How Do I Know What I Think Until I See What I Say?

I saw War of the Worlds - the Tom Cruise/ Steven Spielberg version - in the theatre when it first came out (this was before Tom Cruise became a total negative for me). It's on television tonight, and seeing it again reminded me of my original opinion of it, which is this: WOTW would have been an awesome and terrifying movie, except that it was made by Steven Spielberg. I've thought for a while now that Steven Spielberg is at war with himself. Although I'm no film conniesuer (or speller of conniesuer), I think it started with (or resurfaced as a result of) Schindler's List. I'm totally speculating and making stuff up, but I think that once Spielberg became aware of the larger things he could do with film and the larger darkness that exists at the heart of humanity as a result of Schindler's List, he became a filmmaker divided against himself. And there is no where that division is clearer than in WOTW. The first side of Spielberg is the side we all know and l...

Right now I'm watching The Star Chamber, a movie from the 80s in which Michael Douglas plays a judge who is so upset by criminals getting off scot-free that he joins a secret judges' organization that kills people who get off on legal technicalities. It's a cool idea - people get off on technicalities all the time. I specifically chose not to go into criminal law because I didn't think I could live with innocent people getting convicted or guilty people going free. But I'm not really getting into the movie because, in short, they're getting it wrong. In this particular case, what they're getting wrong are the legal technicalities that are getting the criminals off. To be fair, these technicalities were probably not wrong in 1983, when the film was made. For example, one guy who is accused of killing five women gets off because he threw his gun in the garbage can in front of his house (!) and the cops can't search the garbage can because it's the c...

Let's just get it out there - I heart Christian Bale. Seriously. He's the peanut butter to my bread, the knees of my bees, the weeble to my wobble. He's lovely. He also has the advantage of being a really interesting actor, who picks a lot of strange and unconventional roles, so when I follow his career I get to see everything from Reign of Fire - a low budget movie about dragons, to American Psycho - the adaptation of the Bret Easton Ellis novel about a (maybe)serial killer to Batman Begins, the restart of the expensive superhero franchise, to 3:10 To Yuma, a remake of the 1957 film of the same name, and a good old-fashioned western of the best kind. In 3:10, Bale plays a struggling rancher injured in the Civil War. When he goes to town to beg a fellow rancher for more time to pay his debts, Bale takes a paid job escorting gunman and villain Russell Crowe to the train - the 3:10 to Yuma - so that he can be shipped off to jail and hung. The rest of the movie is basical...

I don't know how I discovered "The Grounding of Group Six" by Julian Thompson. I don't remember. I know that it happened in high school sometime, but unlike my discovery of "The Changeover" , my discovery of "Group Six" is clouded by the fog of the past. But I did. Thank God. Because "Group Six" is the book that showed me how to write multiple characters and points of view. And it's just plain awesome. "Group Six" is the story of five teenagers, each of whom is sent to a boarding school for not living up to their parents' expectations. It's a little Breakfast Club in the set-up - one of the kids is a delinquent, and one is a hippie chick, and one is even a nerd (and her story is particularly heartbreaking, let me tell you) - but these kids aren't stereotypes. Their backstories feel genuine and real. These are kids you could know. Anyway, because of their various problems with their parents, they are sent to...

In light of my last post, I've been doing some thinking about when authors should shut up. I was all "ooh, extras like on DVD" and then I thought about how, sometimes, with shows or movies I really like, I don't actually watch the commentaries (although I do usually watch the deleted scenes). Why? Because I love those shows, and I'm afraid knowing too much about how they work will ruin them for me. I'm the same way with celebrities - if I love their work, I will try to avoid knowing anything about their personal lives. For example, I was an X-Phile for a long time (that's a fan of the show The X-Files, for those of you who aren't nerds like me :) ). And I loved the character Fox Mulder, so I made it a point to avoid everything I could about David Duchovny, who played Mulder. Didn't watch him on talk shows, didn't read interviews, didn't look him up on the internet - nothing. Because I was afraid that if I did, he would ruin Mulder fo...

One of the things I like about the internet is that it allows authors to show people things that never made it into the final drafts of books. A lot of times, there are good reasons for not including these scenes (like, they suck?), but it's interesting to see them nonetheless. It's like the extras on a DVD - you can look at those extras without polluting the author's final version of the text. In the book that I'm working on now, there are a LOT of those extras. This book has gone through several incarnations over the years. There was a version in which there were four sections, each of which was told from the point of view of another character. It was a disaster. Interesting (at least to me), but seriously a disaster from a book perspective. Also, when I started writing, I wrote a lot of scenes that I wanted to see that didn't actually fit in anywhere once the plot finally crystalized. That blows, because I really like a lot of those scenes. They're ...

Recently, I found a copy of "Beyond the Chocolate War" by Robert Cormier at a used bookstore. I've been looking for it for a while, so I picked it up and read it last weekend, and then read "The Chocolate War" again, for, like, the 50th time. While "Beyond the Chocolate War" is a serviceable sequel, "The Chocolate War" itself is a brilliant book, psychologically complex and original, honest and brutal. "The Chocolate War" is about the boys that attend Trinity, a private school. Most of the boys are average kids, but there is a secret organization at Trinity called The Vigils, which exists, basically, to make the other kids' lives miserable. The Vigils are run by Archie Costello, an evil mastermind who understands that it's a lot easier to destroy people through their psychological levers than it is to destroy them physically. When kids get beat up, the school administration has to take notice, but when a kid is beat up e...