Halloween Movie Marathon: Tales from the Darkside

I never saw the television series Tales from the Darkside, but I really liked this anthology film. Like Stephen King's Cat's Eye or the Twilight Zone Movie, it was a collection of three tales, bookended by a riff on Hansel and Gretl with Deborah Harry of Blondie fame playing the witch figure.
The three segments were "Lot 249," based on a Sir Arthur Conan Doyle story and starring Steve Buscemi, Julianne Moore, and Christian Slater; "Lover's Vow" starring James Remar and Rae Dawn Chong; and "Cat From Hell," based on a Stephen King story, starring the supremely creepy William Hickey (remember him from Prizzi's Honor?) and David (Buster Poindexter) Johansen.
Oddly, I have almost no memory of the "Cat From Hell" segment, which was adapted by George Romero from King's short story. Romero and director John Harrison are long-time friends and colleagues--you can see Harrison play Pellinore in Romero's entertaining Knightriders. If you're an Ed Harris fan, you should really check the movie out. It's about a troupe of Ren Faire biker/jousters. Stephen King makes a cameo appearance as an obnoxious audience member (and if memory serves, his wife Tabitha King is also in there.) Harrison and Romero also collaborated on Diary of the Dead.
"Lot 249" was a very creepy mummy story.  Buscemi had mostly been doing television series work up to them (he'd be in Miller's Crossing a couple of years later). Slater had just had a Lindsay Lohan-style problem with his car and some alcohol but didn't let it affect his work.
"Lover's Vow" was possibly the strongest of the stories and had some really good special effects for a horror movie made for a price. The chemistry between Remar (of Dexter) and Chong was hot.
This is a movie where you can dip in and out of the stories as the night goes on. Pair it with something like the Romero/King collaboration Creepshow.

Halloween Movie Marathon: Pet Sematary

I have read nearly all of Stephen King's books, some of them twice, and Pet Sematary scared me the most because the wish fulfillment at work is so incredibly basic. Who wouldn't want a beloved pet to return, or a beloved relative?
I liked this movie although I never saw either the sequel or the remake. The tagline from the movie, "Sometimes dead is better" is kind of my policy on remakes--sometimes you just need to let a movie die. Seriously. Now that we have Blu-Ray and VOD and streaming and netflix and hulu and whatever, you really don't need to remake a movie for a new audience because each generation of audience can see the original for themselves.
But I digress.
I liked the casting in this movie. Dale Midkiff was fine as the father who can't resist the oportunity to bring his son back. This movie is King's version of The Monkey's Paw and audiences were screaming "Don't do it" when I first saw it.
Denise Crosby's role as his wife was probably the best role she ever had on the big screen.
The person I really liked, though, was Fred Gwynne, who played the neighbor who holds the secret of the Pet Sematary.  Three years later he played the long-suffering judge on My Cousin Vinny and he was a hoot. Here he is utterly convincing as a man who talks about having a heart like stony ground, but who can't help but interfere when he sees his neighbor suffering.
Stephen King has a cameo in the film as a minister, and he's better than M. Night Shyamalan in his cameos, but not by much. He's about on a par with Peter Benchley, who made a brief appearance in Jaws.
The movie was directed by Mary Lambert, who also directed the sequel. Lambert's film career never really got any traction, although she has directed a number of genre films (and has one in production) and a lot of music videos for Sting and Lionel Ritchie and similar superstar talents.
There are some genuine frights in this movie, and the idea itself is just damn creepy. The book is even creepier, so you might want to read it first just to get the full effect.

It's not that hard to get it right!

Sigh. The four most lucrative times of the year for me are the annual film festivals--Cannes, Toronto, Berlin, and the American Film Market, which is due to open in little over a week. I read between 30 and 100 movie scripts in the weeks running up to the markets, and sometimes I have to subcontract the work in order to get it all done.
I've gotten used to certain errors I see over and over and over again in scripts ("Vile" of cocaine"; "His breaks failed"), but I'm starting to get a little nuts about the mistakes my subcontractors routinely make.
The most common error is mistaking ITS and IT'S.  Seriously.  It is not that hard to keep them straight. Ditto for WHOSE and WHO'S. My contractors are smart people, good writers, educated. But somewhere along the way, they just missed a couple of things.
My best friend mocks me when I go off on this stuff and calls me a "word snoot."
And it's not like I don't have weaknesses.  I can't spell graffiti to save my life. I always want to put in one F and two Ts.  I'm not really clear on THAT and WHICH.
But I know IT'S and ITS.
I actually blame Spellcheck. Have you ever noticed that Spellcheck will challenge your every use of ITS and IT'S? If you're not rock solid on the rule, it would be VERY easy to get it wrong. 
I try to remember that as I go through the work I get back.
I fear I am becoming the grammar equivalent of the cranky old person who tells kids to get off his lawn.

