Dana Reeve, the widow of former Superman actor Christopher Reeve, has been diagnosed with lung cancer.
“I have recently been diagnosed with lung cancer and am currently undergoing treatment,” Reeve, 44, said in a statement on the Web site of the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation. “I have an excellent team of physicians and we are optimistic about my prognosis.”
Reeve, who has a 13-year-old son, said she decided to disclose her illness because a tabloid was about to report on her health. Her announcement came two days after the lung cancer death of ABC News anchor Peter Jennings, 67.
Last night, before the school board meeting, I came home briefly, and found an Unholy Funk had taken up residence in the apartment.
It was a smell that I might remember from somewhere. It has elements of other smells, including burning machinery, a metallic smell and, well, feces. What it is, I can’t figure. The garbage has been taken out, the dishes, if not all 100 percent clean, don’t have anything that would produce a smell like that (especially after they were rinsed off as a result) and there’s no other obvious sources of the smell in the kitchen, and I’ve looked. The fact that the apartment apparently got pretty hot during the day yesterday didn’t help. (If you don’t glance at the weather icon on this page when you visit, it’s been over 100 more often than not recently, and it’s in the 90s until relatively late at night.)
I’m thinking now that there’s some gunk stuck in the sink drain below the disposal teeth. Of course, I have no idea how to test this theory or get rid of it if that’s the case. Yuck!
The funk appears to have been a culprit in the dairy family, hiding dried (hitherto unnoticed) on a dirty dish in the sink. All better now.
Let me say this up-front: I’m a huge fan of the “Hellblazer” comic book, especially the long run by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon. So I was more than a little nervous about this movie. But at the same time, I also like films like this, even when they’re not connected to any existing franchise.
“Constantine
” feels like it both took too little from the comic books and not enough, which is a neat trick. There’s likely a heck of a good movie on the cutting room floor or, more likely, in previous versions of the scripts that were sliced and spliced together to make the theatrical version of the film.
Keanu Reeves plays LA detective John Constantine or, as he says it, “John Constantine, a-hole.” That’s a cute line, but it points to one of the major problems with the film: It’s Schwarzeneggerized. Dialogue in the movie, for the most part, consists of clever catch phrases (and we know “John Constantine, a-hole” is a catch phrase because a riff is done on it by another character within the first minute of Reeves saying it in the movie). Is he an a-hole? Hard to tell: In the comics, he certainly is — John Constantine in “Hellblazer” will sacrifice small children to save a city, or sell someone else’s soul for a marginally improved chance of defeating an enemy. In the film, Reeves’ Constantine is mostly just moody, but we never heard him say “I’m Neo, a-hole” or “I’m either Bill or Ted, a-hole” in previous movies, despite his Constantine not being dramatically different from any of his other roles. But it’s a cute line, so we’re stuck with it.
In the comics, these clever bits that Constantine says are spaced out over several issues and we see a lot more of his street level grungy street magic. He’s not a cool guy, he’s a failed human being who happens to pull a rabbit out of his hat and save the day, once in a while, but at great cost to everyone around him. In the movie, we get all the cool bits and none of the context. This is Neo in wool instead of leather and using magic instead of virtual reality.
Likewise, the story, involving the Devil’s son, angels and demons involved in a cold war on Earth and twin psychics, is very authentically “Hellblazer” — specifically, it hits a lot of the moments in the Ennis/Dillon run — but where it should explain, it skims and where it should move quickly, it broods on arty sequences. As a result, the actual plot of the movie comes suddenly at the end, and it feels as though most of what came before was unneeded, and it probably was.
Having said that, the film looks like a million bucks, whether it’s cinematography, special effects or costuming. You can certainly see where they spent the money they saved on having a solid script doctor come in and clean things up afterwards.
Those interested in the subject matter — a war between Heaven and Hell in a modern urban landscape — would be better advised to pick up the Ennis/Dillon “Hellblazer” paperbacks (all of which are available here at Amazon) instead. “Hellblazer” fans would be advised to rent this, at most.
