THE DESCENT 2

I wasn't totally blown away by the first installment of this action/thriller from helmer Neil Marshall and the second is not wildly better.  What The Descent 2 is: a reasonably enjoyable action/horror movie.  What it is not: a searing, deep character study as so many people seemed to say of the original.  But Shauna Macdonald reprises her role as the badass Sarah, who strongly (and positively) recalls Sigourney Weaver's alien-busting Ripley in the Alien saga.  Overall, a recommend.

So You Want to Be A Writer

by Charles Bukowski

if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don't do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don't do it.
if you're doing it for money or
fame,
don't do it.
if you're doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don't do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don't do it.
if it's hard work just thinking about doing it,
don't do it.
if you're trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.

if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you're not ready.

don't be like so many writers,
don't be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don't be dull and boring and
pretentious, don't be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don't add to that.
don't do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don't do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don't do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.

Courtesy of Ted Hope

THE RE-ANIMATOR

There are so many great ideas in this movie: non-zombie reanimation, setting such a film on a college campus, a power struggle between a professor and his upstart student, &c.  And practically none of them are executed well in Stuart Gordon's cult classic.  Nor does the film share any of the gothic aplomb of Lovecraft himself, who although infamous for his purple prose, knew how to conjure atmosphere when he had to.  This film has as much atmosphere as early Cronenberg, which is to say: none.  But it also has none of Cronenberg's emotional intelligence or dream logic sensibility.

Frankly, I was disappointed, but that doesn't mean I won't crib from it wildly.

First Post

Okay, I know that nobody cares that this blog exists, but although I put it up a couple of days ago, I have been unable to post due to some kind of silly paralysis about "what I should post about first."  So I'm circumventing that issue by posting something completely inane.  Namely, this photograph: