The Conjuring 2

Photo: the movie's poster, from t3.gstatic.com

My review of the first Conjuring movie is here.

I visited the house in the first Conjuring movie. You can read about that here. There are lots of creepy photos of gravestones and crypt doors, too.

This was a good scare of a movie, perhaps better than the first. I can't remember the last time I was actually spooked in a theater, but I exclaimed something out loud during one of the scenes. (I never talk during movies, and usually tar and feather those who do. And I never get jolted at them, either. I tend to figure them out pretty quick, too, like when I saw The Sixth Sense and knew right after he got shot that he was dead thereafter. I mean, the kid said he saw dead people, for God's sake.) James Wan, the director, is especially good, I noticed, at showing something you expect to be scared by, then not being scared by that thing (because nothing's there, but you're a veteran of these movies, so you expect there to be, but Wan knows that, so purposely doesn't put anything there), and then when the camera slowly pans back to where it had been, something jumps out at you. That's what happened when I said something out loud. The instant is when the little girl is watching television--and it's not when something was in the television, either. Just next to it.

The story starts at the home of the clairvoyants--or mediums, or whatever exactly it is they say they are. (Actually, it really starts in the Amityville Horror house. You know you've seen and read a lot about this stuff when you see just the outside of the house in the opening shot, and think, "Oh, it starts in Amityville, with Ronald DeFeo killing his family." I also remembered the house was owned by the Lutzes and that the book was written by Jay Anson. I really should go on Jeopardy one of these days. By the way, I also thought, "As you know, Amity means friendship," but of course that's another movie.) One of them keeps seeing this really spooky-looking nun with barracuda teeth and dirty smock--ironic, considering how Christian the two say they are. (In fact, they technically work for the Church in this movie.) This nun-demon is harassing one of them, and they agree to stop their investigations.

Until...

In Enfield, England, a really nasty old man of a ghost is haunting a woman and her two daughters and two sons. (The father abandoned them--all five of them! How come people like that are never the ones harassed?) This only happens after one of them messes with a handmade Ouija board, which I never recommend. Anyway, this old guy had died in their living room, in his favorite old recliner, which every old man has. (We called my father's black, held-together-by-thick-black-masking tape LAY-Z-BOY "The Knowledge Chair," for obvious reasons.) This old guy is in the habit of biting unsuspecting screaming people on their arms--though they find his retainer after the last one, and the biting stops. So he's harassing everyone, insisting the place is his--while others insist it's not anymore, because he's dead, and so will he please leave, and not let the door hit his arse on the way out?

He agrees to do that--without telling anyone--but then...Well, Houston, we have a problem.

So go see this one if you like this kind of thing. Like most decent scare flicks, this one won't make too much sense when you have a second afterwards to think about it, but it's a good scare while you're sitting there. I'd heard from a few reviews that the whole movie seemed a half hour too long. It didn't seem that way to me, and it didn't really drag, either, which is rare for this kind of thing.

One thing I really liked about it is that the movie doesn't pander to the audience. At the risk of sounding like a prude, there's no gratuitous violence, gore, or anything else. It has confidence in its ability to scare, and it doesn't assume the viewer's an idiot. There are the token nay-sayers (Franka Potente, from the first Jason Bourne film, and from Run, Lola, Run), and it's nice to see that they're smart as well, and not just token blowhards. In fact, Potente's character had a point: these things are often either fakes, or the person being possessed--usually an adolescent girl--has psychological or emotional damage and disabilities going on that have nothing to do with being possessed. (There's one on YouTube, a French girl from the 50s, that I play whenever I want to freak out my better half, who insists with vigor that I turn it off.) Anyway, these girls think they're possessed, so they're not faking, exactly, but the parents often know there's no actual possession going on, but they let the whole thing go on anyway because of a Munchhausen Syndrome, and...yeah, it's all a mess, and very hard to both prove and disprove. The girl in this movie looks and sounds like the one I'm talking about on YouTube, and I think some of The Exorcist is based on this girl as well.

I kept waiting for something else to happen, because the girl's behavior and voice mirrored the one I mention. When the slight twist happens, you may be a little let down like I was, as the movie comes full circle again, and if that was going to happen, why not just do so where they were, and not make these two have to travel across the Pond to get what they can get (and did get) just as well back home? Like I said, like most terror flicks, it's a house of cards if you think about it too much.

