Movie Review: The Wildling
So my bad-horror-movie-to-watch-while-folding-laundry last week was The Wildling. I went in expecting, like, a psychological drama, a lot of tense conversations and pregnant silences and such-like. It, uh, it um... well, boy it was something, I guess.
Opens with twenty minutes of extended abusive parenting, then segues abruptly into Twilight by way of Ginger Snaps. There are some wild scene and timeframe changes, not to mention a tone that veers between the aforementioned highly detailed abuse scene(s) and some Encino Man fish-out-of-water jokey segments. Honestly, with how extreme the scene jumps are and how much goes unspoken between them while excessive time is spent on completely unnecessary bits, I assumed that this thing was based on some YA novel that they were trying to remain faithful to, but according to my spouse's research, it's original to film. I could go on for hundreds of words listing all the weird inconsistencies and bonkers narrative choices, not the least of which is the central premise of sending a teenage girl with medically-induced developmental disabilities to live unsupervised with a non-expert who has a busy job that leaves said girl alone constantly with a horny "teenage" boy. (The actor is visibly nearing thirty, but he is apparently supposed to be still in high school.) And then the backwoods werewolf hunters who also have a national network, the wolf shaman who just kind of lives in town except when he's setting lethal mantraps in random locations in the woods, the unexplored implications of werewolf DNA now being in national medical and criminal databases... Anyway.
Everyone involved is trying very hard, but I can't recommend this movie unless you just really super duper love werewolf movies and want to see all of them or if you enjoy (as I do) watching the slow-motion trainwreck of people with lofty goals and big ideas grinding agonizingly against the limitations of the medium and the budget.
Hire a Weirdo to Edit Your Work
I am officially online on Upwork, if you need an editor/proofreader/professional slush monkey to review your writing for you. I promise to be only as cruel as is necessary.
Sentences That Were Not Imagined in 1990
“I think I will call the predatory disruptive taxi company and ask for their side business delivering fast food to drunk people during a pandemic to bring me an entire bicycle from Wal-Mart.”
Book Review: 14
We've been trying to get to the library more often these days. (As long as everything is going to stay open, we might as well try to keep the boychild supplied with reading material.) In the interests of not having a completely dead website, I'll chat with y'all about the books I find.
Last week, I read "14," by Peter Clines. It has a nearly ungoogleable title, but I'd endorse digging it up if you like creepy house mysteries. The story is set in a mysteriously cheap apartment building, with the titular Room 14 being a completely sealed and locked door. The protagonist notices an increasing number of oddities and eventually joins up with the other residents to dig to the bottom of the weirdness, which turns out to be extremely deep. The cover blurbs all raved about it being "like 'LOST'," but I can assure you that it is not, in fact, in the sense that in this book, the mysterious signs and symbols all actually have a planned meaning that resolves into a coherent plot. However, I'll concede that the tone of high weirdness and general WTF-ery is somewhat akin to the flavor that LOST was striving to create.
The prose is solidly readable, the characters are amusing and varied, and the plot follows an enjoyable mystery curve of slow build-up to an increasingly hectic resolution. You may catch a faint whiff of harem anime from the first bits, in which our male hetero protagonist meets a series of attractive women with different body types and personalities and thinks about how attractive each of them is in their own ways, but this odd thread is thankfully quickly dropped/resolved without anything actually unpleasant or irritating happening. I don't think it was even intentional, but if it ever was, it got removed in some editing pass or other.
Overall, strong endorsement from me. I might not go out to buy a hard copy for my shelves, but I'd happily pick up more by this author with confidence in my enjoyment or buy some e-book versions. Firm A-Tier. Well done, Mr. Clines.