There are countless well-loved Christmas movies, but Thanksgiving movies are a rarity. I’m not much of a fan of 1995’s Home for the Holidays, but I often steer people toward What’s Cooking? (2000), Gurinder Chadha’s delightful, too-little-known multi-cultural Turkey Day comedy. In case you’ve already seen it, though, here are a few more Thanksgiving titles:

Hannah & Her Sisters: Possibly Woody Allen’s best film, this 1986 tale of the inter-marital affairs & career & religious crises of a Manhattan show-business family begins with a Thanksgiving dinner & ends with another one. Mia Farrow, Michael Caine, Dianne Wiest, Barbara Hershey, Julie Kavner, Max Von Sydow & Allen himself, among many others, are at their best here.

Planes, Trains & Automobiles: For many people in the mobile American society, part of the lore of Thanksgiving is simply the struggle of traveling home in time to celebrate it. This challenging odyssey seems to have especially captivated the imagination of the late John Hughes, who had a hand in two films about it. He wrote & directed this episodic 1987 comedy, in which upper-middle-class executive Steve Martin, trying frantically to get from New York to Chicago in time for dinner with his family, finds himself forced to travel with buffoonish salesman John Candy. The gags are uneven, but the great Candy is lovable as ever, & Martin makes a fine straight man for him.

Dutch: Hughes also wrote the script for this 1991 comedy, directed by Peter Faiman. It’s also about a road trip home; Ed O’Neill plays the working-class title character, who’s pressed into service driving the snotty private-school son (Ethan Embry) of his girlfriend (Jobeth Williams) from Georgia home to Chicago for the holiday. Wacky adventures ensue.

A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving: Kids will enjoy this half-hour Peanuts special from 1973, & you probably will too. I especially like Vince Guaraldi’s funky song “Little Birdie,” which accompanies Snoopy & Woodstock setting up for dinner. It’s a little disturbing, though, to see Woodstock eating turkey at the end of the show…

Erie folks: My guitarist/songwriter nephew Zack Orr is headed to Erie from Portland, Oregon for Thanksgiving, & is slated to play a gig with his old pal Tim Sul at Nelson's in Erie Wednesday evening. Check them out; it'll be the best show in town on "Wasted Wednesday"...

http://www.goerie.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20091119/ENTERTAINMENT0301/311199924/-1/SHOWCASE

Here's a scene from 1967 the Frank Sinatra film Tony Rome, posted for no other reason than that it's one of the greatest scenes in the history of Western drama...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGwdIKUKzZc

At the screening I attended earlier this week of Twilight Saga: New Moon, the theatre was packed to the seams with quivering fans of the supernatural teen-romances, popularized first as a series of novels by Stephanie Meyer. Before this second movie adaptation started, a DJ worked the crowd by asking the fans whether they regarded themselves as members of “Team Edward” or “Team Jacob.” Each team had partisans of shrieking enthusiasm.

For the uninitiated: The Twilight tales center on a teenage girl, Bella, who is loved by a teenage vampire (well, he’s actually over a hundred years old, but he’s stuck in his teens) of Edwardian elegance named, appropriately enough, Edward. She’s also adored by Jacob, a buff young Native American kid who, it turns out, is a werewolf. I had the good luck to attend the screening with an actual 14-year-old girl, the very nice daughter of a friend. We observed the first two contestants in the DJ’s trivia contest: A young woman in a man’s plaid shirt & a young woman in a lacy jacket.

“So the Team Jacob girls are the sort that wear plaid, & the Team Edward girls are the sort that wear lace, right?”

“Exactly,” she said.

”And you?” I asked. She was wearing a coat and scarf.

”Team Edward,” she said firmly.

”Could you have gotten all those questions right?” I asked her after the competition.

“Oh, yeah,” she said.

I saw Twilight, the film from the first book, last year, & found it a handsome but not quite interesting piece of work. My young companion avowed that the new film is better than the first one, & I guess I’d agree, but it was still slow going for me.

In New Moon, directed by Chris Weitz from a script by Melissa Rosenberg, Edward dumps Bella for her own safety—he can’t kiss her for fear of drinking her blood, & her connection to him & his benign-to-humans family, the Cullens, makes her a target of other, more predatory bloodsuckers. Bella’s utterly devastated by the loss, & soon resorts to risky behavior because she finds that an adrenaline rush will conjure up Edward’s specter (which reproves her for her recklessness). She gradually bonds with the good-natured Jacob, but just as she’s starting to adjust to Edwardlessness, Jacob dumps her little ass, too—again, for her own safety, since he’s realized his own shape-shifting lupine nature.

