Bev Vincent

We don’t often get snow days here in Southeast Texas, but rain days we get. Yesterday we had the (according to one source) rainiest day ever in the Houston area. Harris County, the county that contains Houston and comes to within a few miles of where I live, received enough rain yesterday alone to fuel Niagara Falls for three and a half days.

The rain started Sunday night, and thunder and lightning occurred throughout the night. When I got up at my usual time and looked out the window from my exercise machine, the water was flowing fast and furious in the ditch out front, and the yard was soggy. Our subdivision must be just a few inches higher than everywhere else around us, though, because we’ve always been able to withstand these heavy storms (10-12″ in one day, apparently) without any threat of flooding. Lots of people in the vicinity weren’t so lucky. At least five people died, many in their cars when they were inundated or attempted to drive through standing water. The city came to a standstill. All schools closed. All government agencies closed. The IRS is going to try to extend the deadline for people who waited until the last moment and then couldn’t make it to the post office to file returns.

I’m always amazed by how much water is involved. Imagine looking out your front window and seeing six, eight, ten feet of water and then try to figure out how much water that involves everywhere around you to achieve that level! That’s what it was like in downtown Houston, which is prone to flooding. Apparently we’re going to get more rain today and tomorrow—nothing like what we got yesterday, but with the ground saturated, it probably means more flooding. A lot of schools are still closed today because feeder roads and surface roads are still covered in water in a lot of places, and the rivers and bayous are still rising.

This from a storm that didn’t even get a name. It wasn’t even a tropical depression.

My wife and I like Sam Elliott, so we decided to give the new Netflix series The Ranch a try. Elliott is the patriarch, Debra Winger plays his somewhat estranged wife (they live apart but they still hook up regularly), and Ashton Kutcher plays the prodigal son who left to pursue a pro football career but now has to slink back home to small town Colorado and nurse his wounds and ego. The “responsible” brother is played by his That 70s Show costar Danny Masterson, whose brother Chris I met when I visited the set of Haven a couple of summers ago.

The humor is fairly sophomoric, but it’s Debra Winger who saves the show. Elliott is good, but Winger is the only one who plays it straight. She gets some good, funny lines, but she doesn’t play them for laughs, with a deliberate pause for yuks. She delivers them like they’re normal, regular dialog, and that works so much better. We’re five episodes in (out of ten) and we’ll probably watch the rest. Not “must-see” TV but it’s okay. Sitcoms seem to have left me behind over the years. The lafftrak on this one gets on my nerves. The only sitcom we watch regularly is The Big Bang Theory and even that one is starting to wear thin. We also came to realize that sitcoms aren’t really binge-able. Two episodes in a row is about our limit.

I’m not at all happy to hear that ABC has decided to not renew Stana Katic’s contract for Castle. I’m hoping it is a ploy to build suspense at the end of the season. Nathan Fillion is fun, but Katic has always been the bigger attraction for me. She’s the kind of actor who I enjoy watching when the focus is on another character, because she’s always doing something interesting. Not upstaging, but she’s present in the scene, not waiting to say her lines. The show won’t be the same without her. In fact, I can’t think of any way for them to have her leave that maintains the show’s premise for another season.

Funny thing—we saw a guy wearing a t-shirt that said “Muir” something or other, which led to a discussion of the TV show The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, which led to the mutual realization that neither of us had ever seen the 1947 movie on which it is based, so we queued it up on Amazon video last night. The TV show was set in Maine, but the original is on the British coast, with Gene Tierney, Rex Harrison, George Sanders, and a very young Natalie Wood. Tierney is a feminist in 1900, unwilling to let anyone tell her how she should feel or live. The score was by Bernard Herrmann, which lends the movie a Hitchcockian atmosphere. It’s not perfect: Mrs. Muir ignores her daughter for huge chunks of time, and it leaps ahead twice at the end to a kind of saccharine finale, but it was pretty good, if you can adapt to the glacial pacing of the era.  The “coarse language” (blasted this and blast that) is amusing.

