Bev Vincent

While parts of Atlantic Canada (and the eastern U.S.) are getting walloped with snow, we here in southeast Texas had a rough day with heavy winds, hail in some parts, the odd tornado or two, and a bunch of rain. It was a cold front that saw the temperatures drop from the eighties on Sunday (sit in the driveway with a glass of wine and watch the sun go down) to the upper forties overnight (I don’t think we’ll be dining on the restaurant’s patio tonight, alas).

I’ve been reading Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe to my wife, so we decided to revisit the movie this weekend. It doesn’t hold up quite as well as I might have liked, but it still has some fine moments. It’s funny, though—in my memory of the film I had Mary Stuart Masterson and Mary-Louise Parker’s characters inverted, and I think that if I was casting the movie today, that’s they way I would have gone.

During dinner on Saturday, we listened to an Alison Krauss and Union Station live album, and “Man of Constant Sorrow” inspired us to watch O Brother, Where Art Thou? again (Dan Tyminski of Union Station is the vocalist to whom George Clooney lip-syncs). It holds up a little better than Fried Green Tomatoes. There’s plenty of mugging and over-acting, but it’s still watchable.

Then we were tempted by a trailer for an Australian film called The Dressmaker about a young woman (Kate Winslet) who returns to her tiny hometown after a couple of decades abroad. When she was ten, she was suspected of breaking the neck of a boy and she was effectively banished from the community. She has no recollection of the events of that day, so she’s come back to find out if she is, in fact, a murderer. Her mother has declined in the intervening years (the locals call her Mad Molly), but she perks up again after her daughter’s return. Liam Hemsworth is the love interest and Hugo Weaving is the cross-dressing local constabulary who bowed to pressure and spearheaded her banishment all those years ago. It’s a bit of a revenge tale, and once it starts going down that track it derails a bit. Characters behave uncharacteristically, merely so we feel like they deserve what happens to them. It has the out-of-kilter feel of a Wes Anderson movie, but it’s not quite quirky enough to be that and doesn’t play it straight enough to be taken seriously. Plus there’s an unearned death at the 2/3 point that just felt arbitrary and unnecessary to me.

When I bought tickets to the Yo Yo Ma concert, I didn’t realize at the time that it was going to be on Super Bowl weekend. Not the night of the big game, but the night before. We kept reading about all the activities that would be taking place in the theatre district all weekend long, and how bad traffic was going to be, how difficult the parking, etc.

So we allowed plenty of time and found out it was much ado about nothing. We got to the theatre district in the same amount of time it would have taken under normal circumstances, and we paid our $10 to park in the garage near Jones Hall, same as always. (On Sunday afternoon, some of the surface lots were charging $100 and $200 for a parking spot!) We had early dinner reservations (which somehow got lost), but there was no trouble getting seated, either.

There were major events going on all around us, though, and there was a large police presence. We saw several Department of Homeland Security vehicles go by, and there was no shortage of black SUVs and marked police cars lining the streets.

The concert was quite something. The Houston Symphony Orchestra opened with Gershwin’s American in Paris and then the cello master joined them for Dvorák’s cello concerto. After all the obligatory applause and handshaking and bowing and encore calls, Yo Yo Ma came back by himself and played something that I didn’t recognize. His playing is so dexterous that at times it seemed like there were more notes being played than was humanly possible. It was a night to remember, for sure.

I’m not a huge football fan, but I usually watch some playoff games and the Super Bowl. This year’s game was one for the books, no doubt about it. We heard that a bunch of people, presumably hoping to beat the crowds and traffic, opted to leave NRG Stadium in the fourth quarter, when it looked like Atlanta had the game wrapped up, only to end up watching on TV screens in the parking lot when everything went south for the southern team and north for the Patriots.

We had to take a 45-minute break in the second quarter to talk to our daughter, so I pushed “pause” and we picked up where we left off at the end of our conversation. That meant I had to stay off social media for the rest of the game to avoid “spoilers”! Think what you will about Brady and the Patriots, it was an impressive performance and a comeback for the ages. Made for an exciting game, no doubt about it.

We were equally impressed by the halftime show. Lady Gaga put on a memorable performance. The drones that made the animated star patterns at the beginning were pretty impressive. Something we’ll no doubt see more often in the future.

Well that was interesting.