For me, I’m afraid this made for a pretty heavy dose of teenage bereavement. It doesn’t help Kristen Stewart, who plays Bella, to have little to play but grief. Stewart’s a very beautiful young woman, no doubt about it, & at times her sober face has a lovely gravity. But at other times she just seems a bit blank & slack-jawed, like she’d taken a croquet ball to the back of the head. She acts her heart out, but she’s in almost every scene—after a while it starts to seem like she’s in every shot—& she has a hard time finding much variety. She makes too many puffy, startled little sounds, like “huh,” in reaction to whatever she sees.

As for Edward, aka Robert Pattinson, with his mussed hair & sideways-cocked head & heavy-lidded gaze, he looks like he just rolled out of bed, & is trying to wake up.

Taylor Lautner, who plays Jacob, at least comes across like he doesn’t need a stimulant. So put me down for Team Jacob, I guess.

Despite its plodding, unvarying pace & its anticlimactic final quarter, there are compensations to New Moon, certainly. For one thing, the movie, like virtually every member of its cast, is stunningly good-looking. The camera movement is supple, & Javier Aguirresarobe’s cinematography paints the Pacific Northwest scenery in mythically rich colors.

The werewolves, when we finally get a look at them, are pretty great too—CGI effects that, for a change, have real wonder & warmth & canine personality. But it’s my painful duty to report that when Jacob & his pals are in human form, they hang out together shirtless & barefoot (with matching tattoos!), wearing only jean shorts. This is presumably an economic measure, to cut down on their Old Navy bill should they suddenly shapeshift & explode their clothes. Somehow the locals in this chilly-looking town don’t seem to find this singular style choice odd.

Here, & at several other points, the movie tips over into camp, but that’s not a bad thing. Michael Sheen turns up late in the story & makes a spectacle of himself as a foppish vampire aristocrat, & he transfuses some life into the proceedings, & there’s a shot of Bella & Edward running in slo-mo together toward the end that even cracked up the fangirls.

I was glad to see this glimmer of perspective from them (& from the movie), because when you strip away the supernatural gimmickry & the tempestuous melodrama & the subtextual attempt to glamorize teen abstinence (probably the most successful such attempt ever), the theme of New Moon is simply that Breaking Up Is Hard To Do. & so it most certainly is, whether you prefer the swanky vampire types or the studly werewolf types. So it is, even if you're not a teen. So forgive me if I sound like I’m patronizing New Moon—if it salves a single teenage (or sheepish adult) heart, it’s doing far more good than all the words I’ve written here.

This past May, when the extravagant new J. J. Abrams “reboot” of Star Trek hit theatres, it took my mind back to an even earlier reboot of the series—a literary reboot. Between the show’s cancellation in 1969 & the launch of the animated series in 1973, Star Trek was a publishing phenomenon, as the Trek episodes were adapted by James Blish into a highly successful string of short-story anthologies for Bantam. In those days before home video, these books were the only alternative geeks had to reruns.

Blish, much-admired by sci-fi enthusiasts for his 1958 novel A Case of Conscience, cranked out 12 Star Trek collections between 1967 and his death in 1975 (the last collection was completed by his wife, J.A. Lawrence). I spent a great deal of the ‘70s poring over them when I should have been doing schoolwork, and Blish’s original story Spock Must Die! (1970), was, I think, the first full-length novel I ever bought for myself.

Feeling a wave of Trek nostalgia in the wake of the current movie (out today on DVD), I decided to revisit Blish’s version. I easily found three of the short-story collections and Spock Must Die! at a couple of used bookstores, for well under ten bucks all together.

It was great fun rereading them. In the anthologies, Blish appears to have been working from earlier drafts of the episodes—many details, and at times even titles, are different from the TV versions.

In the novel Spock Must Die! the transporter generates a doppelganger of the title character, and the story involves trying to tell which is the real and which the ersatz Vulcan. The first chapter opens with McCoy holding forth on questions of identity and the reliability of memory that would have interested Scotty’s countryman David Hume, and it’s almost certainly the only Star Trek tale in which Uhura employs Eurish, Joyce’s version of the invented language in Finnegans Wake, as a code.

The real amusment in Blish’s Trek books, though, is in the eyebrow-raising style, which at times borders on Mickey Spillane: “Kirk wasn’t a man to be fazed by female tantrums.” Uhura is referred to as “The Bantu girl,” and at one point gives a “fat African chuckle.”

The passages where hasty composition and hasty editing show up in the prose offer amusement, too, as in: “A loud hum broke the silence. Its pitch increased to a whine…and the whole cave moved bodily under their feet, descending as a descending elevator descends.” I let out a fat Anglo-Saxon chuckle at that one, laughing as a laughing reader laughs.

Also out on DVD today is Bruno...

