the abrupt cut-to-black that took place at a diner during Journey's "Don't Stop Believing" and the ambiguous lack of closure the show ended with. I knew all of this because I was not living under a rock five years ago when the series finale made national news for being so unconventionally abrupt and vague. For the past fifteen months, as I've watched The Sopranos from beginning to end, I've never known what was going to happen next to Tony, his family, his crew, or his rivals, but I always knew the series would end with Tony, Carmella, Meadow, and A.J. gathering for dinner at a small town diner. And while I'd love to have been genuinely shocked and surprised by the now infamous cut to black, there was an undeniable excitement building inside me as the final episode grew closer and closer to that instantly buzz-worthy scene. In a way, knowing what was coming gave me a strange adrenaline rush that I'm sure most people didn't get organically from a Journey song and a diner scene.

Let's back up though. I'm here to recap nine episodes' worth of this show, and that iconic final scene was merely one of hundreds that composed the final stretch of The Sopranos, arguably the most game-changing drama in the history of television. Yet I don't really know what to say about this half season in general. I loved it? It was excellent? All that seems trivial and obvious. It's tough for me to start picking it apart and analyzing its relevance because doing so would open up the floodgates for me to re-visit the entire series from start to finish. You know what? Fine. Let's just jump right into the series in general, its legacy, and any general statements I feel like making on it. In bullet form, even.

• The Sopranos instantly joins The Wire atop my list of favorite TV dramas of all time. This is, admittedly, not so different from the top pairing in many other "best drama ever" lists, but what can I say? I think both shows were phenomenal and so do most other people who have seen them. Mad Men and Breaking Bad are near the top as well, but both of those shows are ongoing and I want to withhold final judgment. I think I still put The Wire above The Sopranos when it comes down to picking one absolute greatest show of all time, but The Sopranos holds many other superlatives, including "most iconic," "most definitive," and "most thematically pure." More on this in a bit.
• If I side with the masses in taking The Wire and The Sopranos as my top two all time dramas, let me run counter to popular opinion with this next statement. I think that, contrary to popular opinion, The Sopranos got better and better with time. If this two-part sixth season is to be taken as one season, then it's easily my favorite of the six. If not, Season 5 may prevail over the individual halves of Season 6 taken separately. A lot of people criticize the show for overstaying its welcome by just a little bit, and many think that the final batch of episodes was a bit aimless overall. I totally disagree, as I found several early episodes to be kind of dull or meaningless on their own, but considered every single Season 6 episode to be a fantastic stand-alone piece. While I generally love ranking the individual seasons of a TV show or the books in a series, I'm honestly a bit stumped here since the seasons are largely just loosely serial collections of episodes and since the series in general just feels like one complete work rather than six or seven smaller chunks that can easily be compared against each other the way that, say, all five seasons of The Wire could be. I'll need to re-watch the series from start to finish some day before I can even pretend to have a preference for certain seasons.
• To reiterate, I need to re-watch the series from start to finish some day. There are too many other shows I've seen and enjoyed that I couldn't honestly say that about once I'd finished them for the first time.
• Back to that "thematic purity" thing. I think that, while many great shows are so many things, The Sopranos is, by and large and above all else, primarily concerned with the moral decay of 21st century America. It's a cynical, cynical show, in the end, and while it's easy enough to sympathize with or root for certain characters, not one of them comes off as righteous or innocent. Violence and crime run amok, obviously, but the show delves far deeper, showing the hypocrisy of mob wives, the entitlement of mob kids, the bitterness and jealousy of elderly, and the overall unawareness of everyone over how horrible they're really being. The more I consider various stories and characters from the show's run, the more apparent it becomes that every single person was acting with his or her own best interests in mind at all times. This was not a show where noble heroes made silent sacrifices, and it was better off for avoiding giving its characters any redeeming qualities.
• Tony Soprano is probably the most complex yet well-defined character I've ever seen. Not only are we given valuable insight to his past and his unfiltered opinions in his nearly weekly therapy sessions with Dr. Melfi, but also we're treated to some pretty intense and symbol-laden dream sequences. There are plenty of strongly developed characters out there; Don Draper is a man with a complicated past, Walter White is undergoing a slow but total moral decay before our eyes, and Coach Eric Taylor was an absolutely unwavering rock for both his family and his football team. But there is no character I've ever seen whose mind we are more readily invited straight into than Tony Soprano.
• For what it's worth, I think the series ends with Tony getting whacked. I've read compelling Internet pieces arguing for various interpretations of the controversially abrupt ending, and creator David Chase has refused to explain anything, claiming that doing so would diminish the message, but also promising that there is in fact a definitive ending and that, at least in his mind, things aren't open for interpretation. Once again though, I don't think I'm straying too far from the beaten path with this understanding of the final scene of the series.

