A list of Halloween Movies that you should find enjoyable and I probably missed a lot: Alien / Aliens John Carpenter’s Halloween John Carpenter’s The Fog John Carpenter’s The Thing Poltergeist Jeepers Creepers Session 9 The Frighteners The Conjuring Devil’s Backbone The Name of the Rose Insidious Shaun of the Dead The Exorcist Cabin in the Woods Ghostbusters Evil Dead 1+2 The Others Friday The 13th Dead Alive The Shining Phantoms And lastly, like I do every Halloween, the Vincent Price’s voice over from Thriller: “Darkness falls across the land The midnite hour is close at hand Creatures crawl in search of blood To terrorize yawls neighbourhood And whosoever shall be found Without the soul for getting down Must stand and face the hounds of hell And rot inside a corpses shell The foulest stench is in the air The funk of forty thousand years And grizzy ghouls from every tomb Are closing in to seal your doom And though you fight to stay alive Your body starts to shiver For no mere mortal can resist The evil of the thriller… Vincent Price – Michael Jackson’s Thriller, 1984. Dir. John Landis
Thursday, I spend at my door awaiting for my iPhone 6 to arrive. Physically at my door reading Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. My printer died and there was no way to print out a signature form. The movie premiered today directed by David Fincher. David has directed Alien 3, The Game, Se7en, Social Network, the American adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and others. He is one of my favorite directors so when the trailer dropped I loved it when they announced Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor were doing the soundtrack like they had done with Social Network and all three hours of Dragon Tattoo, it felt perfect. I hadn’t read the book so with nothing else to do on Thursday, I read it cover to cover. Suffice to say, I finished before my iPhone 6 arrived. Gone Girl, the novel, written by Gillian Flynn is thriller about newspaper writer Lance Nicolas Dunn and his soon to be wife, Amy, a writer of personality tests. Her psychologists parents are the geniuses behind Amazing Amy, a series of children’s books that made money and thus she has a trust fund. They marry and the couple live in New York until the recession hits they lose their jobs just in time for to bring Nicolas home to care after his mother who is going through cancer treatments, his father is in a home due to going through Alzheimer’s. Using up the last of Amy’s trust fund money, Nicolas and his twin sister Margo buy a local bar. During all this, Nicolas gets a job at the local college while Amy is the stay at home wife with little to do and like every anniversary she leaves clues for Nicholas involving their life. It takes a while for Nicolas to figure out the clues since Amy is in the New England vernacular: wicked smart. Until on the morning of their fifth wedding anniversary Amy disappears. Now, before you say, I know how this movie ends: You don’t. And I’m not going to ruin it for you. Go read the book first then watch the movie. The good news is the trailers reveal nothing of the twists and turns of this movie. Often times the trailers do and I groan but not this time. This a faithful adaptation and doesn’t adhere to the book as much as it needs to. Which is a good thing because the book only has two point of views: Amy and Nic. The movie has a third point of view, that of Detective Rhonda Boney played by Kim Dickens which solves a few wandering plot threads from the book. It should be noted Gillian also wrote the screenplay. So the movie feels like a re-polished final draft, in my opinion. While most of the novel is first person the movie dialogue more than makes up for missing beats from the novel. So much so, sometimes the actors are talking too quick. The police investigation led by Detective Boney begins looking into Nicolas and Amy’s life and the cracks begin to appear from the debt on the credit cards to Amy’s diary entries going from sunny to darker and darker to Nicolas cheating to Amy’s life insurance policy being upped and more. It’s just heaped on. The only thing neither the movie or the novel can figure out is how to land the dismount and win the gold. The suspension of disbelief is stretched thin. I’m not talking about Chief Brody in Jaws the movie, shooting the oxygen tank and blowing up the shark, that ending made perfect sense and I cheer every time it happens. It’s the suspension of disbelief that Tom Cruise’s son survived and magically re-appears at the end of The War of the Worlds so everyone can have a happy ending. Or as one of the over fifty crowd behind me in the crowded small movie theater said: That was a stupid way to end the movie to which I replied that’s how the book ended, too. She was surprised there was a book. The actors in the movie are perfect. The direction is spot on. The music is right. The lighting is all David Fincher. I’ll probably see it again, when I don’t have to sit in the front row.
Welcome to October. One month to go until NaNoWrimo and I’m not coordinating this year. This will be my tenth year of being NaNoWrimo participant. Besides the Weaver ‘verse, I’ve got two maybe three different themed ‘verses that have come from doing NaNoWrimo. A zombie urban fantasy ‘verse that could be spun off into space and a space invader ‘verse that needs a crap ton of space research involved. The writing group’s fourth year anniversary arrives this year. Bennett North has been writing some good posts about preparing for the annual event. It should be noted, the posts are good anyone writing a novel because it’s best to plan things out before you jump in. Discovery writing or pantsing your way through a novel isn’t the best in my humble opinion. The writing group had several great suggestions to fix Weaver. I’ve not taken the editing chainsaw to the first draft and instead I’m re-planning it. Not a page one re-write, thankfully, I’m just a revising what happens after page thirty. Keeping the setting, narrowing down the characters and the plot. It’s moments like this why I’m happy the writing group exists. I’ve been pantsing my way through Weaver since the beginning and even though I did beat sheet it all out, the overall plot turned out to be too much too fast. So the new marching orders is to make sure it reads right before going off and writing another chapter. This doesn’t change the plan to turn Weaver into a graphic novel and judging from the reactions of the writing group they liked the character sketches. I don’t know what I’m doing for NaNoWrimo this year. The plan is to re-plot Weaver. Take it slow and steady and not take another four years to finish the second draft. I think setting a deadline of March 2015, just in time for Emerald City Comic Con is a good plan.