This fascinating 1961 documentary-style indie chronicles one Friday night in the lives of a group of Native Americans, played by non-professional actors, living off the rez in the old Bunker Hill section of Los Angeles. While we watch them party, drink, dance, gamble & brawl, we listen to them talk, in quiet, ruminative voice-overs, about their sense of alienation & sadness. Directed by Kent MacKenzie with breathtaking cinematography by Erik Daarstad, Robert Kaufman & John Arthur Morrill, it’s a heartbreaking portrait of a people, & a visually ravishing portrait of a departed L.A. Check it out.

Yesterday I walked out my front door to a grim & unnerving sight, lying on the gravel next to the front walk: a baby bird, decapitated. It appeared to be a nestling chick, still covered with downy fuzz, but on the large side. I'm guessing a pigeon. The head was a ragged blossom of gore, so candy-apple bright-red that for a second or two I actually thought it was a flower. I'm assuming (& I hope) it was a thoughtul gift from one of the ubiquitous feral cats around here.

RIP also to Edward Woodward, who has passed on at 79...

http://www.reuters.com/article/entertainmentNews/idUSTRE5AF2A820091116

Popular in the title role of The Equalizer on '80s TV, he was even better as the hapless policeman in The Wicker Man (the 1973 original, that is), & he was the best Ghost of Christmas Present I ever saw, in the 1984 George C. Scott version of A Christmas Carol. He never retired: He was in the Simon Pegg comedy Hot Fuzz two years ago, & appeared on the Brit soap EastEnders this year.

This evening The Wife & I had dinner at Marie Callender's, & for dessert we enjoyed a tasty mandarin orange muffin. On the check, it read:

MUFFIN--MANDARIN

Wouldn't that be a great name for a Bond girl? As in: "Mr. Bond, allow me to introduce my associate, Muffin Mandarin. She will see to all of your needs..."

According some interpretations, reportedly questionable, of the ancient Mayan calendar, that culture had December of 2012—the exact date is debated, but sometime around the Winter Solstice—set aside for Doomsday. The premise of Roland Emmerich’s new film 2012 is that the Mayans nailed it.



If this is the case, then Emmerich & company have done humankind a profound disservice. This grandly inane movie is almost certainly the least frightening cataclysmic vision ever, & it’s hard to imagine anyone over the age of ten taking it seriously. It’s the end of the world as we know it, but you’ll feel fine.

To some extent, I knew this going in. I had already laughed out loud at the lengthy special-effects set-piece scene shown in the trailer & TV ads, in which the everyman hero, limo driver & struggling sci-fi writer John Cusack, frantically drives his family to the Santa Monica airport while the surface of the greater L.A. area buckles away just behind the car like a ruined soufflé. Cusack pilots the car around, over or even straight through one collapsing edifice after another, & despite the extravagance of the visuals, the sequence carries absolutely no sense of real danger or threat—it feels, rather, more like an externalization of the emotional state you’re in when you’re running late for an important meeting.

In the film, this scene arrives, I’d guess, maybe forty minutes in. Up to that point, the story’s other hero, pure-hearted geologist Chiwetel Ejiofor, had unfolded some reasonably effective pseudoscientific babble explaining why planetary alignment and solar eruptions were about to make the earth’s core throw a tantrum. But once Cusack & company’s wild Buster Keaton ride begins, any claim on our authentic eschatological dread simply caves in faster than the earth’s crust. Funnier still, Emmerich is so fond of this chase gag that he offers it up two more times in the course of the film.

Thus 2012 starts to seem like a sort of Epcot Center of the Apocalypse: we see Yellowstone Park destroyed, then Vegas, then Washington D.C., then Rome, and so forth. I can’t say I found the spectacle boring, but it hasn’t a whiff of horror or pity, or even much variety—as with other thrill rides, the various episodes of ruination start to seem much the same.

Another part of the reason why there’s so little true power to 2012 may be that it’s apolitical & amoral. Humans aren’t the cause of this—it isn’t happening because of environmental hubris, or out-of-control technology. There’s no suggestion that this is even the Wrath of God come upon us for decadence—about all we seem to be guilty of is ignoring the Mayan calendar, & even if we hadn’t, we couldn’t have stopped it.

Laughable though the picture is, I hung in there with 2012 for the first two hours. The large cast is full of capable hands: Amanda Peet as the ex-Mrs. Cusack, Thomas McCarthy as her new, plastic-surgeon hubby, Danny Glover as the President, Thandie Newton as the First Daughter, Oliver Platt as a skunky White House official, Woody Harrelson as an Art Bell-style mad talk-radio prophet, & such other usual suspects as George Segal, Blu Mankuma, Jimi Mistry & the ever-reptilian Stephen McHattie. I was especially amused by Zlatko Buric’s slowed-down Boris Badenov tones as a shady Russian bigwig.

But as the movie slogged on into its final half-hour, it ran out of fun for me. The climactic scenes, with Ejiofor passionately insisting that there’s room for more people on the international survival ark on which he has a berth, & Platt taking the con position, followed by a long struggle to get the ark’s jammed door closed, are gruelingly tedious.