About a week ago, I did a quick search and found out that Houston was hosting a Women’s March to run in parallel with the one in Washington. My wife and I decided to attend. She has a history of participating in protests in the past, but this was my first.

When I registered us, there were only about 2500 RSVPs. The number of attendees grew quickly in the week or so that followed.

We had elaborate plans. There was a restaurant in Houston that my wife wanted to have breakfast at, although it was a fair distance from where we needed to be for the march and rally. We decided to park centrally and figure out the public transit. As that grew more complicated, we decided to go to a place in the theater district we were familiar with. Forgetting that downtown Houston is a dead zone on Saturday mornings. Nothing was open, except for a McDonalds, so we settled for that. (A few blocks away, as we later discovered, there was an Einstein Bros. Bagels that we would have preferred. Alas.)

Everyone gathered at Jamail Skatepark at 10:45. There were a lot of people. A lot. Of all ages, genders, nationalities, etc. Kids in strollers. Gay Muslims. People even more senior than us. Even though it was a Women’s March, men were definitely welcomed and embraced. There were some very creative and funny signs, all of them correctly spelled with proper grammar and punctuation. Texas Congressman Al Green gave us our call to action and then we set out on the 15-minute march to Houston City Hall.

The route took us along the Interstate and overpassing some major thoroughfares. We got lots of honks of encouragement along the way and no animosity whatsoever. Spirits were high and there were lots of chants as we marched. At least one guy had a drum.

When we reached the Hermann Square in front of City Hall, the scope of the group became more apparent. The police estimate at least 20-22,000 people in attendance, likely the largest public gathering in the history of the city. The organizers spoke, as did members of city council and state representatives. The chief of police talked, as did Phyllis Frye, the first openly transgendered judge in the country. News choppers showed up and we received word that Mayor Turner was on his way to speak as well. Everyone issued a call to action, with most of the attention focused on 2018’s mid-term elections, although there are bills coming up in the Texas legislature that require public response as well. I’ve never been terribly politically active, beyond voting when I could, but the current environment has fired up a lot of people who’ve never been to a rally before. Hopefully this lasts…as long as necessary.

It was a fascinating experience. Fortunately, the weather cooperated, after a terribly rainy few days. It was overcast, so it was neither hot nor cold, and there was an occasional breeze, which made it all very tolerable. As with the other marches and rallies around the country (and the world—even in Antarctica!), it was orderly and peaceful. The police were congenial and many in the crowd thanked them for their service along the way.

As things started to wind down, we decided to grab lunch rather than deal with the congestion. By then the downtown had awakened and we had more options.

My first two book reviews of 2017 are up at Onyx Reviews:

• Behind Her Eyes by Sarah Pinborough
• Rather Be the Devil by Ian Rankin

You know you’re in Texas when the ice cream truck, with its annoying, endless chiming melody, goes down your street in the middle of January. And you think that if you’d been outside you might have bought something! It’s nearly 80° today, and there were tornado alerts earlier this morning. Looking like a soggy week here.

Hopefully it won’t be too rainy come the weekend. I’m about to do something I’ve never done before; take part in a protest march. We’ve signed up to participate in the Women’s March in Houston on Saturday. Nearly 6000 people have signed up to attend. Should be interesting. Anyone who follows me on Twitter knows that I’ve become more politically active and vocal since the outset of the recent election campaign. Before I became a citizen, I didn’t really feel like I had a voice in this country. But I do now, and I’m going to use it—at least during the tenure of the forthcoming administration.

We saw Hidden Figures on the weekend. An excellent film about a little-known aspect of the NASA program: how many African American women worked on the mathematics that put John Glenn into orbit, and subsequent aspects of the program, too. Three women are the focus: one aspires to be the first black woman engineer with NASA (despite the fact that the only school providing the extension courses she needs is segregated), one who runs the Colored Computing division, although her request to be acknowledged as a supervisor, with the attendant respect and salary are regularly turned down, and one who proves her computational and mathematics skills under pressure. It’s a good ensemble, also featuring Kirsten Dunst, who doesn’t think she’s prejudiced but is; Jim Parsons, who has to swallow his pride when a black woman computer solves problems his team has thus far failed; and Kevin Costner as the leader of that group. Costner is surprisingly good as a man whose team is under a great deal of pressure to get a man into orbit. I love the scene where he solves an issue with bathrooms. I don’t always care for his performances, but I liked this one a lot. There’s also a nice romance subplot featuring Taraji P. Henson’s character and Mahershala Ali, who plays Remy Danton in House of Cards, and I appreciated the scene where Octavia Spencer’s character picks up a Fortran book, determined to teach herself the programming language to guarantee that the new IBM mainframe won’t make her and her fellow mathematicians obsolete. I taught myself Fortran some 30 years ago, and it was a valuable skill indeed!