So don't do that. Go see it. You'll get your scare fix, and probably stronger than from the first one.

For more on the Enfield story, and for a fact vs. fiction article, go to http://www.historyvshollywood.com/reelfaces/conjuring-2-enfield-poltergeist/

I'm most impressed by the tidbit at the bottom, which says that when the new family moved in, they almost as quickly moved out, staying for just a few months. This is unlike what the new families said of the Amityville house, and of the house mentioned in the first Conjuring, which I visited.

As a reminder, you can read about that here. There are a lot of pictures, including some creepy gravestones and crypt doors. My review of the first Conjuring movie is here.

American Horror Story: Asylum

Photo: A promo poster for the show, on its Wikipedia page

I've been trying forever to get to this series, which I'd DVR-ed.  Turns out, I somehow missed the first episode, and--since two episodes started later than they were supposed to--I missed fifteen minutes or so on those two episodes.

At any rate, I came into the house exhausted from working outside in the heat for five hours--I didn't take any breaks, and was often so lightheaded that I became dizzy and nauseous, but I did the day--and sat down and didn't want to get up.  Thinking I was now in my best position to at least start the series, I did so--and then watched them all, until about three in the morning.  That was about 11 1/2 straight episodes--fast-forwarded through all the commercials, of course.

So, since it's been nominated for a million Emmys, here's my two cents of it:

--Very compulsively watchable, despite the characters being in so many implausible situations.

--Jessica Lange was the best of the bunch, as she apparently was last year when she took home the Emmy. 

--I don't know what's so exactly American about American Horror Story.  Seems more French to me, in a very Sartre-like, "Hell is other people," kind of way.   But if you don't know that, and you thought it was a lot like Lost, well, then, there you go.  I got an Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None vibe while watching the series, too.

--(I'm reminded of the time I saw a few minutes of one of the first episodes of the first season of Lost.  I told someone the island was obviously a Sartre-like Hell, and that "Hell is other people," and I never had to watch a single episode again.  When it was all over, years later, the girl I said that to said I'd ruined it for her, that she wasn't surprised at the end, and that she'd been ticked that I'd been right about the whole thing in five minutes.  I admit that I'm a bit of a killjoy that way.  I did the same thing while sitting in the theatre, watching The Sixth Sense.  The Bruce Willis character was obviously dead, and the real tipping-point for me was when he was at dinner with his wife, and the waitress placed the bill on the table, facing her.  Waitresses purposely don't point the bill at the guy anymore, but they still did in 1999.)

--I got the Hell aspect of the show, and that Briarcliffe was supposed to be that, but it became suspension-of-disbelief impossible that they'd all get put back there by the State of Massachusetts so many times.  I mean, I went with it, but...it almost derailed my viewing between episodes six through nine, or so.

--The demon didn't seem to have a fully compelling agenda.  I know that the angelic sister was battling the demon the whole time, but, still...Demons normally have plans of destruction, or something, right?  This one seemed content to take part in a battle of wills with the Nazi doctor, the sister in charge, and the Monsignor--all battles that she was apparently content to lose most of the time, as well.  The demon in The Exorcist at least wanted to conquer some souls and kick some ass.

--Jessica Lange's Boston accent was both right-on, and too exaggerated, at the same time.  Odd.

--It also doesn't seem reasonable that the girl she ran over ended up living a productive, mobile life.

--Her thinking that she'd run her over, blaming herself her whole life, drinking again, and all for what?  I realize there's a lesson in there, somewhere.

--What're the chances of a fake nun, a demon, a possessed man, some aliens, some inhuman creatures, and a Nazi doctor all being in the same building at the same time?  Maybe that's the American part.

--There were many homages to Psycho, especially, but other American films as well.  One of the many notable Psycho homages was when a woman entered the behavorial therapist's (or whatever she was) office, and found the therapist sitting in her chair, hair to us, facing away.  I expected her to turn the chair around, and to hit a swinging light fixture as she screamed.

--I'm no prude, but...I don't know.  I have to admit to being a little uncomfortable knowing that so many crude sexual references, so much cursing, and so much nudity was on commercial television.  I'm surprisingly prudish for such a liberal-minded guy.

--I still watched it all, of course, hypocrite that I am.  Perhaps that's the American part as well.

