I spent most of yesterday running errands, which is always nice (please note the irony). Between driving around delivering things, I managed to watch a few movies and finish my book. Artwork? Not so much. Never mind...
The first movie of the day was a trip to the cinema to see 'Law Abiding Citizen'. Starring Gerard Butler and Jamie Foxx, this is a tale of a man whose wife and daughter are raped and murdered by burglars (at least, I assume they were burglars... the film isn't very clear on this point) and then has a bit of a breakdown when one of the murderers gets off lightly because he informed on his partner-in-crime. The widower (played by Butler) waits ten years (for some reason that is also never explained) before exacting his brutal vengeance on, not just the murderers of his family, but the entire U.S. legal system. What makes this vengeance more deadly is that the grieving nutcase also happens to have worked for the intelligence community as some kind of weapons designer/tactician (again, what exactly he did for the government is never entirely made clear... are you starting to notice a pattern?). Where this movie falls down (other than the lack of clarity over several plot points as demonstrated above) is that it never seems to be able to make up its mind whether it's rooting for Butler's character and his completely over-the-top killing spree or Jamie Foxx's character; the lawyer who made the deal with the murderer of Butler's character's wife and child in the first place. If the movie just let events unfold and left the viewer to make up their own mind where their sympathies lay, that would have been fine (and made for a much better movie, too)... the trouble is, it does that Hollywood thing of trying to manipulating the viewer to root for one character or another and fails spectacularly as a result of its own inability to decide which character holds the moral high ground. As a result of this lack of identity, the movie ends up looking like a bad knock-off of 'The Punisher'.
More errands run and I'm back home to watch my new DVD, which I won in a competition (go me!). 'The Number 23' is a Joel Schumacher movie, which is no seal of quality as the man is responsibility for some of my all-time favourite movies ('The Lost Boys' and 'Flatliners') but also some of the worst movies I've ever seen ('Batman And Robin' and... actually, 'Batman And Robin' was bad enough that I really don't feel I need a second example). I'm glad to say, though, that 'The Number 23' is another tick in the win column for Mr. Schumacher, as far as I'm concerned. It's a rather lovingly crafted little film about the lengths people can be driven to by obsession in general and apophenia specifically. (If you don't know what apophenia is, look it up. What am I; your mother?) It's also a murder-mystery and a damned good one, too. Jim Carrey proves once again that he's just as good in a straight dramatic role as he is at doing his human-cartoon-character comedy bit. I was impressed when I first saw this at the cinema and this extended cut on DVD, while not adding a great deal plot-wise, does restore a lot of Rhona Mitra's performance, which was nice (if you blinked during the theatrical cut you could easily have missed that she was in the movie at all). The DVD also contains a shed-load of bonus features, which is impressive considering it's a single disc release.
Several errands later and it's back to the cinema for my third movie of the day, I met up with a friend to watch 'Paranormal Activity'. For those of you who don't know, this movie is claiming to be actual documentary footage of a couple who used a video camera to make a visual journal of the spooky goings on in their home. If you actually believe this is real documentary footage, I strongly recommend you book yourself into the nearest psychiatric facility immediately. Note to the producer of this movie: genuine documentary footage is not riddled with continuity errors. Far from being, as it has been billed, 'one of the scariest movies of all time', this is actually one of the least frightening movies I have ever seen. More than that, it's quite possibly the single worst movie I have ever had the displeasure to sit through. This is basically 'Most Haunted: The Movie'; a few extremely bad actors hamming it up for the night vision cameras in a supposedly haunted location with the in such a hackneyed manner that it would only fool the most gullible of people. It is tedious beyond belief. I nearly nodded off a couple of times, I was so utterly un-gripped. The only entertainment to be had from this experience was the fact that the girl in the row behind us was so terrified that she was in floods of tears for the last twenty minutes of the movie. I can only assume she was on day-release from a home for the unbelievably stupid. She was hilarious, though, and I'd like to thank her for making this experience not an entirely wasted one.
Moving onto books, I have finally reached the end of my Hannibal Lecter marathon and I have to say that I have enjoyed re-reading these books immensely. The final book in the series, 'Hannibal', is the first in the series to use the same protagonist as the previous book, namely Clarice Starling, and it is quick to show that the credit she gained at the end of the last book didn't last long at all. This book does an excellent job of chronicling this ex-rising star's frustrating fall from grace against the backdrop of a battle between Lecter and his only surviving victim, the physically and mentally hideous Mason Verger. Thomas Harris truly steps up his writing game with this novel; I'm not normally somebody who even bothers making the distinction between 'low art' and 'high art' but it is harder than ever for the naysayers to deny that this is genuine Literature with a capital L. The poetry contained within his prose is wonderful and classical allusions abound here more than in any of his previous works. You also have to admire him for having the guts to write a phenomenal ending that he must have known wouldn't please most people looking for a more traditionally satisfying moralistic conclusion. Even Ridley Scott found it un-filmable and created a new ending of his own that resembles that of the novel not at all. All in all, the Lecter novels are one of the highlights of my reading life and I look forward to revisiting them again in another ten years or so.
Now for something completely different... where did I put that copy of 'Northanger Abbey'?
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