Still Another Tough Old Animal?

I'm still not sure if this article quite belongs in this sequence. After all, Koko is only 33 (just middle-aged in gorilla years), and her use of sign language to complain about her toothache is hardly stoic. Eating the business card, though, trumps all those caveats.

The Village: Brief Review

What an extraordinarily dumb movie. The most obvious explanations turn out to be the answer for both of the major mysteries.

And of course these "explanations" prove Shyamalan to be a pretty clueless city boy, as there's no way the radically circumscribed setup he depicts could really work, economically or psychologically.

This movie continues Shyamalan's downward slide. I admired Unbreakable more than most people, but I actively hated Signs and The Village amplifies that flick's flaws: ponderousness, turgid dialogue, and awkward allegory. You ain't the next Spielberg or Hitchcock yet, buddy, and if you keep this up, you never will be.

Too Sane

I just finished reading L. Sprague de Camp's biographies of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert Howard.* They left me with a bad taste in my mouth. Part of my reaction is surfeit, having read them both in one evening . . . but jeez louise, the word around town wasn't wrong when it said this Lovecraft bio was hostile! de Camp's almost invariable procedure is to quote Lovecraft and to follow up with a challenge, offering his opinions as the final word. In some cases this is justified - Lovecraft was one very weird cat in a whole host of ways - but ultimately it seems egotistical and ill-mannered of a biographer to intrude himself so repeatedly and so obtrusively. It's also obvious despite demurrals that de Camp really dislikes Lovecraft as a person. It seems a clash of temperaments and values: the practical sensible man versus the unworldy dreamer.

There's more sympathy in the Howard bio - you would damn well hope there would be, as de Camp spent much of his career subsisting parasitically on the corpse of Conan - but there's way too much psychobabble for my taste. And even here I feel de Camp finds Howard a little distasteful.

Ultimately I think De Camp was just too sane to really understand people like Lovecraft and Howard. I'm reminded of Damon Knight's comment in In Search of Wonder: "Howard had the maniac's advantage of believing in whatever he wrote; de Camp is too wise to believe wholeheartedly in anything."

I look forward to taking a look at some of the other Lovecraft bios, S.T. Joshi's and maybe Frank Belknap Long's. But not just now. In a few weeks. Right now I'm tuckered out on these two of the Musketeers of the Weird.

*OK, OK, the latter is a colloboration with his wife Catherine and another person. Just in the interest of precision.

One Description Fits All

Last night I noticed this blurb for a movie on my satellite system:

The actions of people trigger consequences which propel new events.

For some reason I can't quite recall the flick's name today.

Speak nothing but good of the dead . . .

Following the above advice, here's a provocative article from last year. I remembered it immediately when I heard of Reagan's death.

Still Another Tough Old Animal

Third in an apparently ongoing series:

Meet Timmy the Tortoise, recently deceased veteran of the Crimean War.

Synchronicity

I received issues of two different magazines in the mail this week: The New Yorker and Asimov's Science Fiction. You wouldn't think they would have much in common, would you? Ah, but they both have stories entitled "Chicxulub," written by T. Coraghessan Boyle and Larry Niven respectively. Both victims of iridium poisoning, obviously.