The movie’s major distinction, perhaps, is commercial: The very last lines of 2012 are a product placement. Some things even Doomsday can’t destroy.

Yesterday I saw a piece of advertising with a line of copy that struck me as painful because probably accurate. At an AM/PM gas station/convenience store was a sign promoting special on burritos, 2 for $2. It read:

SO NICE YOU'LL TASTE IT TWICE

Quite possibly more than twice, I bet...

My pal Dewey sent me this article from Variety...

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118010941.html?categoryid=13&cs=1

...breaking the thrilling news that a Yogi Bear feature film is in the works with Dan Aykroyd in the title role, & Justin Timberlake--that's right, Justin Timberlake--as Boo Boo...



Don't get me wrong, Timberlake seems like a nice young man, & he's shown he has a good sense of humor on Saturday Night Live. But I question whether he has the range for an acting assigment like this. Boo Boo strikes me as the sort of role that you don't just give to anybody.

The thudding pulse of the rotors grew. Yusef shifted himself around and scanned the row of hills behind him, trying to guess from which point the chopper would spring into view. It took forever. The sound held steady, held steady, then seemed to diminish, then jumped, louder than ever, as the craft flittered up from the treeline, nowhere near the spot Yusef thought it would.
 

He shifted around again, flattening himself on the ground. He looked over his shoulder, keeping his eyes on the chopper as it curved toward him, growing as it descended, lower, lower, a tiny, pretty machine with a latticed tail, bright yellow up front like an exotic bird, somehow too delicate-looking for the racket it made.
 

He turned back toward the clinic. The men, four or five of them in ragged scrubs, had backed toward the wall, making room. The front door opened, and the boy re-emerged, followed by a white woman in her thirties, wearing a white lab coat, with a halo of frizzy red hair. She carried a blue plastic cooler in her hand. The boy pointed, and the woman waved.
 

Yusef chambered a round and shouldered the rifle as the chopper drummed past over his head and slowed toward the parking lot in front of the clinic. Dust flew. Yusef swore to himself as he peered through the sight. The visibility was shit. This was a job for any idiot with an RPG-7, not for an artist like himself, but there was no cover any closer to the clinic than Yusef’s position, more than four hundred metres away from the building.
 

The woman was ducking, covering her eyes with her free hand. Yusef’s finger curled on the trigger. The chopper was maybe ten metres off the ground, gently bridling in its descent, when he found his shot—the pilot’s left ear frozen in his crosshairs. He squeezed the trigger.

II.

Twenty minutes later and two hundred kilometers to the north, Dr. Fekade’s cell phone rang, to the tune of Stravinsky’s Firebird. The thin, dome-headed man gave Dr. Osoble a look, then set down his Styrofoam cup of tea and scurried out the front door of the hospital, to where the reception was better.

Osoble crossed the lobby and looked out the glass door. He watched Fekade talk into the cell for a minute, then sit down on the curb and talk for a few more minutes. Then he rang off and slipped the phone into the pocket of his white coat. He didn’t get up. He sat motionless. After staring at his back for nearly ten minutes, Osoble walked out into the dusk and approached him. Tears were streaming down Fekade’s hollow cheeks.

“Dr. Fekade? What’s wrong?”

“Everything,” said Fekade in a matter-of-fact voice. “Everything is wrong, Hakim. Of course it is. How could everything not be wrong, here? The boy will die. I must tell his parents. Will you join me?”

“I…of course I will, Doctor, but…why must the boy die? What happened?”

“It isn’t just the boy, Hakim. Solomon is dead. And Dr. Evans. The helicopter crashed.”

“Great God. Where?”

“Outside the clinic. Solomon was landing, and suddenly the helicopter just rolled over, hit the ground, and exploded. It…” He exhaled hard. “It landed on Dr. Evans. She was carrying the heart. It burned up with everything else. They’re all…all dead.”

“How could this happen?”

“Some of the men who saw it happen say that there was a shot. It was loud, because of the helicopter, so they don’t know yet for certain. But it may be that somebody shot Solomon so that he couldn’t...so that he couldn’t complete the flight. So that the boy would die.”

Osoble sat next to Fekade. He honestly couldn’t think of anything to say.

“God above,” he finally managed.

“Yes,” said Fekade, as if he was answering a question.

III.

The American was at the crossroads two hours later, just where he said he would be. Yusef’s headlights illuminated him, leaning against his Land Rover, smoking.
 

“Is it true, what they saying on the radio?” asked Yusef, as he climbed from the jeep.
 

“I haven’t listened to the radio since Sonny and Cher broke up,” said the American.

“He wasn’t military, that’s what they saying on the radio.”

“What else are they going to say?”

“They saying he worked for some damn hospital up north, he was flying there to get some dead guy’s heart, to give to some kid. That true?”

