Diminished Capacity

Watched Fear Itself this week because the script was by Rich Chizmar and Jonathan Schaech. It was a decent little scare-fest about a shape-shifting people eater. A few nods to the genre: a cop named Bannerman and a magazine called “Death Dance.” I was frustrated by how often the female cop kept going back to the chained exit. Yep, still locked.

We watched a neat little film called Diminished Capacity last night, starring Matthew Broderick, Alan Alda and Virginia Madsen. Broderick suffered a serious concussion before the movie begins and he’s on the mends, but still having memory and thought process issues. His mother calls him to come home to Missouri from Chicago to look after his uncle (Alda), while she goes away for the weekend. Uncle Rollie is also suffering from memory and thought process issues—the only difference is that Broderick’s will improve with time. The uncle has an old typewriter out on the wharf with fishing line tied to the keys. The fish write poetry, he says. He’s just the editor, striking out the typos and identifying words from among their gibberish. Some of it is quite profound! The uncle also possesses a very rare baseball card that he wants to sell so he can fend off being put in an institution, and much of the story centers around the greed that card brings out in anyone who knows about it, as Broderick, Madsen (old flame) and Alda, along with Madsen’s young son, head to Chicago to a sports convention to see how much they can get for it. It’s a light movie with baseball heart and a decent stab at the profound issue of getting older. Dylan Baker, as a true-blue Cubs fan, has a great scene where his favorite team breaks his heart once again. Bobby Cannavale (he appeared on a few episodes of Cold Case last season) is the nominal bad guy.

I read a fascinating novel called Real World by Natsuo Kirino. I’d previously read her other two books available in English, Out, which I really liked and Grotesque, which I liked less. This one is about four teenage girls, around 17 years old. The next-door neighbor of one, a boy their age, murders his mother and steals the girl’s bike, which also has her cell phone in the basket. He starts calling up the girls in the phone’s directory and they all get caught up in his situation as he wanders through Tokyo. He feels like the act of murder has exiled him from the real world (hence the title). The four girls react to him in different ways, and chapters are told from each of their point of view. They all also have aspects of their personality that they think the others don’t know about, but we discover that they really have very few secrets from each other. It is the parents who are unaware of the pressures their children have, many of these pressures applied by the parents themselves, who claim they want their children to succeed but in actuality often want to inherit their children’s success as a replacement for their own perceived shortcomings. It’s a thoughtful novel, and a dark look at the high-stress life of Japanese teens.

I segued from that to The Instant Enemy by Ross MacDonald. I never tire of his books, as convoluted as they may be, because his jaded style is so brilliant.