Great season, great series, and an ending that was just fine in my book. Now I only wish I had something to look forward to watching as much as I always did The Sopranos.

The Jungle

A few years ago I posted Oil!, Upton Sinclair's muckraking novel about the oil industry that turned out to really be about socialism, and I said I would likely read Sinclair's best known book, The Jungle, someday. With Gallagan's shelf winding down (I've been saying this for a while, I know) I finally got to give it a chance. Unfortunately, I didn't really enjoy it. The novel's introduction by Jane Jacobs details the book's main criticism- it's not quite journalism, but it's not very good as a piece of fiction either, and then claims that this doesn't really matter because most of all the book is above all else a very important work. For those who don't know, The Jungle exposed the horrors in Chicago's meat-packing industry in the early 20th century and inspired a major public outcry, causing Teddy Roosevelt to pass acts that eventually led to the formation of the Food and Drug Administration. This is all great, I mean how many books really enable social changes in their author's liftetime? But it doesn't make for all that interesting a read 100 years later. I suppose the story about the book is more interesting than the story in the book. Lithuanian immigrant Jurgis Rudkus moves to Chicago in the early 1900's expecting to be able to provide for his family with his slaughterhouse job, but through all sorts of mistakes and unfortunate events the family ends up dirt poor and everyone needs to find a job. Things keep going from bad to worse as random members of the Rudkus family get sick, injured, and die, so Jurgis eventually flees the city to briefly live as a hobo. Being a hobo isn't all that great either, so Jurgis finally comes back to the city and ends up joining a Socialist movement, delivering impassioned speeches on the importance of labor unions. This all could have been very interesting I suppose, but it just didn't do much for me. For one, the characters here are all pretty flat and boring. This stands in stark contrast to Bunny and his father in Oil!, where it's no surprise a great movie was made from the source material. The Rudkus family's descent into poverty just didn't surprise me much either- I was expecting to be shocked at the working conditions Jurgis works in, but they were about on par with what I thought they'd be. Granted that's not a fault of the book, which is probably the reason I knew conditions were so bad in the first place; it's just another reason the book won't have nearly the same impact a century later. Finally, I just didn't like Jurgis much in the first place. I know we're supposed to sympathize with him, but randomly attacking people when he's mad and abandoning his family to be a hobo aren't really endearing qualities. Sure, he thought his family was all dead or long gone, but the guy still could have looked a little harder before up and leaving the city. His sudden rise through the ranks of the Socialist movement towards the end of the book felt pretty unnatural as well- throughout the book he's been an uneducated man who relies on his physical strength, but suddenly he's this great orator? I dunno, it all just felt like a rushed version of Bunny's similar transition in Oil!. I shouldn't lay it on so heavy here though- The Jungle seems to be Sinclair's biggest bombshell and he should be lauded for his ability to start a flurry of activity for labor laws and health conditions, but if you're looking for a book that you'll enjoy reading you might want to look towards his later works.

