story progress, movies seen, and a machine 

So, it’s about time for a blog post (it must be, right?).

I don’t have any grand unified field theory of writing to report or anything like that. But I guess I have some things.

1) I’m still working on “The Bus Station Mystery.” It’s not quite ready for prime time, in its new form, but it’s getting there. It’s not so frantic and rushed now — there’s more room for the characters to breathe.

Well, except for the ones who get murdered.

 
2) I saw the movie Unlocked, mostly because Noomi Rapace was in it. She did not disappoint (she never does 🙂 ), and the rest of the cast were good, too (Michael Douglas, John Malkovich, Toni Collette — Orlando Bloom was a drag, but his character was ridiculous, so it wasn’t entirely his fault), but the movie was totally predictable. To paraphrase Truman Capote, the movie was full of surprises, if you’ve never seen a movie before.

Movies like this are never worth thinking about — that would just make you think about all the (better) movies from which they’re taking things.

 
3) I also saw Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. Not a complete success, but, unlike Unlocked, it rewards consideration, since there are fairly simple changes I can see which would have made it much better. I like pondering those sorts of things, as I did with Suicide Squad — it can be a useful exercise to see where things went off the rails and why.

Apart from that, as more than one review pointed out, the movie is a lot of fun to watch, even during the parts where the dialog is less than stellar. It is nice to see a big summer action movie which is obviously not made based on some proven, preset, blueprint for such things.

 
4) I had a feeling that I’d written about Florence and the Machine before, but apparently that was only a draft that never got published.

Since Arcade Fire became less interesting, Florence and the Machine have filled the niche in my brain that wants big, strummy, indie anthem-type music with unusual instrumentation:

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