BEST POSTER EVER


Oh man, I want one of these.

WE CAN NAME HIM "BOB," OR WE CAN NAME HIM...

Beowulf
AMC Hampton Towne Center 24
Hampton, VA
DLP Projection
11/24/07

The morning after I saw The Mist, my Dad and I went to see Beowulf. I'm not quite sure what to think. It feels a little distant to me, but that may be because it doesn't really feel like the motion capture animation technique has progressed to a point where it doesn't feel gimmicky. It feels like we're watching a step towards something, but we're not quite there yet. Still, it looks better than what I saw of The Polar Express.

I haven't pretended to read Beowulf since college, so I had to go back and see exactly how the original poem went. Neil Gaiman and Roger Avery's screenplay covers the three main events of the original (Beowulf fights Grendel, Beowulf fights Grendel's mom, Beowulf fights a dragon), but integrates the events in a different way, while still acknowledging that the story told in the poem is still valid as a story. The film is about storytelling, and about how the story of a hero is sometimes as important or even more important than the reality of the hero himself. That's what's interesting about Beowulf.

Which brings us to the 3-D. I figured that if I was going to see this in a theater, I had to see it in 3-D. We tried to see it in IMAX on Thanksgiving, but the Riverside IMAX was not open as early as advertised. So we saw it at my old theater in their new DLP house and paid the two extra dollars for the 3-D glasses and saw the oldest story in English told with the most advanced technology available. In 3-D. But here's the thing. As impressive as the 3-D effect is, I'm not sure it's any less of a gimmick that it was when introduced in the 1950s. It doesn't do anything to immerse the viewer in the story, because it still isn't true three dimensions. It's still action on a series of panes and we're already viewing a two dimensional image with the illusion of depth anyway, so the effect doesn't do anything more than distract from the story. So as a storytelling device, I'm not really sure if 3-D adds anything. I'm not sure it's necessary.

But I could be wrong.

Ghoulies and Ghosties and Long-Legged Beasties

The Mist
Regal Kiln Creek 20
Newport News, VA
35mm
11/23/07

Major spoilers ahoy.

Frank Darabont's adaptation of Stephen King's "The Mist" feels like an open letter to moviegoers that reads thusly:

Dear Audience,
Fuck You.
Sincerely, Frank

I saw this with a group of about ten other people in a small, sold out theater on Black Friday. Most of them did not like it. Most of them did not like it at all. Jamee is still mad at me about the pharmacy sequence.

I liked it. I liked it a lot.

I haven't felt as exhausted after a movie since Children of Men, which my friend Marie echoed as we were leaving. I think she and Kevin liked it. I'm not sure about them. I do know that I felt bad about her getting dragged to a horror movie knowing that she does not like them, but she said she was fine once the tentacles showed up. So I don't feel as guilty.

This flick is tense. I'm not sure how it's going to play on video, but with 200 people in a theater there's definitely tension. There were people taking, but it didn't bother me once I realized that if the movie was working on me and I was feeling as tense as I was, others were probably feeling the same way. And it's not like you're given any outlet for release.

There's very little humor in The Mist. It gets going pretty quickly (sacrificing a bit of build-up and some of Brent Norton's character from the book) and things start getting bad within the first reel. And then they get worse. And worse. By the time you get to the end you're drained. And then Darabont hits you with the bleakest ending to a horror film since Night of the Living Dead or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. More on that later. I'll warn you. (Actually, there are going to be spoilers-a-plenty from here on in, but I'll red flag it when I get to the ending.)

There are three main monster sequences in The Mist: What Happened to the Bag Boy, the bird-thing attack, and the expedition to the pharmacy. Normally, when you read something, especially in one of King's stories, by the time it gets translated to film it loses something. Not here. Even though the tentacles in the first sequence look a bit CGI-cheesy (They're the worst effect in the film) Darabont amps up the horror from the source material. In the story, King describes the tentacles as eating into Norm's flesh as they wrap around him. Here we have a single feeding arm that rips chunks out of him. Chunks. It's gory and shocking and raises the bar for what's going to happen later. And it's the first monster we see.

