I received a rejection letter from Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine yesterday. It was a form rejection that claimed they didn’t have time to make personal responses…but at the bottom there was a handwritten personal response. The editor told me she liked the story a lot and hoped to see more from me. So, of course I sent them another story immediately. Strike while the iron is hot. I also found a new market for the story that I’d received a rejection letter for during Ike week.
I read Dexter in the Dark yesterday, the third of Jeff Lindsay’s novels. It goes in a direction I didn’t care for that much. If I had been the book’s editor, I would have suggested lopping off everything in italics, for starters. The book could have been a decent mainstream crime novel, but the demonic aspects Lindsay chose to introduce diminished it, in my opinion. I’m also not a fan of what he’s doing with Rita’s kids, either.
I finally got to see The Closer‘s season finale. The ending was the tensest fifteen minutes I’ve seen on television in ages. The beginning was just silly, with Brenda acting like a dimwit over her purse. The show redeemed itself from the moment they arrested the kid in his house, though.
We went to see Ghost Town last night. I’ve never seen Extras or The Office. My only previous exposure to Ricky Gervais was a long, awkward bit he did during the Diana tribute last year, trying to fill in time when one of the bands was setting up. This is a very good film. Greg Kinnear is becoming one of the most reliable actors around, and Téa Leoni was rock solid in the kind of role that suits her. She doesn’t do well with some of the slapstick parts she’s had recently, but as a foil to Gervais—terrific. And Gervais himself, wow. Doing the stuff he does, with the conversational retreats and redirections, the awkward rambles to get himself out of trouble but only digging himself farther in, can’t be at all easy. The scene between him and Kristen Wiig (the surgeon) when she was stepping all over his dialog has fantastic comedic timing. I wonder how many takes that took to perfect. The movie has the obligatory tear-jerker scenes at the end, and the also-obligatory shock ending that isn’t, but we really enjoyed the film, and the rest of the audience (packed house) seemed to as well.
