Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in cinriter's LiveJournal:

[ << Previous 20 ]

Sunday, July 20th, 2008
9:58 am	My dad just sent me this picture that pretty well sums up my childhood: That's a barracuda I'm holding up, fer cryin' out loud. I think I will never again have to answer the "Why do you write horror?" question. Current Mood: amused (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, July 19th, 2008
1:40 pm	Found in a 1964 Sears catalog So...the same year that Vinnie was starring in The Masque of the Red Death and The Last Man on Earth, I could buy a frigging CHRISTMAS TREE from him?!! Damn. That almost makes Christmas cool. Almost. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 16th, 2008
7:52 pm	My Winnipeg And now, just to prove that (after my last post) I really don't despise all recent movies, here's a fabulous photo taken by my pal Kent Adamson on the set of Guy Maddin's stunning and truly strange My Winnipeg: Yes, that's the maestro with the goddess Ann Savage, whose astonishing career goes from the ultimate bitch femme fatale in Detour to the terrifying mother-from-Hell in My Winnipeg. Thanks for the groovy pic, Kent! (1 Comment |Comment on this)
8:41 am	Halfcocked (Please don't read this if you, for some insane reason, care about spoilers in relation to the movie Hancock. After all, I wouldn't want to be the one to ruin those astounding plot twists for you.) So I saw this tripe movie Hancock last night. I went because I like Charlize Theron and had heard that she might become a superhero. She did. I liked those - oh, say - ten minutes of the movie. And don't get me wrong, I like Will Smith. But... My God. If I turned in this script for one of my crappy little million-dollar movies, the producers would flay me alive. There's basically not a single thing in here that makes sense. Really, not one. Right down to stuff like telling us that Jason Bateman is failing at his job, and then showing his house in the "valley" - and it's basically a two-million dollar home. Let's not even talk about that big plot twist, which renders the entire premise of the movie - Will Smith is a superhero - null and void by making him "mortal". And what kind of superhero is Hancock? Even after being reformed, this guy deals with one crisis situation by needlessly cutting off a man's hand and then being applauded by all the onlookers. Poor Theron is asked to deliver some of the most absurd and inexplicable dialogue in recent movie history, declaring her eternal love for one character while making googoo eyes at another. When she's revealed as a superhero, her appearance suddenly changes from sunny suburban soccer mom to rock babe, complete with Jack Sparrow's eye-liner and a leather outfit straight off the sales rack at Sluts R Us. Of course after telling Will Smith that she's "stronger", she conveniently spends the finale in a coma while he fights off the bad guys. At the end, she goes back to suburban soccer mom. I don't know about you, but if this woman was MY wife I'd be like, "Hey, honey - I think you need to be out there fighting a little crime!" This is a script that works on NO level, and these guys probably made ten times more money than I've ever been paid for a movie. Now granted, maybe their first draft was flawlessly logical and they were victimized by hack rewriters...but when every single plot element is that critically flawed, it seems doubtful. This reminds me of a conversation I once had with a producer of one of my films. I'd already told him I thought the movie was very bad, then one day we had a test screening which received some modest approval from the audience...and more than a few walk-outs. After the screening, the producer crowed to me about how much the remaining half of the audience liked it. My response, of course, was to remind him that we could have had a movie everyone would have liked, which would have made him even more money. He was honest enough to admit I was right Too bad the producers of Hancock weren't even that smart. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, July 12th, 2008
10:24 am	Vintage paperback article My article on vintage paperbacks is now live at Clarkesworld: Vintage paperbacks Special thanks to nihilistic_kid for first sending out the siren call for articles in his blog and then for buying this one! (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, July 11th, 2008
