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Trying to Re-Start the Car
Sep. 4th, 2012 10:35 amI sent Cal back off to school again this morning, finally. The bus was almost fifteen minutes late, but I'm sure things will improve as we go along. Tomorrow I get to pick him up from school at 3:00 and take him off to his first music lesson in a month before running home for BodyCombat and YogaFit. Things are back on track, supposedly.
That said, I'm sitting here staring at that damn story again, like I sort of suspected I might be. Back on the train. (I also have to think of what to talk about in my ChiZine column, which is due Thursday or Friday.) So here's some stuff to tide us all over, in the meantime...a precis of (almost) everything I saw over our little mini-vacation.
First off, two weeks in, I'm extremely happy with Tom Fontana's new BBC America series, Copper, which is basically Gangs of New York boiled down for television and extended into ten hours instead of three. Great core cast of characters, some truly vicious stuff going on thus far, and a sub-plot or two which reminds me strikingly of some of the stuff I want to do with The Heart's Filthy Lesson. There's a bit of proto-CSI going on with Doctor Martin Freeman--a black former Army surgeon trained in Paris, whose wife was so traumatized by the Draft Riots that she now walks around with a pistol in her skirt, ready to shoot any white man who comes too close to the house--but the default investigational method practiced by our Metropolitan Police 'tec main character Kevin Corcoran is to just pick out somebody he thinks did it and beat on them with the Brass Knuckles of Justice 'til they confess. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but it's certainly tried and true.
The level of in-house police corruption is historically accurate, with the clot of fellow Irish Corcoran pals around with acting pretty much as a gang unto themselves, haphazardly solving crimes in between shaking down shopkeepers and crims for "the Captain's tax". Thus far they've managed to identify a high-placed child molester/murderer only to see him buy his way out of trouble, then engineered his execution with his now-widow's connivance, and while I'm happy this little vendetta didn't drag on, I'll be interested to trace its fallout. I'm also getting extremely fond of Corcoran's current GF Eva (Franka Potente), a Five Points madam with aspirations to set up on Wall Street and catch a few millionaires, and Corcoran's former commanding officer Robert Morehouse (Kyle Schmid), a charming, unreliable, near-constantly drunk playboy with a wooden leg and massive daddy issues.
Meanwhile, one of the unexpected pleasures of the CNE was a tent near the kids' Midway selling DVDs four for twenty bucks. I picked up copies of two slightly obscure Denzel Washington movies, For Queen and Country (In which he plays a Falklands veteran caught up in U.K. political shenanigans) and Fallen (in which he fights a body-hopping demon with a taste for the Rolling Stones), as well as letterboxed copies of both the excellent Robert E, Howard biopic The Whole Wide World and John Boorman's Excalibur, which I don't think I've seen since the 1980s. These went straight in my To Watch sleeve, along with cheap Criterion copies of Danton and The Red Shoes (finally!), the most recent 2001 remastering, Tom Shankland's The Children, Julie Taymor's Frida and a two-disk set of Richard Stanley's Hardware, which I'm currently in the process of moving through.
The jewel of my recent purchases, however, has to be a $9.99 collection of Hammer rarities (eight films on two DVDs, two per each disk's side) that includes not only Brides of Dracula, Kiss of the Vampire, Curse of the Werewolf and Evil of Frankenstein, all of which I'd wanted to see, but also four films I'd never even thought about picking up, at least one of which is pretty amazing: Night Creatures, in which Peter Cushing plays a former pirate running a smuggling operation out of a mash-bound village, while simultaneously masquerading as said village's mild-mannered vicar. It bears talking more about, as does Jess Franco's insane sexploitation "classic" Vampyros Lesbos, but this has already gone on too long.
Outside, it's pissing rain; inside, my brain is slightly less sludgy. Later.
That said, I'm sitting here staring at that damn story again, like I sort of suspected I might be. Back on the train. (I also have to think of what to talk about in my ChiZine column, which is due Thursday or Friday.) So here's some stuff to tide us all over, in the meantime...a precis of (almost) everything I saw over our little mini-vacation.
First off, two weeks in, I'm extremely happy with Tom Fontana's new BBC America series, Copper, which is basically Gangs of New York boiled down for television and extended into ten hours instead of three. Great core cast of characters, some truly vicious stuff going on thus far, and a sub-plot or two which reminds me strikingly of some of the stuff I want to do with The Heart's Filthy Lesson. There's a bit of proto-CSI going on with Doctor Martin Freeman--a black former Army surgeon trained in Paris, whose wife was so traumatized by the Draft Riots that she now walks around with a pistol in her skirt, ready to shoot any white man who comes too close to the house--but the default investigational method practiced by our Metropolitan Police 'tec main character Kevin Corcoran is to just pick out somebody he thinks did it and beat on them with the Brass Knuckles of Justice 'til they confess. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but it's certainly tried and true.
The level of in-house police corruption is historically accurate, with the clot of fellow Irish Corcoran pals around with acting pretty much as a gang unto themselves, haphazardly solving crimes in between shaking down shopkeepers and crims for "the Captain's tax". Thus far they've managed to identify a high-placed child molester/murderer only to see him buy his way out of trouble, then engineered his execution with his now-widow's connivance, and while I'm happy this little vendetta didn't drag on, I'll be interested to trace its fallout. I'm also getting extremely fond of Corcoran's current GF Eva (Franka Potente), a Five Points madam with aspirations to set up on Wall Street and catch a few millionaires, and Corcoran's former commanding officer Robert Morehouse (Kyle Schmid), a charming, unreliable, near-constantly drunk playboy with a wooden leg and massive daddy issues.
Meanwhile, one of the unexpected pleasures of the CNE was a tent near the kids' Midway selling DVDs four for twenty bucks. I picked up copies of two slightly obscure Denzel Washington movies, For Queen and Country (In which he plays a Falklands veteran caught up in U.K. political shenanigans) and Fallen (in which he fights a body-hopping demon with a taste for the Rolling Stones), as well as letterboxed copies of both the excellent Robert E, Howard biopic The Whole Wide World and John Boorman's Excalibur, which I don't think I've seen since the 1980s. These went straight in my To Watch sleeve, along with cheap Criterion copies of Danton and The Red Shoes (finally!), the most recent 2001 remastering, Tom Shankland's The Children, Julie Taymor's Frida and a two-disk set of Richard Stanley's Hardware, which I'm currently in the process of moving through.
The jewel of my recent purchases, however, has to be a $9.99 collection of Hammer rarities (eight films on two DVDs, two per each disk's side) that includes not only Brides of Dracula, Kiss of the Vampire, Curse of the Werewolf and Evil of Frankenstein, all of which I'd wanted to see, but also four films I'd never even thought about picking up, at least one of which is pretty amazing: Night Creatures, in which Peter Cushing plays a former pirate running a smuggling operation out of a mash-bound village, while simultaneously masquerading as said village's mild-mannered vicar. It bears talking more about, as does Jess Franco's insane sexploitation "classic" Vampyros Lesbos, but this has already gone on too long.
Outside, it's pissing rain; inside, my brain is slightly less sludgy. Later.