The previews looked good, and it starred Helen Mirren, a household favorite, so we checked out Eye in the Sky last weekend.  Highly recommended. It’s about a covert operation in Kenya where a group of terrorists, including an American and a woman from England, are convening. UK military and intelligence want to capture the woman and take her back to England, so they have operatives on the ground and an American piloted drone in the sky. Circumstances change, causing the various entities to debate launching a Hellfire missile at the compound.

Besides the physical location in Kenya (actually South Africa), there are three distinct silos. Mirren is orchestrating everything from her command bunker. Alan Rickman (in his final role) is acting as military liaison with the British politicians who can decide whether certain things are legal or justifiable. And Aaron Paul and Phoebe Fox are in a silo of their own, piloting the drone, analyzing its feedback and targeting the missiles.

The movie is all about collateral damage and risk assessment. How much is allowable given the intelligence on the ground? Barkhad Abdi from Captain Thomas has some high-tech gadgetry to surveil the compound, but is in a tenuous position. Not since Les Miserables has so much importance rested on loaves of bread. One would like to hope that the same amount of soul-searching goes on before every strike of this type. I was interested and amused to see the way the two different groups were depicted. The British debated and delayed, passing the buck up the chain of command, unwilling to pull the trigger, whereas the Americans consulted at various points had no compunction about authorizing a strike, almost regardless of the collateral damage. It’s a taut thriller that will leave you with plenty to talk about once its over.

Only one episode of Better Call Saul left, and whoa, are things ever getting intense. The series could equally be called Don’t Mess with Mike. Or Kim, for that matter, as she got one of the series’ best scenes when she confronted Chuck. Rhea Seehorn isn’t a showy actress, but you can always tell there’s a lot going on in her head all the time. There was also a moment early in the episode when Bob Odenkirk almost looked straight into the camera. It was quite disconcerting.

I’m into episode three of The Path, still not quite sure where it’s going to go. I’m intrigued but not 100% hooked.

Being the judge for a literary award means you have to do a lot of reading. A lot. A lot. A lot. I’ve been up to my eyeballs in anthologies and short stories for the past few months. Some novelettes, too. But mostly short stories and collections thereof. Easily a thousand short stories.

I won’t be sorry when that part of the process is over. The only novel I’ve read recently is End of Watch (how could I not?). I’ve had a galley of Justin Cronin’s City of Mirrors for over a month and really want to dig into it, but I’m waiting for a time when I can tackle it without interruption. This morning, though, I picked up The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins and tore through the first sixty or seventy pages. It has an interesting structure. One set of chapters is narrated by an alcoholic woman, divorced, prone to blackouts, and another is narrated by a somewhat depressed woman, though the timeframe of her story is a year earlier. It will be interesting to see how it all joins up.

My wife and I binged through 11.22.63 last weekend, finishing up last night. This was my second time through the eight episodes, and it was good to refresh my memory of it for my News from the Dead Zone overview, which went up yesterday at Cemetery Dance Online. I don’t have much more to say about the series than I did there, but my wife really enjoyed it. She thought the first episode was okay, not compelling, but it got its hooks into her after that and she was as eager to see the next batch of episodes as I was. She hadn’t read the book, so it was good to get her fresh opinion of the adaptation. She was especially pleased with the ending.

I also finished Season 4 of House of Cards this morning. It was what I’ve been watching during my weekday exercise regimen. More of the same, more or less. Nothing too earth shattering, but it’s always interesting to see where they take the story. I wish they’d found more use for Neve Campbell, but it was terrific to see her again. It took me a while to realize where I knew Governor Conway from—he was played by the Swedish actor who played Holder in the US version of The Killing.

Speaking of Swedish actors, my wife had read part of a book called The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared by Swedish author Jonas Jonasson. I stumbled across the movie adaptation on Amazon Prime a couple of weeks ago, so we decided to give it a go. It’s about a centenarian who absconds during his birthday party and soon thereafter winds up coming into possession of a suitcase full of money. Hilarity ensues. It’s a quirky story, like something Roald Dahl might have written for adults. It has a surprising amount of explicit violence and some absurd coincidences, but it’s always interesting to see the sorts of things that other cultures enjoy. The stuff with Albert Einstein’s lesser known brother Herbert was particularly amusing. It’s the third highest grossing Swedish movie of all time, up there with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. movies.

