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Four weeks ago, I linked to yellojkt's "National Just Read More Novels Month" and declared my intention to participate. It's wrap-up time, so let's review January's reading. I had hoped to do a little better than I did—I read four and a half novels, which is pretty average for me, I guess. I read two and a half books while I was on vacation: Adriana Trigiani's The Queen of the Big Time (borrowed from my mom, who had in turn borrowed it from her friend Joan) and Lee Goldberg's Mr. Monk Goes to the Fire House. Both were fun, light vacation reading. I started Anna Maxted's Behaving Like Adults, a British chick-lit novel about a woman who runs a dating service and winds up being date-raped herself. Yeah, a bit of a downer. I put it down when I returned home because at that point, my book club was starting up again after our holiday break, and I had to start on our new reading list. We read Natasha Cooper's Creeping Ivy, an extremely disturbing suspense novel, and Pip Granger's Trouble in Paradise, a post-World War II slice of life that takes place in London's East End. As an Anglophile, I enjoyed the Granger book a lot—it's the sort of novel where characters say things like, "You're looking a wee bit peely-wally if you ask me," and are forever nipping around to each other's homes for a cuppa tea. There are three other Granger novels available and I definitely plan to read more of her work.
Focus groups have shown that before people will plunk down their $10 to see a movie, they want to know everything about it before they go into the theater. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it's true. That's why trailers give away the whole plot now. The public demands it! It didn't used to be this way; I mean, what did we know about "Star Wars" back in '77 besides the fact that it was about space ships and looked really cool? Anyway, if a movie seems to be getting good buzz and it seems like something I'd want to see, I try to avoid learning too much about it beforehand. Because everyone seemed to love the French-language thriller "Caché," I carefully avoided reading reviews and saw it on opening weekend. Maybe I'm just not tapped into the critical zeitgeist, but in my opinion, this film is a colossal bore. Amazingly, the Chron's Mick LaSalle, with whom I frequently find myself in fervent disagreement, summed up my feelings exactly in his review, which I really, really wish I'd read when it came out in Friday's paper, because it would have saved me two hours:
"The form of this unholy experience is so sublimely conceived that Haneke can rope in post-colonialist atrocity (specifically, the Paris drowning-massacre of protesting Algerians in 1961) and contemporary injustices (ever-present on Anne and Georges's plasma TV), and make it all seem of a piece with the central issues of seeing-but-not-seeing, of bobo complacence in fragile balance with Frantz Fanon's 'wretched of the earth,'" opines the Village Voice's Michael Atkinson. That kind of review makes me feel like an Américaine stupide for not loving it, but to be honest, there are plenty of arty films I've enjoyed. This just doesn't happen to be one of them.
I don't know why, but after long, long periods where I've been basically indifferent to almost all the new music I hear, lately, a multitude of things have really been connecting with me. Which is delightful—I always dread turning into one of those people who sits around listening to 10@10 and muttering about how no one writes 'em like Toto anymore. My latest turn-on is She Wants Revenge, a Southern California duo that sounds—OK, they sound like Interpol covering Joy Division's "She's Lost Control." But I prefer them to Interpol, for some reason. Their song "Tear You Apart" is dark and sinister, with a mesmerizing metronomic beat. You can hear a tinny low-fi version of it at their MySpace page (warning: explicit language), or watch 'em perform it sans obscenities on Monday night's "Jimmy Kimmel Live" rerun (it's a particularly funny episode, with a hilarious segment featuring Jimmy and my good pal Regis Philbin). Their album is due out on Tuesday.
1.27.06 Five Years Ago Today...
Our lives changed forever on Jan. 27, 2001, the day we adopted Hobie, a Boston Terrier mix, from Wonder Dog Rescue in San Francisco. He was not a bouncing baby puppy, but somewhere between 4-7 years old. (Our vet guesstimated his birth year as 1996, so I consider today his "10th birthday.") We don't know anything about his background, since he was a stray. When no one claimed him from the animal shelter, he was saved by Boston Terrier rescue. Linda at Wonder Dog fostered him for about four months before we adopted him; our relationship with her is ongoing, as she is now Hobie's regular dog sitter whenever Joe and I are out of town. In the past couple of years, Hobie has gotten very, very gray, but he's still a lively, happy dog (though he does need a solid 16 hours of sleep a day). Since I work at home by myself, I appreciate having him around for companionship. I had never lived with a dog before; my only previous pet experience was with a cat, who would frequently disappear for hours at a time (when I went looking for him, he could usually be found under the bed or deep inside a closet). Hobie is not that aloof. If I get up and leave the room, he immediately springs into action and follows me. He takes the role of companion very seriously. Plus, there's always the chance that I could be heading for the kitchen and there might be food. Owning a dog is a tremendous amount of work; living in an apartment means we can't just let him run out a doggie door to do his business, but have to take him out on a leash 3-4 times a day. (Thank goodness for Mutt Mitts.) Still, the rewards have been great. Hobie deserves to celebrate his birthday/anniversary tonight with his favorite food: a chunk of steak.
