Movie Review: The Thing

    A flying saucer heading toward the Earth.  An American science research post in Antarctica.  A Swedish (Norwegian!) helicopter chasing a dog across the ice.  Winter rolling in.  Thus begins one of the best horror movie, and a darned fine science fiction movie, ever filmed.  Like Alien, the movie takes its time, introducing the cast and giving them each a little moment or two to establish personality.  A sizable cast of character actors, with a few especially strong stand-outs lend the film a credibility that grounds the cosmic madness laying in wait.

    Though originally conceived as a remake of the 50s film, The Thing From Another World, John Carpenter helmed what became a ground-up, serious adaptation of the inspirational short story ‘Who Goes There?’ by John W. Campbell Jr.  It gets much more into the concept of the original story, keeps several characters, and captures its atmosphere in ways the 50s film (awesome, though it is) never did.  And man, the movie drips in atmosphere.  The sequence where Mac and Copper explore the Norwegian camp is beautiful and disturbing.  The quiet shots of the American camp dial the paranoia right up.  The oppressive snow storm and ever-present cold lend natural danger to moments tinged with unnatural evils.

    The script is crackerjack, with the actors all in top form.  Interplays between various men produce moments both funny and disquieting.  Touching and terrifying.  As they begin to realize the true danger of the Thing, friendships and loyalties are tested and the breakdown of civility and trust is as frightening as any monster.  Even the people who have been turned might not know they’ve been turned.  Copies so perfect they don’t even know (at least not consciously) they’re copies until their alien nature asserts itself.  Nasty.  There are so many classic moments.  Of course, the dog creature, the head falling from the table only to sprout legs and walk away, Wilford Brimley’s axe wielding Down Home Freak-Out, Mac with the dynamite, and Garry tied to that f*&%ing couch.  And man, every moment Wilford Brimley is on screen is amazing.  He goes for it.  Everyone goes for it, but Brimley goes the distance like nobody’s business.  He lives that part, and it’s awesome.  His disgusted autopsy, his complete meltdown, his noose shadowed apology.  All great.  I guess Kurt Russell is the star of the film, though it feels more like an ensemble.  Always a solid, workman actor, Russell and director Carpenter had by this point established an excellent working relationship.  He manages to play a practical, grounded guy who can still keep cool during unprecedented situations.  In some ways, the character feels the closest to Russell himself.  He’s not the brightest bulb in the chandelier, but he shows up, he does his job, and does it well.  He doesn’t have the academic skills, but practical experience out the wahoo.

    The effects hold up for a reason.  The practical effects were bold and ground breaking, and still look better 30 years later than most CGI done today.  It has a realness, a physicality that fools even your reptile brain like CG still rarely can.  The use of multiple styles of effects goes a long way.  Puppets, stop motion, matte paintings, etc.  Great stuff.  I do wish there had been a bit more of the previous forms the Thing might have taken.  The dialog, and the original story point to some possibilities that could have been pretty cool to see.

    Excellent cast, effects, cinematography, and script are made that much better by the haunting, pulsing score by Ennio Morricone, which matches Carpenter’s own musical style so well.  It’s not flashy, but like the Thing itself, it gets inside you.  Morricone helps set the inevitable, apocalyptic tone.  It might just be the final beats of the human heart, before Mankind is brought low by a corrupting alien menace.

    This review ended up being hard to write.  Not at all because I didn’t have enough to say, but because I have a hard time not talking about it.  I think the film is probably both John Carpenter’s and Kurt Russell’s best, though not my favorite (Big Trouble in Little China likely takes that award).  And The Thing may well be one of those very rare perfect films.  It’s certainly close.  A simple essay doesn’t seem like nearly enough to sing the film’s well deserved praises.

-Matt

Matt’s Week in Dork! (2/3/13-2/9/13)

    On Sunday evening, thanks to Ben, I finally saw a movie that everyone under the sun has been telling me forever that I needed to watch, but in all honesty, I’ve never much been interested in.  Goodfellas.  I didn’t do up a list of New Years movie resolutions, but if I did, Goodfellas would have been on it.  Maybe now I should think about that list.  Shawshank Redemption, I would probably have put Birth of a Nation on it, which Brad and I watched a few weeks back (gah!), The Seventh Seal, and maybe An American In Paris.   And maybe this is the year I should put my heart into giving a few directors another try.  Fellini, Kurosawa, Woody Allen (shudder), and Altman (not that I would say I don’t like Altman, only that he never drew me in).

