The Haunted House

Phil is getting ready to see the newest haunted house movie, THE CONJURING. Although I enjoy books or stories about haunted houses, I cannot bear seeing them. So my favorite one is going to be THE HAUNTING OF HILL House, which is oh, so sublime due to its subtlety.

What is your favorite haunted house story or movie?

Your Favorite Rant

Every once in a while, a good rant clears the air. And goodness knows, there are so many things to rant about in this world. Who delivered your favorite rant in a movie, a book or in real life? I am going with this one.

"Listen to me! Television is not the truth. Television’s a goddamn amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers and football players. We’re in the boredom-killing business. So if you want the truth, go to God. Go to your gurus. Go to yourselves, because that’s the only place you’re going to find any real truth. But, man, you’re never gonna get any truth from us. We’ll tell you anything you wanna hear. We lie like hell. We’ll tell you that Kojak always gets the killer and that nobody ever gets cancer at Archie Bunker’s house. And no matter how much trouble the hero is in, don’t worry. Just look at your watch. At the end of the hour, he’s gonna win. We’ll tell you any shit you want to hear. We deal in illusions, man. None of it is true! But you people sit there day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds. We’re all you know. You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here. You’re beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you. You dress like the tube. You eat like the tube. You raise your children like the tube. You even think like the tube. This is mass madness you maniacs! In God’s name you people are the real thing, WE are the illusion!"

Not exactly true anymore. I think the tube has lost some of its powers, but a good rant it was.
What's your favorite?

Ghost Stories

In a recent issue of THE NEW YORKER, in a review of a new collection of M.R. James' stories, Anthony Lane quotes Virginia Woolf as saying, "it is pleasant to to be afraid when we are conscious that we are in no kind of danger." This was a quote from a longer essay by Woolf entitled " The Supernatural in Fiction."

This quote explains to me why some people are able to read and watch ghost or horror stories without feeling threatened. Part of their brain tells them that they are safe. They have a certain detachment from the goings on.

It is not like this for me. If the story is well done, I cannot tell myself that because my entire brain believes I am in danger like the people in the story.

How is it for you? Are you able to step outside the story? Can you watch or read it without feeling threatened?

Better Than the Book (or the first adaptation)

Tucson-back after a fabulous week in Tucson. Barely got my horrible computer to check the weather. Sorry if something got overlooked because I know I missed several emails with the computer which shall not be named.




I just saw the Fincher/English adaptation of THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO and found it superior to both the book and the first movie.

They cut a lot of boring economic stuff that preceded the real story and got rid of a worthless romance among other things. Fincher did a brilliant job of making every scene zing. He really knows what matters and how to make it matter to you.

But the real key for me was I could pay attention to faces and action and not the sub-titles beneath them. I kid myself sometimes when I say that sub-titles don't bother me because in a thriller, they do. I think they were a real hindrance in the Swedish version of this, for instance.

Here is a list of someone's idea of 50 films that were better than the book, and I would include this one. What is your favorite example?

Serial Killers

I was two episodes into Luther 2 on BBC America-when it occurred to me that I had had my fill of serial killers.

Truthfully SKs are not a very interesting lot. Their back stories are always the same. Their little fetishisms, surprisingly alike. Candles, religious symbols, hair, stolen body parts, carved mementos.

Yet writers love to write them. And even more, TV shows love to do them.
Are they easy to write? Sexy? What is it about them that so attracts us? I blame Hannibal Lector for most of this. I do admit to liking the TV series Dexter, but that series is larger than the idea of a serial killer. Or I tell myself that.

Are you attracted to books/movies/TV about serial killers? Is there one that stands out for you?
Or do you think we should put this plot device to rest as we did with multiple personality disorders and various other plot conceits of the day? I've had it. Give me a serial killer I can love. I dare you.

