Lana the Dog and Alien: Covenant

Thanks for coming back! I've been gone a long time, because of a stubborn chest cold and work overload.

So a few quick things:

--Lana has been saved! Thanks to those of you who told me you went to the shelter's Facebook page!

--Looks to be like the Trump administration--and I do mean all of them--have been to brunch with Russia, if you catch my drift. We can impeach a guy who slept with an intern, but not a guy who for years has been in bed with the Russians? It'll get uglier before it gets better, and I'm not sure I want Mike Pence at the con, either. Maybe if it's proved the entire election was rigged, they all go, and we do it all over again. The proof is there. Someone just has to type it up. Where's Woodward and Bernstein when we need them?

--And Jared Kushner is yet another thug in an expensive suit. He and all of his brothers-in-law.

--Ridley Scott's Alien: Covenant, which I just saw today, is a visually stunning film of bleh! I'm really upset about how he chose to deviate from Prometheus's sense of ideological wonder and instead delve into monomaniacal domination, which we've seen plenty of times before. I'm also angry about what he did with Noomi Rapace's Elizabeth Shaw character, an awesome, riveting, strong women who deserved a helluva lot better than this. Like her, I also wanted to know about the Engineers, and about why they created, and then wanted to destroy, us. You'll see why we're now never going to know. Why would a very talented director waste so much time making a visual but morose film? And the captain...I swear, he must be the dumbest character this side of Friday the 13th movies. After seeing lots of death and destruction and aliens, he actually peers inside a hatching alien cocoon for several long moments. Deserved what he got, though Ridley Scott made him suffer for way too long, after he asked David, the Synthetic, philosophically, about what he believed in. Odd last question. Watch Prometheus again and skip this one.

The Hunger Games -- Mockingjay, Part 1

Photo: Poster used in the viral campaign for the film, from the film's Wikipedia site.

Mockingjay, Part 1 is a very good, effective film that can be seen as a YA action movie, perhaps the first of its breed.  Jennifer Lawrence's performance and the just-right balance of action and politics carry it, and save it from being just another action film, or just another angry YA film.  I could've done without the (for me) unnecessary romance angle, but I'm not exactly the target audience for this film, and I'm okay with that.  In fact, this film deserves the same kudos as the Alien franchise, and maybe Thelma and Louise: usually action films have male main characters and the females are slower-witted things who get told what to do.  Mockingjay is exactly the opposite of that: the women here are large and in charge, and it's the men who look and act lost.  The men have to be saved by the women, not the other way around.

This is a smarter-than-usual YA movie, which I mean in the kindest of all possible ways.  It's political message is strong: if we all fight each other to the death, surely we will all die.  This makes sense.  Yet, does that mean you shouldn't rebel, as this movie (or, at least, the Capitol, strategically) says for awhile?  The answer is No, of course not.  The rebels will die if they don't rebel, and they may only die if they do.  Furthermore, it makes no sense to support a system that suppresses you.  This makes me want to go on a tangent about Southern Republicans, and the women who support the men behind that social and political system, but for now I'll refrain.  But don't get me started.

This movie should work for the older crowd, such as myself, as long as said crowd remembers that it is a YA action movie, not necessarily made for guys my age.  One immediate criticism (you knew there'd be at least one) hit me, hard, during the movie: Just as the female protagonist (Sigourney Weaver / Ripley) did in the first Alien, Jennifer Lawrence / Katniss (or, more specifically, her sister) does here: during a violent life and death crisis for a large group of people, these two women went back to get the cat.  True, Katniss goes back for her sister who had gone to get the cat, whereupon Ripley simply went back for the cat, but it's still the same.  Of course, the point is that love conquers all--and I'd be a hypocrite if I said I wouldn't risk life and limb for my own pet--but that doesn't stop me from picturing someone in the underground rebel stronghold murmuring: "Uh, could someone close that door, please?  Aren't we getting bombs dropped on us?"  It's a bothersome sequence, though, in 1979 and now, if your point is to show that women can be just as formidable in war as men.  The scenes fit the YA movie, but it didn't fit the movie's subtext.  I'm just sayin'.

And, like me, you may have to assume that the moviemakers really don't believe that an emotionless tyrant in charge of a totalitarian regime--someone so evil that he would bomb a hospital just to prove a point--would let some fighter jets and some really good, sophisticated fighters come and go as they please just to deliver a brainwashed former-boyfriend to a teenage girl who stands mostly as the symbolic representation of a rebellion.

Read that sentence again.

This point was actually discussed between a friend and I recently.  I tried picturing Saddam Hussein, for example, doing the same.  Or, maybe Stalin.  Hell, even Sherman or Ulysses S. Grant.  But, no.  They'd just overwhelm and kill such fighters, or--like Sherman and Stalin--just burn to hell everything in their paths to starve them out.  Chances are, such men wouldn't even know what such emotions were.  There's a war to win here, after all.  Snow wouldn't think he was fighting one teenage girl.  He'd know he was fighting a rebel army, with a solid leader, good fighters, a sophisticated technology expert, etc.  If a brainwashed and violent guy would be trained to go after any of those people, Katniss Everdeen would be the last person he'd strangle.  He'd be sent after President Coin first, the tech guy second.

