We watched 88 Minutes this weekend, a movie that was, oddly enough, 108 minutes long. I thought they might try to do a 24 with it, but that wasn’t the case. In case you’re not familiar with it, it’s a disaster movie—or rather a disaster of a movie. Check your mind at the door entertainment. Al Pacino is a forensic psychiatrist whose sister was murdered (long ago) when he was supposed to be looking after her and whose testimony put a rapist-murderer on death row. On the day of the execution, he receives a phone call with his own death sentence: he has 88 minutes to live. That timespan has special significance to him, but is known by few other people. The supporting cast includes Leelee Sobieski and Alicia Witt (Falacci on Law & Order: Criminal Intent). The movie suffers from “famous actor” syndrome, which occurs when you put a highly recognizable actor in a seemingly secondary role, which betrays the fact that the character probably has more to do with the story than it appears. I was actually pleasantly surprised by Witt, whose flighty character was vastly different than the no-nonsense, mostly humorless Falacci.
I finished Black and White and Dead All Over, which was a fun book with more twists than a pretzel and highly amusing character names that seem like something out of Dickens. I only sussed the killer’s identity a few seconds before it was revealed.
Yesterday I drove into Houston for the Mystery Writers of America (Southwest Chapter) luncheon, which featured a presentation by David Morrell, who I know through NECON and other genre events, as well as through the ITW. I heard him speak at the Stoker weekend in LA a few years ago and found him inspirational and motivational. Yesterday’s talk was equally inspirational, as he spoke about how writers need to identify the dominant emotion that they need to come to terms with to find the subject matter for their writing. I mention a little bit about this in my Storytellers Unplugged essay, which goes live tomorrow.
I finally caught up on last week’s NCIS, which I had on tape. I’m glad to see they are finally getting back to the “mole” storyline. Gibbs knows something, but it will be interesting to see if it’s just a gut impression (which he hasn’t acted on because his confidence is shaky) or if he senses the mole’s nervousness. I also watched the finale of Raising the Bar, which brought the season to a close on a few interesting notes. The season’s arc essentially traced the transfer of emotions of the main lawyer from his prosecutor girlfriend to the new public defender.
Is Grey’s Anatomy getting close to jumping the shark? The “ghost” plotline is coming dangerously close to shark-jumping territory, in my opinion. It’s rare that I give up on a show that I’ve been watching for a while (I ditched Desperate Housewives in the second season and never looked back), and there is still much about Grey’s that intrigues me, but the ghost is pushing it.