I finished Behind Her Eyes by Sarah Pinborough (review forthcoming, but #WTFThatEnding indeed!) and started Final Girls by Riley Sager, which I’m enjoying thus far.

We watched quite a few movies over the past week or so. First there was Manchester By the Sea, which deserves all of the praise it has been getting. There’s a scene late in the film between Michelle Williams and Casey Affleck that is simply devastating. Essentially the movie is about how there are some things people are unwilling to forgive—in others or in themselves. The big reveal is a major gut punch, when it comes, it makes everything clear. Plus the scenery is gorgeous: reminds me of Eastern Canada, where I grew up, or the drive from PVD to NECON, except in winter.

Then we watched Barry on Netflix, which makes a good companion piece to Southside With You. This movie covers the year when Obama transferred to Columbia University. It’s a time when he’s not sure where he’s from (it’s a complicated story, and you get to see him fine-tune his answer to the question) or where he belongs. He doesn’t feel comfortable with the black community but he faces all the expected bias from the white community. He also has a serious girlfriend, but he wonders why she’s with him—his perception is somewhat skewed by his mother’s (Ashley Judd) relationship with his father.

Then we saw La La Land. Our decision to go came at the last minute, and we ended up in a tiny auditorium that was mostly full, having to sit in the third of those rows at the front where no one ever sits. If there was ever going to be a movie to see from that perspective, this would be the one. It’s larger than life and slightly skewed from reality. I thought it was beautiful—I was swept away by it completely, and I would happily have sat there and watched it all over again straightaway. The story is fairly simple: man and woman meet, eventually connect, but are thwarted by their careers—at first because of a lack of a success and then, later, the opposite. It doesn’t have the expected outcome, except you get that, too, kind of. The fact that people break into song-and-dance routines bothered me not the slightest, and the show-stopper by Emma Stone during her big audition was incredible. I’m also impressed by the fact that Ryan Gosling did all of the keyboard work for real. He’s very good.

We also enjoyed the Doctor Who Christmas special, which was a riff on superheroes. And I watched a British series called Paranoid that opens with a shocking murder and then gets a bit bogged down with some of the most screwed-up coppers to grace a miniseries. Their personal problems got in the way of the investigation time and time again. It stars Indira Varma (Ellaria Sand in Game of Thrones) and features a rather manic Kevin Doyle (Molsely from Downton Abbey). I liked Danny Huston in this—he was also in American Horror Story (as the Axeman), but on the whole I wasn’t terribly satisfied with the series compared to some of the others that have come out of the UK recently. We haven’t seen the new Sherlock yet, but soon.

I read a lot of books last year.

In large part, the increase over previous years is thanks to my tenure on the jury for the Shirley Jackson Awards. I read a lot of anthologies and collections, plus a whole stack of standalone short stories that don’t appear on this list (I estimate that I read at least a thousand short stories in 2016). Plus a number of novels, novellas, novelettes, novelishes, and other variations on the theme.

I also read the five existing Game of Thrones novels, which was an accomplishment in its own right. Plus I finished my reread of the Travis McGee books.

Without further ado, here is my 2016 reading list. Hyperlinks lead to reviews. I didn’t do as many of those this year. Not enough time. Can’t do everything!

1. Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore – Robin Sloan
2. The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry – Gabrielle Zevin
3. The Dreadful Lemon Sky – John D. MacDonald
4. The Fireman – Joe Hill
5. The Woman Who Walked in Sunshine – Alexander McCall Smith
6. The Empty Copper Sea – John D. MacDonald
7. What We Become – Arturo Perez-Reverte
8. Hap and Leonard by Joe R. Lansdale
9. The Green Ripper – John D. MacDonald
10. The City of Mirrors – Justin Cronin
11. Isaac’s Storm – Erik Larson
12. Free Fall in Crimson – John D. MacDonald
13. Cinnamon Skin – John D. MacDonald
14. End of Watch – Stephen King
15. The Road to Little Dribbling – Bill Bryson
16. The Lonely Silver Rain – John D. MacDonald
17. The Girl on the Train – Paula Hawkins
18. The Glittering World – Robert Levy
19. Song of Kali – Dan Simmons
20. When We Were Animals – Joshua Gaylord
21. Eileen – Ottessa Moshfegh
22. Lord Byron’s Prophecy – Sean Eads
23. Dollar Deal: The Stephen King Dollar Baby Filmmakers –  Shawn S.Lealos
24. Experimental Film – Gemma Files
25. In the Lovecraft Museum – Steve Tem
26. Wylding Hall – Elizabeth Hand
27. The End of the End of Everything – Dale Bailey
28. Get in Trouble – Kelly Link
29. Gutshot – Amelia Gray
30. The Nameless Dark – T.E. Grau
31. You Have Never Been Here – Mary Rickert
32. Nightscript I: An Anthology of Strange & Darksome Tales – C.M Muller, ed
33. She Walks in Shadows – Silvia Moreno-Garcia & Paula R. Stiles, eds
34. Ain’t Superstitious – Juliana Rew, ed
35. Blurring the Line – Marty Young, ed
36. Midian Unmade – Del Howison & Joe Nassise, eds
37. Insert Title Here – Tehani Wessely, ed
38. Licence Expired – Madeline Ashby & David Nickle, eds
39. Resonator: New Lovecraftian Tales From Beyond – Scott A. Jones, eds
40. Whispers from the Abyss – Kat Rocha, ed
41. The Doll Collection – Ellen Datlow, ed
42. Exigencies – Richard Thomas, ed
43. Cassilda’s Song – Joe Pulver, ed
44. Dreams from the Witch House – Lynne Jameck, ed
45. Ghost in the Cogs – Scott Gable, Scott & C. Dombrowski, eds
46. Hanzai Japan – Nick Mamatas & Masumi Washington, eds
47. Seize the Night – Christopher Golden, ed
48. Aickman’s Heirs – Simon Strantzas, ed
49. 18 Wheels of Horror – Eric Miller, ed
50. Penumbrae – Richard Gavin, Patricia Cram, and Daniel A. Schulke, eds
51. The Bestiary – Ann VanderMeer, ed
52. Black Wings IV – S.T. Joshi, ed
53. Innsmouth Nightmares – Lois H. Gresh, ed
54. That is Not Dead – Darrell Schweitzer, ed
55. Kill for a Copy – Rob McEwan, ed
56. Giallo Fantastique – Ross E. Lockhart, ed
57. Cthulhu Fhtagn! – Ross E. Lockhart, ed
58. nEvermore! – Nancy Kilpatrick & Caro Soles, eds
59. Hides the Dark Tower – Kelly A. Harmon and Vonnie Winslow Crist, eds
60. The Burning Maiden – Greg Kishbaugh, ed
61. Breakout – Nick Gevers, ed
62. The Box Jumper – Lisa Mannetti
63. Unusual Concentrations – S.J. Spurrier
64. Nightjack by Tom Piccirilli
65. In a Sunburned Country – Bill Bryson
66. Vinyl Cafe Turns the Page – Stuart McLean
67. Shadow Season – Tom Piccirilli
68. Arson Plus and Other Stories – Dashiell Hammett
69. Modern Lovers – Emma Straub
70. Stop the Presses – Robert Goldsborough
71. A Game of Thrones – George R. R. Martin
72. A Clash of Kings – George R. R. Martin
73. A Storm of Swords – George R. R. Martin
74. A Feast for Crows – George R. R. Martin
75. A Dance with Dragons – George R.R. Martin
76. The Highwayman – Craig Johnson
77. Disappearance at Devil’s Rock – Paul Tremblay
78. Rise the Dark – Michael Koryta
79. You Will Know Me – Megan Abbott
80. Revolver – Duane Swierczynski
81. I Am Providence – Nick Mamatas
82. Top Suspense: 13 Classic Stories by 12 Masters of the Genre
83. The End of Everything – Megan Abbott
84. Six Scary Stories selected and introduced by Stephen King
85. Burial – Neil Cross
86. Alex – Pierre Lemaitre
87. Irene – Pierre Lemaitre
88. The Girl from Venice – Martin Cruz Smith
89. The Wrong Side of Goodbye – Michael Connelly
90. Camille – Pierre Lemaitre
91. An Obvious Fact – Craig Johnson
92. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms – George R.R. Martin
93. In Sunlight or In Shadow: Stories Inspired by the Paintings of Edward Hopper – Lawrence Block, ed.
94. Witness to a Trial – John Grisham
95. The Trespasser – Tana French
96. The Princess and the Queen, or, the Blacks and the Greens – George R.R. Martin
97. Last Wish and The Gulf – Poppy Z. Brite
98. The Whistler – John Grisham
99. The Godsend – Bernard Taylor
100. Hearts in Suspension – Jim Bishop, ed.
101. Blink – Malcolm Gladwell
102. Ararat – Christopher Golden
103. Precious and Grace – Alexander McCall Smith
104. The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life – John le Carré
105. Rather Be The Devil – Ian Rankin
106. Blood and Lemonade – Joe R. Lansdale
107. Quicksand: What it Means to Be a Human Being – Henning Mankell