--It's not every day that you see a nun forcing sex on a Monsignor.  While wearing black garters.

--The suicidal driver who picked up the reporter when she escaped must've been thinking, "Of all the suicidal guys' cars in all the state, she has to jump into mine."

--While watching, I must've said, "What?" two hundred times.  Usually after what someone said.

--Speaking of being such a prude, I couldn't get over the constantly-repeated massage gel commercial.  Times, they are a changin'.

--I didn't expect the Monsignor to throw the nun off the stairway.  But I did expect the Nazi doctor to become permanently bereft about it.

--Of course, he was already permanently bereft, in many other ways.

--I expected things to get easier for Lange's character after she was born again, but instead they got much harder.  I know the Lord works in mysterious ways, but after awhile He didn't seem to be working in Briarcliffe at all.

--Of course, the asylum was Hell on Earth, so that sort of makes sense, but still...

--The series wrapped up very well, showing what happened to all the characters.  It ended like a Stephen King book has ended lately, at least in the last ten years or so.  Very bittersweet, sad but not.  That speaks well of how the show (and King, I suppose) led us to care about the characters.

--The aliens seemed to also be very hands-off in the series, much like the demon.  It feels odd to have just typed that.  But it's true.  The aliens didn't try to save the two women at all.  And I can understand each of the women's POV, too.  One felt raped, the other raptured.  I would've felt like the first, too.

--I saw the rebooted Star Trek movies before this, so it was hard for me to see Spock doing those things.  Speaking of being a killjoy, I nailed him as Bloody Face right away.  Had to be him.  He was the only good character on the show at the time.

--Speaking of that, Jessica Lange has come a long way since King Kong.  That was in 1976, by the way, for those of you who didn't feel old enough already.

--That little girl perhaps disturbed me the most out of everyone.  I've read lots of nonfiction books that said that five-year-olds can indeed by evil psychopaths.  After killing her family, she's never referenced again, with quite a few episodes remaining.  Maybe in Season Three?  Though every season is a different story, she can find her way into the show again if the writers really want her to.

--Having a show's cast be like a repertory theatre troupe is a good idea.

--Very good show, overall.  I did watch it for about twelve straight hours, which perhaps says something unfortunate about me as well.  And, no, I didn't have to get up for work in the morning.

Dan Brown's Inferno and the Joy of Info. Dumping

Photo: Inferno's first edition hardcover, from its Wikipedia site

I liked Inferno, but I can't say that I really liked it, and I certainly didn't love it.  It's got some things going for it, but it's got a surprising number of things against it, too.

It depends on why you're reading this book, I guess.  If you're looking for really good writing, whatever that is, exactly, then you're going to strike out here.  Some parts made me shake my head, literally.  There are some parts that are so remarkably bad, you'll want to put the book down, but you won't.  (One aspect of the ending made me want to do this.  Actually, some parts are so bad that it reminded me of the famous Dorothy Parker quip, that "...this isn't a book to be put aside lightly.  It should be thrown with great force.")  Some parts really are that bad, so be forewarned. 

What makes them bad?  Well, in a nutshell, Brown's writing is at its worst when he tries to give his characters some depth, and I mean that in the best of all possible ways.  He just can't.  It is that simple.  His characters just say things.  And they just do things.  Anytime he tries to get beneath that surface, your eyes will roll, I assure you.

Robert Langdon, for example, is (in)famously described, very simply, as Harrison Ford in tweed.  Brown describes him that way in every single book, and he makes Langdon describe himself that way, and he makes many of the other characters describe him that way.  Everyone, in fact, in Brown's universe, describes him that way.  This is very lazy writing, of course, as if nothing else about him needs to be said.  And, in a way, that's true.  Nothing else really is needed.  He's smart and erudite.  He's tall and handsome.  He has a deep voice and he wears tweed.  And that's it, throughout four books now.  Nothing else is needed because, frankly, there isn't anything else.