We also watched The Grand Budapest Hotel, which was a lot different than I thought it was going to be. For some reason I thought it was going to be about shenanigans at the aforementioned hotel, but it was actually more about shenanigans involving the concierge (Ralph Fiennes) and the lobby boy (who grows up to be F. Murray Abraham). It’s just as absurd as the Swedish movie, but we liked it. More than I expected we would, in fact.

I was very nervous about that bag of money on this week’s episode of Vinyl. When Richie was playing blackjack, I had a bad feeling. And then it played out the way I thought it might once they went back to the room. Only, in a twist that O. Henry would have loved, the reality was different than Richie allowed his long-time friend to believe. It was a great twist.

We watched a bunch of movies this weekend. Started with Gosford Park, a murder mystery written by the guy who wrote Downton Abbey and directed by Robert Altman. You can see where the idea for the dowager countess came from, although Maggie Smith was cattier and nastier in this film. It was also fairly obvious who the murder victim would be: the guy everyone had a motive to kill. Altman’s directing style is interesting, especially for big group scenes. Seems chaotic, with multiple people talking at the same time, and yet it also seems real.

Then we watched The Big Short, and I couldn’t help thinking that Steve Earle (pictured), who was so incensed in 2004 that he wrote the energetic album that gives this post its title, along with the memorable song “F the CC,” could have written an equally vitriolic album about the 2008 crisis.

The Big Short takes a complicated financial disaster and makes it entertaining. One thing I like about movies of this type (also: Spotlight) is that they take a scenario where everyone knows the outcome and still manage to make it suspenseful. I liked the movie’s conceit of using unlikely people in cameo roles to explain complicated economic concepts. Selena Gomez, for example, explaining synthetic CDOs or Margot Robbie in a bubble bath drinking champagne while she explains mortgage-backed securities. I still have a hard time taking Steve Carell seriously, but he’s winning me over. A great ensemble cast and a script that doesn’t take itself too seriously, but at the same time dives deep into a serious subject. Highly recommended.

Finally, we saw Like Summer, Like Rain, a light drama about a young woman played by ‎Leighton Meester who falls on her feet when she gets fired and ends up as a nanny for a 12-year-old musical and mathematical prodigy with a neglectful, mostly absentee mother (Debra Messing). I found some of Meester’s characters’s decisions toward the end somewhat improbable (where the heck did Idaho come from?), but it’s one of those feel-good movies. Bonus points for a small part played by Billie Joe Armstrong from Green Day.  We also watched the short “One Hundred Eyes,” which is the origin story of a character from the Netflix Marco Polo series, which returns this summer.

I saw 10 Cloverfield Lane on the weekend. It’s a movie best enjoyed by knowing absolutely nothing about it going in. I was intrigued by the trailer, featuring John Goodman and (to me) a couple of unknown actors. The premise is pretty straightforward: A young woman who’s just had a row with her boyfriend is driving through Louisiana when she gets in a wreck. She wakes up in an underground room shackled to the wall with an IV drip in one arm and a jury-rigged cast on one leg.

Okay, so this is Room redux, right? Not so fast. John Goodman tells her that there’s been some sort of event outside this bomb shelter and it could be a year or two before it’s safe to venture out. Not to worry. Goodman is a good paranoid conspiracy freak, so he’s got everything they need to survive. Just him, her and a neighbor who helped him build the shelter who pushed his way in at the last second. So, the question is: did something happen to the rest of the world, or is this all an elaborate ruse to keep her prisoner? The answers, as they come, are surprising but, mostly, foreshadowed. Or at least the basis is laid for them. On the other hand, not every question is answered. We’re left to wonder about Meghan’s fate, as well as that of the woman in the photograph. Goodman’s performance is compelling.

It’s almost like a three-person play, given that the set is limited. Some really good surprises and jolts. And then comes the third act, which starts with a chemical bath and ends with…whoa. Wow-eee. Don’t read anything more about it: go see it. You won’t be sorry.