Goodfellas:  I’ve never seen the appeal of mob types or their lifestyle.  Yet this movie manages to show the lives of some pretty useless dumbasses in such a way that I still found them occasionally charming.  The cast does a good job, and the period-piece aspect was interesting.  Watching these guys live through the 60s, 70s, and 80s, rise up the ranks, fall on hard times, get into drugs, murder and all sorts of poor behavior.  These guys all seem like stupid children, easy to anger, violent and impulsive, so concerned with honor and image they can’t figure out how keep from f’ing up.  It’s like a collection of people you don’t want to stand next to, because they’re the dumb fools who get other people killed.  It’s a solid film with a good cast and some grim humor.  The violence exists mostly as a constant threat, only actually hitting the screen on a few dramatic occasions.  The soundtrack is pretty awesome.  Why is it hailed as one of the greatest movies of all time?  I don’t know.  It’s good.  It’s very good.  One of the greatest movies of all time?  I don’t see it.

The Sun Also Rises:  “I’m just…detached.”  Ava Gardner is fascinating.  I know she’s considered one of the great beauties (and in this film, she is quite comely), but I’ve never thought of her as ‘beautiful.’  But she is somehow more comfortable in her skin (seemingly) than most women, giving her an attractiveness that isn’t about her looks.  And unlike Lauren Bacall with Bogart, Gardner and Tyrone Power look more appropriate.  Don’t get me wrong, Bogart was the man, and I hope one day to have my ugly old mug next to a woman half as beautiful as Bacall.  Anyway, the life of Americans drifting around Europe in the aftermath of the Great War is the subject of this film, and Power is good as the broken, haunted and sad man, wounded in a way that makes him useless to a woman.  Bar crawling, trysting, moping, and drinking.  And one woman capturing and destroying the souls of several men.  As a dour and taciturn fellow myself, I do empathize Power’s journalist who just wants to be left alone, who has love in his heart, but an inability to get it out without un-survivable pain.  And like him, I want to go fishing in France with Eddie Albert.  But, how does anyone in this movie even manage to stand up, with all the booze they consume.  I’ll admit, I’m a lightweight.  However, I think most people would be staggering and slurring their speech at best.  Errol Flynn as the busted sot is weirdly charming, in spite of being kind of a douche.  He and Eddie Albert are highlights.  It’s an OK movie that does capture a certain mood.  It reminded me a bit of the Bill Murray version of The Razor’s Edge.  That whole, Lost Generation in Paris thing is rich with mood and kind of fascinating, though not really my cup of tea (much like the late 60s San Francisco business).

Heaven and Hell:  “You’re the Ghost with the Rotten Heart!”  Most Martial Arts movies are half way to fantasy anyway, so one would think a full-on fantasy film would be amazing.  Sadly, most of them are just dull and awkward.  This one is a bit more surreal than most, which makes it a bit more entertaining.  There’s a lot of smoke, a lot of crazy sets.  And yeah, they fight with a metal hula-hoop.  Then it switches to the real world, which is much more the surreal world, with more strange sets, a horribly dubbed singing number, and extra loads of goofy.  There are a lot of fights, but they feel kind of meaningless, and so lack a level of excitement.  At least when they travel to Hell things become a bit more interesting visually.  Frankly, Chinese Hell(s) seems very complicated, with far too many obscure rules and regulations.  Is there a ‘For Dummies’ guide?  Good and bad seem to go there.  But good guys get a visit from the Buddha of Mercy, who gives them the go-ahead to fight their way out of hell.  That’s weird, right?  Like the David Lynch film Inland Empire, this feels like it might work better as a video installation, playing in the background while you’re hosting a party or something (I suggest a tiki-type thing with lots of little umbrellas in drinks and crap).  What do they call movies like The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari?  German Expressionism?  This is Hong Kong Expressionism.  The actress who plays Red Dress is kind of fascinating.  She’s not really pretty, exactly.  Kind of ‘ugly-pretty,’ really.  But fascinating.  She has a unique look.  Overall, not one of the better Shaw Brothers movies I’ve seen, though it’s certainly better than Black Magic or Cave of the Silken Web, though.

