Review: Traitor

I just finished watching the first really good movie of 2009 (for me--it actually came out last year, but I [natch] caught up to it on DVD, instead of seeing it in theatres): Traitor, written and directed by Jeffrey Nachmanoff from a story developed by he and Steve Martin(!), with Don Cheadle and Guy Pearce headlining. It's a complex, provoking story about an American-raised Muslim--Cheadle--who joins an international terrorist cell after developing a jailhouse friendship with Omar (Said Taghmaoui, probably better known as the Iraqi officer who speaks in jive while torturing Mark Wahlberg in Three Kings, like so: "Oh my God, buddy! No, I haven't even told you the really terrible part, my main man!"); Pearce is the FBI agent chasing him, who slowly begins to realize there may be more going on here than he originally thought. I particularly responded to the film's portrayal of its protagonist's faith, which manages to be both unwavering and intelligent. "Remember who you answer to," somebody advises him, late in the game; "I answer to God," he replies. "We all do." But there are a million other reasons to watch, from taut suspense sequences to the luminous set dec and color-scheme...orange figures heavily, as do designs made out of light. As ever, I seem to recall people were extraordinarily harsh on this when it came out--here's hoping Nachmanoff recoups by going directly to the audience. The surprisingly literate imdb.com reviews I've seen thus far seem to indicate that it's already making a positive impression amongst those who want to understand rather than dismiss what's fast becoming the primary bugaboo of the 21st century (ie, Islam first, terrorism second).

Next on the Are They Really Shit? docket: Pride and Glory, Righteous Kill. As ever, I worry that not having to do this for a living is making me into a big softy--but maybe not, 'cause I didn't even bother watching more than twenty minutes of Baghead before deciding that if I never see another messy little indie film about how Hollywood is mean! and ladies who won't sleep with me are mean! and all my friends are dumb! and so am I, hee hee!, it'll be too fuckin' soon. (This goes double for "meta" films about horror made by people who obviously never watch horror films, and have no interest in them aside from dissecting their imagery/philosophy, neither of which they understand or care about to begin with.)

Then again, I guess most things probably just tend to seem better when you're not paying fifteen bucks a pop for them, and get to go to the john whenever you want. Mystery solved!

Strange Happiness

I'm weirdly pleased, this morning, to discover there's no possible way I could ever have applied for the writer-in-residence job at the Judith Merrill Collection and hoped to be given it, since one of the primary criteria is: "Must have published at least five novels or short story collections", which I just haven't. So I don't need to feel bad about there being only a week left, and can just go back to doing what I was already doing.

In other news: Jim Emerson, just STFU about The Dark Knight, okay? You don't like it, we get it, great, move on--it's not the end of human civilization, and even if it were, you're hardly important or interesting enough to save us from ourselves. The only good thing to come out of any of this crap you've been posting for roughly the last million years is the thread in which you challenged TDK fans to explain what they DID like so much about it, and people actually stepped up--intelligently and ably, I might add! So go find something you like, and leave us alone: Your work here is done.

A Book of Tongues: THUD

Words added: 1,042.
Where you at?: Chapter Two, section two...still. I hope to get through this conversation my characters are having sometime before the end of the week.
Words overall: 14,261.
Victories: I don't think I'm going to need to do much more research to get to the end of this sequence, which is a form of ecstasy in itself.
Challenges: Given all the discussion of cultural appropriation going on recently, I have to admit that much of what I just wrote will seem horribly racist at first glance--not in terms of content, hopefully, but definitely in terms of how my characters are behaving. Unfortunately, it's also historically accurate, and I don't know how to get around that except to keep doing what I've been doing: Making the non-white characters hopefully just as awesome and threatening, and trying to soothe the sting with small jokes like having one guy insist on speaking pidgin Cantonese to people who obviously only speak Mandarin.

Also: 500 more words on "Strange Weight", which takes me almost past the reef of action this chapter keeps snagging on. Can I hook this up before Friday? Stay tuned.

P.S.: I was also maybe thinking of doing that first lines of open files thing, cf. cristalia. Anyone interested?

P.P.S.: Hey, you know what else really reeks, in Hot New TV? The Mentalist. Oh my good God: I could sort of take the pilot, especially since Jane was revealed to have already been bitch-slapped at least once for his heinous behavior--not that I'm in favor of wives and kids dying, of course--but the hilarious part is, it doesn't really seem to have changed him much beyond making him harass a completely different set of people for purposes of justice as opposed to purposes of making lots of dough. Then I was watching last night's episode and realized that it hit two particular notes kelpqueen had recently pointed out to me as being completely unbearable: Its main character consistently acts in a way no other human being would ever let him get away with for long, and whenever he comes onscreen, the soundtrack suddenly turns into a herky-jerky mishmash of ooh, oh HEY! something FUNNY! something FUNNY GONNA HAPPEN! any fuckin' time now, NO DON'T GO, FUUUUNNNNYYYY!...

Yeah, not so much. Eat a dick, Mentalist.