I don't like to think of myself as a music snob. I stayed loyal to ABBA, for instance, during the eighties, a time when (at least in the U.S.) being an ABBA fan was about as fashionable as a Nehru jacket. But I fully admit that I did not want to buy anything by Death Cab for Cutie because of their popularity on a teen soap opera called "The O.C.," which I have never seen, but it seemed like every time I saw DCfC mentioned in the media, it was in the context of that show. Plus they have a stupid name. I kept hearing songs by them that I really liked, and yet I resisted. Finally, a couple days ago, I was driving home and a DCfC song happened to come on the radio. I was about six blocks away from Amoeba Records, so I took it as a sign and stopped in and bought the band's latest CD, Plans. Anyway, I think it's a gorgeous album, the lyrics are beautiful (and I usually don't notice lyrics), and the singer has a wonderfully sincere and heartfelt voice. I'm sorry my own stubbornness kept me away from them for so long. From now on, Seth Cohen and I are as one in our musical tastes.
Several times in recent weeks, I've driven past a building with big COMING SOON signs in its windows. What is on the way? A coffee house. Of course. Because there are only three Starbucks and a Peet's within a quarter-mile radius. Anyway, this particular coffee place is not part of a chain, but it will be named Central Perk, which even this non-"Friends" viewer knows is where the sitcom sextet hung out. At first, it kind of made me mad—like, couldn't you come up with something more original? Finally, it hit me that the coffee shop's location is on the corner of Central Avenue, which makes the name a little more acceptable. But it's still a little too much like starting a bar and calling it Cheers, or opening a crab shack and calling it The Crab Shack.
Today is a dark, dark day for those of us who are Peter Sarsgaard fans. Regular readers are well aware of my girlish crush on the actor, and I was incredibly excited when I heard he would be hosting "Saturday Night Live" last night. But it totally sucked (OK, I'm sure everyone out there is now preparing to tell me, "It was 'SNL,' what did you expect?"). I still watch "SNL" regularly, though, and find a lot of it funny. Not Colbert/"TDS"-level funny, of course, but humorous enough to keep it on my TiVo Season Pass list, especially when watched with the judicious use of the Fast Forward button. Peter was stuck appearing in all of "SNL"'s worst recurring sketches, including the Target sketch (please, Target's lawyers, send Lorne Michaels a threatening letter and put a stop to this!), Gays in Space and, most hideous of all, Carol. Ordinarily, the sight of the horrendously unfunny Horatio Sanz in drag would cause me to lunge for the FF, but I had vowed to watch every single sketch with Peter in it last night. The agony!! People, you should hope & pray that your favorite actor is never asked to host "SNL." We recently restarted our Netflix subscription in order to catch up with some films we missed during their theatrical run. I'm going to start a regular DVD review feature here, using a new movie-rating system. My pal Rog has experimented with numerous ratings schemes, but never came up with one he was totally satisfied with. My system is incredibly simple; it consists of just two ratings: Wish I'd Seen It Theatrically and Glad I Waited. WISIT designates a film of sufficient quality that it would have been worth paying the nine bucks to see it on the big screen. Last night, prior to the ill-fated "SNL," we watched Werner Herzog's documentary "Grizzly Man." It is definitely a WISIT, especially since the DVD version is missing a scene (a clip of Timothy Treadwell's appearance on David Letterman's show was cut at Letterman's request). The gorgeous footage of the Alaskan wilderness, shot by Treadwell before he was killed by one of his beloved grizzlies, is also breathtaking. I really regret not catching this one during its theatrical run. "Grizzly Man" could have been extremely exploitative, and sometimes it skates on the edge of good taste (for instance, the scenes with medical examiner Franc G. Fallico describing the deaths of Treadwell and his girlfriend Amie in rather disgusting detail). But what really makes this film brilliant is the narration of director Werner Herzog, who clearly has an incredible amount of respect for Treadwell as a fellow filmmaker, as he strives to understand why Treadwell felt the way he did about the grizzlies. These are fierce, wild animals, after all, and Treadwell—who gave the bears cutesy nicknames and frequently seemed on the verge of tears when he talked about how much he loves them—expected them to behave more like the beloved stuffed teddy that he brought along on his expeditions. When a cub is killed and eaten by adult bears during a period of famine, Treadwell seems personally betrayed. This is a riveting film and would definitely have been worthy of a place in my top-five list had I seen it last year. The only special feature of note on the DVD is a 45-minute documentary on the making of the score by Richard Thompson, Henry Kaiser and other renowned musicians. Bonus: it was recorded at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley, a mere couple miles from my home.
