Angels and Demons
I’ve been ignoring my short story submissions for most of 2009, while working on the book project that will be coming out later this year. I filed the rejections, but let the stories lie fallow. This weekend I decided to get back on top of things, so I went through my records, did a search of current pro markets on duotrope and got a dozen stories back into circulation. I still have another dozen or so to circulate, but they are tougher. There simply aren’t that many places to send 5000-word crime/mystery stories.
We watched Slumdog Millionaire the other evening. An interesting movie, a look into a culture that we rarely see in the cinema. The Who Wants to be a Millionaire conceit pushes credibility to the limits, but if you roll with it, it makes a nice throughline for the film. The beginning of the movie doesn’t flinch from the ugly realities of the slum life, but it gets progressively more sanitized late in the game. The main character, for example, speaks the Queen’s English despite having no eductation, and his moral compass points true north (except when he steals to survive). I’m not quite sure why it became the phenomenon it did, but it was a decent film.
Today I watched Angels and Demons. Though the female sidekick doesn’t have quite the charisma of Audrey Tatou, the movie rocks harder than the Da Vinci Code. The Rome/Vatican scenery is spectacular (even the cgi stuff). The accelerated timeframe of the plot keeps the tension level high. A dead priest every hour for four hours followed by a big boom at midnight, thanks to the antimatter meltdown. Strong performances by the support cast. Who would have thought the Large Hadron Collider would make such a stunning big screen debut? (And a dizzying one.) The movie is very faithful to the novel, though it discards some of the symbology. Check your brain at the door and strap in for a rollicking good time.
My review of Michael Connelly’s The Scarecrow just went up at Onyx.
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