We had a brief cold spell last week where the temperatures dropped to below freezing. So, when it suddenly went back up to the eighties again, the flora and fauna in the area became understandably confused. The azalea bush in front of our house produced a single flower over the past couple of days. Presumably it thinks spring is here. Who knows—maybe it is? The unseasonably warm temperatures show no signs of abating any time soon. We sat on the patio of a nearby restaurant for a mid-afternoon dinner on Christmas Eve and again last night at our local pizzeria. I had to switch the climate control back from heating to cooling. I guess it’s better than snow.

We saw Passengers last week, the space odyssey starring Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt, with Michael Sheen and Lawrence Fishburn. It was pretty good. I certainly understand the controversy surrounding the movie, but I’m having a hard time condemning it in as strong words as some have done. There’s an assumption in movies that if someone does something bad or wrong or ill-considered that he must pay for it at some point, but the real world doesn’t operate that way, so I don’t always expect that divine justice will be meted out for all cinematic transgressions. I know that the hand-waving explanations (“yes, but later in the movie he…”) won’t satisfy everyone, but they did me. And my wife, as well, who hadn’t read about the complaints about the film. On an unrelated note, every time I saw Michael Sheen, I thought of Lloyd the bartender from The Shining. We were standing at the food counter when I realized that the millennial working the ticket booth had given me the senior discount. It must have been the bad light outside the multiplex that led her to believe I looked over 62, right?

On Christmas Eve we went to the local church to watch the pageant and sing carols, something that always takes me back to my childhood, when I was involved in such productions. Then we watched Love, Actually, which was on a round-the-clock loop up against A Christmas Story. However, we soon discovered that the movie had been edited (most notably during Nighy’s early colorful rant), so I pulled it up on Amazon Prime and we watched it uncensored. We’d seen it on VHS, probably, when it first came out, so I remembered some but not all of it. I tend to agree that the movie doesn’t get falling in love right in most of the stories, where the prime ingredient seems to be physical attraction (other than the Martin Freeman storyline where the characters actually fall in love while talking to each other). The Liam Neeson storyline is just a ton of fun, especially in the way that this step-dad relates to the boy, very direct, honest and coarse. I didn’t care for the way the Laura Linney story petered out, either. It’s easy to watch, but the movie doesn’t really stand up to close scrutiny.

On Christmas Day, I put an iPod loaded with every Christmas song we own (about 400 of them, with a total running time of nearly 24 hours) on random shuffle and we listened to the music while we read and relaxed. I don’t normally like shuffle—I’m an album kinda guy—but it was fun to hear Sarah McLaughlin one minute and Trans Siberian Orchestra the next and Twisted Sister the next. We also watched Southside With You, the movie about Barack Obama’s first date with Michelle Robinson, who was his supervisor at a Chicago law firm and very reluctant to get involved with him. Parker Sawyers looks a lot like Obama from certain angles, and he certainly mastered his rhythms and styles. I had a harder time seeing Michelle Obama in Tika Sumpter, but it’s a nice story, mostly based on fact, although the meeting they attend might not have happened on their first date.