8:33 am	Girls With Guns Having recently seen Wanted, I've been thinking about my favorite action movie sub-genre: Girls With Guns. Yep, I love 'em. I'm not talkin' big, serious flicks about proactive heroines like Silence of the Lambs or Thelma and Louise or even Alien(s). No, I'm cheering on the ones that know there's something vaguely absurd about a woman lugging some bigass gun and just run with it. Here's my top five. And then a list of the bottoms, just to round things out. 1. So Close - Shut up, it is the best Girls With Movie ever. C'mon, the opening scene is dropdead gorgeous Shu Qi in Chow Yun-fat's white suit from The Killer slinking down the high-tech halls of a skyscraper shooting guys in the kneecaps, all set to a Hong Kong knock-off of the Carpenters' "Close to You". You also get two more gun-toting babes, Karen Mok and Vicky Zhao Wei, some great swordplay, and one of the best martial arts fights ever put on film, as Mok's cop and Qi's assassin duke it out with fists, kicks and hair (yes, HAIR!). Every kind of awesome. 2. La Femme Nikita - No, dork, not that stupid American tv thing. Nah, we're all over Luc Besson's original feature film, with the feline Anne Parillaud as the punk-turned-hitwoman. This was the classy kind of camp, complete with Jeanne Moreau as one of Nikita's teachers and Jean Reno as "The Cleaner". Oh yeah, and the kitchen shootout, with Parillaud in a designer sheathe crouching behind counters and popping off shots, is a classic. 3. Coffy - It was hard to pick between this and Jack Hill's other Pam Grier classic Foxy Brown, but this was the original so I went with it. Pam Grier was young, enthusiastic and hot as the pistols she periodically shot guys with on her vendetta. I love everything Jack Hill did, but this one also had that bitchin' "Coffy is the COLOR!" funk song goin' for it. Yeah, baby. 4. Wanted - Yep, liked it that much. Granted, the young guy is the real protagonist, but come ON - we just can't wait for Angelina Jolie's "Fox" (perfect name, ain't it?) to come back on the screen and fire somethin' else. Added bonus: She beats the shit out of the kid with her bare fists (well, okay - and some brass knuckles) at one point. 5. Barbarella - Okay, I really put this on here just because I wanted a science fiction Girls With Guns movie and I couldn't think of anything else that didn't suck. And this does have young blonde Jane Fonda being flown over the labyrinth by Pygar the Blind Angel while she shoots the Black Queen's mechanized flying guards out of the sky. Oh yeah, and she has lots of sex. What's not to love. Honorable Mentions: I was going to include Hong Kong's Yes, Madam, but I really think of it more as a martial arts movie, and besides, we didn't need two Corey Yuen movies (he also directed So Close). Well, wait - yes, we need even more Corey Yuen movies. We always need more Corey Yuen. Also: Faster, Pussycat, Kill, Kill, which never really does the Girls With Guns thang, but it's still so great it deserves a mention. And now the bad bad girls: 1. Mr. and Mrs. Smith - Yep, it's Angelina again, but everything that Wanted got right this thing blew. All that time it spent on (unsuccessfully) trying to be hip it could have been using to show Angie blowing guys away, but NOOOOOOO, it had to try to be big and sophisticated and boring. Yawn. 2. Point of No Return - I will forever be mystified at how this American La Femme Nikita managed to simultaneously be a nearly frame-by-frame remake and completely dull. Well, yeah, okay...Bridget Fonda was way better at something like Jackie Brown's annoying stoner chick than punk hitwoman, but that still doesn't completely explain it. Just...suckass all the way around. 3. The Avengers - Yeah, I know Mrs. Peel wasn't really a Girl With Gun, but damn - she did shoot the cork out of the champagne bottle in the opening titles of the color season of the old series. And the big-budget movie did suck on every single level. An astonishing amount of terribleness here - dull, badly made, completely miscast, and...did I mention dull? Blecch. 4. The Brave One - Maybe it shouldn't be on here, because it was trying to be a big serious examination of feminine violence an' crap, but...I'm sorry, I giggled and groaned way too often. What a misconceived mess. So is Jodie Foster a female Walking Tall-style vigilante...or a sensitive girl who cries a lot because that gun is big and heavy and scary and how did it get in her hand and...? Try neither; she inadvertently ended up being a wannabee camp queen (just not a very entertaining one). 