But it's not really about the monsters. Like the sociological horror films of the 60s and 70s, this is more about the people that the beasts. Or, more precisely, it's about the beasts that are the people. Here, it takes about two days for everything to go to hell with in the "safety" of the supermarket. The early King religious nut character begins preaching about the end of the world and sacrifice and it takes about two days from most everyone in the store who isn't dead to come around to her point of view. Two days. As scary as the monster sequences are, the scenes where Mrs Carmody's mob begins to act out on their blood-lust are more frightening because something like that is more apt to actually happen that to have a multi-tentacled hellbeast come out of the fog and eat you. At least in the county where I live.

But here's the thing. In the last mob scene, where the crowd is screaming with blood lust to sacrifice the little boy, Mrs. Carmody gets blown away. And the audience roars. It's another of Darabont's F-you's to the audience. He gives you a character who is inciting a crowd to kill in order to get a horrified reaction from the audience and when she gets killed, the audience watching the movie has the same reaction that they were just horrified to be watching on screen. And I'm not saying this at a distance. It's the reaction I had, too.

Which brings us to the ending. And the beginning.

Jim Emerson, the editor-in-chief at Roger Ebert's Web Site has something called The Opening Shot Project. The basic premise is that the first shot of a movie tells you everything you need to know about how to read the movie you're about to watch. The first shot of The Mist shows our protagonist, David Drayton, at work in his studio. He paints movie posters and is currently finishing one of Roland the Gunslinger from The Dark Tower. This is an in-joke for King fans and ties this into the meta-fiction of Roland's story. It's not the first time that a character in a King story painted a picture of the Gunslinger. But that's not what's important in reading the film. There are movie posters displayed throughout the studio and the two most prominently featured ones are Drew Struzan's paintings for John Carpenter's The Thing (which I have) and Guillermo Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth (which I don't). Both of these have bleak endings, although you can argue that Pan's Labyrinth has a happy ending if you believe that Ofelia's fantasy world is real. Regardless, it still ends with the death of a child, a death that is established in the film's opening shot. So, the way to go into The Mist, based upon the images that we're given up front is to expect that it is not going to end well.

And it doesn't.

Darabont has so far made three feature-length Stephen King adaptations. Two of the original stories, "The Mist" and "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption" end with the word "hope." Both film versions have endings that go further than their source material. The Shawshank Redemption ends with Red and Andy's reunion, where the novella ends with him on a bus, headed towards that reunion. "The Mist" ends ambiguously, though it sets things up to go badly. The story is told in first person, as though Drayton is recording everything that happened in a journal. His group of survivors, including his young son, are stopped at a motel. They have a dwindling gas supply in their truck and a gun with four bullets. Drayton writes that they are headed in the direction of a single word that he thinks he heard while scanning the radio. If they run out of gas they're prepared to use the gun on themselves. There aren't enough bullets for everyone, but he'll do what he has to if it comes down to it. He leaves the journal for someone to find and then they drive off into the mist. The End.

How pissed off would you be if you saw a movie that ended like that?

The film goes further. It goes to the point where they run out of gas and they hear the monsters approaching. And then it goes further. It goes to the point where the gun is used. And then it goes further. It goes to the point where Drayton steps out of the car to meet his fate, to offer himself up to the beasts. And then, because this is the narrative engine that this movie has been going on, it gets worse.

It gets worse.

It takes balls to end a movie the way this one ends. It takes balls to release it and not tweak it to give the audience some sort of upbeat ending (see the American cut of The Descent). It really is a great big "fuck you" to the audience and I'm glad to see it. I don't think the ambiguous ending would have worked, though it's fine in the novella. A happy ending in any form would have ruined everything that came before it. For my money, and I do realize I had a free pass, this is what a horror movie should be like. And I hope to see more like it coming out.