“You in the habit of asking questions of your employers? I’m not.”

“So it’s true? Man, what we doing shit like this for? I never wanted no part of nothing like this.”

“Give me a break. You think I grew up dreaming that one day I’d interfere with heart transplants for thirteen-year-olds? What would Roy Rogers say? I don’t know why the S.O.B.s wanted this done. Something to do with the kid’s old man, I think. They want him to stay pissed off.”

“Don’t ever call me again,” said Yusef. “You ever call me again, I kill you.”

“I’m brokenhearted,” said the American. He reached into the pocket of his khaki jacket and removed a thick brown envelope. “I did get a call. They said there was a collateral loss. I suppose you couldn’t have managed it in some way that didn’t involve killing a doctor without a border on the ground?”

“You said, take him while he’s still in the air. What you expect?”

The American shrugged, taking the point, and tossed the envelope. As Yusef caught it, he heard a squawk behind him. Both men turned. A big black bird was perched in a bare, craggy tree about twenty metres behind them, an inky silhouette in the light of the rising moon.

“Jesus, that’s a big bastard,” said the American. “Is that a raven? I never saw one here before.”

“Neither did I,” said Yusef after a moment, and then he smiled for some reason.

“’In there stepped a stately raven from the saintly days of yore,’”  quoted the American, and felt pleased with himself . He had long ago given up on the idea of being a hero, but he liked to think he could still be a complex and epigrammatic villain.

The bird let out another hoarse cry.

“Doesn’t sound like a raven, actually,” said the American.

“Iske’noo!” said Yusef, still grinning.

“What’s that?”

“Nothing,” said Yusef. He looked at the American. “I’m leaving. See you later.”

“I thought you said this was good-bye.”
 

“I said I’d see you. I didn’t say you’d see me,” said Yusef with a chuckle, as he walked to the jeep. “But don’t worry, I changed my mind. I think we see each other again sometime soon.”

IV.

Yusef was still smiling an hour later, as the jeep bounced along through the moonlit grassland. He was thinking of Uncle Wubalem. He always smiled when he thought of Uncle Wubalem, and his stories.

Hey boy, bring me one of those beers! Hurry up, I’m thirsty! Iske’noo, iske’noo!

You know what that means, iske’noo? You don’t? That’s Arab talk, boy. You know Arab? You don’t? Well, your Uncle Wubalem knows. I worked up there for a while, and they told me all about iske’noo, iske’noo. That means ‘Give me a drink, give me a drink, give me something to drink.’ That’s what the Hameh says. You know what the Hameh is, boy? You don’t?

The Hameh is a bird. You get murdered, the Hameh is a big old bird that grows right out of your blood. And he flies, and he flies, until he finds that man that murdered you, and then he says to that man, iske’noo, iske’noo, over and over until he gets his drink.

Of course, when the Hameh says give me drink, he doesn’t mean beer. He means blood. He’s like any other Arab that way. He thinks a lot of blood, and he doesn’t think too much of beer. Which is why your Uncle Wubalem never thought too much of Arabs...

Well, Uncle, I think the Hameh’s thirsty, thought Yusef. But not just for me.

V.

iskenoo iskenoo iskenoo iskenoo iskenoo iskenoo iskenoo iskenoo

The American was dreaming. In the dream Yusef was looking at him, smiling, whispering something over and over. Birds flapped around him and behind him and above him, and they seemed to be saying the same thing as Yusef, over and over, some repetitive croak, mindless, endless, percussive.

iskenoo iskenoo iskenoo iskenoo iskenoo iskenoo iskenoo iskenoo
 

He opened his eyes to a harsh glare streaming into his room, filleted by the venetian blind. The insistent nonsense phrase from his dream shifted seamlessly into the unmistakable whop-whop-whop of a whirling rotor. He sat upright, fumbled for the Glock on his bedside table, crossed the room low to the floor, and peered around the edge of the blind.

“Shit,” he said.

Sure enough, a helicopter had landed in the field behind the bungalow. He couldn’t see it too clearly, because the nose of the craft was pointed straight at the window, and the searchlights blazed at him like eyes. But he could see that both of the doors were open, as if...

As if somebody had already gotten out.

He heard the doorknob turn behind him. He whirled and leveled the Glock, glumly certain that it would do him no good. The door swung wide.

“Stay where you are,” he said. It came out as a whimpering, childlike request.

Two figures stood in the shadowy doorway. The American couldn’t make out their faces, but he did see a glint of steel. One of them was holding a scalpel.
 

They stepped into the room, and he got a good look at them. His mind, his bladder and the Glock were all emptied in the same five seconds.

iskenoo iskenoo iskenoo iskenoo iskenoo iskenoo iskenoo iskenoo

VI.