5. Savage Streets - Another one that maybe I'm being unfair to - oh wait, that's right - it sucked! I'm really using this as just a sample of any of those dreary '80s cheapies about girls on vendettas. They were all kind of gloomy and not much fun. Granted, this one had Linda Blair and Linnea Quigley, but the director sure as hell wasn't Jack Hill, and none of these '80s things had any sense of fun about them. Good thing that decade is over, I say. (Dis)Honorable Mentions: Kill Bill, which - as with the sublime Yes, Madam - I didn't include because it's really more of a martial arts movie. But damn, another overhyped, overarch suckfest. Somebody should keep Uma Thurman away from these movies. Also: The Quick and the Dead had a great premise - female Old West gunslinger - and Sharon Stone looked fab in her outfits, but they wimped her out before this thing even reached the halfway point. Tragic. "So, Lisa," I hear you saying, "if you like these movies so much, why don't YOU write one, huh?" Oh, what, like you think I haven't? It just ain't sold. Yet. But if it ever does, I promise it will be one of the best Girls With Guns movies of all time. (16 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, July 7th, 2008
9:11 am	The Big Time There's talk now of one of my old feature spec scripts going into production in September. Sounds great, right? Except the budget for the entire film wouldn't even make much of a down payment on a house. You can guess what my lunch money payment would be. Remember those little squiggles Charles Schulz used to draw above the heads of Peanuts characters to indicate they were sort of halfway between depressed and pissed off? Current Mood: Squiggly (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, July 5th, 2008
8:34 am	The REAL 4th of July post What better way to celebrate America's birthday than with a little Asian food porn? Yes, we spent our Fourth in Alhambra, shopping at bootleg Chinese video stories and the 99 Ranch Market grocery store (which we realized was so much cheaper than our local groceries that we'd actually save money driving there to shop, including current SoCal gas prices). For lunch we chose a Korean tofu house and had a spectacular meal of seafood pancake (see below), dumpling tofu soup (served so hot it looked like a little bowl of bubbling lava), and of course about a dozen fabulous side dishes of pan chan, including whipped sweet potatoes, seaweed in a delightful smoky sauce and the usual kimchis. It was all insanely good, especially the seafood pancake, which had an interior so light and fluffy it was almost mousse-like in consistency. Even the drink was delightful - a house blend of green and brown rice teas, served iced. Cost for this feast? Twenty bucks. The restaurant itself was also lovely - wood paneled, decorated with displays of traditional bowls and sake containers (we also enjoyed noting that there were no condiments on the tables - none needed, to be sure!). If you're ever in the vicinity of the big shopping center at the corner of Valley and Del Mar, we highly recommend the Korean Tofu place (on the second floor). There's even a Hello Kitty store right below them. At the 99 Ranch House market I did something I've never done but always wanted to: Bought a bag of fresh lychees. Turns out they're easy to peel - that red rind looks spiky, but is actually soft and can be removed with just a thumbnail, and of course the fruit beneath is wonderfully sweet and juicy. I stuffed myself with lychee at home yesterday, and found it even makes a fabulous natural tea sweetener. We always marvel at the lone Amurrican restaurant along Valley Boulevard, a Norm's, at which there's invariably a line of fat white people (we, of course, were the only non-Asians in our restaurant). You people are in the middle of the greatest collection of Asian restaurants in the U.S. and you eat at effing NORM'S?! As Ricky Lee cried out, "Couldn't we get surgery to become Asian?" Here's the Big Kahuna hisself with our delectable meal: (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, July 4th, 2008
4:50 pm	Here is this year's obligatory fireworks stand photo: (This one was on Valley Blvd. in Alhambra) Hint to fireworks companies: Y'know, I would totally buy a T-shirt from a fireworks stand. (Comment on this)
9:36 am	Lisa's in the Fear Zone! Interview at Fear Zone Hey, it may be shameless self promotion...but at least it's not more bad news. And by the way - Happy 4th of July! (It is, of course, "Happy" because there are only 3 months and 27 days left until Halloween) (Comment on this)
Monday, June 30th, 2008