See, there's that hope that got tossed aside.

And Mr. Darabont, if you want to make it up to your audience, please make that Dark Tower poster available for purchase. Showing that off like that... and then destroying it...

That's just mean.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier
Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill

So it's finally out. DC first announced that this was due out in October 2006, then pushed it back, and back, and back. It came out this week. Turns out that DC wasn't supposed to solicit until it was finished, which took a while. And looking at the finished product, that's not surprising. And it's still not really complete - there was supposed to be a 45 included containing two 1950s style pop songs that will be included in next year's pricey Absolute Edition, which will most likely find their way online in one way or another.

Anyway. I first started reading The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen at the end of the first six issue volume. It's a great concept, though not necessarily an original one (Google "Wold Newton" for more info.) -- the heroes of Victorian literature all exist in the same world and team up to fight for the British government. Every speaking character in volume one either previously exists in literature, or has been retro-engineered from from another character, such as Campion Bond, 007's grandfather. Many of the characters are familiar, such as Dracula's Mina Murray or Doctor Jeckyll, but there's obscure ones in there too, like Rosa Coote, who appeared in Victorian "stroke pamphlets."

Which is where the fun begins.

One of the best things about the series is reference-spotting, which has been made considerably easier by Jess Nevins, who has annotated the whole thing online, and in a series of books.

Which makes volume two considerably easier to digest. When volume two was orignally published, each issue had a section at the end called "The New Traveller's Almanac." This was purportedly a report compiled from various sources that served as a travel guide to the earth of literature. It's mind-blowing. Page after page of dense Victorian style prose with the occasional reference that you get (there;s a mention of a nine-pins loving sailor named Lebowsky who gets stranded in California in the early 1900s) and other that, well, make you thankful that someone like Nevins exists.

"The New Traveller's Almanac" expands the world of the League and The Black Dossier builds on that. Volume one and two are set in 1898 and cover a battle with Professor Moriarty and Fu Manchu, followed by the Martian invasion of War of the Worlds. The Black Dossier jumps forward sixty years to a post Big Brother Britain and finds the surviving heroes from the first two books, Mina Murray and Alan Quatermain, stealing the title documents from MI5 and then being chased by James Bond and Emma Peel, though for copyright reasons those two are never called directly by those names. That's it. It's a simple plot, but throughout the book we get what's in the dossier, which is being read by our heroes as they're on the run and includes:

• A history and integration of gods from HP Lovecraft, the Bible, and every religion you can think of.
• The life of Orlando
• The first act of a lost Shakespeare play
• The New Adventures of Fanny Hill
• A PG Wodehouse story by way of Lovecraft, involving Jeeves, Wooster, and monsters
• The first chapter of a Beat Generation novel

There's other stuff too and what's great is that Moore does a perfect pastiche of each style that he attempts, though I must admit that I have a hard time slogging through most Beat Generation stuff and haven't quite finished "The Crazy Wide Forever" yet.

So is it any good? As a whole? Well, frankly, after three years since volume two, and hearing Moore say that it's the best thing ever, initially it's a bit of a letdown. Initially. Yes, it's overstuffed and loaded with the trademark references, but the impression is there that Moore wants to do something more with the series than have it be just a funny little collection of adventure stories that comes out every few years. We seem to be headed into something a bit grander than what's come before and if nothing else, The Black Dossier serves as a bridge to that, which is probably the main reason that it's not called The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume Three. That's officially due next year and is set to cover the entire 20th Century.

So, it should be fun to see where we're headed with this. The Black Dossier's a nice stopgap release, almost like an annual in the world of traditional comics, and I can't wait to see what's next.

GOING POSTAL

So I went to the US Postal Museum with my sister yesterday. And we saw this, which I thought Jamee would like:

The Postal Museum is small, but nice. They hit you with the most interesting thing right up front -- a collection of postal items recovered from various disasters. A rusted mailbox from the Johnstown Flood, a mail carton from United 93, a letter sent along with delivered mail that was recovered from the World Trade Center. I had seen on a recent documentary that they have a postcard that survived the Hindenberg. Now, we've all seen the crash footage. How the hell does a postcard make it through that as anything other than ash?