We watched the Lifetime version of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None over the weekend. There have been many adaptations of this classic novel: Original title: 10 Little very-non-PCs. Renamed 10 Little Also non-PCs. In this version, they’re soldiers, so I guess that’s okay. This is the most faithful adaptation with which I’m familiar. Most movies pull the punch at the end. Not so here. Some familiar faces: Miranda Richardson, Sam Neill, Burn Gorman (Torchwood). If you like a good locked-island mystery and are jonesing for some Downton Abbey vibe (it’s set in 1939), check this out.

I watched the second season of Bosch on Amazon Prime. The premise is that instead of exploring how cops work on crimes, the series (based on the Michael Connelly novels) looks at how the crimes work on the cops. A pornographer is shot by the side of the interstate—that’s the main case. His widow is played by Jeri Ryan. The story pulls in the Armenian mob and a cadre of bad cops. One “problem” with the season is that there’s a very recognizable actor playing what seems to be a minor role, so it’s apparent early on that he’ll figure more into the story. He ends up being the Big Bad, ultimately. It’s a minor quibble. The plot involves Bosch’s ex-wife (a former profiler who is now a pro gambler) and his teenage daughter, so the stakes are elevated. One of my favorite things about the series is the look of Los Angeles: it looks much more genuine than in anything else on film. Also, a lot of the locations are real and real cops came out to fill in the background in a shootout scene and a police funeral, for example. Titus Welliver (Lost) plays Bosch: he’s a guy who’ll do anything to get the job done, even if it’s off the books. Especially if it’s off the books. Lance Reddick (The Wire, Fringe) plays a Deputy Chief whose character I like a lot more in the series than in the books. Good stuff. Definitely binge-worthy.

I guess I should have known that I was straying into Twin Peaks territory when I cued up Mulholland Drive but I honestly didn’t expect the movie to be so weird. There’s something highly artificial about the way characters look in his movies. Take the couple Naomi Watts meets on her flight to L.A. How creepy do they look when they get into their car after they part company? Rictus grins on their faces. Justin Theroux is virtually unrecognizable as the movie director. My favorite scene, though is the one where Mark Pellegrino plays a hit man who totally botches the job, accidentally shooting someone through the wall and then having to try to clean up that mess, only to create worse messes. It’s pretty hilarious. Ultimately, though, I guess I don’t get the movie. Not in the sense of it being “one of the greatest films of all time” (according to the British Film Institute).

So, what’s this Dark Tower thing all about, the one that’s all over the news today because it’s going to start filming in 7 weeks, with Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey (some day I’ll learn how to spell his name without having to look it up every time) as Roland and the Man in Black respectively? Funny you should ask, as I have a couple of books that might help you out with that: The Road to the Dark Tower and The Dark Tower Companion. Both available as trade paperbacks or eBooks.

Today’s news is exciting. There’s actually a date when filming will begin and confirmation of the casting rumors. The only bummer from my perspective is that the movie is going to be made in South Africa, which means I won’t be able to wrangle an invitation to the set because that’s a little farther than my travel budget allows!

Of course, there’s lots of controversy over the casting, but I’m delighted. I can’t wait to see what they do with this massive project. And when you’ve got cool dudes like this working on it…

Robin Lindzer interviewed me for Suspense Magazine, and I even got my name on the cover along with Peter Straub, who is also interviewed in the issue. Cool stuff.

My latest historical context essay is up at Stephen King Revisited. This time I dig deep into the circumstances surrounding Pet Sematary, in a little piece I call A Man’s Heart is Stonier.

We watched two Academy Award-nominated movies this weekend. On Friday, we saw Bridge of Spies, starring Tom Hanks and Mark Rylance, the latter the winner of the Best Supporting Actor Oscar. I loved Rylance’s character’s response (perhaps a tad overused) whenever anyone asked him if he was worried. “Would it do any good?” I have an affinity for Berlin Wall stories: that was the setting for my Ice Cold story “The Honey Trap,” which was nominated for an ITW Thriller Award last year. I researched Berlin in the early 1960s extensively for that story and watched a movie filmed and set in the era as well (Michael Caine’s Funeral in Berlin). I was in Berlin in 1986 and crossed through Check Point Charlie into East Berlin, where I stayed for nearly two weeks. I’d love to go back to Berlin some day to see how different it is now.