But there's a method to this madness.  Is Brown simply incapable of giving him individual depth, or is there another reason?  Well, there is something else.  Langdon is a blank slate because the reader needs to have room to put himself in Langdon's clothes.  In short, we are Robert Langdon.  He is the audience figure, perhaps one of the better ones in contemporary fiction.  And if he had more specific personality, that would shut us out, because he would be too uniquely himself.  There wouldn't be room for us in there.  We would have to watch him do things, rather than us being him, thereby allowing us to do those things, instead.  It's the difference between playing a video game and watching the character do things, and playing more of a reality role-playing game, and feeling like it's us actually doing those things.  This, plus the world-traveling, the codes and puzzles, and the info. dumping, are the reasons why his books work like they do.

Of course, Brown also carries this into his minor characters, which is bad.  And he tends to get a little preachy about his themes, which Inferno certainly does.  By the end, you'll wonder about how Brown actually feels about what his antagonist feels.  I think they're one and the same.  Brown gets just as fever-pitched as his antagonist does.  And he, and his characters, are severely repetitive about it, too.

For the record, their point--that this world is so overpopulated that we could potentially create our own cataclysmic demise--is well-taken, and well-known.  I know that we don't need a super-villain (or not, depending on your point of view) to create a virus that will become our present-day Black Death; there are plenty of them out there right now, including two presently incurable viruses written about this week, one in California, the other in Saudi Arabia.  We are very overdue for another pandemic like 1918's super-flu, which originated in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and which killed hundreds of millions throughout the world, more than every war combined.  The population-thinning virus before that?  The tuberculosis of the mid- to late-1800s.  One herd-thinning virus tends to hit the world every fifty years or so.  Nature has a way of cleaning its own house.  The book will hit you over the head with this, and then stuff it down your throat, about fifty times over--and then it will end with a horrific event that all of the characters just shrug their shoulders about.  Very, very odd.

Having said all that, there is a lot to like about this book, which isn't as good as Angels & Demons or The Da Vinci Code, but is a bit better than the slower The Lost Symbol and Dan Brown's others.  In fact, the best (and perhaps only) good thing about The Lost Symbol is what works really well with Inferno.  In The Lost Symbol, I was surprised to learn about how much like a deity George Washington was treated.  The painting of Washington standing like God, or like Jesus, in the clouds, in a giant painting on the ceiling of The Capitol, is flat-out creepy and fascinating.  Without The Lost Symbol, I wouldn't have ever known about that, or about the painting, or a few other things about D.C. in general.

I felt the same about Inferno.  Though lots of writers have used Dante's work as a focal point for a novel of historical fiction--the best is perhaps Matthew Pearl's The Dante Club--this book works because it brings the world-famous work of Dante to light, to better historical context, and to a better present-day understanding.  It made me want to take out my (very nice) copy of The Divine Comedy and to read it, which I'd never really done before--well, beyond line 50, anyway.  (I have a feeling that Dan Brown would be very happy if his book was well-received and that it made people want to read Dante again.)

Dan Brown's Inferno also will show you a lot of Dante's death mask, St. Mark's, Venice, Istanbul / Constantinople, Florence, The Hagia Sophia (mentioned before in Brown's works), the Palazzo Vecchio, and seemingly dozens of other things.  All of this was so interesting that I found myself wanting to buy The Illustrated Inferno once it comes out.

And that's why you read this stuff, right?  To place yourself as Langdon into all of the places he goes, to see all of the things he sees, to think about and to know all of the things he thinks about and knows.  To learn about all of the stuff that Dan Brown teaches us with the info. dumps.  To Google all of the things he refers to that we find interesting.  To travel to all of the places he travels to.  (Dan Brown clearly has his very favorite places in Florence, Venice, Rome, Vatican City, and Istanbul.  You have to spend a lot of time in all of these places to know their nooks and crannies, to have favorite spots.  I mean, I know Fenway Park like that, because I practically live there.  That's how well Brown knows these places, and there's a large amount of envy on my part involved with that.)

Anyway, to rate this, I'd probably give it three stars if I was in a writerly mood at the time, because the characterization, and sometimes, the plot, really are that bad.  But I'd give it four, maybe even five, stars if I was in the mood to remember that we read his stuff for the globe-trotting, for the vast amount of info. he has about history, about art and architecture, about stuff that you wouldn't normally think about.  And, if I was to remember that to do all this, for the reader to feel this way, the main character would have to be such an empty shell so that there'd be room for us to step in to experience these things.

So if that's what you want, you should read this.  If it isn't, if you want characterization and plot, you'd be better off with almost anybody else.  Read and choose accordingly.