Deeply Odd

That's Really Odd

By Preston Sinclair

"My name is Odd Thomas. I have accepted my oddness."


 The thing I like most about Odd Thomas is that the guy simply cannot stand still. From page one he is in perpetual motion.  He does take a moment to pee, which is a humorously refreshing reminder that he is in fact human.
   This time he's allowed to pause and take a breath, and even eat something. At a pivotal point in the book Tom and Mrs Fischer stop to eat at Ernestine's diner. He adopts the motto, 'We might as well eat'. That's what I love that about him, nobody could deal with the crap he has to on an empty stomach. 
   Oddie's existential angst goes into overdrive in Deeply Odd when he's pitted against the truck driver from hell, a real rhinestone cowboy all right, talk about road rage. The story brings back memories of the 1971 movie Duel with Dennis Weaver, directed by Steven Spielberg.  One can almost smell the diesel exhaust and burning rubber.
    Odd Thomas's pre-apocolyptic visions draw us in and at the same time propel the story forward. He's chasing someone and at the same time being chased by his own fears.  Who here hasn't woken up with night terrors? The feeling that something else dark and blacker than night is sitting beside your bed and watching you sleep.  It pants and mewls in anticipation of your sweat and fear, and then you wake up kicking and screaming.  I think these night terrors are the inspiration for Odd Thomas' bodachs.  Yes, they're a real thing.
    In Deeply Odd, Tom explores the possibility of another dimension he calls Elsewhere. A gateway between this world and a parallel universe that is perhaps deeper and darker than we ever imagined. A mysterious cult has somehow found a key between these two universes which they use to their own evil advantage as they kidnap a group of children to use in an unspeakable ritual. Odd enlists the help of like minded individuals who want to help him save the innocent victims.
     Dean Koontz delivers as always on the theme of good versus evil and yet he leaves many things unexplained and many questions unanswered, which is as it should be.  Odd Thomas, the bewildered honest fry cook, doesn't have all the answers. He just knows what he needs to do.

    

     During the time I was reading Deeply Odd I learned that the original Odd Thomas novel has been made into a movie. I rented it from Redbox. Apparently there was some kind of financing issue and it's release date was postponed for several years.
     Odd Thomas is a good movie. It has solid production values. The cgi script works and doesn't overshadow the characters. It's in the background where it belongs. Anton Yelchin is well cast as the self deprecating average but cute Thomas. He is one of Koontz's most endearing characters. 
     Embrace your oddness. Be odd.

 

Under The Skin

An Itch You Can't Scratch

By Preston Sinclair

"Do you think I'm pretty?"
      Laura

  

   This may seem like an idiotic question under any other circumstances. Scarlett Johansson's voice purrs in a  gorgeous British accent. There's a certain earnestness to her question which betrays her ignorance of human behavior.
   Jonathon Glazer's film 'Under The Skin' is at once jarring and mesmerizing. It defies expectation. Please check your preconceived notions about film making at the door and most importantly, stop trying to figure it all out.  It's part travel log, part music video, part documentary, part science fiction, part film noire.  Take your pick.
    

  If you like Scottish men with woodies, then you'll like this movie. This movie can't stand much more deconstruction than that.  The guys in this film are like Pavlov's Dog. They salivate when they see Laura. Laura, the alien, doesn't know why the men follow her into the black goo, she just knows that they will.  She's just doing her job. Until she starts to wonder what it would be like to be human, then the whole thing goes sideways.
   Laura has an a-ha moment after she meets a man who is severely disfigured.  She seems as charmed by him as he is by her.  She lures him into the ooze as she has probably done dozens of times before yet somehow she lets this one slip away in order to give him a chance to survive on his own. That chance is short lived due to her cohort's apparent clean up crew sensibility. 
   Laura wanders away in a literal fog. She explores her own humanity by trying to eat cake, which makes her gag.  It's somehow painful to watch her lift the fork to her mouth. At one point she is frozen, as she forces herself to eat something by which she is repulsed..  
   Later, She meets a kind man that she thinks wants to take care of her, but he really wants to have sex with her. During this pivotal scene Laura learns why the men have been following her into the black gooky stuff. It's a private and intense moment yet it lacks passion as the man grimaces as he tries to penetrate her.  Laura pushes him off and grabs the lamp on the night stand and shines it "down there" as she realizes that she is not anatomically correct. It appears that her beauty is in fact only skin deep. 
   She tries to escape the maddening world and for a while and she does find some solace in nature itself. She wanders in a lush forest where she crosses paths with what seems to be a friendly woodsman.  Laura is able to pass as a lone hiker in the woods and she stumbles upon what appears to be a vacant cabin where she tries to curl up and take a nap in a kind of "Goldylocks and The Three Bears" moment.
  