Then we went to the Cap City Brewery for lunch.

Later, Kelly cleaned a pie. Jamee can tell you about that.

MOORE LATER

My brain hurts.

I can't believe they brought in the Gollywog. Yet it makes me smile.

More later.

(Oh, I'm referring to this.)

Doc Jay and Eightball are wasted...

FULL METAL JACKET
with audio commentary
My House
DVD
11/13/07 & 11/15/07

I realized while watching the commentary on Full Metal Jacket that it's been almost ten years since I've actually sat down and watched the whole thing. And I love this movie. I think the last time I saw it was at the Naro as part of the Warner Bros Fest. It's weird seeing it in the theater. For one, it's in mono. And that takes some getting used to. And on the big screen it's a hell of a lot more intense than it is on video.

And it's pretty intense on video.

The new DVD, which is apparently only available as part of the new Kubrick box set looks good. It's the first time that it's been available letterboxed, which isn't absolutely necessary because it was shot open-matte, but there's something about the images in this that are enhanced by the cropping. Kubrick made movies to be seen in theaters and for Full Metal Jacket the rectangle works better than the square.

The commentary is interesting, though I don't know if I'll go through it again. There are a few good tidbits in it. I had no idea that the Vietnam scenes were filmed first, before the Parris Island stuff. But it makes sense - why wait around for Matthew Modine and Arliss Howard to grow out their hair when you can shoot the bits where their hair's grown out and then shave it off for boot camp.

And it was pointed out that Pyle and Animal Mother are mirrors of each other and that Animal Mother is what Pyle would have become if the machine of the film's first act had worked. We don't know anything about any of these characters prior to the moment they appear on screen. There's no backstory and few hints about what or who they were prior to the Corps. It's intriguing to look at Animal Mother's helmet decoration, where he wrote "I am become death." He's quoting the Bhagavad-Gita or Oppenheimer quoting the Bhagavad-Gita. Either way it's not necessarily something you would expect someone like the character as presented would know (though that does make assumptions and stereotypes the guy) and raises the question - what was this guy like before?

And what will he be like when he goes back?

TAGNABBIT

Tagged by Kelly

4 jobs I've had:
Projectionist
Bookseller
Editorial Assistant
Ghost tour guide

4 movies I love to watch over and over:
Raising Arizona
Fight Club
Shaun of the Dead
The Incredibles

4 places I have lived:
Hampton, VA
Harrisonburg, VA
Ashburn, VA
Brunswick, MD

4 TV shows I enjoy watching:
The Office
30 Rock
Battlestar Galactica
Spaced

4 places I have been:
Edinburgh, Scotland
Dublin, Ireland
Savannah, GA
Akron, OH

4 websites I visit daily:
www.cnn.com
www.comicbookresources.com
www.neilgaiman.com
www.aintitcool.com

4 favorite foods:
Tuscan Meatballs
Mediterranean Lentils with Feta
Jambalaya
Chili with Spatzle

4 places I would rather be:
Scotland
Somewhere else in Scotland
Another place in Scotland
Scotland

4 blogs I'm tagging:
Jamee
Emily
Maria
The unknown blog of nothingness

Three Kings

"The Gingerbread Girl" - Esquire, July 2007
"Ayana" - The Paris Review, Fall 2007
"Mute" - Playboy, December 2007

Didn't Stephen King say he was retiring after The Dark Tower was finished? By my count, there's been four novels (The Colorado Kid, Cell, Lisey's Story, and Blaze) with a fifth due out in January (Duma Key). And there's been at least three new short stories in magazines this year. I had a copy of the Esquire issue but hadn't read the story. I picked up The Paris Review and Playboy this past Friday. And yesterday I sat down and read all three stories.