Dr. Fekade stood on the roof in the cool and beautiful night, smoking, staring down at the helipad from which, eight hours earlier, he had watched Solomon take off from the clinic. He was trying to decide just how unfortunate the boy was. Soon he would be free of the world where these things happened.

Someone had shot Solomon out of the air. The police hadn’t confirmed it, but state radio had been in full rant over the outrage for hours already, blaming the rebels of course, and demanding an end to the fragile truce of the past month. Fekade didn’t know who was to blame, but he was sure that this had been no accident. This had not even been intended to look like an accident. It had been intended to be seen through, he thought dizzily; to look like a clumsy attempt at looking like an accident. It had all been carefully orchestrated by somebody who thought that it would be in their interest if a boy died, instead of lived.

He glanced at his watch. Almost midnight.

Might as well try to get a few hours of sleep, he thought, crushing out his cigarette. He would go downstairs and say goodnight to the parents, and to Dr. Osoble. Tomorrow he would cancel his trip to the seminar in Cairo. He had grown close to the boy and his family; he wanted to stay with them.

He was almost at the door to the stairwell when he paused, and turned toward the south.

Had he imagined the sound? No, there it was—a low airy thumping, like a rug being shaken out, but regular, rhythmic. Getting louder.

My pal Stan sent me an image of artist Coop's "Devil Girl" for my Halloween delectation, along with some random vintage horror-comic panels & a really peculiar & disturbing newspaper clipping:

The World Series begins today--the latest start in the Fall Classic's history--between the Yankees & the Phillies, leaving me with little choice but to root for the rather obnoxious Phillies. Anyway, in honor of the confluence of the Series & Halloween, here's a spooky little baseball yarn for you--also a bloodcurdling cautionary tale on the maple vs. ash bat controversy...


BAT VS. BAT by M.V. Moorhead

Just after sunset Adolphus, the rodent-faced man who had paid to travel with his cargo, slipped down into the hold of the Wallachia and tapped gingerly on the lid of the large box. 

“Master…Master? We’re here. We’re in port, and the sun is below the horizon.”
 
With a low creaking, the lid of the box rose. Adolphus reflexively cringed and scraped and kowtowed as Count Schuechenzuber, tall, pale, and black-caped, levitated to his feet and turned his burning gaze on him.

“What port are we in?”
 
“It’s called Erie, Master. A small lakeport in America.”

“Ee-rie. I’ve never heard of it.” 

“The skies are murky with clouds here, O Dark Master, and though it is not yet autumn there’s a chill in the air as from a graveyard at midnight. It will remind you of the climes around your castle.”

“And the prey? You have scouted them?"

“I have, Master. I have walked the streets. The peasants here are grown fat from battered fish and beer and sausages enclosed in greasy bread. Their thick blood will nourish you."

“Nourish my bloodlust, perhaps, Adolphus,” sighed the Count. “But what of my hunger for love? Where shall I find the reincarnation of my beauteous Elisabeth? Surely fate would not have brought her noble and imperious soul to this place you have described.”

“It doesn’t seem likely, at that, O Master.”

The Count looked down again at his servant. “You have done well, Adolphus. Here is your pay…” He slid his hand into his vest pocket and drew out a handful of dried spiders, which he scattered on the floor. Adolphus dove for them, giggling, and began stuffing them into his mouth.

“And now,” said the Count, with a faraway look, “I must feed, and I must continue to search for my reborn love, so that this time I may make her my Countess…eternally.”

Count Schuechenzuber spread his cape and, soundlessly shape-shifting into a large black bat, flitted out the open door to the hold, over the rail of the Wallachia’s deck, over the dark waters of the bay, over the dark streets of Erie.

“If he thinks he’s going to find his true love in this place, he’s lost his mind,” Adolphus muttered, gobbling another spider.

The Count fluttered his leathery wings through the cool, damp late-August evening. He headed east, up the shoreline, until his beady black eyes caught a glimpse of gold in the dark ahead. An echolocation click revealed the unmistakable shape of a spire, and the Cross at the top made him veer off with a cheep of terror—an Orthodox Church! He flapped toward the south and west instead.

The discovery troubled him—Eastern Europeans lived in this place. That meant there might be a Staker somewhere down there. But he dismissed the worry. Stakers had grown rare now, and most of the few who were left were very old, and regarded as superstitious relics. As the Count sailed farther inland, toward bright lights that promised good hunting, he began to feel invincible again.

“...For it’s One! Two! Three strikes, you’re out, at the ooold baaaalll gaaaaaaame!”

Morgan and Drew swigged their beers and sat down. The visiting Akron Aeros took the field, and the batter for the Erie Seawolves was announced.

“What were you saying?” Morgan asked. “Sorry, I was distracted by her.”

He pointed at one of the promotions babes that had been leading the singing in the Seventh-Inning Stretch, a dark and imperious beauty in t-shirt and shorts.