   Just when we begin to root for Laura and hope she makes the break from her motorcycle cronies, the bad woodsman comes in and tries to have his way with her.  What ensues is probably one of the most horrific rape scenes since the classic movie 'Deliverance' with Ned Beatty. In the end the predator becomes the prey.
   This movie will haunt you for days, or even weeks after you watch it, kind of like a rash in a spot you can't quite reach.  Yet when you do reach it, it feels oh so good.

References:

Internet Movie Database 

Angela's Ashes

Och, 'Tis Such A Sad Story

By Preston Sinclair

Jacket photograph  (c) culvwe pictures inc.

     "My father and mother should have stayed in New York where they met and married and where I was born."
      Frank McCourt

     All those poor babies dying, and children starving, and men and women suffering from consumption. And yet, I'm here. Perhaps there's something to Darwin's theory of survival of the fittest. Ireland must have a very strong gene pool.  You see, my great grandfather Thomas Lawrence came over on the boat from Ireland in 1907. If it had not been for him, I wouldn't be here.  
     Frank McCourt's seminal memoir, Angela's Ashes, touched a chord with me as it did with many readers. According to The Daily Mail, it struck a sour note with some of his actual friends and family from Ireland who cried foul because of his portrayal of them.   Regardless of how they may feel, these were his impressions and his memories as a child. They should write their own books if they're not happy about what he had to say.
    

Lena and Thomas Lawrence

     If I were to write my own memoir, it could be called Lena's Ashes. That's because I can imagine great-grandma Lena Lawrence chain smoking unfiltered cigarettes by the fire as she ponders, "Och, what have I done to deserve this?"  I mean, there has to be a story behind this picture of my great grandparents. Was he a devilish cad who drank too much as Irish men are wont to do? Alas, I will never know because I never thought to ask my grandmother, their daughter, about them. Yet the fact that she never spoke of either of them speaks volumes to me.
     I remember visiting great-grandma Lawrence at Whispering Pines Old Folks Home when I was a child of about six or seven. She never spoke a word to me, yet I have this image of her nodding at me with that same grim smile on her face, her wild gray hair tied back in an Edwardian pony tail. I was terrified.
      Frank McCourt's lilting Irish voice carried me through his memoirs from the age of four, when his family moved from New york to Ireland, to the age of eighteen, when he returned from Ireland to New York. He's at his best when he goes off on a riff about religion, or his family. His rants build to a crescendo to which we can all relate.
     One of my favorite passages in the story is where Mr O'Dea assigns Frank the task of writing a composition about what it would be like if Our Lord had grown up in Ireland. With brutal honesty Frank writes, 'It's a good thing Jesus decided to be born Jewish in that warm place because if he was born in Limerick he'd catch the consumption and be dead in a month...'
     Sometimes life is a random sepia toned drama. 

 

Rare video of the reclusive Donald

The Donald is well camouflaged by laminated wood flooring, his natural habitat.

Life of Pi

Donald Is Richard Parker's Biggest Fan

By Preston Sinclair 

 

I've seen this look on Donald's face before.

"Thank you. And so it goes with God."

              Pi Patel

   Donald is my fourteen pound, three legged ginger tabby.  He curled up on the couch with me and became fascinated with Richard Parker. Now he fancies himself to be a smaller, less agile version of the cgi script star of Life Of Pi.  There's something about the tiger in all of us perhaps that helps us relate to this hostile reclusive shipmate of Pi Patel.
   Yann Martel's Life Of Pi is a spiritual odyssey. It's a journey during which a boy creates his own religion.  In this age of menus, and drop down boxes, who's to say that someday one won't be able to create one's own religion by selecting the best attributes of each? 