Equilibrium

I doubt I'd ever even have heard of this 2002 dystopian movie had Keith never shown it to me one night back in college. After a second viewing a year or so later, I still wasn't really sure if I was ultimately ambivalent toward the mostly forgotten film or if I had developed, like Keith, an actual appreciation for it. When I recently found the DVD on sale in some bargain bin or another, I knew it was time for a third viewing, this time going solo and without anyone around to hype it up. My conclusion? That Equilibrium is a fun but strangely flawed movie. Released within a year of Minority Report and both Matrix sequels, Equilibrium was a failure both critically (37% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes) and commercially ($20 million budget, $1.2 million domestic box office). But it's got all the makings of a decent and likable movie. There's a solid cast, there's a great sense of atmosphere and set design, there's beautiful gunfight choreography, and there's a generic enough plot - high-ranking and respected agent of the dystopian state undergoes life-altering experience and then comes to rebel against the dystopian state - that the movie never grows overly convoluted or confusing. But where Equilibrium falls short of becoming a legitimately good movie trapped with a bad movie's reputation is in trying to answer that broad question all dystopian fiction must in some way answer. "Why does this world work this way?" The movie begins with some expository narration about how there was a third world war in the early twenty-first century, and how in order to prevent a fourth one, the various governments of the world needed to get rid of people's... emotions. Right off the bat, we've got a flawed concept. Emotions don't lead to warfare. They lead to small-scale fighting and violence, for sure, but global wars tend to be based on economics, famine, religious fanaticism, and other basic concepts that have always risen and abated regardless of human emotion. This isn't to say that there's no place for anti-emotion agencies in dystopian fiction; placating the masses is a huge trope when it comes to totalitarian states, but this is typically so that the people won't rise up and overthrow an oppressive regime, not so that there will be no more wars. I suppose you could make the argument that the movie is intentionally holding its cards close to its chest, and that maybe we're only given the same shoddy anti-emotional rhetoric that the government is using on the people, but the issues don't stop there; countless times throughout the film we see people acting on certain emotions - rage, jealousy, the desire to protect loved ones - and these emotions are never called into question or punished. It seems as though the world of Equilibrium seeks only to curtail certain emotions at certain times, but the distinctions are never really made clear, and this lack of clarity rears its head especially hard when the punishment for feeling things - "sense crime" - turns out to be immediate execution without trial. Compounding the issue is an unwaveringly dark and humorless tone that never lets up for Christian Bale's character to even so much as crack a smile or laugh or weep while holding another person in his arms; even after he discovers what it is to have feelings, he never really seems to have any. I'm not sure if this is the general issue critics had with the movie, or if it's in some way why audiences never showed up, but this strange and specific flaw is what kept me, ultimately, form fully enjoying Equilibrium. And that's a shame, especially because of how many components of a really good movie there actually are here. Some of the gunfight scenes, I should reiterate, are really just incredibly choreographed and well-made. In the end, if Equilibrium is nothing more than a solid combination of acting, action, and ambiance, it's still worth seeing. Maybe not three times, but at least once.

The Wind Through the Keyhole

I knew this book was coming out but I didn't actually keep track of the date of it's release. I saw a review of it and found out that fellow loggers Sweeney and Trev had already began reading the book. I didn't want to read either post because I like to be surprised by a books content, so my obvious choice was to go read the book! I am in a middle of a few other books right now and have been logging at a snail's pace, but this book brought me back to me normal reading ways.

I was a big fan of the Dark Tower books, and I was a big fan of this book. I think it is a great addition to the series for those who have already read the series. It picks right up with Roland and the gang and I was happy to be reading about them again. The threat of the starkblast was a nice way to introduce us to some back story told by Roland. The story about Roland and his pal Jamie and the skin men was interesting. But the story that shined in this book was, as the title suggests, The Wind Through the Keyhole. I thought the story of Tim and his journey through the woods was thoroughly entertaining. Like seriously, what the hell was that thing beneath the bridge with the tentacles? And the throcken! I want one! They just seem like dogs, but even cooler somehow. 