I am completely obsessed with the song "Nth Degree" by Morningwood, which struck me as a puerile band name when I first heard of them, but heck, this is one fabulous single. You can hear it (and check out the cute video, which will resonate with anyone who's spent a lot of time going through vinyl cut-out bins) at their web site. I seldom get so taken with a single that I buy it on iTunes and play it over and over and over again, but "Nth Degree" just makes me want to jump around the room.
1.18.06 The Military Industrial Complex I love, love, love this comic. Having spent several hours over the last few days reading and listening to interviews with Taylor Branch, whose web site I just discovered by chance—Google hasn't catalogued it yet—I've been having flashbacks to my work on the books. (Which in large part consisted of lots and lots of photocopying; don't get me wrong, there wasn't a lot of glamour involved.) Anyway, in celebrating King's birthday, George Bush said, "Today we celebrate the life of an American who called Americans to account when we didn't live up to our ideals," and applauded "his strength of character and his leadership." But let's face it, if MLK were still around, he would be the biggest thorn in Bush's side. Virtually no one in 2006 disagrees with the King who stood up to the Southern segretationists and supported the right of blacks to vote, but the positions he took later on in his life, speaking out against the Vietnam war and moving to Chicago in an effort to bring the nation's attention to the scourge of northern inner-city poverty, would still be incredibly controversial today. King's efforts in Chicago met with widespread derision; the moral clarity of the Montgomery bus boycotts and the church bombings weren't present in the more complicated efforts to bring about economic justice. And now, equal time, since I know a lot of conservatives read this blog. I felt like hiding my head under a pillow when I heard Sen. Hillary Clinton's comment, made at a Harlem MLK Day celebration, about how the House of Representatives "has been run like a plantation." In the words of Democratic NY City Councilman Charles Barron, "her speech was contrived and condescending." Just reading her words is bad enough, but the way she said it, with this "you brothas and sistas know what I mean" inflection in her voice, was truly icky.
Now it can be yours: The entire Stephen Colbert interview is online at SFGate.com. It's in four parts. Get absolutely free what we paid $18.50 each to experience! My ex-boss, Taylor Branch, is everywhere this week, promoting his new book At Canaan's Edge. He's been on Fresh Air, on the "Today" show, profiled in the Baltimore Sun, and tonight he's scheduled to appear on PBS's "The Tavis Smiley Show." He reminds me of a cicada, you know, the ones which stay burrowed in the ground for years and years, and then all of a sudden they pop out and become positively omnipresent for a short period of time. In the 24 years he's been working on his MLK trilogy, Branch has only popped up a handful of times: when each of the books has come out, and when he won his various awards. I haven't seen Taylor in years, but I'm hoping he'll do a book signing in this area so I can say hello. Aside from being a cool boss, Taylor is also responsible for one of my favorite celebrity Brushes With Greatness. I happened to meet the rock writer Dave Marsh back in the early 1990s. After a few minutes, he mentioned how much he admired Branch's Parting the Waters, the first book in his trilogy. "Taylor Branch? Really? I work for him. I'm his research assistant," I said. Man, did I feel cool right at that moment. I impressed Dave Marsh. Yep... when you're in your early 20s and grew up reading Creem, that's pretty heady stuff.