I suppose the big question about King's post Dark Tower work is whether or not they tie into The Dark Tower. Of the three new stories, "Mute" is the only one that explicitly ties into King's earlier work, with the narrator mentioning that he's headed to Derry, Maine. I don't think any of the stories rank with classic King, but they're interesting. "Ayana" is a short, sad tale of healing and death that fits into the mode of stories like The Green Mile and "The Reach." It also feels a bit like Christopher Moore's A Dirty Job. Just not goofy. "The Gingerbread Girl" starts out like of of King's recent more literary stories and then takes a nasty left turn and becomes something very different. Of the three, it's the weakest.

The most interesting one of the bunch is "Mute." It's a fairly slight story, basically a mash-up of two story types: "Guy goes into a confessional" and "Guy picks up a hitchhiker." What's interesting is how King tells the story. Basically we have one guy telling one story, but it cuts between him telling a priest in a confessional and him telling a deaf-mute hitchhiker in his car. About halfway through you can kind of tell where it's going, but it's fascinating how it gets there. It's nicely constructed and I think it's great that the experimental type story is not the one in the literary magazine, but the one in Playboy.

A Link for Jamee

5 Scientific Reasons a Zombie Apocalypse Could Actually Happen

Mmmm, brain parasites...

Where's My Super Suit?

The Incredibles
My House
DVD
11/11/07

I love this movie. And I love that Tilda loves this movie. She woke up from her nap this afternoon asking for 'credibles. So I put it in while I made dinner. So technically I didn't actually watch the whole thing. But I've seen it enough times that I don't really need to. And it never gets boring.

So Brad Bird has managed to make three practically perfect movies in a row, with this one sandwiched between The Iron Giant and Ratatouille. For my money this is the best thing Pixar has ever released. I know people who don't care for it. They also seem to not like Ratatouille. I don't get it. And they all seem to love Cars. Anyway, Bird makes great movies that would not work in any medium besides animation. Look at the scene where Dash is being chased by Syndrome's henchmen and he's discovering just how fast he can run. One of the best action scenes ever put on film. No argument. Imagine it being done in live action. Wouldn't work -- though maybe I'm just thinking about how lousy the young Clark Kent running alongside the train effects looked in 1978 because I just finished watching a documentary about Superman. Lemme think. Nah, wouldn't work.

So what we basically have with The Incredibles is Watchmen for kids. But it's not really for kids, is it? (Even though my two-year-old loves it.) I don't think that Bird has an intended audience in mind when he makes movies (More on that when I finally get around to showing Jamee Ratatouille). He's smart and the work reflects that. I mean, this guy worked on The Simpsons when it was good. I mean really good. Back in the episodes where you can still remember quotes and stuff. Sigh, poor Simpsons.

Right, where was I? The Incredibles. Best superhero movie made so far. Grown-up entertainment that kids can enjoy and can hold a two-year-old's attention for two full hours. I love this movie. Have ever since I first saw it. And I'm glad my kid wants to watch something that doesn't make me want to claw my eyes out.

And dammit, the Watchmen movie had better be at least as half as smart as this.

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

No Country For Old Men
Landmark E Street Theater
Washington, DC
35mm
11/9/07

First, a note on moviegoers. At movies like this there's almost always some asshole at the end who has to announce to the crowd that he just didn't get it. Then there's the girl who had no idea what she was getting into who got dragged in by boyfriend, husband, etc. She's the one who goes "awwww" every time a puppy or kitten shows up on screen and gets audibly upset when something bad happens to said animal. She was sitting next to me tonight. And I'm sorry, but if you've just been chased across the desert and had a pit bull sicced on you that is about to rip your throat out and you have a gun and the ability to use it... you shoot the fucker. You shoot it dead. You do not go "awwww."

So, how's the movie then? It's great. It's the best thing the Coens have done in years. Possibly the best thing they've ever done. It's a note-perfect adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel and at the same time definitely a Coen Brothers movie. Tonally it's closest to Fargo, but it's got the trademark weird haircuts, satchels full of cash, big men of power behind big desk, and so on, and so forth. And they're all from the novel.