“Yeah, she’s something,” Drew agreed. “She handles the cold well. Anyway, I was saying that I’m never comfortable this close to the field since they started using maple bats. The lousy things are like fragmentation bombs."

“You really think they’re that much more dangerous than ash bats?"

“Most definitely. They actually did scientific tests that show that the grain in maple is...”

“Wow! Lookit that!” Morgan interrupted.

“Look at what? Another chick?"

“No! That!” Morgan pointed upward this time, and Drew saw it. A big black bat had just glided past them, and was now circling back around the outfield of Jerry Uht Park.

The Count had discovered that the bright lights illuminated a stadium. Sure enough, it was filled with people, watching some ridiculous ritual performed on a field with a large diamond-shaped geoglyph. To one side he saw a figure capering about, a huge wolf on two legs. Then he saw it was a just a human in a crude wolf-suit, no doubt representing some primitive lupine god.

He swooped in, looking for an unobtrusive place where he might shift back to his human form, when all at once he caught sight of one of the priestesses, leading the crowd in some raucous hymn.

It couldn’t be! His beautiful beloved Elisabeth? Here?

His bat’s eyes must have deceived him. He would circle around for a better look...

The kid at the plate had run the count full. The Akron pitcher shook off a sign.

“...people have already been hurt, on and off the field,” Drew was saying. “What I’m getting at is that until somebody actually gets killed, they aren’t going to ban maple bats from the game, do you see what I mean?"

Morgan was watching the high-cheekboned promotions beauty passing in the aisle. He barely registered what Drew was saying, nor was he watching when the Akron pitcher wound and threw, and the kid got a piece of it, hitting a towering pop-up foul...and exploding the lumber in his hands into wooden shrapnel. A shard of maple went wheeling straight into the stands, but just before it would have connected with the beautiful woman’s head, the bat—as in the flying mammal—flew between her and it, and was impaled, right through the heart. The crowd screamed as the creature flopped onto the cement steps. A few seconds later, its body crumbled away in a puff of dust.

“OK, you’ve convinced me,” said Morgan. “Maple bats are bad.”

The power source which runs the title character in Astro Boy, a pint-sized robot superhero who can fly on his rocket-powered feet & has artillery in his hands & elsewhere, is a positive substance called “Blue Matter.” The force that runs the villain, a power-mad president who turns into a rampaging robot giant, is negative “Red Matter.”

In other words, Astro Boy may not be too popular with the gang over on Fox News.



There are plenty of occasions when commentators spot political content in children’s movies that strike me as over-sensitivity, but I think it’s hard to miss the shots that Astro Boy takes at the previous Administration. Whether they annoy or tickle will depend on the individual viewer, but it may be noted that the film makes a good-natured jab at the far left as well, in the form of three silly quasi-Marxist robots, ineffectually planning the Revolution.

Sort of a sci-fi variation on the Pinocchio theme, Astro Boy originated as a “manga” (comic) in Japan, where the character’s name translated as “Mighty Atom,” in the ‘50s. A creation of manga-master Osamu Tezuka, the futuristic tale concerned a robot boy...



...created by a scientist as a replacement for his son, who had been killed. The scientist soon rejected the robo-tyke as just a machine, but another kindly scientist became Astro’s surrogate Dad.

Out of this poignant little fable grew hundreds of adventures in which Astro did battle with aliens, monsters & mad robots of every imaginable variety. Astro found his way to TV cartoons by the early ‘60s, and the show was soon syndicated to the US, where Astro got his new name & a rousing English-language theme song...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3UbaB7oPTw&feature=related

I well remember how my friends & I got scolded by my Mom, at around the age of eight, for singing a vulgarized version of this song which we thought the height of satirical wit. But even at that age I could see that the show had real charm, imagination & visual beauty.

The new computer-animated version has all of this going for it, as well.



It retells the sad story of the creation of Astro (voiced by Freddie Highmore), his rejection by his bereaved father (Nicolas Cage), his adventures when he falls from high-tech Metro City to the earth’s surface, now a dumping ground for Metro City’s junk. The material fits the classic tropes of popular animated features, like the hero who feels like a misfit, has lost a parent, & is looking for his destiny, like a glove, & on the whole they feel mythic here, rather than laborious & obligatory. The voice cast is full of pros like Nathan Lane, Eugene Levy, Bill Nighy, Donald Sutherland, & Charlize Theron, among others, & the big showdown with president-turned-robo-beast is exciting.

Even another obligatory animated-movie element, the adorable sidekick pet, works well here: Astro hooks up with a distinctly canine robot trashcan, conveniently named Trashcan. I’ve known plenty of non-robotic dogs, including my current one, eager to perform that function.

