handful_ofdust

Tonight I've made arrangements to go see The Rendezvous, and have agreed to make myself available for questions afterwards (which means I kind of have to show up for the actual film, because I can barely remember anything about the story I wrote for them. It had...conjoined twins in it? Or maybe it was a variation on The Dark Half, except with chicks? Yeah, that might have been it). So I'll be wending my way down to the Revue for 9:00 PM, leaving Cal with Steve, and before that, I need to do some serious supplemental food-shopping, because we're running out of everything, very fast. I don't even have Coldwater Tide, which is pretty bad, in a three-loads-of-laundry-per-day home.

Yesterday, meanwhile, I managed to do 1,800 words of notes, then took Cal over to the wading pool for two hours, and finally read Sarah Rees Brennan's The Demon's Surrender, a fun capper to a really enjoyable series full of dark magic, reflexive violence and genuinely amusing snarkery, as opposed to the sub-Buffy variety (ie, "spank your inner moppet, whatever"). On the way home I rented some more movies, and watched one of them: Shelter, a straight-to-DVD release with Julianne Moore and Jonathan Rhys Meyers, which mixes DID/MPD debunking with what initially appears to be straight possession, then takes a weird-ass turn into Appalachian mountain magic/sin-eating/gothic freakery. Obviously a bit too interesting--and possibly disturbing, considering how stuff pans out--for wide release, though the pedigree is good on one side ("producers of The Ring") vs. questonable on the other ("writer of Identity"). Next up: Either The Warrior's Way (steampunk ninja Western), Wake Wood (Hammer horror, whoo hoo hoo), Forget Me Not (Mean Girls-centric ghost story) or Djinns: Stranded (a French film pitting Foreign Legionnaires against, um, djinns).

I also continue to work my way through Thriller. One episode that completely engaged me was "God Grante She Lye Stille", a neat-o little story featuring a curse that allows an executed witch/vampire to prospectively occupy the body of her nearest female relative (always with the gender essentialism, Satan! It'd've been hilarious if she was allowed to just pop into whoever was handy--but then again, that wouldn't allow for all the sickbed eroticism of her doctor becoming Edgar Allen Poe-type infatuated with that most glorious of subjects, a beautiful woman dying young). One way or the other, I loved everything about this one--fatalistic, visually inventive, full of fine performances and an evocative score. Made me want to switch to "History's Crust", not that I'm going to.

Okay, back to it. I probably need to get out of here by 11:00, if I'm going to shop.