That'd be like the U.S. South sending a hitman after Harriet Beecher Stowe, who for many was the symbolic representation of the North's stance against slavery.  Didn't happen.  (Well, to the best of my knowledge, anyway.)  Hell, that'd be like Hirohito sending kamikaze pilots after Rosie the Riveter.

But I digress.  I liked the movie.  Seriously.  It's good for all ages, if you like action movies with a political message.  Or if you enjoy looking at Jennifer Lawrence all pissed off.  Maybe she was thinking of the guy who hacked into her cloud.  (Sorry.)  Anyway, go see it, but repeat three times: It's a YA action movie...It's a YA action movie...It's a YA action movie...and a pretty good one, at that.    

The Alienist by Caleb Carr

 Photo: Bellevue Hospital Ambulance, New York Times, 1895--from the Wikipedia page of The Alienist.

Been a few weeks away with illness, exhaustion, overwork, and some good headway on my novel and some shorter pieces.  Sort of an odd time lately, mostly without focus.  I've been reading six or seven books, and writing too many things at once--and not completing any reading or writing at all.  My sleeping patterns have been all screwed up, and...blah blah blah.  I'm tired of my own whining, but it is what it is.

That changed with The Alienist, a novel so well-written that I finished all 597 pages in just a few days, even waking up early to read it.  I read it through my cluster-headache on Sunday; I read it through an otherwise scattered-minded few weeks.  It cut through all that and straightened my focus and psyche out--for quite awhile, I hope.

I'd heard great things about this for a long time, and finally I gave it a go, with regret, since I'm trying to finish about six other things, like I said.  But I'm glad I did.

This novel has a lot going for it.  It's told in a first-person limited POV, by a reporter narrator who's good at describing his world without making it seem like he's purposely describing his world.  But he is, and he needs to for us, because he's describing 1896 NYC (and a little of D.C. and New Paltz, NY, too).  Caleb Carr does a fantastic job making this world interesting and alive, and the crimes he covers--and the investigation they cause--are top-notch.  (But not for the squeamish.) Essentially Carr describes the first wrinkles of what has become known as criminal profiling, which basically can be boiled down to analyzing the crime, and then asking yourself, What kind of person could have committed this crime, exactly this way, in this exact place and time?

As readers of this blog should know, I've long been interested in this kind of thing myself, so it was very cool to see some characters using these methods as the focus of their investigations.  In addition to profiling the crime, they profile a letter the serial murderer sends to a victim's mother--with some handwriting analysis as well, also new at the time--and there's a lot of attention paid to the earliest childhood years of many criminals in the book, also a cornerstone of criminal profiling.  Abusive and criminal parents will, more often than not, create abusive and criminal offspring.  This sort of implies that it's more nurture than nature, and that free will isn't all that strong, either, but that's a misreading that many people today--and many characters in the book--suffer from.

I'll leave that to the reader.  Bottom line is, if you like historical fiction, or crime/criminal investigation, or the 1890s in general, or if--like me--you happen to like all of those things combined, than this book is the one for you.  As I've said about some of Stephen King's books, there's something to be said for a 597-page book that's read in about three days.

As I mentioned, it was so good that it straightened out my psyche for a few days, and made me feel more complete, more whole, more in my own realm--whatever the hell that is.  Next up: his follow-up, The Angel of Darkness.

As the footnote at the beginning of the book says, an alienist is today's psychiatrist, or mental health researcher, as someone who needed to speak to someone like this (because there were few private practices in those days, so most people, especially the poor, would have to be committed to a facility or to a hospital to speak to one) was thought to be alienated, both from their society and from their own true natures.  (Sort of like how I've felt the last few weeks, though not to the extremes you'll read here.)  So a helper to these people would be an alienist.

Caleb Carr himself is quite an interesting guy, as is the story surrounding Lucius Carr, his (in)famous father.  It seems as if his father stabbed to death a man who was hitting on him, and William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac helped him dispose of the body and of some evidence before Carr confessed.  He served a couple of years in an Elmira prison, then worked for UPI for 47 years, though he was apparently also an alcoholic and an abusive father.

Caleb Carr comes off as a novelist of historical fiction who also dabbles in historical articles and books (and, it turns out, screenplays of two Exorcist prequels), but it turns out to be the opposite.  He's a well-respected historian.  Caleb has an injury to his arm and shoulder, similar to his alienist character, and he lives in a beautiful, self-made home with a wrap-around porch, in the mountains--alienated from his society, and recovering, as Carr admits, from being alien to himself.

Art imitates life.