In celebration of the 40th anniversary of Monty Python's Flying Circus--the greatest TV show ever made; the 20th Century Canterbury Tales--IFC is two parts into a wildly comprehensive six-part documentary, Monty Python: Almost the Truth (The Lawyer's Cut), airing on consecutive nights through Friday. Unless you're one of the poor benighted souls to whom Monty Python means little or nothing, if you aren't watching this, you're missing out.

Details:

http://www.ifc.com/monty-python-almost-truth-lawyers-cut/

RIP to the original James Bond villain: Canadian character actor Joseph Wiseman, who played the title role in Dr. No--& who reportedly never quite lived down his embarrassment over it--has passed on at 91.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/oct/20/joseph-wiseman-obituary

October has arrived at last. It’s my favorite month wherever I am, but especially here in central Arizona, where the pleasure & relief of the gradual cooling-off isn’t undercut by a glum awareness that an arctic freeze is fast approaching.
 

I also love it because it’s the time of year for scary movies. Here are quick looks at several now in theatres:

Zombieland—Earlier this year Jesse Eisenberg was stuck in Adventureland, set at a shabby Pennsylvania amusement park in the ‘80s. Now he finds himself in Zombieland, which, oddly enough, also climaxes at an amusement park. That’s about the only common ground between the two films, however. Zombieland takes place in an America recently ravaged by a cannibal-zombie plague.

Eisenberg plays “Columbus” (most of the characters are known by where they’re from), a withdrawn, soft-spoken young college nebbish, physically unthreatening, who nonetheless finds himself adept at zombie survival. This is mostly because he’s a little on the obsessive-compulsive side, & rigorously observes a long list of rules for avoiding predation. His narration is a primer in these guidelines, many of which are pretty good rules of thumb whether there are zombies around or not: Get cardio exercise, always check the back seat, wear your seatbelts, limber up before going into a physically strenuous situation, & so forth.

Columbus falls in with Tallahassee, a cocksure redneck with a talent for exterminating the ghouls--played by Woody Harrelson in one of his better roles in years--& later both of them meet up with a pair of wily sisters, Wichita (Emma Stone) & Little Rock (Abigail Breslin). The quartet ends up in Hollywood, where in spite of everything they manage to have a celebrity encounter & an excursion to a theme park.

This wacky but well-controlled farce, written by Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick & deftly directed by Ruben Fleischer, doesn’t shirk on the slapstick blood & gore, yet somehow this almost seems beside the movie’s point. The focus of the comedy is really on road rules, & on the ways that traveling together can make even very mismatched people bond.

Jennifer’s Body—An occult ritual gone awry turns sultry small-town high schooler Jennifer (Megan Fox) into a literal temptress: a succubus, a she-demon who seduces men & then devours them. Jennifer’s dowdy best pal Needy (Amanda Seyfried) suspects the truth but is unable to stop a string of grisly murders.



This tongue-in-cheek shocker was written by Diablo Cody, who gives the dialogue some of the same epigrammatic snap as her script for Juno, but Cody & director Karyn Kusama are unable to make it truly scary, & it’s only intermittently funny. There’s an unbecoming hint of adolescent self-pity to the subtext (only barely subtextual) that pretty & popular girls are evil, & that their offered friendship is always false, mercenary or condescending, at least when offered to outcasts like Needy.

Still, the film has its moments. Fox & Seyfried both give creditable performances, & Adam Brody is splendidly odious as the loathsome indie rocker who starts all the trouble.

Sorority Row—A gang of sorority sisters pulls a stupidly dangerous prank, one of their number gets killed, & they decide to cover it up & swear each other to secrecy. Months later a hooded figure shows up at a graduation party at their house & starts racking up the body count. This old-school slasher flick has flown under the radar, & it’s certainly no masterpiece, but in some ways it’s a more efficient piece of work than Jennifer’s Body, & thanks to the performances, especially of Leah Pipes as the snottiest of the girls & of Rumer Willis as the shakiest, it may on balance even be a little funnier.

RIP to Frank Coghlan, Jr., aka Billy Batson in the great 1941 Republic serial Adventures of Captain Marvel, who has passed on at 93...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/arts/television/04coghlan.html?_r=1





RIP also to the woeful season of the Arizona Diamondbacks, which at least ended with a 5-2 win yesterday over the Cubs at Wrigley. The Wife & I had a pretty lousy personal baseball season, too--we saw the Diamondbacks beat the Indians in Spring Training in Goodyear (I also saw Oakland rough up Team South Africa at Phoenix Municipal Stadium), but in the regular season, we saw the Diamondbacks clobbered once, & the Erie Seawolves clobbered once, in the game before which I read my sonnet (see entry "Take Me Out to the Open Mic Night," below).

The only win we saw was the Palm Springs Power, over the Casa Grande Cotton Kings on May 30. I'm not sure that even counts, since Palm Springs is only a home team for us in our daydreams...