One week from tomorrow, June 8, I’ll be signing Flight or Fright at Murder by the Book in Houston at 4:30 pm. The store’s event page is here and the Facebook event is here. Our anthology of turbulent tales comes out in trade paperback from Scribner (US) and Hodder & Stoughton (UK) on Tuesday, June 4. Of course, I’ll be happy to sign anything at the event, and I’ll be talking for a bit about how the project came about. We’re up to 13 translations now, with the recent addition of a Chinese edition.
Today is the last day to order Brian Freeman’s new LetterPress Publications’ Deluxe Special Edition of Revival. I wrote a “Historical Context” essay for the book, called “A Nasty, Dark Piece of Work.”
Last weekend, we watched a batch of movies. On Friday, we saw The Professor and the Madman, with Mel Gibson (not as the Madman) and Sean Penn (as the Madman). It’s based on the real-life story of a professor who tackles the huge challenge of compiling the first ever dictionary of English. He sends out a call-to-action to readers across the nation to read everything that’s ever been published and annotate all of the vocabulary. However, the project founders under its own weight until an inmate at a mental institution volunteers to contribute. After all, he has nothing but time on his hands and is a voracious reader. He’s a Civil War survivor with PTSD who thinks he’s being pursued by a scar-faced man. In a moment of hysteria, he accidentally killed an innocent man, which is why he’s in the asylum. It’s an interesting movie about words and sanity. Equally interesting is the story around the film: the director took his name off the movie and he and Gibson sued to stop it from being released because they’d wanted to film more scenes and the studio stopped them.
Our daughter had seen Monster when it first came out. We saw Charlize Theron talking about her physical transformation for that role on an episode of Graham Norton, so we thought we’d check it out. Then we found the documentary Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer, made by a British guy who clearly didn’t want Wuornos to be executed. It revealed a lot about her background, the things that led up to events at the start of Monster. It’s a gruesome story, but there is a lot of conflicting information. Wuornos herself changed her story a few times, so who knows what the truth of any of it is?
Then we watched On the Basis of Sex, starring Felicity Jones as Ruth Bader Ginsberg at the beginning of her legal career, when she joined up with the ACLU to take the case of a man whose tax deduction for providing care for his ailing mother was denied because the law was designed for women. She saw it as a test case for equal rights that had the advantage of demonstrating gender bias against a man.
Finally, we saw The Mule, the latest Clint Eastwood film, based on the true story of a 90-year-old man who became a drug mule for the Sinaloa cartel. The story didn’t go the way I had assumed it would from the trailer: I thought he was going to get caught much earlier and have to go undercover for the Feds. There’s a great scene in a diner between Eastwood and Bradley Cooper (DEA agent who is pursuing Eastwood but doesn’t know who he is). They have a conversation about work vs. family and Cooper’s character says, “It’s good to talk to someone like you.” Eastwood says, “Like me?” Cooper responds, “Yeah, someone older, who doesn’t have any filters any more.” Eastwood, as he gets up to leave says, “I’m not sure that I ever had any.” Given the movie’s focus on how bad a husband and father Eastwood’s character was, and his regrets about that, I found myself wondering how much of it was Eastwood expressing his own regrets.
I enjoyed the series White Dragon on Amazon Prime. It stars John Simm as a university lecturer who finds out that his wife, who spends a great deal of time in Hong Kong, has been killed there. He goes to Hong Kong and discovers she’s been keeping many secrets from him. They make maximum use of the setting: lots of great shots of Hong Kong from all angles. I’ve been there twice, both times over 25 years ago, but I enjoyed seeing all that great footage of a fascinating city-state. It’s a decent thriller, too. I always enjoy Simm.
This weekend, I hope to see Rocketman, the Elton John biopic. His first Greatest Hits album was the first non-K-tel record I ever purchased and I’ve been a fan of his music ever since. I’ve seen him in concert numerous times over the years, and I wrote an essay for Steve Spignesi’s book Elton John: Fifty Years On: The Complete Guide to the Musical Genius of Elton John and Bernie Taupin, which will be out around the same time as Elton’s autobiography, Me.