The novel is probably the best thing I've read this year. It's brutal and gruesome. The movie is not quite as violent as the book. In particular, there's a death in the novel that sticks with me. There's half a hand held up with half a head behind it and blood and brains splattered on the wall behind. In the film it happens off screen and it's no less effective.

Which is one of the things that's so brilliant about the film. It follows the book nearly word for word (There's a few excisions and a couple of changes, but nothing major) and having read the book I knew exactly what was going to happen in any given scene. And it's still intense. There's a sequence that begins in a hotel that's one of the most perfectly constructed suspense scenes I've ever seen.

And having read the book I was ready for it to veer into anticlimax in the last third of the movie. The end of the book, the long conversation between the Sheriff and his cousin (who we've never seen before) struck me as being completely wrong. But McCarthy knows what he's doing and so do the Coens and the last scenes with the Sheriff cap the story perfectly. If you listen to him through the story he spends most of the time wearily regretting how times have changed and how he cannot understand the new ways the world is slipping into senseless violence. And then he's told at the end. This isn't new. The world has always been this way. It doesn't change.

There's going to be a lot of argument about the last scene and the Sheriff's last speech. It seems similar to the coda to Blood Meridian and I can't recall if it's actually in the book. It's odd and doesn't quite seem to fit. But to me it's simple. It tells us we haven't just been watching a chase movie, or a crime movie about a drug deal gone wrong. We have been watching myth.

TAGGED, PART 2

So Maria tagged me and now I have to post eight random things about myself. Here goes.

1. I love my daughter and my nieces. But most other children make me twitch.
2. I tear up at the climax of Blade Runner. Every. Single. Time.
3. There is a picture of me in my high school yearbook where my name is listed at "Sambo Winning."
4. I can be connected to both Johnny Depp and Bela Lugosi in one step in the Kevin Bacon game.
5. I am deeply jealous of my father for getting to work on Terrence Malick's The New World for a week. He can be seen in the film for three seconds in the background of one shot, standing next to Christian Bale. I call it "Batman and Robinson."
6. There is a polaroid picture of me and two of my friends in a box in John Waters' house in Baltimore.
7. I have seen 2001: A Space Odyssey on TV, VHS, laserdisc, DVD, 35mm, and 70mm. I have not seen a 16mm print. That would be wrong.
8. I like zombie movies, but Jamee has made me like them more that I would have if I have never met her. I stood in line for two hours to get George Romero to sign her Dead posters for our dining room. And I do not regret it.

And I almost forgot. I tag:

Jamee & Kelly

Everyone's going to say that the Robinsons are strange and they're going to be right!

FIDO
DVD
11/3/07

Wow. That was disappointing. I've been looking forward to Fido since I first heard about it a year ago. It's a zombie comedy set in an alternate 1950s where zombies have been domesticated and follows the story of young Timmy Robinson and his pet zombie Fido. It has a few good moments (I especially like the line quoted as the post title, but that's for personal reasons) and the general idea is great, but it's oddly inert and not particularly funny. It's been less that twelve hours sine we finished it, most of which were spent asleep, and the majority of Fido has slipped out of my head already.

All these moments...

BLADE RUNNER: THE FINAL CUT

AMC/Loews Uptown 1
Washington DC
35mm
11/3/07

So they actually decided to expand the Blade Runner: The Final Cut release outside of New York and Los Angeles. Which is nice. In the DC area it's playing for a limited time at The Uptown, which along with The AFI Silver is about the best place to see a movie in the area. I've seen three versions of Blade Runner theatrically now (although I've only seen the original theatrical cut in 16mm at Grafton-Stovall when I was at JMU, so I'm not sure that it really counts) and I've never seen it look better that this. If I didn't know better, at times I could have sworn that it was DLP projection. It looks that good.

So, what's the verdict?