12:36 pm	If I talk about any other part of my life lately it will be depressing and wildly uninspiring, so instead...it's Halloween in June! I believe this is my first bondage-themed vintage Halloween postcard: Best of all is the handwritten message on the reverse: Postmarked 1908 and addressed to a doctor, it reads in part: "Don't you wish you were a girl so you could try all of these little fortune telling games on Halloween?" (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 24th, 2008
7:02 pm	Let's hear it for genetics I was digging through old photos this weekend because Ricky wanted to post a collection of Buster photos (which you can find at the bottom of his blog entry here). I stumbled across my grandmother's high school yearbook from 1917. When my grandmother was alive, it would never have occurred to me to think I looked even remotely like her. Then we saw this picture of her: I remember finding this among Grandma's possessions while I was with my dad, stepmother and uncle, and everybody just gaped. It is pretty freaky. Maybe I need to write one of those time traveling stories about going back and posing as my own grandmother. Then I will of course submit it to nihilistic_kid because I know he's never seen a story like that before! (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, June 23rd, 2008
8:56 am	A grim fairy tale Here's a little writer's fairy tale to get your week off to an entertaining start: Once upon a time, there was a writer who had racked up enough sales and years to earn the title Established Pro (or EP for short). As EP's reputation grew, so did the number of less-established writers who asked for EP's help. At some point, EP was getting so many unsolicited manuscripts in her e-mail that she even had to put a special little Java script on her website that told anyone using the e-mail link to not send manuscripts, because EP didn't have the time to read them and really couldn't help anyway. (By the way, that didn't entirely stop the queries; just last week, in fact, EP got one from a man asking her to look at his baseball screenplay. The e-mail wasn't even addressed to EP, who wondered why she should spend two hours of her time reading something that didn't interest her when the writer couldn't even be bothered to take the time to address his e-mail to her. She deleted that query without responding simply because she considered it rude.) Which is not to say that EP didn't like working with new writers, because she did. She signed up for a mentor program; she co-founded a writing group, partly because of the chance to help fresh new talents get those all-important first sales. One day, at a local event, EP met a young writer, Mr. A. Mr. A was passionate and enthusiastic, but was possessed of the notion that real publishers would never do his work justice, leaving only self-publishing. EP tried to dissuade Mr. A from this idea and agreed to read something from him. It was actually good. Mr. A gave her a second story, which was very good. The subject of this very good story happened to fit a themed anthology that was about to close to submissions, and so EP urged Mr. A to try a submission (even though the story was also very long). Mr. A agreed. EP exchanged several e-mails with Mr. A, helping him prepare the manuscript for submission. Several months went by, then EP received a quizzical e-mail from the editor of The Themed Anthology - did she really know Mr. A (who had used her name in his initial query)? Well, it turned out that the editor of The Themed Anthology had also thought Mr. A's story was very good, but it was just too long for the book; the editor asked if he might be able to consider it for a later volume. Mr. A proceeded to send the editor at least three increasingly nasty e-mails, which essentially boiled down to "you're an amateur because you are incapable of recognizing my genius and buying this story even though it's too long for your dumb ol' book." It also turned out that Mr. A had ignored most of EP's advice and had included things with his submission (like a photo) that she had told him to lose. Fortunately for EP, she already had a good working relationship with this editor, and together they were able to laugh about the fact that she ever tried to dissuade Mr. A from self-publishing. However, imagine the possible consequences for EP if she hadn't known this editor, or if this editor had maybe been a little grouchy the morning he got Mr. A's first vituperative message. We're talking potential bad splashback here, dear reader. All because EP tried to help a new writer. The moral of this story is: If you're a new writer and some Established Pro refuses to look at your work, don't blame the Established Pro - blame all the Mr. A's who have already gone and screwed up the works. And if you do get lucky and find an Established Pro who agrees to help you out, then for godssakes don't do anything that might embarrass the Established Pro. Because the Established Pro just might come looking for you then. (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, June 22nd, 2008