1.16.06 The Coolest Thing Ever: The Follow-Up Ha ha ha. I love keeping people in suspense. Anyway, back at the beginning of June 2005, I bought tickets to see Stephen Colbert at City Arts & Lectures in January 2006. This was before "The Colbert Report" was even announced. So I was prescient enough to know that by the time I saw him in San Francisco, Stephen Colbert would be hosting my favorite show. It's almost eerie! Actually, I would have happily seen him simply on the basis of his being a "Daily Show" correspondent, but this just made things even better. I grew strangely OCD about the event as it approached, checking the tickets over and over again to make sure I had the date and time correct, and worrying about improbable things (what if I choked at dinner beforehand and had to be rushed to the hospital and missed the event?). When we arrived, there were lots of people standing around outside asking if anyone had extra tickets, which is the first time I've ever seen that happen at a City Arts event. Colbert was being interviewed onstage by Tim Goodman, the Chronicle's TV critic and someone who is obviously an it-getter. The evening began with an extended clip from the first episode of "TCR," featuring the debut of the word that would eventually become a national sensation, "truthiness." Then Colbert walked out onstage, to rapturous applause from the packed house. Goodman started by asking Colbert, the youngest in a family of 11 children, about his childhood, and then proceeded through his life history, up until the triumphant beginnings of "TCR." One extremely sad thing that influenced Colbert's life was the death of his father and two of his older brothers in a plane crash when Stephen was 10 years old. (A little further research on the internet turned up the following: the three were killed in an Eastern Airlines jet crash near Charlotte, NC. Dr. James Colbert was en route to Connecticut to enroll his sons Peter, 15, and Paul, 18, in prep school.) After the tragic event, Colbert grew disinterested in school and began to obsessively read science fiction. (No wonder he's writing his own epic, the Tek Jansen series!) He managed to graduate high school without doing any work, and eventually became the Peabody Award-winning pseudo-journalist we all know and love today. How? Well, that's a long story, involving Dana Carvey, Robert Smigel, Second City and "Good Morning America." Better keep an ear out for the City Arts broadcast in a month or two, so you can listen to the whole thing. A highlight of the event was when Stephen talked about one of his brothers, who does a hilarious imitation of an incontinent squirrel. Stephen said he does this imitation himself at least once a year, in public, say while crossing a busy city street, because in his line of work, it's important to be able to do humiliating things on a regular basis. Stephen then got up and did sort of a weird crouching walk across the stage. It was really funny. Since it was strictly a visual, though, I suppose that whole bit will be cut from the radio broadcast. Anyway, the event lasted 90 minutes and then after all those months of anticipation, it was over all too soon. After sitting a mere several yards from Stephen, I shall have to go back to watching him on TV four nights a week. But I'm happy to know that he seems to be such a nice, charming, down-to-earth guy. As to what I'm looking forward to next: on Saturday, Peter Sarsgaard will be hosting "Saturday Night Live."
1.14.06 The Coolest Thing Ever I am so, so, so excited about tonight. I'm like a 13-year-old girl circa 1983 with front-row seats for Duran Duran. All week long, I've been terrified that I'm going to come down with a horrible cold or something—I mean, I would have gone anyway (I went to the "Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me" taping with a purse full of Kleenex and cough drops), but happily, I'm well-rested and healthy and ready to enjoy the evening. I'm not going to say where I'm going 'til afterwards, but trust me... it will be grippy! Also in the Conical Glass entertainment files: Philadelphians (does anyone from that area read this?): Josh Kornbluth is performing his Ben Franklin monologue at the Philadelphia Theater Company for another week. If you're anywhere in the vicinity, enjoy a cheese steak, a Tastykake and a hot pretzel, and then take in Josh's brilliant show! Right here in the East Bay, Rick Miller will be doing his renowned "MacHomer" one-man show at the Berkeley Rep (Jan. 24-29). Yes, this is a hybrid of "The Simpsons" with Shakespeare's "Macbeth." And it works. Joe and I saw it a couple of years ago, and it was hilarious. The guy's a genius impressionist. Tickets available through Cal Shakes. Best of all, it's indoors (ordinarily, Cal Shakes' productions are held in their outside theater, where it is inevitably freezing). I was going to mention the Shotgun Players' "Cabaret" again, but it's completely sold out through the end of its run, so fuhgettaboutit.