Herstory: Mary Seacole

I'd never heard of Mary Seacole, a Jamaican-born nurse, until I was given a script to read about her. She was the first nurse on the battlefield in the Crimean War--first, even though we've all been taught about Florence Nightingale, who came later. (And in fact, Nightingale said ugly things about Seacole, accusing her of running a brothel and getting soldiers drunk.  Sisterhood isn't always powerful.) She's got an amazing story. Read more about her on Wikipedia.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Seacole

Feminist (Non) Fiction Friday--the News Edition

Pauline Frederick c. 1955

When I was growing up, writing for school newspapers and thinking about going for a journalism degree, the three most visible women journalists were Barbara Walters, Pauline Frederick and Helen Thomas. (On the print side there was also Gloria Emerson and Frances FitzGerald, who both wrote fantastic books about the Viet Nam War.)
Later, there was Diane Sawyer, former beauty queen and Republican political strategist  (she helped write Nixon's memoirs), and Jessica Savitch, the weekend anchor at NBC who died tragically in 1983. I never watched the Today Show, so never had an opinion about Katie Couric one way or another. I never watched a single broadcast of her prime time news show. I just never really put her in the same category as other women journalists. But they came later.
The three women who shaped me were Barbar and Pauline and Helen.
I cannot tell you how completely betrayed I felt when beteran White House reporter Helen Thomas suddenly revealed herself to be an anti-Semite. I took it personally.
I remember Pauline Frederick as a UN reporter. I thought that sounded very glamorous. I could see myself doing that--using my French and maybe other languages I'd pick up on the side as I covered stories in far-off places.  The story is that when Pauline was first starting out, few men would agree to be interviewed by a woman so she approached their wives first.  She was the first female reporter to broadcast from China and she had an early interest in "electronic communication." She died more than two decades ago at the age of 82, but she would have felt right at home in the world of Twitter and FB and YouTube.
And then there's Barbara Walters. Every female journalist working today owes a big thank you to Barbara. She's always been an easy target for jokes about her questions ("If you were a tree what would you be?") but I've done my share of celebrity interviews and you know...sometimes questions like that are the only way to break through the wall and get something like a real answer,
Barbara. She worked her way up to that slot on Today and she paid her dues in a time when NO ONE would take a woman reporting hard news seriously.
Seriously.
That idea seems so quaint now.
Connie Chung was another journalist who was very visible in the late 20th century but she's kind of disappeared now. That's a shame.  Andrea Mitchell, another veteran reorter, is very visible right now, appearing at the RNC and DNC conventions, doing interviews from the floor while being virtually engulfed in balloons. She is a breast cancer survivor (this is Breast Cancer Awareness month) and a tough cookie who is in her mid-60s and shows no signs of slowing down.
When CNN came along it was thrilling because there was Bobbie Batista anchoring the news and just being awesome by her very presence. And then there was Christiane Amanpour, who was tough and beautiful and whip smart and reporting from war-torn countries. (I still had fantasies of being a war reporter myself.)

Chocolate Milk for Grownups--Coco Metro

I am all about the cheese (and the yogurt, and the sour cream and the butter) but I despise milk. My parents didn't force us to drink  milk once we were weaned, and we happily drank ice water at meals, or iced tea. When I used to eat cereal, I would splash on some milk, but only enough to moisten the cereal and only if it was non-fat milk. I just don't like the way milk tastes or the way it feels in my mouth. (My father's family owned a dairy farm and at my grandmother's house I once had milk pretty much straight from the cow.  It was NASTY.)
I don't even really like chocolate milk all that much. Of course I like chocolate, but most processed chocolate milks taste vaguely chemical-y to me, and the texture is kind of revolting too.
Today at my favorite grocery store, they were giving out samples of something called Coco Metro, though, and I hadn't eaten yet so I grabbed a sample.
It was delicious.
For one thing, even though there's a fair amount of sugar in the mix, what you taste is the chocolate and not the sweet. And the chocolate is high quality, dark Belgian chocolate so that the taste left in your mouth is that lovely, bitter chocolate finish of a fine truffle.
It's not cheap.  While other bottled chocolate milks are priced at around $1.59 (on sale for 99 cents most of the time), Coco Metro costs $3.79 a serving.
I don't always drink chocolate milk, but when I do, it'll probably be Coco Metro.

I do not think that word means what you think it means...

The word is FREE.
I keep seeing posts on FB with links to a Kindle book that's FREE only to find out that it's  not actually free to anyone but people who belong to Amazon's PRIME program. In other words...it isn't FREE.
And while we're on the subject of Kindle books, what's the deal with Kindle books being ... out of stock?  Seriously?