Last night we saw Lion, starring Dev Patel and Nicole Kidman. It’s based on the true story of a little boy (4-5 years old), who lives in rural India in abject poverty. Through a series of misadventures, he ends up trapped on an out-of-service train that takes him over a thousand kilometers from home, to Calcutta. Not only can he not convey the name of the village where he comes from, he can’t speak Bengali, the local language, only Hindi. After some Oliver Twist-esque experiences, he ends up being adopted by a family in Tasmania, where he grows up to be Dev Patel. It’s about 2008 and he’s introduced to Google Earth, which sends him on a years-long quest to try to figure out where he came from based on only his geographic memories. It’s a feel-good movie, probably Patel’s best work. We liked it a lot. Interestingly, you don’t find out why the movie has that title until the text updates just before the closing credits. It’s a funny reveal.

We watched Coming Through the Rye this weekend. It’s about Jamie Schwartz, a teenager at prep school who decides to adapt Catcher in the Rye into a play for his class project. His advisers tell him he needs to get permission from Salinger. So he does a little bit of sleuthing, figures out where the reclusive author probably lives and goes on a road trip with a female companion who’s a little bit in love with him.

Though the locals are protective and obstructive, Jamie eventually finds Salinger (Chris Cooper), who refuses to give him permission. More than that, he tells Jamie that he would be stealing from him if he did it. Jamie returns to school (there’s a lot more to the story than that), and reports his findings, at which point the advisers tell him to go ahead and stage the play anyway. “No one’s going to make any money from it,” they say, uttering the false justification many copyright violators use. “And he’s never going to find out.”

At which point, I could only shake my head. First of all, if they didn’t have any respect for Salinger’s copyright, why did they bother sending the boy on this difficult mission to obtain permission? And then, given that Jamie held Salinger in such high esteem, how could he not refuse his advisers by telling them what Salinger had told him…that to do so would be stealing? The film was generally good, but that element ruined it for me, I’m afraid.

To cleanse our palate, we watched a few Christmas specials. I’ve heard of Pentatonix, but haven’t seen them, so we saw their special. They remind me a lot of The Nylons, the Canadian a capella group that was popular in the eighties. This was followed by  Amy Grant’s special. The next night we watched the Mormon Tabernacle Choir’s show, which ended with a retelling of the events surrounding the creation and early performances of Handel’s Messiah. I’d heard some of the details before, but having it interspersed with the performance was nice.

I binge-watched Goliath, the Amazon series starring Billy Bob Thornton that I mentioned last time. It’s quite good. Very Grisham-esque. Some of the characters are overly quirky, a David E. Kelley trope, but Thornton plays it straight and the show wouldn’t be much without him. Funny, though: I thought there were 10 episodes, but mid-way through the eighth it seemed like they were starting to wrap things up, and indeed they were. Caught me a bit by surprise.

The promo trailer for Netflix’s The OA intrigued me, and I was familiar with Brit Marling from the series Babylon where she plays an American hired as a publicist for the London Metropolitan Police. It was an oddball show, half camp-half drama, but I liked it. Sometimes I feel like I’m the only person who saw it.

The premise of The OA seemed interesting, too. A young woman who has been missing for seven years shows up under mysterious circumstances. When she vanished, she was blind; now she can see, but has strange scars on her back and is somewhat unstable emotionally.

The first indication that something weird was going on with the show (not the story) was when the “opening” credits started crawling at the 50 minute mark of the first episode (out of 70 minutes). It made what came before feel like the longest “cold open” in television history. And, in fact, it was, because at that point the show changes radically, and it turns into (mostly) a narrated flashback of the main character’s life. Wow, did that rob the story of any dramatic impact. It becomes tedious to listen to someone telling you what you’re seeing (in abbreviated fashion) on the screen. Apparently it’s all about the benefits of having near death experiences, but by the mid-point of the second episode I was starting to have a near-death experience of my own, so I bailed. I don’t quit shows easily, but I couldn’t imagine going through several more hours of that. And apparently that’s what the remaining episodes were: more of the same, until an unearned shocking event in the final minutes.

We were looking at a list of movies we might like to see over the coming weeks when I mentioned that Rogue One was playing right now and I wanted to see it. This was at 7:00 last night and the next screening, we learned, was at 7:05. But the next one after that was at 7:30 and there was another at 8:00.