I'm not sure why, but I love reading about hoaxes. I wasted way too much time on the web yesterday searching out articles and blog entries about JT Leroy. To me, the Leroy story is way, way more interesting than the whole James Frey hoo-hah. Perhaps it's because Frey is simply one guy who embellished his life story, whereas JT Leroy appears to be an entire collective who managed to scam celebs like Carrie Fisher, Gus Van Sant, Suzanne Vega and Courtney Love. (OK, it probably wouldn't be that hard to scam Courtney Love.) I haven't read any of his/her writing, but he/she has been a huge, huge deal in San Francisco for years. It's such fun to see it all fall apart! My all-time favorite scam is the Janet Cooke Pulitzer Prize scandal. Cooke, then a Washington Post reporter, made up a story about an 8-year-old heroin addict named Jimmy. After resigning from the Post in disgrace, Cooke wound up working as a department store saleswoman in, of all places, Kalamazoo. (That was a few years ago; she seems to have disappeared again and is apparently living far from the public eye.) Many of the articles about Leroy have reported that the alleged teenage hustler-turned-novelist seems to be the creation of "middle-aged" Laura Albert, described in some articles as "a failed rock musician." I'm just a bit younger than Laura, so I'm sensitive about this. I picture the 30something woman, struggling to break into music or literature and getting nowhere. Then one day, she sneers to her husband, "Nobody wants to hear from a middle-aged woman. I'll bet if I were a hot transgendered teenaged ex-prostitute with AIDS, everyone would hang on my every word." They stay up all night concocting the scheme, recruiting hubby Geoffrey Knoop's sister Savannah to "play" Leroy in public. In their wildest dreams, I'll bet they never imagined just how far it would go. I can't help but wonder if Laura and Geoffrey will now somehow try to capitalize on the revelation of their fakery by selling the book and movie rights to the "real" JT story for millions. It's got everything—sex! lies! celebrities! glamour! A Chronicle reporter trying to track down the couple was told they'd fled to Mendocino. It wouldn't surprise me if they're on the phone to agents and busy plotting their next move. Meanwhile, after l'affaire Leroy and the strikingly similar case of Anthony Godby Johnson (who inspired Armistead Maupin's fascinating book The Night Listener), I hope people will stop being so gullible. Seeing is believing, folks, and if the latest hot young literary star is never, ever seen in public, be suspicious—be very suspicious. I mean, Anne Tyler may be almost as reclusive as Leroy, but even she is spotted every once in a while shopping at Eddie's.
OK, so I didn't really take a week off to read novels, though that would be a fun thing to do, wouldn't it? I was actually in St. Petersburg, FL, visiting my parents. They spend the winter down there, in an area that is like heaven on earth. I mean, just take a look at the view from their balcony. Wouldn't you love to visit?
The only problem with Florida is that it's 3,000 miles away from my home. It takes around 5 hours to fly there—and there are no direct flights from San Francisco or Oakland to Tampa, so add an extra hour or two to change planes. Despite the fact that I probably travel by air more than most people, I have a dirty little secret—I am afraid of flying. I know it's completely irrational and I should just get over it already, but even after taking hundreds of plane trips in my life, I just can't. I white-knuckle it, especially when there's turbulence. I always picture the airplane as a little toy model hanging perilously from a thread, being buffeted back and forth by the winds. Yesterday, some particularly unpleasant jostling around Denver made my stomach clench up, and it stayed that way for hours after we finally touched down. When I'm nervous, I can't read, so I usually bring piles of puzzles to distract me; on yesterday's flights, I solved two Sunday New York Times crosswords and a half-dozen sudokus. I tend to think of phobias as a form of weakness and do my best to not let my silly fears keep me from going to wonderful places like New York, Florida, Sweden or Cancun. If only I could be more like my father-in-law, an extremely frequent flier (he used to travel routinely between New Jersey and China) who is capable of falling fast asleep on any flight he's on. I can't relax enough to go to sleep, even on long overseas trips. Of course, even if flying was a total lark to me, I still hate the indignity of it. The Oakland airport security people make everybody take their shoes off. So one guy tried to hide explosives in his shoes a few years back. What are the odds that it's going to happen again? It's a completely pointless exercise. As Salon.com's "Ask the Pilot" columnist, Patrick Smith, has pointed out, the Sept. 11 hijackers' real weapon was surprise. In these days of reinforced cockpit doors and air marshals, threatening people with box-cutters isn't a viable option. I cringe at the inevitable sight of an elderly woman in a wheelchair being closely examined by one or two security guards. So, flying stinks. And yet I put up with it every year for the pleasures of relaxing in a deck chair, dining at the Good Times, and playing mini-golf at the beach.