Cat Chaser:  “We made a pact.  Us against them.  Shirts against skins, man!”  A lot of Elmore Leonard stories have been translated to film.  Some are good.  Some are not so good.  A few just are.  This one is.  Some good location shooting but kind of blah, otherwise.  Look, what I’m about to say is almost certainly horribly sexist and/or insensitive.  But the fact that this movie features a lot of nudity makes it kind of like Christmas.  The fact that that nudity is Kelly McGillis makes it kind of like getting a sweater for Christmas…a sweater with a reindeer, bells, and pompoms on it.  I wasn’t into her in Top Gun, and nothing has changed.  It’s like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction.  We’re supposed to believe that Michael Douglas is gonna give up everything and destroy his wife for…Glenn Close!?  Kind of the same here.  Peter Weller seems more than happy to throw his life away for an emotionless, chain-smoking mannequin with old lady hair.  And it’s all directed by Abel Ferrara.  If Brian De Palma is a poor man’s Alfred Hitchcock, Abel Ferrara is a dead broke guy’s De Palma.  It’s not that Weller is better than this movie.  He’s just more interesting than it deserves.   They made a lot of these attempted Noir films in the late 80s and through the 90s.  I don’t know if it was intentional, or what.  But it seemed like there was a factory churning out movies about world-weary guys caught up trouble outside their control, while some dame twists the knife.  There’s always a broken buddy (usually a drunk), a wealthy, jealous guy, and loads of bad lighting.  Whatever it was that made Noir that special kind of magic was missing in these movies.  The whole subgenre feels like a straight to video cure for sleepless nights.  It’s where actors who never quite made it to the big time, like Weller, Tom Beranger, Eric Roberts, and the like all did time.

Shaolin & Wu Tang:  “Never teach the Wu Tang…To the Ching.  Uhhhhh.”  When the styles of Shaolin and the forces of Wu Tang come together in two friends, one painfully stupid and short sighted lord wants to put his clumsy fingers in their martial pie.  He wants those fighting styles, and he’s willing to kill, poison, offend, fight, steal and verbally harangue (while pointing imperiously) his way to victory.  Sadly, the quality of the DVD was appalling.  Not just that the dubbing was bad, but the recording of the dubbing was bad, or the sound mixing, or whatever technical thing makes it hard to hear individual voices.  The video quality was bad, too, with the hard to read subtitles cut off by the bottom of the screen all too often.  And of course, it’s pan & scan, so half the picture is cut off, sometimes including stuff that would probably be helpful (like yet more of the subtitles).  Getting past the technical issues, the movie is pretty badass, with some rockin’ fights and typically crazy narrative paths.  The sequence in the women’s prison, introducing the ‘Mad Girl’ is so perfectly nuts.  It reminds me of some of the crazier Kung Fu films I’ve seen, like Legend of the Liquid Sword.  I need a girl to nipple twist me back to mental health.  Gordon Liu and Adam Cheng are fun as the two fighting buddies, and their martial arts rivalry produces some great mad bastard fighting.  And when the dudes team up with the ladies, the battles are taken to the next level of total insanity.  Beauty.  Of course, there are twists, turns, betrayals, revenge, redemption, and fists a’flying.  You may be asking yourself if there are extremely weird and overcomplicated training methods explored through montage.  If you are asking this, you haven’t seen enough of these films and need to get on it.