Bridge of Spies was pretty good. Low-level people working behind the scenes to do things that authorized people at higher, more official levels of government couldn’t. Also interesting to see the tension between the Soviets and the East Germans during that turbulent period.

On Saturday we saw Room, the story of a woman who had been kidnapped at seventeen and spent seven years in captivity, living in a shed in her captor’s back yard, most of it with her son Jack. The first half of the movie shows their daily routine while in captivity and the second half shows what their lives are like after they are free. Obviously inspired by real events, but it’s a brave story all the same because taking on the scope of the emotional impact of this kind of experience is pretty daunting. Brie Larson won the Oscar for Best Actress, but the Canadian kid who plays Jack could have taken home a trophy, too. He was probably only eight when he made the movie, and he’s in it a lot. Impressive.

We were amused to see a preview for a new TV series called The Family starring Joan Allen as the mother of a son who was kidnapped and returns at some point years later. Same as her character in Room. It’s an unusual niche category.

One of the cool things about being a Canadian is that I get a check every year from the Public Lending Right Commission just for having my books in libraries across the country. They do a random polling of 7 locations (for each eligible book) and you get credit based on the number of times it’s found. There’s a depreciation factor, so you don’t get as much for older books over time, but I’m still doing well with The Road to the Dark Tower a dozen years out. I even get credit for When the Night Comes Down from Dark Arts books, because I contributed ¼ of the content, which is the minimum amount to be eligible. I’ve made as much from the PLRC as in royalties for that particular title! Unfortunately, the check arrived when the Canadian dollar is in the sub-basement. Think I’ll hold onto it for a few months to see if it rebounds.

I became a US citizen in time to vote in the last Presidential election, but I’ve never voted in a primary before. The Texas primary is next week (on Super Tuesday), but we went to early voting last Saturday, when the line was small (read: non-existent). There were several referenda on the ballot. I was also surprised by the number of Democrats running for president. Who are all these people? Star Locke?

I finished my binge rewatch of the X-files, polishing off Season 9 and the 2008 movie and the new Season 10. I’d never seen the movie before. I hear it was a commercial and critical failure, but it wasn’t all that bad. I’m glad I refreshed my memory about Reyes so I knew who she was when she returned in the finale of the new season. The last episode was a hot mess. Way too much crammed into way too little time, and not a lot of it made sense. So they managed to shoe-horn in the 2012 prophecy from the end of S9, but I think they should have done a two-hour final instead of cramming all that action into 45 minutes. The mythology episodes were generally the weakest of the lot anyway.

I’d heard good things about Jessica Jones on Netflix, so I decided to give it a shot next. I’m not a superhero fan, in general. The only movies I’ve seen in recent years are the Iron Man ones. I know nothing about the character’s history. Doesn’t matter: this is a decent contemporary noir where the main character (Kristen Ritter from Breaking Bad) happens to be extraordinarily strong and she can jump from considerable heights. Getting David Tennant as the nefarious nemesis, a guy who can compel people to do things, was a stroke of genius. I especially liked his scene where he negotiated to buy a guy’s house without using his superpower. It was a challenge for the character. I’m only five episodes in, but liking it very much.

I have to confess that I was a naive young man who thought the Neil Young song was about vinyl records being scratched by the tone arm needle! There’s a new show on HBO called Vinyl, starring Bobby Cannavale, Ray Romano, Mick Jagger’s son, the Danish actress who was the reporter on Borgen, Olivia Wilde and a host of others. It’s set in the seventies, with Cannavale as the head of a failing record company that’s about to be bought out by Polygram. He’s in a bit of a spiral, falling off the wagon. Oh, and there’s also a brutal killing and a building collapse, all in the first episode. Plus Andrew Dice Clay—remember him? And, to top it all off, it’s directed by Scorsese and co-written by Mick Jagger. Among the characters we see: Lou Reed, Andy Warhol and, I think, David Bowie, plus a young punk musician who seems like Sid Vicious (played by Jagger’s son). There’s a lot of jumping around in time, leaving you to figure out when it is based on the state of Cannavale’s hair. But I’m enjoying it so far.

Oh, and we saw the Bill Murray movie Rock the Kasbah. My advice: don’t.

I’m interviewed today at the Nerd Girl Power website. The piece is called Every Gunslinger Needs a Companion.