So we got in the car and zipped over to the multiplex five miles away and by 7:20 were seated in the biggest auditorium. The place was quite full when we got there, but we got decent seats, up high and to the right of the side aisle. Not a place I’d normally pick, but the seats turned out to be not bad at all.

I saw a trailer for Rogue One a long time ago, and read or skimmed a few articles about it in the interim, but it was a movie that I wanted to see without too much advanced knowledge. I didn’t watch any of the subsequent trailers or read any reviews…just a few headlines from reviews to see that they were generally positive.

The movie is a ton-o-fun. A little bit complicated in terms of where all these planets are in relation to each other and who all these people are. There are very few familiar Star Wars lynch pins to anchor you. Everything is shiny and new, except it’s mostly gritty and lived-in. The scene-stealer of the movie is Alan Tudyk’s K2 robot, who is a hoot. Not quite as dismal as Marvin the Paranoid Android but trending in that direction. There’s a character who seems like a direct rip-off of Hundred Eyes from Marco Polo. The battle scenes—in space, but particularly on the ground—are grueling, like something out of Saving Private Ryan or a Vietnam War reel. A couple of familiar faces are created via CGI, to interesting effect. Mixed in with all of the frenetic action are some good character moments and arcs. We enjoyed it, and I’ll probably see it again before long.

A friend recommended a series I hadn’t heard of. It’s called Goliath, and it’s streaming on Amazon. Stars Billy Bob Thornton as a lawyer who co-founded a firm that has grown to mammoth size, but he’s no long associated with it, for reasons I don’t yet know, but his name is still on the masthead. His ex-wife (Maria Bello) still works there, though, and William Hurt, the other partner, rules the place like a tyrant. In the first episode, Thornton is hired to pursue a civil case against a private military contractor that is represented by his old firm. Thornton doesn’t have a drinking problem (“I drink just the right amount”), lives in a seedy hotel, has a part-time prostitute working as his legal aide, and in general looks to be a ghost of his former self. He also has a 17-year-old daughter with whom he has a good, albeit strained, relationship. The show itself has the visual appeal of Bosch. It’s set in Los Angeles (Venice Beach) and mostly seen in the daylight instead of at night, and it looks mighty fine. The other side doesn’t play by the rules (Thronton finds his car, a Mustang convertible covered in fish guts at one point), so he is David rather than Goliath. Looking forward to seeing where it goes.

Spring is here. Winter is over. So say we all.

We had our days of near-freezing temperatures. Now it’s 66. Tomorrow 72. That’s okay by us.

I had to sign my name 265 or so times yesterday. The project hasn’t been announced yet, so I can’t say exactly why.

We watched The Hollars on the weekend, enticed by the presence of Margo Martindale (from Justified and The Americans). It’s a family drama about a man (whose girlfriend, Anna Kendrick, is profoundly pregnant) who returns to home after his mother (Martindale) falls and is found to be very ill. His brother is living at home again and his father’s plumbing business is failing. It’s a nice movie with a good heart. There’s always one character in these things, though, who destroys any semblance of reality by being over-the-top outrageous, and in this case it’s the brother, who takes comic relief and turns it into some cringe-worthy moments. Josh Groban has a small part, and the father is played by Richard Jenkins, who was the father in Six Feet Under, which makes the scene where he has to lie down in the back of a hearse all that much funnier.

I finished watching the first season of Spotless on Netflix, although it apparently originated with Esquire TV, which I didn’t even know was a thing. It’s a French/British production about two brothers who did something terrible when they were boys growing up in France. One brother moved to London and has a family there (wife, 13-year-old daughter, 10-ish-year-old son). His business is crime scene cleaning, hence the series’ title. He knows how to remove every last spot left from a murder scene or a house where someone died and wasn’t found for a while. The other brother shows up from France in possession of some stolen property that leads to trouble upon trouble upon trouble for both. The series has a strong Breaking Bad vibe as this previously honest guy gets pulled into doing work for a crime boss, played by Brendan Coyle of Downton Abbey, who is even more dapper than Gus Fring, a gentleman crook with sharp fangs. As with Breaking Bad, everything keeps going from bad to worse. A lot is resolved by the end of episode 10, but far from everything, and Season 2 is scheduled for next year, although when it will make its way to Netflix I don’t know. Well worth checking out if you like crime shows.