The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
Three of those are Volume One of finished trilogies. Three of them are either one-shots or Volume Ones when Volume Two isn’t out yet, and I got as pre-orders. So progress is being made even if that technically could be twelve books and not six.
Also, this:
The Tchaikovsky, at the very least, is going down in June. The Robin Hobb books are being saved for last, mostly because I know there are twelve more after those three if I get hooked and I’m terrified.
I have to admit that I thought that finding out that the Previous Occupant had been convicted of 34 felonies would make me happier. Instead, I just find myself hoping he owns a gun. I want this bastard to face some fucking consequences for something, God damn it. And that pants-shitting waste of my oxygen got to walk out of the courtroom and bitch about the trial being rigged again, so this ain’t it yet.
In other news, the last day of school is tomorrow, and I am not literally too tired to live, at least insofar as I am quite clearly still alive, but I could probably convince myself otherwise. Tomorrow will go by quickly, and then year 20 (21? I may need to recount) will be in the books.
One more day. Piece of cake.
The boy, who is somehow now a 7th grader, had his end-of-year celebration … thingie tonight, and I’ve been poorly all day, and I have like eight things to do before I can lay down and die. So this is all the bloggery you get from me today. Please accept my deepest apologies.
I mean, not really. And I need to figure out where to stash the actual computer, which is the silver rectangle there. And clean up some cables, and rearrange the monitors, and hook the old computer up somewhere so I can make sure everything’s transferred properly, but I have my music and I have WordPress and I have my password manager so everything else can wait, right?
I need to turn the YouTube channel back on for a while, if only to find a way to put this thing through its paces a little bit.
ABIGAIL is one of those movies that technically has a big twist, but if you’re aware of the movie at all, all of the marketing, including the trailers, has spoiled the shit out of that big twist already, and it happens early enough in the film that the twist is kind of also the premise, which makes it hard to talk about. So this sentence will serve as the spoiler-free review: Abigail is kind of a failure as a horror movie– I am bad at horror movies, and I have been since I became a father, and I was never scared. It is, however, a pretty damn effective, predictable but wildly entertaining horror-adjacent action/slasher film, and all in all I’m going to recommend it, so long as you go in with the proper expectations. Expect something closer to From Dusk Till Dawn than to The Exorcist or Paranormal Activity and you’ll be fine.
So, yeah. Spoilers from here out, although once you know the premise, you already know the broad strokes of the movie.
Alisha Weir, am I right? I haven’t seen a child actor this effective since Season 1 of Stranger Things Millie Bobby Brown, and I really don’t think Millie has ever had a role that allowed her to cut loose the way Weir gets to in this movie. Millie has never gotten a line as iconic as “I’m sorry for what’s going to happen to you.” But let’s back up and talk about the actual movie: Abigail starts off as a heist movie, as a group of criminals kidnap a little girl from a massive mansion and then, rather inexplicably, spirit her off to a similarly massive but much older and creepier mansion out in the middle of nowhere, where Giancarlo Esposito tells them to wait with the girl for 24 hours, during which time he’ll extract a $50 million ransom from her father, which they can all split and then be off on their separate ways.
Only, oops, the little girl is a vampire, and, well, it doesn’t go great for them. This plan has some flaws even before you get to the vampire, and my wife called another minor twist early on– all of the kidnappers have screwed over this little girl’s vampire crime lord father at some point or another, and she’s managed to bring them all here so she can hunt and kill them. Two of them die before it’s immediately clear what’s going on, and the reactions of the rest to being hunted by an actual vampire are kind of hilarious. Eventually the main female character survives, blah blah blah, you know how this is going to go.
This movie rides on the strength of its atmosphere and its characters, and the house is effectively creepy, Amelia’s penchant for tossing ballet moves into her fighting style and her hunting (watching her tiptoe across a stairway bannister on her way to try and kill somebody is impressively fucked up; her movement and physicality throughout the movie is excellently done) and the gore level is turned up to 15; the number of bodies and/or body parts that literally explode in this movie is … significant.
And, again, the characters are fun, if broadly drawn; the ex-undercover cop turned criminal, the dim-bulb Quebecois muscle guy, the e-girl hacker, and the Main Character With a Dark Past, along with an ex-marine and a druggie wheelman, plus Giancarlo fucking Esposito, who has never in his life not elevated anything he was in. The biggest problem with the movie is that everyone in it looks like someone more famous than them; the Quebecker looks like Elon Musk, the hacker looks like Winona Ryder circa Beetlejuice, the ex-cop is Not Ryan Gosling, and the druggie is basically playing the exact same character he played in Euphoria, which I guess isn’t quite the same thing but it’s still kinda weird. They all bounce off of each other nicely and most of them get at least a couple of cool moments here and there to chew some scenery of their own. I mean, this moment here. I love it:
The house itself is straight out of Resident Evil, and I mean it as a compliment when I say this movie would make a great video game, although it kind of already did, except with a little ballerina girl instead of nine-and-a-half-foot-tall Lady Dimitrescu. The scenery is great, the pool scene is horrifying, the ‘plosions are gross, the characters are fun, and at least some of the acting is absolutely phenomenal. Again, it’s not scary, so don’t go in wanting that, but I’m really glad we actually sat down and watched this last night. I don’t watch many movies any more so I like to be able to recommend them when I do. Two thumbs up.
With only four days of school left, none of which are really going to count for a damned thing– three days of babysitting and grade finalization and then a field day– it’s time to think about how I’m going to get through the summer without turning into a greasy lump. Since we all know I will turn into a greasy lump over the summer, let’s set some goals that I can feel bad about not fulfilling. Note that, for the most part, these are weekday goals; on weekends I still get to laze about.
And, because not everything has to be serious:
What about you? Any big summer plans?
The computer is getting worse, not better, and I still have no idea what exactly is wrong, but the arrival date on the replacement keeps getting moved up, which is good. Currently it’s supposed to be here on Wednesday, which would mean that it took two days to get to Memphis, TN from China but then took five days to get from Tennessee to northern Indiana. Which, okay, intellectually I get why that might be the case, but it still strikes me as kind of ridiculous.
At any rate, the computer could decide to shit the bed on me at any time, so expect short updates for the next several days and then probably a New Hotness post. Hooray?
I went out after work and made some bad decisions, so if anyone wants to recommend a part-time job I can do from home over the summer, it would be appreciated. 🙂
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