We saw The Lady in the Van this weekend. The obvious pun is that it’s a vehicle for Maggie Smith. It’s about an old woman who lives in a van that she parks on the street in a residential London neighborhood. She has a colorful past as a pianist, ambulance driver during the war and a nun, but now she’s haunted and tormented, as well as crotchety and foul, both of mouth and of bodily odor. She befriends (as much as that is possible) a writer named Alan Bennett, a man who struggles with his sexuality and with his relationship with his mother. He sees the lady as a model for his mother and decides to write about her. The interesting thing the movie does is to split him into two: there is the version of Alan who lives life and observes, and the version who writes about things, and they banter with each other. It’s a visually interesting way to show a person talking to himself. The story is mostly true (and one Bennett comments to the other in passing when they put something on the page that didn’t really happen), and Maggie Smith first portrayed the woman in the van in the stage version 15 years ago. She’s a hoot as this uncouth Dowager Countess. A real delight.

Watched a BBC series called London Spy, which stars Ben Whishaw from The Hour (and also from Suffragette) as a guy who gets romantically entangled with a man who has created something that no one wants publicized. There’s sex and murder and intrigue, all in a somewhat leisurely John Le Carré vein. It’s five episodes and features the likes of Jim Broadbent, Charlotte Rampling, Mark Gatiss, as well as a brief appearance by Clarke Peters (The Wire). Some of it is highly improbable, but it’s a compelling drama about families and secrets and the surveillance state.

Speaking of Suffragette, we finally saw that this weekend, too. It’s an interesting story, and I always like Carey Mulligan, but it plods a bit. Hard to believe the state of things just a hundred or so years ago, though. Not only couldn’t women vote in the UK, they didn’t have any ownership of their children.

I’m up to the “Mulder’s back” section of the eighth season of The X-files. I probably saw these episodes before, but I don’t have a very strong memory of them. Also saw the fourth episode of the new season, which was very good. I think someone got the wrong end of the stick last year when they saw the episode title “Home Again” and assumed that the show would be revisiting the “Home” plot. That wasn’t it at all. This was a monster-of-the-week episode, but also a very personal one for Scully. Very well done, I thought. People in Philly probably aren’t very happy by Mulder’s thoughts on their basketball team, though.

I posted an update at News from the Dead Zone yesterday, including the news that Josh Boone is planning to film King’s Revival this year, assuming he can get a studio on board.

I received my contributor copies of the second X-files anthology, The Truth is Out There, yesterday. One of the super cool things about this book is that the introduction was written by Dean Haglund, who played Langly, the long-haired member of The Lone Gunmen. There’s also an audio version available, which I look forward to listening to. It’s always interesting to hear someone else read your work.

I’ve been enjoying the new season of The X-files. The third episode was hilarious, with all these funny little set pieces and great supporting characters, including the stoners sniffing paint (who appeared in two early X-files episodes), the motel manager and the psychiatrist, who opined that the antipsychotics he’d prescribed for Guy Mann probably wouldn’t do much good because he was “pretty crazy.” I figured out who the killer was very early, but the banter was great and so was the were-twist.

I finished reading Joe Hill’s The Fireman yesterday morning. I had to tear through it fairly quickly (as quickly as you can tear through a 730-page book) to get my review in to Cemetery Dance for the next issue. This is easily Hill’s best novel to date, and I really want to go back and read it again at a more leisurely pace in a few months. My casual reading is going to be pretty sparse for a while as I have a ton of material to read for the Shirley Jackson Awards. The couriers and mail delivery people are probably cursing my name. Every day they bring more boxes of books, and they’re really starting to pile up. That’s in addition to the electronic books and stories. One intern, I presume, heard the instructions “send out five books to the judges” and took them literally, so I received five copies of one of the submissions, and so did the other judges. When this is all over, I’ll take a photograph of the stacks and stacks of books I’ve received. It’s crazy.

We only have one episode of I’ll Have What Phil’s Having left, the one in Hong Kong. Last night we watched the Barcelona episode. That’s one city I’ve always wanted to visit, and hearing it described as a cross between Paris and Florence only heightened that desire. One day.