The End of a Novel

Just read a novel where multiple story lines are all resolved by the end of the book. It felt forced. That was followed by a novel (My Cousin, Rachel, where the ending was enigmatic. I wasn't sure exactly what had transpired, despite enjoying much of it. I am never sure in this case if my attention had drifted off and I have missed some key clues.

What do you demand at the end of a good novel, especially crime, I guess? How much resolution do you like? What book had the most satisfying ending in your memory?

Bad Girls

Bad Girls are not necessarily femme fatales here, but a female presence in a book or movie that wreaks havoc. There have been plenty of elderly ladies that have done such a thing. (Arsenic and Old Lace comes to mind). Or the teenager in The Childrens' Hour. Or the child in The Bad Seed.

In Leave Her to Heaven (1945), Gene Tierney plays a woman so obsessed with her new husband, she will destroy anyone she perceives to be a threat to her marriage.

I was scared to death of this movie seeing it on The Late Show as a kid.
It still scares me today. I think it might have been the first time I saw a movie where someone with the face of an angel did such hideous things.

The title is a quote from William Shakespeare's Hamlet. In Act I, Scene V, the Ghost urges Hamlet not to seek vengeance against Queen Gertrude, but rather to "leave her to heaven, and to those thorns that in her bosom lodge to prick and sting her."

Who is your favorite Bad Girl? Characters from books, tv or the movies .

What Movie Wrecked the Book

ENDLESS LOVE by Scott Spencer was a book I adored. The story of a boy so helplessly in love that he burned the girl's house down trying to get closer to her and her family.

Great book, lousy movie. Everything seemed over the top in the film. Romantic gestures seemed adolescent. And, they were, but not like the movie painted them. Better acting might have helped. A better script. Better directing.

What movie ruined a book for you? What movie makes you have to explain to those unfamiliar, "Yeah, but the book is really great."

A Palate Cleanser: Who are the Worst Mothers in Literature

Well sure Medea and Gertrude come to mind. But in the books, we actually read, who scares you most? How about Mrs. White, Carrie's mother? Stephen King is hard to top in creating monsters.

Lois Duncan Interview, Appreciation and Book Giveway

Right here.

How well I remember Megan reading Lois Duncan books in her pine-paneled bedroom beneath a huge window looking out on the leafy backyard. I think I even have a few of those books boxed away.

If there were any YA books around when I was 12 in 1960, I missed them and that's a pity. I don't remember reading books for or about girls my age at all. A few of the Maude Hart Lovelace books concerned older girls but I had read them by then.

For me, at 12, I was obsessed with books about the Holocaust and its survivors. Novels by Elie Wiesel, Leon Uris, Boris Pasternak, Herman Wouk, Salinger, Katherine Porter, Issac Singer, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud and of course, THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK. The event and its aftermath was still every much with us in my largely Jewish neighborhood of 1960. Although I was not Jewish, most of my friends and teachers were. It felt like my story after a while, even if it wasn't.

What books spoke most to you at twelve-thirteen?

The Perfect Book

After seeing JANE EYRE this weekend, we had several discussions. Eight of us went to see it. One of the women was a nineteenth century scholar and was able to shed light on many issues.
The movie was generally enjoyed by those of us who could see past its romantic trappings. (Ahem, Phil).

I remember hating the book when I read it in my first year of college, but loving it twenty years later. Another woman claimed the opposite. That now, she sees it as a romance masquerading as a novel with social relevance. But it did tell you much about the fate of those without money or family. It did raise issues about divorce, orphanages, the treatment of the insane, the place of religion. Okay but basically it was a romance. Nothing wrong with that and it certainly is superior to the latest Jennifer Anniston movie or romance novel.

Phil said it would have been better had Rochester died in the fire. To me this was crazy. You can't watch a movie (or read a book) where someone suffers for its entire length and not have any catharsis. He pointed out Tess of the D'Urbervilles. But Hardy was clearly a sadist. All his characters went down. Remember Jude.

I would classify it as one of the best books I've read. Maybe it is not perfect though.
What do you think of JANE EYRE and what is the most perfect book you've read.