I don't think I ever need to see the Director's Cut again. Little mistakes are fixed and though it still strongly implies that Deckard is a replicant, it's clear that he wasn't originally part of Batty's group of escapees (although I'm not quite sure how Batty knows his name). It's still essentially the same movie as the director's cut and most of the little additions and fixes don't really change much, and many of them are not even noticeable if you don't know what you're looking for, which is actually a good thing. Blade Runner is still Blade Runner, no matter which version you see and the only real difference is whether or not Deckard is a replicant, talks over the damn thing, or has a happy ending.

Here's the breakdown:

1982 versions - Deckard's not a replicant. Deckard narrates. Happy ending.

1992 Director's Cut - Deckard's a replicant. Possibly formerly with Batty. No narration. Ambiguous ending.

2007 Final Cut - Deckard's a replicant. Never with Batty. No narration. Ambiguous ending.

Here's the thing. It doesn't matter whether or not Deckard is a replicant. It's not important. The real question is whether or not the replicants are human. Tyrell says that his company's goal is to make things "more human than human" and Batty's gang, murderous children that they are, are the only ones in the movie who seem to crave the live that all of the "real" people have had sucked out of them from living in, well, Blade Runner.

I have not seen the film since my daughter was born or my mother died. What struck me about the opening scene when Leon is being given the Voight-Kampff test that I've never really seen before is that he seems like a child who has been caught doing something wrong. I may have noticed it before, but never really seen it.

And Batty's death is heartbreaking. It shouldn't be. We've seen him do horrible things and been told he's done much worse. But at the final moment, with his last words to Deckard there is a palpable sense of sadness and loss. What are all these moments and memories that are gone? We'll never know.

YOU'RE IT

Damn. I've been tagged twice in 24 hours, by Kelly and Maria. I'll do the easy one first.

Total number of books:

I believe the proper number is a shitload. Possibly a metric ton. A lot, at least.

Last book I read:

I'm currently rereading "The Mist," by Stephen King, which is technically a novella and part of a collection, but they've gone and blown up the typeface and published it as a standalone volume that sells for probably about the same price as Skeleton Crew (just checked-it's actually one buck cheaper if you pay full retail for the mass market paperback), which is silly. The last two books that I finished reading were Baltimore, or The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire, by Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden, and Making Money, by Terry Pratchett. I think there may be another that I've forgotten, though.

Last book I bought:

The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, by Oliver Sacks. Bought it last night at Politics and Prose and then he signed it. Neil Gaiman's Absolute Sandman Volume 2 showed up in the mail yesterday, but I suppose I actually bought it earlier.

5 Meaningful Books:

1. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volumes 1 and 2, by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill - Forget the movie. It's a joke. And I'm cheating because this is two books, but I don't really care. For me this is everything that fiction can be, because everything in fiction is here, or has the potential to be here. The "New Traveler's Almanac" section in volume 2 alone will blow your mind.

2. Assassination Vacation, by Sara Vowell - The most impressive thing is that it makes you care about President Garfield. Or that I can never look at Oneida dishes again without suppressing a dirty little giggle. Or that I was giddy that Mathilda shares a birthday with Robert Todd Lincoln and wouldn't have made the connection if I hadn't read this. Or a hundred other things. It's a rare book that actually changed my perspective on quite a few things. Like dirty, dirty Oneida.

3. Cold Mountain, by Charles Frazier - A beautiful, brutal novel of the Civil War. The film does it no justice whatsoever.

4. A Year at the Movies, by Kevin Murphy - So Kevin Murphy decided to see a movie a day, presented publicly, for a year. And then wrote a book about it. I recently reread it and it's a wonderful read about movies, movie-going, and life (insert MST3K style comment here).

5. Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov - A beautiful book about a bad, bad thing. (Although Jamee is younger than me...) I bought this with me to jury duty hoping it would get me out of it in case it was a pedophilia case, but alas, 'twasn't.

And I tag:

Maria
&
Emily