Snake Dancer (aka Glenda):  “There was only one dirty minded person in that audience tonight, Ken, and that was you.”  All a girl wants to do is dance and play with snakes.  Why does everyone want to stop her?  Apparently in uptight South Africa, people don’t like their Sunday School teachers dancing naked with snakes on stage.  She’s supposed to be this great dancer, but she’s doing the same thing a million hippie girls did every day.  I guess the summer of love didn’t hit South Africa?  Glenda Kemp (playing a fictionalized version of herself) is very cute in that fresh-faced 70s chick kind of way, but it’s hard to see what all the fuss is about.  But then, isn’t that always the way with oppressively moralistic and hypocritical societies.  Her goofus brother is kind of charming in a Paul McCartney (Wings era) kind of way.  I said it before, many moons ago, that in spite of what my brain (or something) wants and expects, a woman dancing with a snake is actually not particularly erotic.  Snakes just hang there, like nothin’s nothin.  So it becomes more ‘look at this woman with a big thing hanging off her shoulders.  Snore.  Though Kemp gives it the old college try, and it more successful than most (are her snakes on pep-pills or just really hungry, because they’re far more active than normal)  The vaguely racist first snake dance is rough.  At least the dancers weren’t in blackface.  Of course, knowing some of the horrible stuff that was going on in South Africa at the time puts a weird spin on things.  As a kid who grew up in the 80s, the only thing I ever heard about the country was the constant ethnic violence and oppression by the Apartheid government.  It existed like a weird evil state in my mind’s eye, so in a sense, this feels like a movie made within Nazi Germany during WWII, that never mentions any of the ‘troubles’ going on.  Perhaps that’s not fair, but that’s what the movie brought up in me.  You have a large population of people being excluded from government, the legal system, society in general, and people are getting upset over some bare breasts.  Reminds me of the States today, where our young men and women are getting chewed up and spit out by constant war, maimed for life, psychologically broken, committing suicide on an unprecedented scale, and people are more concerned with what to dudes are doing in their bedrooms.  Anyway, the stripping routines are more awkward than sexy.  I like naked women and people sticking it to the Man.  So that’s pretty cool, I guess.  I can’t even say the movie is bad.  Just kind of odd.  And I find it odd that people going to see scantily clad women dance would be offended by a naked woman dancing.  But people are weird like that.  They’ll watch Janet Jackson gyrating, half naked on stage for five minutes, but one flash of a weird looking pasty and the country goes into a fit of mock-moralistic rage.  These same shocked and appalled people will then go home and watch two nearly naked beefcake men roll around together while plastic surgery disaster women walk around in their underwear, frequently debased in the most horrendous of ways, and they’re all smiles and sunshine.  It’s just good clean fun.  I’ve been subjected to professional wrestling, which is one of the most disgusting displays of human indignity I’ve seen but is well loved by Bible-belters and rednecks nation wide.  Homophobic wrestling fans are possibly the funniest thing I’ve ever encountered.  The irony they embody is worthy of the greatest satirists.

The Big Easy:  “Aw man, now they killin’ retards.”  Accents are a dangerous thing.  Frankly, my take on it is simple.  If you can’t do it and do it well, then don’t.  I’d rather the guy from Boston, or the guy from Russia sound like he’s from…well, wherever the actor is from than sport a dreadful accent.  This movie is so self-consciously set in New Orleans it bathes in voodoo, breaths gumbo, eats Creole, and shits Mardi Gras beads.  I could have used about 30 less references to it being the ‘Big Easy.’  I like Dennis Quade.  I really do.  But I don’t know.  His weird down-home charm, especially with such a bad Cajun accent is kinda grating.  I think he had Wilfred Brimley’s dialect coach from Hard Target.  And I’ve never thought much of Ellen Birkin, so that doesn’t help.  It has a super 80s vibe, with lots of blue jeans, a fridge stocked with Bud, and a painfully unique apartment for our lead.  At least it didn’t have a freight elevator.  80s cop movies have a comic-book feel, where the world obeys rules that only make sense in the context of 80s cop movies.  Good natured police corruption goes up against the bad kind.  Organized crime doesn’t much like a corrupt cop who still tries to bust the really bad guys.  Evidence tampering, witness intimidation, and what-all.  It’s all in good fun.  I guess if you’re in the mood for this specific brand of thing (akin to Beverly Hills Cop, 48 Hours, Stakeout, or what have you), you could do worse.  Ned Beatty is one of those character actors who pretty much just plays variations on a theme or type, but he always does it well, sells it.  And his performance here is another good variation on the Beatty.