All in all, it was great to be back in Mid World. I think King did a good job with this book. More of present Roland, more of past Roland, and more of Mid World lore. Now I guess I should go try to finish the less exciting other books I am reading. 

Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever

I recently saw The Cabin in the Woods, a horror movie that's been praised and lauded for being a ridiculously over-the-top blend of parody and homage, and one that is certainly unlike just about any horror movie out there. Funny, gory, and tonally absurd. The Cabin in the Woods was definitely worth the hype and the acclaim. But it still wasn't quite as good as a similarly-named hilarious horror movie from ten years prior: Cabin Fever. Cabin Fever had the set-up and outcome of any generic horror flick; a bunch of kids go camping in an isolated area in the woods, and then an infection - in this particular case, a water-borne flesh-eating virus - begins to take them down one by one. They die one by one at the hands of both the virus and each other, and we're left with the knowledge that the deadly water is now being bottled and shipped around regionally as drinking water. What makes the film work so well is its ability to simultaneously play straight and also be filled with sophomoric gags such as thinking you're fingering a girl and then realizing you're just fist deep into a festering wound on her inner thigh. I wasn't around for the early '80s, obviously, nor have I seen many horror flicks from that time, but apparently Cabin Fever was a pitch-perfect homage to that specific period and genre, perhaps with a greater sense of self-awareness. Whenever you can include the line, "That guy asked for our help and we lit him on fire!" organically into your movie, you've made a fantastic movie.

At any rate, Cabin Fever was indeed a fantastic movie, but this sequel was not. The premise just barely allows it to be a natural continuation of the original movie's story; the bottled water makes its way to a high school prom, and sure enough, there's an outbreak on the dance floor and kids are puking blood all over each other and a number of dresses and tuxedos are ruined. Spring Fever manages to recreate Cabin Fever's gory campy style very well, actually. The problem this time around is a complete lack of tonal awareness and charm. There are too many characters doing too many things both before and during the prom, and before we can even figure out who is who (and who has already had some of that bottled water), we're at a full blown crisis. There's also an unfortunate shift from "humorous amounts of excessive blood and gore" in the original movie to "really gruesome and no longer funny depictions of rotting flesh, loss of teeth and fingernails, the bloodiest bathroom miscarriage ever seen, and a mangled penis that oozes a strange orange pus." Blech. Compound this with the issue that none of the characters are especially memorable or differentiable - there's a reason stock stereotypes like "the dumb slut" and "the brainiac" and "the asshole jock" exist, after all - and there really aren't too many saving graces here. It'd be easy to pin the letdown on the change in directors, since Eli Roth just seemed to know exactly what he was doing in the first movie, but even Spring Fever's director, Ti West, apparently did his best to distance himself from this final product. I guess there's plenty of blame to go around, but perhaps the original movie was just never going to have an equal sequel regardless.

As a follow-up to Cabin Fever, then, Spring Fever is pretty much a failure. New cast, new director, new setting, and none of the old charm. But as a stand-alone campy and grotesque B-movie, Spring Fever does the trick just fine. There are allegedly two new Cabin Fever movies in the works, and even though this one showed that slapping the franchise name on a movie about a flesh-eating bacteria does nothing to actually make it anything like that original Cabin Fever movie, I'm sure I'll at least be interested in checking them out at some point in time. You know - should they come to fruition at all. Anyway, if you haven't had the pleasure yet, see Cabin Fever. It's awesome.

That '70s Show: Season 1

I've got several loosely connected thoughts on That '70s Show's first season. It's time to jump into paragraph format!