Someone, someday, will make a great gritty supernatural thriller set on the mean streets of London. “Constantine” isn’t it, and isn’t even a particularly satisfying appetizer for that film.
“Titan,” this ain’t.
John Varley’s done some novels, most notably “Millennium” and the Gaia trilogy, that are full of Big Ideas and sprawling imagination. In contrast, “Red Thunder” is a popcorn movie, all concerned with fun and momentum forward.
Literally a novel about four friends who help assemble a homemade spaceship in an attempt to be the first people on Mars — with the help of a disgraced ex-astronaut and his idiot savant cousin — “Red Thunder” is a love letter to the Robert Heinlein “juvenile” novels about people pulling themselves up by the bootstraps of their moon boots and heading out into space for adventure.
And “Red Thunder” succeeds at that, handily, in fact. His physics, once you get over the giant deus ex machina at the heart of the revolutionary space drive, are pretty good. His realpolitik is excellent, and a bit more canny than Heinlein. And, for once, Varley doesn’t emulate Heinlein at the end of his life, meaning this is his first novel in decades without strong (and often somewhat strange) sexual content.
This is a fun-for-all-ages, no deep thinking necessary adventure novel. Judged on its own merits, it’s a definite success. Judged as part of the Varley canon, it feels like something he just knocked out for fun between bigger projects. I’m definitely looking forward to seeing his next big project, whatever it might be.
Strongly recommended for space adventure fans of all ages, especially readers of earlier Robert Heinlein novels.
In many ways, “Harry Potter & the Half-Blood Prince” is the end of the first half of his saga. This is the conclusion of Harry as an innocent and a young man. No surprises here: The entire series has been leading towards Harry having a final confrontation with Voldemort.
The certainty of that confrontation, and the uncertainty of what will result, hangs heavily over “The Half-Blood Prince.” Harry’s sixth school year is full of preparations for the confrontation. The wizarding world is on high alert, the Death Eaters are murdering those who will not side with them, Harry’s rival Draco Malfoy is up to something and Headmaster Dumbledore is preparing Harry with the information he’ll need to face Voldemort in the prophesized final battle.
An air of tragedy and tension thus overlay the normal interests of 16 year olds, including the opposite sex, sports and the opposite sex. Romance fully blossoms at Hogwarts at last, but it’s love during wartime, given less time to bloom than it would in more peaceful times.
In many ways, this is J. K. Rowling’s “The Empire Strikes Back”: There are no real conclusions here — even the much-hyped death is so wrapped up in mystery that it will inevitably be the focus of much of the final novel — but merely setting things up for that final conclusion. And as it’s always darkest before the dawn, Rowling makes things very, very dark indeed. Any notion that she would be dumbing down this story, or the depiction of evil, for a children’s audience is finally ground to dust. Death and other evils are treated in a mature fashion, especially the ramifications for the survivors.
Along the way is a great deal of evidence that Rowling has grown up as a writer along with Harry. The structure of the early books is almost entirely gone, and all indications are that the final book will have only a passing resemblance to previous books in terms of structure. Quidditch is here, but it receives its smallest focus to date. Time spent in class is likewise not the focus of the novel, nor is a great deal of time spent with Harry’s non-wizarding relatives, the Dursleys. At this point, Rowling rightly assumes anyone reading her novel is aware of the setting and history, and just jumps right into the story itself.
But this is ultimately a hard novel to judge, as it really forms the first half of the final novel of the series. Indeed, it looks likely that the first chapter of that book will take place hours, at most, after the final page of “The Half-Blood Prince.” It’s going to be a heck of a ride, with confrontations with numerous antagonists likely to be going down in surprising ways, if the twists in this novel are any indication.
On its own, this isn’t the best novel in the series — that’s still “Prisoner of Azkhaban,” for my money — but it’s definitely among the best installments to date.
Now to climb the walls for two more years waiting for the conclusion of this series …
|
|