4:20 pm	Life After Buster We're coping. In typical girl fashion I've over-indulged this week in the purchase of meaningless luxury items. A trip to Giant Robot in West L.A. today yielded up this pointless object of materialist culture: (No, smartass, that is NOT me in the photo.) We also saw the new film by the brilliant Canadian madman Guy Maddin, My Winnipeg. This pseudo-autobiographical personal essay includes sequences like: A seance that turns into a ballet; a river of frozen horse heads that becomes a lover's lane; a segregated boys' swimming pool that plays host to a prepubescent orgy; a tyrannical mother (wonderfully played by Ann Savage) who uses her daughter's car accident to exact a confession of sex; and an endless hallucinogenic ride on a train populated solely by sleeping passengers. For any of you who might feel overwhelmed by big stupid summer movies, My Winnipeg should prove a welcome antidote. Overheard going into the theater (spoken by an elderly couple to the ticket seller): "We've never been to Winnipeg, so this should be interesting!" You said a mouthful, Grandpa... (Comment on this)
Thursday, June 19th, 2008
3:56 pm	Gone I've just lost my best friend, the kid brother I never had, my favorite comedian, and the handsomest fellah I've ever met. Buster passed away yesterday during a bronchioscopy to determine what was causing his recent wheezing. It turned out he had a large malignant tumor in his trachea, and the walls of the trachea were so cancerous that they basically gave way during the otherwise-routine procedure, causing air to escape into his esophagus and his heart to go into cardiac arrest. Buster was 15. I got him in November of 1992, when he was three months old. I'd never had a cat before, and as an adult had never had a pet bigger than a goldfish. Buster came from a friend's litter, and he came at a time I really needed something new; I'd just finished a movie that had paid well but been a generally miserable experience, I hadn't yet started fiction writing, and I'd just broken off an uncomfortable relationship. Buster was a handful as a kitten, but as he aged he became the Errol Flynn of cats - dashingly handsome, adventurous, a bit on the arrogant side, a lovable troublemaker. Whenever I took him to the vet clinic, all the doctors and interns fell in love with him ("he has the most beautiful eyes I've ever seen!", gasped one particularly smitten female vet). He had his own set of continually amusing quirks: He loved spaghetti, on cold nights he liked to crawl under the covers and nestle in by my side, he liked to sit on my lap and bury his head in my armpit, he'd sit in the hottest spots on the hottest days, he liked to be carried around held high so he could see things above his usual sightline, and he liked to attack the other cats with this utterly ridiculous sideways hop. He had some faults, too - he could whine for hours, and nothing would appease him - but his delights far outweighed his exasperations. A while back he developed both allergies and hyperthyroid, but both conditions were theoretically not life threatening and controllable with medication. I expected him to be around for at least a few more years to come. Yesterday morning he was having slight breathing difficulty, but was still charming the vets and waving his magnificent tail for all to admire. I was downtown celebrating the high school graduation of my best friends' son when I got the news yesterday. Needless to say I was in no mood to party, and begged out to find out what happened. At least it was quick and painless...for Buster. I actually credit Buster with saving my life once: He woke me up 30 seconds before the '94 Northridge earthquake hit. I remember waking to feel him standing on my chest; he'd never done something like that, and even in the dark I could tell he was giving me a strange, wide stare. The instant the quake hit, I was already awake, grabbed him and rolled from the bed - just as a bookcase fell onto the spot where I'd just been. If anyone ever tells you animals don't know quakes are coming, tell 'em you know for a fact it's not true. Buster also served as muse on at least one occasion. One of the first short stories I wrote and sold (to Steve Jones for the first Dark Terrors book) was called "Love Eats". It's about a lonely woman who adopts a cat she names Love, and then discovers that the cat is a horrendously finicky eater (which, by the way, was never Buster's problem - he even ate jalapenos). I probably don't have to tell you what's the one food Love will reliably consume. At the story's climax, the woman literally offers herself to Love to ensure his survival. That's just a story, of course. Buster was orange, Love was gray. The woman bore no resemblance to me. Of course not. But y'know...it's probably just as well that choice never came up with Buster. Current Mood: sick (33 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, June 16th, 2008