First, a quick description. For those who are somehow unfamiliar, That '70s Show was a period sitcom that ran for eight seasons and 200 episodes on Fox from 1998 to 2006. It launched the careers of current superstars Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher, and to a lesser extent, well known actors Topher Grace, Wilmer Valderrama, and Laura Prepon. And yet for being such a career launcher and lasting for so long, the show feels remarkably forgotten by the masses to me. It was never the funniest or most popular show on TV, sure, but I can't think of a single person who has so much as brought up its existence since the day it ended six years ago. Maybe I'm just way off base here, and perhaps the show is much more deserving of being a cultural footnote than I think, but I mean, this thing aired from when I was in fifth grade until two days before my 18th birthday; I "came of age" watching these Wisconsin teenagers for eight years (among other things) and yet the show seems to exist in some kind of vacuum within my own memory. I remember watching it in sixth grade, and in ninth grade, and even occasionally in my senior year, and I remember friends and peers doing so as well. But why has society at large apparently forgotten about That '70s Show? No one sees Ashton Kutcher and remarks, "that guy was Kelso for eight years!" or makes a similar observation of Mila Kunis. These people didn't just appear out of thin air in 2005. Is the show even currently airing in syndication on any of those hundreds of cable channels? Maybe I'm just being an idiot here - but can you think of a time over the past five years or so where you so much as heard a reference made to That '70s Show? I can't!

It was partially out of this confusion over the show's apparent lack of any sort of legacy that I recently purchased the first four seasons on DVD. (That the four seasons came to less than $30 total was another good reason.) I'd seen a whole lot of episodes of That '70s Show growing up, but in an era before DVR and regular viewing habits, I basically just caught the show when it aired, often in repeats, and rarely had any real sense of its continuity - not that continuity matters so much in a period sitcom. I was very surprised, then, when watching this 25-episode first season, by just how many episodes I'd already seen, either in part or in full. I always figured I'd seen - very roughly speaking - about half of the series. Yet I swear there have only been two or three episodes so far that I didn't see. Perhaps more surprisingly, though not necessarily in a  good way, was how many of these first season episodes I recalled as classics, or some of my favorites. Again, I only saw so many episodes, and the idea that so many of the good ones have already happened here in Season 1 doesn't exactly fill me with hope for Seasons 2 through 8. I figured that if anything the first season would be full of episodes I hadn't seen, but I guess that doesn't make sense given the way syndication works and all.

The other thing that really surprised me - this time in a good way - was just how quickly the show got off the ground and running. This wasn't a show that needed time to figure out how to develop its characters or anything; right away, just about every main character had been established as the archetype I'd always remembered them as being. There was the sweet and doting mother, the gruff hard-ass (but loving) father, the brain-dead good-looking guy, the cool guy with sideburns and aviators, the quirky foreign kid, the tomboy girl next door, the shallow rich girl, the super-slutty college sister, and the everyman in the middle of it all. The show wasted no time on "will they or won't they" tension, as Kelso and Jackie are dating prior to the pilot episode, and said episode ends with Donna and Eric kissing, setting up an inevitable pairing off that would occur without much teasing or dramatic interruption; I'm pretty sure they were an "official couple" by ten episodes in or so.

Another thing? Tons of seventies references. Like, I know that's kind of the show's big gimmick and all, but I was floored by just how specifically "seventies" the first ten or twelve episodes managed to be. Disco. Pong. New wave feminism. Kiss. Star Wars. The gas crisis. President Ford. I guess, in the show's defense, no one knew during those first thirteen episodes or so that the show would last for 200; might as well cram in every seventies reference while you can, right?

So, yeah. I always enjoyed this show, but I've spent the last week being particularly impressed by the strength of this initial season from start to finish. As long as things don't veer downhill fast, I could see this being a great investment. And if they do? Meh. I've logged my way through worse.

