It was supposed to rain buckets today, but it turned out to be very nice. I have the office window open as I work, and the outside world is full of the sounds of lawn mowers and leaf blowers in their natural habitats. Before returning to plotting and scheming over the novel in progress, I got two short stories back into circulation, both of them to markets that don’t take e-subs, so that necessitated a trip to the post office. I love those little kiosk machines, I surely do.
Last night we watched Crazy Heart. I was surprised to see Colin Farrell in it, and he didn’t suck, either. His character was nothing at all the villain that Bad Blake built him up to be. In fact, he was diffident, hardly making eye contact with anyone, and appreciative of his former mentor. And he could sing, too, as could Jeff Bridges as the stereotypical down-on-his-luck country singer who shambles around the country in a thirty-year-old car, drunk most of the time, sitting with this pants unbuttoned because he’s gained so much weight and pissing in a plastic jug. He’s never late for a concert, and even stone drunk he gives the crowd what it wants–although he might have to duck out back for a puke every now and then. What young mom Maggie Gyllenhaal sees him is beyond me, because we get the impression that to stand near him would be like visiting the bowels of a whiskey factory. When we reached the scene where he is dead drunk in his Houston home, barely conscious and gripping the bottle for all it’s worth, I jested to my wife that this was the epitome of screenwriting: the end of the act where the main character has hit rock bottom and can’t go any further. “What happens next?” she asked. “The character has an epiphany,” I said, and no sooner were the words out of my mouth than Bad Blake calls up someone and says he needs to get sober. The film has all the predictability of a country song, but Bridges’ performance is what makes it worth the journey. He’s a lovable, irascible wreck of a man whose sad songs “come from life, unfortunately.” I’m not a huge country music fan, but the T. Bone Burnett songs in this film are fantastic. I especially like the snippet of lyric that is the title of this post.
Caught up with FlashForward. Interesting developments with respect to Dyson Frost and the guy who was supposed to die on March 15, and ominous signals that something even worse that flash forwards awaits everyone in 2016. Nothing less than THE END itself.
Yesterday I got to watch a sneak preview of Happy Town, the new show that premieres on ABC next week, I believe. I’m not convinced it’s going to survive. The show is about an edenic small town that always smells like baking bread (my favorite line: after flour is detected on the body of a murder victim, the sheriff says, “The back of my balls would test positive for high traces of baking flour”) and hasn’t had a serious crime in years. However, before that, they were terrorized by someone they came to know as the Magic Man, who made people vanish off the face of the planet. The first episode opens with the arrival of a perky young woman who plans to open a candle shop with her inheritance. She is the viewer stand-in, the one who has the town’s history explained to her (us). Some of the writing is unartful — there’s an awful lot of instances where characters summarize their situation in ways that people never do (“Mommy and Daddy still sneak away for smoochies despite being high school sweethearts,” a man explains to his young son, thereby introducing the characters to us). It has the small-town clichés of the menacing junkyard proprietors, with their obligatory mad dog. “Mr. Happy” — aka Tom from Lost — is the town sheriff, and there’s some definite weirdness going on with him. Sam Neill is the town’s Leland Gaunt, proprietor of a store that the newcomer astutely observes would have a hard time surviving in a big city. He’s probably a magician, and we’re meant to believe that he’s a strong candidate for the Magic Man, so he probably isn’t. The murder scene is suitably gruesome–especially the aftermath. Steven Webber pontificates as the father of one of the missing victims from years gone by. The pizza parlor is run by the same guy who tends bar on Grey’s Anatomy. Some characters are sickeningly upbeat–the real estate agent and the old biddies at the boarding house, but the woman who runs the house is nice and creepy. Remains to see what they do after the first episode, but it feels a bit like Eureka crossed with Harper’s Island.
