The Waiting Place

Not much to report.  These days I’m mostly I’m sitting around waiting for responses to a few proposals, playing a bit of my favorite addiction Civ4 and working on a few new ideas.

I did see two movies recently that reminded me how I’m often out of synch with critics and movie-goers.  9 for instance has received a ton of raves from sundry quarters.  The story of a group of post-human inventions that look a but like sock-puppets is a pretty movie, I’ll give it that, but the characters (aside from twin librarians whose eyes fluttered in an exciting way) were flat, and the story of the cookie-cutter variety, up until an ending that creaked and groan to make any sense whatsoever.  But… show some people your cigarette lighter and they’ll worship you as a god.  Go figure.

On the flipside, Taking Woodstock received pretty banal reviews and has been dying in the box office.  I don’t particularly like Ang Lee (hated his Hulk for instance) and more often than not I find Demetri Martin annoying.  All things considered I was expecting to dislike the movie.  Instead, I was very happy for its entire two hour length.  It’s a terrific look at the sixties with incredible acting, great characters and a brilliant knack for combining the truly intimate with the explosively cosmic.  Imelda Staunton deserves an Oscar for her crazed portrayal of the mother, and Demetri even shows some fine acting chops.  I was particularly impressed by the way the movie manages to capture both the light and dark side of the hippie movement, giving it it’s credence but also pointing to the downside of giddy idealism (especially in a final reference to Woodstock’s dark brother, Altamount.)   Ant’s making thunder, as one acid-tripping fellow says.

Reading-wise, I’m enjoying the second part of MT Anderson’s Octavian Nothing, the story of an African American in 18th century America given a fantastic education by an early think-tank, then left homeless to experience the American Revolutionary War.  It’s been on my shelf for months, but I’d been too busy reading non-fiction research for my own projects to give it a look.  Took me a while to get into it.  The intensely intellectual period language was off-putting at first, but it acquires weight if you stick with it long enough for a wonderfully rendered fictional reality to take hold.

That’s about it for now.  Pax.