The Wind Through the Keyhole

Nearly a year ago I read The Stand and in my blog post assured everyone that I'd be sure to get back to Stephen King very soon. Well, I guess a year was my definition of 'soon' cause I have now finally read another King book. Trev, Marissa and I have posted many books in the Dark Tower series, and a few years after completing the series Stephen King has decided to return with a new installment- The Wind Through the Keyhole. You see, in between Wizard and Glass and Wolves of the Calla, an unspecified amount of time passes as Roland and his crew journey along the path of the beam. This was enough room for King to add in a story, but as we all know not much can happen- no character's life is in danger, no one can learn anything too important or change in a meaningful way, as we already know what happens in the next three books. So for the most part, King doesn't have his characters do much except batten down the hatches and prepare for a hurricane, lasting all of 30 pages or so. Even if it was brief, it was just nice to catch up with these characters, it was like reuniting with some old friends. And King actually manages to make the scene pretty tense too, considering I knew no one was in any risk. For another 50 or so pages, the gang waits out the storm as Roland tells a story about his youth; specifically his second major adventure as a gunslinger, months after the events of Wizard and Glass as he and friend and fellow gunslinger Jamie DeCurry attempt to rid a town of a shape-shifting monster. During this tale, young Roland must attempt to calm an even younger child, so he tells the popular Mid-World fairy tale 'The Wind Through the Keyhole'. This sub-sub-story takes up a majority of the book as we witness a young boy seeking revenge against an abusive step-father and stumbling into the world of gunslingers and magic. While not directly affecting the story of Roland and his ka-tet, The Wind Through the Keyhole tale does wonders to expand on the backstory of Mid-World. We learn more of how Merlin and King Arthur fit into the whole thing, and the strong allure the dark tower can have on many outside of our ka-tet. And really that's a good way to describe the whole book- expansion. The Wind Through the Keyhole is pretty non-essential but is an enjoyable return to the story. I'm wondering how it affects the flow of the series as a whole- many complain about how book 4, Wizard and Glass is so heavy on  backstory, so to immediately follow it up with another book of backstory would probably frustrate new readers. I've heard that Webber has started up The Gunslinger, so maybe he'll have some input if he gets into the series. Hop to it, dude!

The Wind Through the Keyhole

Oh, Dark Tower. Will your story ever end? Hopefully not. Last week King released the newest addition to the Dark Tower saga, The Wind Through the Keyhole. In his introduction, King points out that this novel sits as book 4.5 in the chronological sequence of the seven book series. Now, for my own sense of organization, I've always conceptualized the Dark Tower series as two trilogies divided by a flashback story that's always stood as some sort of intermission, if you will. In my reviews, it was this intermission (Book IV: Wizard and Glass) that I ragged on quite hard for the lamest reason of all: it didn't progress any farther into the main storyline. In hindsight, it's a great story. You've got a troubled town, a witch, a band of criminals, and a tremendous flight at the climax to cap it all off. Plus we dive deeper into Roland's mysterious past learning of his first love and her tragic fate. There's a lot to this story that I really never gave any credit to until now. Why is that? I blame it on this book. With the Dark Tower saga finally put to rest, I was able to gauge this novel based purely on its entertainment without obsessing over whether or not efficiently ties into the overall story arc of Roland and his ka-tet's quest to save the Dark Tower from crumbling and unraveling the universe. In this current frame of mind, I can look back at W&G and smile knowing it's a damn good book. But what about Wind Through the Keyhole?

Nothing amazing, but definitely entertaining. 

Before I go any further... Marissa, as the only other DT reader out there (knowing Sween has already polished this guy off), avert your eyes. I tend to recklessly spill important information.

Trying not to make it sound more convoluted than it is, The Wind Through the Keyhole is a story within a story within a story - yeah, one of those. However, it's really not as confusing as it sounds. King does a great job at keeping the third tier story (what is the real crux of the whole book) simple and different enough from the other two story lines that you don't get headache trying to understand everything. The premise is this: Roland and the ka-tat (straight after the event of W&G) are held up in a house waiting out a brutal storm. During this time, Roland regales everyone with yet another tale from his mysterious youth. Following right after the tale he spoke of in W&G, he is sent out on another mission by his father to track down the skin-man (a shapeshifter who can morph into various deadly animals) who has been slaughtering people in a small village far away from Gilead (Roland's home town). While trying to solve the mystery of who in this run-down village is the skin-man, Roland takes in a young boy who witness the skin-man's killing. Buying time before the kid will help identify the suspect, Roland tells the child a story his mother used to tell him... and this is The Wind Through the Keyhole. 