  

   This story illustrates the ultimate confrontation between Christianity, Islam and Hinduism. My favorite chapter in the book is where the priest, the imam, and the pandit confront Pi, as he's walking with his parents, about the fact that he's attending services with each of them. They should have continued to compete for his immortal soul. Instead they shunned him because they didn't understand him.  They set him adrift. They were too set in their own spiritual dogma to answer a young boy's questions. Either that, or else there were easier souls to win and his wasn't worth their time. He was forced to create his own parable as a result of the sinking of the ship during which he lost his entire family, his own Noah's Ark if you will.
  

   Ang Lee won an Oscar in 2013 at the 85th Annual Academy Awards for Best Director for Life Of Pi. This is because he was the spiritual center of the film. Some people thought Ben Affleck got snubbed because he didn't get nominated for Best Director for Argo. Suck it up, bro. You got your Oscar for Best Picture, which goes to the producers of the film. I saw Argo and it was a well produced film. Was Argo well directed? Meh, I think The Academy knew what they were doing.
   There has been speculation on the web about the floating island inhabited by meerkats.  Meerkats are like an adorable cross between a monkey and a cat. They are very social creatures and Pi probably knew about them from his experience at the zoo.
   I associated this floating island with the Sargasso Sea that is created by the swirling tides in the Atlantic Ocean which collect seaweed and flotsam. With a little imagination, I can see an analogy with the huge swirling tidal dump of plastics in the Pacific. Some day we will be able to walk from California to Japan on a plastic ramp across the Pacific.  At this point in the story Pi was so starved, dehydrated and delusional that he could have mistaken this flotsam for an island.
   At the end of his journey Pi tried to explain what had happened on board the ship to the Japanese insurance adjusters. People are often trying to explain or defend something in the name of religion. I think the point of Pi Patel's story is that religion should just let us be. Donald believes he's a tiger, therefore he is a tiger.

Donald doing his Richard Parker impression

“All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think we become.”   Buddha

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

You're gonna put your eye out with that arrow.

by Preston Sinclair

 

"Remember who the real enemy is." 
            Haymitch 

 As a fan of post-apocalyptic dystopian fiction I must say that this young adult version rates right up there with Ayn Rand's Anthem, and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. There's an earnestness and brutality about Jennifer Lawrence's portrayal of Katniss to which we can all relate. The fight or flight syndrome that kicks in with all of us at some time or another. 
     The art of good story telling allows the reader to insert one's self into the story; i.e. to ask, 'What would I do in that situation?'  The most disturbing thing about the original Hunger Games was that it was about children killing children. Catching Fire skirts around that issue by pitting veteran Hunger Games winners against each other as adults.  Was this just a clever plot twist, or a bow to the reality of the world in which we live where children really do kill children?
     I remember growing up with my cousins and friends. We used to play this game called War. We'd go into the woods and find sticks that resembled rifles. Then we'd all go out into the field and pretend to be snipers and pick each other off one by one, a pre-hunger games right of passage one might say.  It was all in good adolescent fun and no one ever got hurt. Yet I remember my aunt standing on the doorsteps yelling after us as we marched off to war, "You boys are gonna put an eye out with those sticks."

   I cannot in good conscience post my thoughts about this movie without paying my respects to the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman. This is one of those moments when I remember exactly where I was when I heard that he had passed away. I was standing in line at my local convenience store when I glanced over at the news stand and saw his picture on the cover of the New York Post.  At first I thought, "Oh cool, an interview." And then my heart dropped when I read the headline.  Rest in peace my friend.
     Phillip Seymour Hoffman played Plutarch Heavensbee with exactly the right amount of duplicity.  He was a good guy pretending to be a bad guy. He had to make President Snow (Donald Sutherland), believe his every word. No easy task, yet he pulled it off with panache.

Spoiler Alert:

     I realize that some people may not have seen the movie or read the book yet, therefore I have created a special page about the ending which is my favorite part. Here's the link to The Catching Fire Spoiler Page.

     Here's my review of the book on Goodreads.com.

 Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins


By the time I was about a third of the way through this book the story had me hooked, yet the only problem I have was that the weak vocabulary sometimes took me out of the story. I stopped and thought to myself, 'there may have been a better word for that.' I quickly told myself that this is a Young Adult book. Also the narrator Katniss is a sixteen year old with a limited education. The story really works best when there is movement. Katniss is either running away from something, or running to something. After I read the pivotal chapter which described how the Third Quarter Quell would be played (I won't spoil it), I had an A-ha moment when realized that I'd had a feeling that this would happen, but I didn't know how it would happen. Suzanne Collins deals with themes that adults can relate to without the language, and without the sex, which is very refreshing.
      Well, I finished reading it last night. I was beginning to worry because the games had not started, and I was almost two thirds of the way through the book. Soon after I started reading Part III The Enemy, I realized that this was not going to be about how people died, but how they survived. After that it became a whole new story to me. I could stop and take a breath and enjoy the book. It must have become tiring to think up new ways for people to die, because Collins abruptly stopped doing it. We still don't know how several of the segments of the clock worked, or how many of the Victors even met their end. This is because Collins was gearing up for The Hunger Games: Mockingjay.
View all my reviews


 

How To Marry A Millionaire

What I Really Need To Do Is...Marry A Millionaire

By Preston Sinclair

"That's the beautiful thing about a bear trap, you don't have to catch a whole heard of them. Just one nice big fat one." Schatze  

    Truer words have never been spoken. Therein lies the rub. What constitutes a bear, and how exactly does one build a better  trap? Comedy ensues as these three bombshells show us how, step by step. 

    Schatze Page (Lauren Bacall)starts out as the brains of the organization, yet she becomes more delusional and confused than the rest of them as the movie progresses. She's mean to her ardent suitor, Tom Brookman (Cameron Mitchell). While she's ambivalent toward her potential sugar daddy, JD Hanley (William Powell).

     Here's what Lauren Bacall had to say about her co-stars.

    "Betty Grable was a funny, outgoing woman, totally professional and easy.  Marilyn was frightened, insecure-trusted only her coach and was late"

Lauren Bacall

 from By Myself 

 

    Loco (Betty Grable) lives up to her name, and almost gets it right with Eben (Rory Calhoun). Except that Eben isn't really a bear, he's more of a svelte otter type. Yet, with those dreamy eyes who can blame the girl for falling for a guy who isn't holding...anything but trees.  

    J. Stewart Merril (Alexander D'Arcy)and Pola (Marilyn Monroe) set up one of best scenes in the movie. They're on a date, and Pola walks into the wall because she's too vain to wear her glasses. There's an audible thump as she hits the wall. There wasn't another actress in Hollywood who could have pulled off this gag better than Marilyn.

"He sounds wonderful, but I was naturally curious to know what he looked like."                        Pola

    Another highlight of the movie was Pola's scene with Freddie Denmark (David Wayne) on the airplane. Their comedic timing was perfect. The whole conversation about glasses was priceless, and well edited.  We were watching Pola fall in love with a man who wasn't holding. She couldn't help it.

    I went to a screening of the documentary Miss Representation, directed by Jennifer Siebel Newsom, at a local Community College.  This insightful doc explored the media's role in spreading propaganda that marginalizes the role of women in society. While watching, I couldn't help but wonder how Bacall, Grable and Monroe felt about the characters they were portraying. Did Schatze, Loco, and Pola have some sense of empowerment over the men in their lives?   Or were they victims of society?

    Today, in our Housewives Of Wherever reality TV world, we have become immune to the portrayal of women as gold diggers. Yet, in the post World War Two era, women were expected to leave the factories where they had been building planes and enter the kitchens as their men came marching home from war. This didn't leave women many choices. What kind of kitchen would any woman prefer, a pump jockey's or a millionaire's?  Don't judge them.  Not everyone could live the June Cleaver "Father Knows Best" lifestyle.  Women had to make hard choices and use the assets that they had in order to be happy.

  This begs the question, what makes us happy? Try turning the table and watching this movie from the guy's point of view. In the end, the men were working with what they as hard as the women were. Each guy was playing the hand he was dealt the best he could.

   For example, J.D. loved Schatze, yet he had enough class to know that he couldn't really make her happy.  While at the same time, Schatze knew that she was happiest when she was with Brookman. However, Brookman wanted her to fall in love with him for himself, not his money. 

   Happiness comes from inside. No one can "make" you happy. The final scene says it all as they are sitting around the diner counter fixing burgers.  Which reminds me that I'm hungry. Who knows? Maybe I'll meet somebody at the deli.

Reference links:

Classic Cinema Gold  

Internet Movie Data Base