Speed Racer:  “He was trying to change this rotten business and they killed him for it.”  It took a lot of flack, and still gets lambasted by many.  But F the haters; Speed Racer is a sweet candy explosion of stylistic panache that manages to fit in some heart & soul between the Technicolor flash.  The cartoon sensibilities, zany characters, and occasionally subversive hints balance well with the genuine relationships between a father and his sons, between siblings, and between competitors and champions.  The Racer family isn’t perfect, but they’re a charming idealized 1950s kind of thing, with love to spare.  With madly over the top villains, the story needs to crank up the operatic intensity, and it does so with aplomb.  Grand theatrics and heart-string plucking.  And man, every time I watch this movie, I like Matthew Fox as Racer X even more.  I’d have loved to see a Racer X spin-off, but obviously, this movie did not set the world on fire.  John Goodman is swell as the worried but love filled father.  Christina Ricci turns in one of her best performances in a long time as the bubbly Trixie.  And even Susan Sarandon, who I normally do not like, is very sweet as Speed’s loving mother.  But in order to properly enjoy this film, you have to check your cynicism at the door; you have to go into it with a child’s heart.  Accept that it’s not a realistic action/drama.  Accept that racing is a metaphor for the search for enlightenment.  Like in classic Kung Fu films, it’s not simply a physical contest but the outward reflection of the interior journey.  It’s a 60s cartoon turned live action.  The filmmakers embraced that, and in order to enjoy it, you need to, too.  My hope is that this will become a Donnie Darko, Buckaroo Banzai, or Rocketeer, which may have failed in their initial run but went on to become beloved cult classics.

    I tried to read the second volume of Batwoman, one of the best New 52 titles from DC.  But the jarring change in artwork pretty much killed my interest on page one.  Maybe I’ll try it again sometime later.  But for now, I’ll move on to something else.  I had better luck reading The Film Club, an interesting memoir about a guy trying to connect with his troubled teen son through a shared love of film.

    And with The Thing From Another World, I started what I’m hoping to be a new series for the blog.  I’m going to focus on science fiction films from various eras.  I can’t promise they’ll always be based around a theme, but I think I will try.  For example, this first round will be in the loosest way, about identity.  The Thing From Another World is missing much of the concept of the original story, Who Goes There?, and so not as much about the question of identity.  But I’m counting it anyway.  ‘Cause that’s what I do.

-Matt

Matt’s Week in Dork! (10/9/11-10/15/11)

In the Shadow of the Moon:  An inspirational documentary about the space program, focusing on the journeys to the Moon.  There’s plenty of beautiful footage, solid interviews, and some interesting information.  It’s nice to see them not just focus on the first Moon landing and Apollo 13, but on the Moon missions overall.  I especially responded to Astronaut Michael Collins talking about his time alone in the capsule as the other two men were the first to set foot on the Moon.  Not feeling lonely as he has been referred to, but more, at peace.  And to William Anders who came away with a profoundly altered perception of himself and the universe.  The tagline for this film is ‘Remember when the whole world looked up.’  I say, remember when we believed in ourselves and in the future.  I hope that young people seeing this movie will see where we’ve been, and be inspired to push us further.

Bored to Death Season One:  Irreverent, funny, surreal, and all kinds of laugh out loud fun, this series is a new favorite.  The cast is excellent and the show has the cinematic quality you expect from HBO.  The writing for the first season is top notch.  More people should be watching this show.

Real Steel:  I really, really wanted to like this movie much more than I actually did.  It’s got all the ingredients.  I like the cast for the most part, the setting, and the concept.  But, the awkward, cringe inducing moments come too often, and too strong.  With ex-boxer turned hard luck looser Hugh Jackman being so monstrously unlikable that I didn’t want him to come back from oblivion most of the time.  Young Dakota Goyo does fairly well, but if his whole story arc had been dropped (the deadbeat dad and the prodigy son), the film would have been better.  Evangeline Lilly is good and typically easy to look at, but her role is almost an afterthought.  The robots are the real stars, and the fights are well done.  And they resisted doing some cliché moves that I was surprised by.  With some more severe editing (the film is over two hours long), I think this could have been very good.  Instead, it’s passable, but ultimately frustrating.  I think, were I a ten year old, I’d absolutely love this film.  But, as an adult, in spite of my child-like view of movies, it just doesn’t quite make it.

Doctor Who: Time Flight:  A really, really weird story gets side-tracked by another appearance by The Master.  The more I see of that character, the less I like him.  Still, this one has some very cool stuff and is genuinely creepy at times.  I actually thought it was going to get into some theosophy early on, and I think that would have been a much cooler direction to take it, instead of the Master showing up.

The Thing from Another World:  While totally missing the ‘enemy within’ element of the story and 1982 remake, this alien menace movie is still really cool.  A great cast of interesting characters bandy about some snappy dialog, trade friendly jabs, and occasionally reminisce about the War (WWII).  And then a giant plant man ambles about trying to kill everyone.  Great sets and cinematography make the experience that much more thrilling.  The sequence where they try to burn the Thing is especially cool.  A must for fans of classic sci-fi horror.  Maybe not as good as Them! but still excellent.