Having nothing to do with Roland (past, present, or future), this tale is a bit of Mid-World folklore. A young boy of a lumberjack community loses his father, supposedly, to a dragon while working in the woods one day. Time passes, and the Convenant Man (is this suppose to be the Man in Black, Sween?) returns to town to collect on taxes. With the threat of losing their home, the boy's mother remarries their father's partner to help pay off the taxes. Things take a downhill for that family from there. The new husband is a drinker, and constantly beats the boy's mother - she eventually loses her sight as a consequence to this. With some devious advice from the Covenant Man, the boy sets out on journey through the woods that will lead to the discovery of his old man's true death and the cure to his mother's blindness.

In retrospect, this book doesn't really have to fall under the guise as a "Dark Tower novel" as it says on the cover. Yes, Roland is the narrator and the fable takes place in an Mid-World setting, full of its magic, dangers, and charm, but the story could stand all on its own. Then again, it might not sell as well if it doesn't have that Dark Tower tag-line. What a tic... What am I talking about? This is Stephen King I'm talking about here. He could sell a piece a paper he's used to wipe his ass - not that he has or would - and still make a killing on sales. I suppose it's just nice to meet our old friends again, even if it's just to catch a quick glimpse of them while they're in passing.

One final note. In King's foreword, he dedicates this novel to Marvel. I remember someone in my screenwriting adaptation classes busting out a Dark Tower comic books to adapt (I did Tin-Tin before it was on the slate to be a Spielberg film... respect). Anyways, it got me thinking. Does my Dark Tower journey have to end here?

Shutter Island

Gallagan had a bunch of books on his shelf that were later made into movies I've seen, but for some reason I've persevered and read through all of them finally with the completion of Shutter Island. Dennis Lehane's been posted here a few times, but his novels are usually a little more straightforward than this. Shutter Island is still a gritty crime drama taking place around Massachusetts, but it's also a period piece that's proves to be a bit more experimental than Lehane's other novels. In the 50's U.S. marshal Teddy Daniels is called to a sanitarium located on an island off the coast of Cape Cod to investigate the disappearance of a patient, Rachel Solando. There's no evidence of Rachel making any sort of escape, and yet she leaves clues taunting Teddy and hinting at a much bigger conspiracy and the truth behind what goes on at the island. All of this culminates in a fantastic twist I'd put right up there with Fight Club and Usual Suspects- yeah, I know, I'm still treating the book like a movie. Even though I had seen the movie before, the book proved to be a taught thriller that kept me interested regardless of whether I saw plot twists coming or not. It's a great story that I'd recommend to any of my fellow bloggers- be it in book or movie form.

Top Gun

Ever since my DVD collection collided with my girlfriend's, this movie has been eyeing me. No, I've never seen Top Gun. Shocking as I feel I might be the only one. (Running with this failure, let me just take the time to expose some other renown films I have also yet to watch: Braveheart, Godfather 2 & 3, JFK, Seven Samurai, Dr. Strangelove, Lawrence of Arabia, Gone with the Wind, Taxi Driver, Manhattan, 81/2, and Network - sad to say I've actually seen very little of Paddy Chayefsky's work. Let the "booing" commence.) But seeing as there are rumors of Cruise working on a new sequel I thought it deserved a go, and...

