So I read this: River of Gods by Ian McDonald.

Imagining India circa 2047, this is a rather remarkable SF novel. It has an expansive but not diluted collection of main characters, its technology is advanced but comprehensible, and its knowledge of human behavior is remarkably consistent with who we are and where we most likely are headed to.

There's a playful cleverness to McDonald's work, and his embrace of the complex sociopolitical forces at work in contemporary (and alternate future-contemporary) India is impressive. I'd love to see this in a cinematic context, but it would be hard to find a happy synthesis that can make allowancwes for some of the extremely nonvisual plot points. But this book is an utter delight, and I recommend it to anyone looking for an evocative SF experience.

At the movies flashback!

So today, I wanted to hype up some of my first net-published film criticism, for my friend Joe Robin's now-defunct Opposable Thumb Films site. These were written from 2001-2003, and while I find my sensibility pretty much the same, I'm glad that we finally have a DVD release for The Fog (and that the current Blue Underground disc of The Stendhal Syndrome ups the ante considerably in terms of visual presentation).

So here you have it, my reviews for Opposable Thumb films.

Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi's Baise-Moi.

Gary Nelson's The Black Hole. This film needs some serious special edition love.

My double review of modern feminist horror classics: Bernard Rose's Candyman and Neil Jordan's In Dreams.

John Carpenter's The Fog. The screencaps were from a VHS dub of the laserdisc, at that time the only way to see the film in a home environment in a letterboxed fashion. And well before that abysmal remake...

Alexandre Aja's Haute Tension, which I still adore.

Michael Mann's The Keep, which needs to get some form of DVD or Blu-Ray or whatever release, because I worry my laserdisc is going to disintegrate and then what will be left?

Ah, Jack Sholder's A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge. This review actually achieved me a small bit of eFame, and it still periodically pops up on horror boards, which is fine by me. I'll grab ahold of any morsel of attention I can.

And finally, Dario Argento's The Stendhal Syndrome. I will not bash Troma (they certainly showed the film more love than Miramax did), but I'm glad that Blue Underground stepped up to the plate and showed what a kickass transfer can be like. If only they could do that with all the Argento films that have fucked up DVD presentations in the US that they're responsible for (Suspiria, Deep Red, I'm looking at you).

Kubrickrolled.

The time has come for you to get your Kubrick on.

And it looks like I will be introducing Eyes Wide Shut at some point during its three-day run. Mark my words, it will be worth it.

At the movies, intermittency.

Since I staggered into Boston yesterday morning, I've seen:

CHOKE (d. Clark GREGG) ***
RELIGULOUS (d. Larry CHARLES) ***
RACHEL GETTING MARRIED (d. Jonathan DEMME) ****
BODY OF LIES (d. Ridley SCOTT) ** 1/2
QUARANTINE (d. John Erick DOWDLE) 1/2
CITY OF EMBER (d. Gil KENAN) ***

"You eat apples? I produce Entourage."

At the movies: The Duchess.

So my review of The Duchess got picked up by The Tennessean, so it will reach the public, somehow or another. I am glad of it, and I hope you're having a good day.

At the movies: Synecdoche, New York.

The short version: unfinished pluperfect subjunctive, four stars.

The not-so-short version: ripples on the surface of a lake cannot be unmade. The point of injury/trauma can be mended, but any true healing will always continue on the heels of that which has already spread outward. Something broken cannot be fixed to be like it was- it is something different, something made new out of brokenness.

It angers me how playful the film plays at being, even as it wounds so very deliberately.

I am not a psychiatrist. I am not a surgeon. I cannot make this film better, despite the countless thousands of words I have written over the past ten years doing, or trying to do, exactly that for countless other films.

I do not fully comprehend aspects of this film.

Small acts of forgiveness, then. The absence of control. The body in revolt. There's something distinctly Cronenbergian afoot; perhaps this was the natural Brundlefly fruition of the Cronenbergian process given theatrical form, rather than the maligned opera of The Fly that I still desperately would love to see.

I will now never be able to meet Dianne Wiest without sobbing incoherently.

I've always said that part of me is still walking through the desert in Van Sant's Gerry. And as with that film, I feel I haunt this one.