NaNoWriMo is a source of civic pride around here since it started right here in the East Bay. On the other side of the country, however, Baltimore's own yellojkt (well, actually Ellicott City's own—but close enough) takes a contrarian view, saying we should forget about writing and start reading. Don't we all have a big pile of books we purchased and have been meaning to "get around to" someday? My own situation is more dire than most because eight months a year, I have to read a book every week for my book group, and yet I still buy books, get them as gifts, and request them from the library. So let's all celebrate National Just Read More Novels Month, or NaJuReMoNoMo, and read, read, read! Remember, only novels count. I'm taking a week off to do nothing but read. See you when I come up for air in a few days!
01.02.06 The More Blogs, The Merrier Yes, I've started a brand-new blog! Don't worry, this one isn't going anywhere—I'm sure that will come as a relief to my 20-30 regular readers. I hope you will all come on over to the new blog, which is cleverly titled 125 Records. Yes, it's a business blog. Jonathan Schwartz, president and chief operating officer of Sun Microsystems, told Business Week that blogs are "a must-have tool for every executive. 'It'll be no more mandatory that they have blogs than that they have a phone and an e-mail account,' Schwartz says. 'If they don't, they're going to look foolish.'" Well, I wouldn't want to look foolish in Jonathan Schwartz's eyes—plus, I'm sure he makes approximately 100,000 times more money than I do (if not more), and if business-blogging can help make me fabulously wealthy, I figured I should try it. I also updated the 125 Records web site over the holiday weekend; its terrible out-of-dateness was a source of ongoing embarrassment to me, especially when a blog ran a feature on us late last month. (I didn't know it was going to appear until I started seeing tons of hits from that site in the referrer log.) I never even listed our latest release, Jill Tracy's Into the Land of Phantoms, on the 125 site. Obviously, this is the "shoemaker's children go barefoot" syndrome. I resolve to keep things up to date in 2006, especially since we have several new CDs coming out and I want them to sell, sell, sell.
01.01.06 When "Bad" Isn't Bad Enough Joe generously risked the scorn of the video store clerks and rented "Alone in the Dark" for me. We rang in the new year by watching it. Now, I'm not denying that "Alone" is a lousy movie that fully deserves its minuscule 1% "fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes; but the sad fact is, the film just doesn't have the trashy joie de vivre of truly classic bad movies. "Can't Stop the Music," for example—now, there's a movie that truly is so bad it's good. Or how about "At Long Last Love," the misbegotten Peter Bogdanovich musical starring Burt Reynolds as a playboy millionaire? I saw it on TV years ago, and even after all this time, the image of Burt singing and dancing to the music of Cole Porter continues to haunt me. As a genre pic, "Alone" is not horrible—the special effects aren't bad, Christian Slater is a decent B-level action hero, and there are a couple reasonably suspenseful scenes. What keeps it from being a success is the nonsensical plot (a long, long crawl at the beginning attempts to explain the backstory, and voiceover narration by Slater is inserted at random points to try to further clarify things) and lots of general sloppiness, the kinds of things easily caught by DVD watchers with their fingers on rewind: when one character dies, for instance, the rest of the team is about to continue on without her, but just before the scene ends, the dead agent visibly raises her head as if she's going to get up. Luckily, "Alone" is redeemed somewhat by director Uwe Boll's unintentionally amusing commentary track. In it, he admits that the opening crawl was added because people at early test screenings didn't understand what was going on (I'm not sure if that long-winded blather about the "long lost Native American civilization" called the Abkani and their artifacts really cleared things up, or just made viewers more confused). He also talks extensively about the film's financing—thanks to German tax law, investors in Deutschland were able to get a big ol' write-off for investing in this movie. Your tax Euros at work, Germans! He points out a shot of a car and notes that it was "product placement." And, of course, he rails against the film's poor reception at the box office and the dummkopfs on the Internet who dissed it. The plot does make sense—so there! Uwe says so! I came across this piece by the New York Times' A.O. Scott today, and to me, this perfectly sums up the problem with today's not-bad-enough movies:
Does Uwe have what it takes to become a truly great bad director, an Ed Wood for the 21st century? He has a new movie called "Bloodrayne" coming out next week—like "Alone," it is based on a video game. If we're lucky, it'll really, really suck.
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