What a homoerotic film! I'm not ragging on it for this or anything, but, I mean, 'BROMANCE" doesn't even begin to explain the camaraderie these pilots have for one another. Locker room banter. Windmill hi-fives. Always cheering or teasing one another while wearing nothing but a towel or whitie-tidies. Then you have the rivals, Maverick and Iceman, constantly starring each other down - I can only imagine what's going through their minds. It always looks as though they're on the brink of a huge make-out session. Oh, and, of course, there's the infamous volleyball scene. Never even seeing this movie, I knew of this bit. (I'm pretty sure anyone with at least a moderately familiar with pop-culture knowledge does.) Man-on-man, no shirt, jeans, baby oil, and aviator sunglasses... all in slow motion. That's how you do volleyball.

All kidding aside, the film was good as many of Tony Scott's films are. It was fun and delivered on the action. I actually thought of this film a lot like an old buddy-cop flick in the sense that there's scene after scene where the commander will be screaming at our two pilots for being reckless and dangerous; they break all the rules, but always get the job done. Regardless of what I mention earlier about everyone seeing this film but me, let me just surmise the premise as a reminder for all. Hot shot air fighter pilots from across all branches of the US military are entered into special training program called TOP GUN. Their goal: to make the best even better. Basically that's the story. We follow two pilots from the Navy (Maverick and Goose) who are elected into the program after their peer has some sort of mental breakdown and drops out. They, amongst the rest of the Top Gun students, all vie for the position to be the best in the school. SPOILERS. Goose ends up dying after some plane malfunction. Maverick waivers on the decision of dropping out. Iceman goes on to win the award for best pilot. Maverick returns and flys with Iceman on a real mission where they manage to put their rivalry aside to the win the day. Yay for your happy endings... Oh, and Maverick gets the girl. Of course there's a girl in the story, but, from what I gather, they didn't really need her unless the producers we're trying hard to balance out the film's homoerotic vibe.

For all of those out there that have either seen the film or know a little about fighter jets and all that jazz, I have a question to pose. What is the purpose that pilot who sits in the rear of the jet (AKA Goose's role)? From what I can gather they do absolutely nothing. I know they definitely don't fly. That became obvious int he first scene when Maverick's peer has that mental breakdown and can't fly the plane back to the aircraft carrier. All the co-pilot could do during this precarious time was just shout ahead saying, "Fuel's low. Let's get back to the base." Is their job to just monitor the fuel gage? Please, someone explain this to me. Otherwise, I'm thinking these "co-pilots" are a total wash - sorry, Goose.

Let me end this post posing one more question: Which TOP GUN character are you?

Sweet mustache! I would like to Viper...

...but we all know damn well I'm just "that guy".

Mulholland Drive

What the fuck?

Tempted as I am to leave my post after those three words, which honestly sum up my Mulholland Drive viewing experience quite succinctly, a film this unique deserves more. I'll do my best. I went into the movie knowing it was famous for being vague and obscure and without any real "correct" interpretation of events. That was fine by me, though; some of my favorite movies have always been puzzle-like in nature, forcing the audience to think about a movie hard and often, even long after the credits have stopped rolling. For a brief period of time in high school, for instance, I became obsessed with Donnie Darko, watching it five or six times in one month and scouring the Internet for various interpretations, at one point being absolutely convinced that I had "figured out" every single aspect of the story. And whenever I finish something like Memento or The Prestige, in which some grand twist is revealed at the end that changes the interpretation of the rest of the story, I'm usually ready to jump right back in immediately for a second viewing. But Mulholland Drive wasn't a "puzzle" movie in that sense, nor can I wrap my head around just about anything I just saw. On a day where I felt more cynical, I'd probably be able to honestly call this one of the worst movies I've ever seen due to its complete disregard for cogent narrative and a semblance of a plot; on a day where I was feeling more artistic and generous, I'd probably be able to honestly call it one of the best movies I've ever seen because of the sheer number of memorable scenes, moments, and characters. I dunno. For me, the jury's still out. I liked what I just saw, but I'm not about to deconstruct it without the aid of a good night's sleep and several virtual pages of fan interpretations. So for now I'll just ask again...

What the fuck?