Sword of War:  Holy Boring, Batman.  This made-for-TV looking snoozefest isn’t worth bothering with.  No interesting characters, a by the numbers pseudo-plot, and bad canned music.  I’m sure, somewhere along the way, this sounded like a cool idea for a movie.  And maybe with more money, or more creativity, it could have been.  It kind of feels like the live action inserts for a History Channel documentary.  And, perhaps, had it had some kind of factual narration accompanying it, I might have paid more attention.

You can see, even with a knife to his throat, he's not impressed.

Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Beast of Yucca Flats:  Meister of schlock, Coleman Francis, brings us this low budget turd that seems mostly concerned with driving and/or parking, with occasional walking, in the desert.  Oh, and sad-sack giant Tor Johnson ambles about with some muck on his face.  Good stuff.  Joel and the Bots take it to task.  This episode also features two shorts, which are both awesome, especially the Puerto Rico propaganda film.

The Thing:  Probably my favorite horror movie of all time, The Thing is an excellent thriller with a fantastic cast of actors playing interesting and memorable characters.  The script is tight, the music haunting, and the setting captures the essence of seclusion.  It really has everything a good horror film needs.  Everyone is in top form.  A must.

      So, on Saturday night, friend of Dorkness Robert invited us over to his place for what is becoming a tradition.  Robert's Trilogy of Terror Movie Night 2011!  Each of us brings a horror movie and we settle in for a night of varied madness.

Brad's Pick:  The Beyond:  What starts out as a creepy, moody Italian horror film turns, like all too many Italian films of the type, into total gobbledegook.  Somewhere around the halfway point, it becomes a series of seemingly unrelated vignettes featuring the same cast, but not following any sort of narrative structure.  It reminded me of a William S. Burroughs ‘cut-ups’ experiment.  So frustrating, because it starts off so promising, and could have turned into a very cool Lovecraftian horror film.  I did think Cinzia Monreale was kind of hot as the blind lady with the dog, and the shot where she’s introduced is by far the best moment of the film.  So, that’s something.

Robert's Pick:  Creatures from the Pink Lagoon:  Goofy, silly, mildly amusing, this spoof features a bunch of guys on a weekend getaway that turns deadly when gay zombies sashay their way to murder.  The acting varies wildly, but the main cast is pretty good, and clearly having fun hamming it up.

My Pick:  The Crawling Eye (aka The Trollenberg Terror): This 50s science fiction horror film is a lot of fun.  Great secluded setting, mixed with a strange cast of characters, and a slow burn horror that takes a good long time to show up.  The Brits at this point were creating harder edged horror and science fiction films than we were Stateside, and this is no slouch in the brutal/graphic violence department.  If you’ve only seen the horrible print shown on Mystery Science Theater 3000, give it another chance with a quality edition.  It’s worth it.

    I also watched a few episodes of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, which has potential and is occasionally really funny, but didn’t wow me so far.  I saw a few more episodes of Fringe, and checked out a bit of the original The Tomorrow People series, which I really enjoyed.  More creepy, strange fun from the UK in the 70s.

    I started the week off building a rocket model with a friend.  The Fame Master 4D Apollo 11 Saturn V is a beast.  But, it’s a well designed beast.   Though not quite glue free (there were a few bits of detail that really do need a few dollops of glue to keep them on), it fit together in a shockingly easy and often intuitive way.  With a few exceptions, most of the model could probably have been assembled without the aid of the instruction manual.  The whole thing took only a couple hours for the two of us.

    On the book front, I finished up Hoodtown by Christa Faust.  A very fun read.  I love Faust’s retro-hard boiled style.  It’s quick and brutal and to the point.  And her alternate world worked very well.  It felt real.  I’d love to see another story, if not featuring the same characters, featuring the setting.  I also read her short story, Cutman, about a butch lesbian working as a boxing cutman.  Extremely brief, but perfectly readable and worth the 99 cents on the Nook.  I also grabbed Clark Ashton Smith’s Return of the Sorcerer anthology for the Nook.  I’ve been in the mood for Lovecraft and similar writers recently (well, always, but more so recently).

    I guess that just about sums it up.  Wasn’t listening to much music this week.  Or at least, nothing hopped out as being especially interesting or important. 


-Matt