11:38 am	Caution: Genius At Work We recently had a pair of brain surgeons show up at the store with 122 boxes of books. Many of the boxes were labeled thusly: "Wow," one of the brainiacs noted as we were lugging the boxes out of his truck, "this Alpha guy musta wrote a lotta books, huh?" Really. (Comment on this)
Sunday, June 15th, 2008
11:45 am	MOTHER OF TEARS The Chizine.com "Throwdown" on Dario Argento's Mother of Tears is now live. My "Throwdown" partner Mike Marano really dug it; I didn't. Enjoy! (Comment on this)
Friday, June 13th, 2008
5:03 pm	It's hot in L.A. today. I'm getting over a little virus that's left me drained. My cat's been diagnosed with possible tracheal wall cancer. It's been a somewhat unpleasant day...and then these fell out of a book: I'm a sucker for that gorgeous 1940s-style graphic design, and these little beauties just instantly cheered me up. Suddenly I'm transported to a dimly-lit comfortable bar where a handsome young bartender has just placed a freshly-shaken martini in front of me, while in the corner somebody plunks another coin in the jukebox for a little more Glenn Miller. Ahhhhhhh... (Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 11th, 2008
11:02 pm	Chancy charities Over at HWA's forum, one big topic of discussion recently has been charity anthologies. Y'know, these are books that solicit stories from authors with the ultimate goal of creating a book that will generate money for a given charity. Myself, I stayed out of this discussion because I like the idea of helping out a worthy cause, and I have no problem with granting reprint rights to something that I've already made money from. Hey, I know my name's no big deal, but heck - if I tell three people to go buy the book, that's a few more extra dollars for the beneficiary, right? But a lot of HWA's hardline pros have argued against ever giving work to a charity antho, even a reprint. Okay, so I just got copies of two charity anthologies I gave work to. One, Jack Haringa Must Die!, is extremely well designed and very entertaining; my entry is an honest-to-goodness post that first appeared in this blog. The book benefits the new Shirley Jackson Awards, and I hope they make some extra dough from it. Here's a handy-dandy link for ordering: Jack Haringa Must Die!. The other one is called Help, and benefits the Preditors & Editors website. I like these guys; I've used them to check on agents, and they've never steered me wrong. Now they're being sued by a couple of shady creepazoids they called out. I wanted to help, so I gave the Help anthology a reprint of a story that I published back in 1999 (it was originally in the Steve Jones anthology White of the Moon). Now, I don't want to steer people away from Preditors & Editors; please, by all means, go to their website and donate to their legal defense fund. But y'know what? Don't buy this book. It's really embarrassing. Forget the layout that looks as if it was done in a 7-point font in Notepad, forget the cover art that looks like it was blown up from a 100-pixel square piece of art...I could have forgotten that if they hadn't completely screwed up my story "Ego-Alien". All I know is I sent them a Word file with proper formatting in place, and what I see in the book has none of my italics and none of my section breaks; this story was dependent on that formatting, and now it's just been rendered into a huge mass of gibberish. So, here's my offer: I've created a PDF of "Ego-Alien", one that is properly formatted. If you've purchased Help, please DO NOT read "Ego-Alien" as it is presented in the book. Instead, please click here to download the PDF. If you haven't purchased the Help anthology, please feel free to read "Ego-Alien", and perhaps afterward you'll consider donating a few bucks to Preditors & Editors. Thank you. And beware who you give reprints to in the future. Sometimes it pays to listen to the old guys at HWA. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 10th, 2008
9:24 pm	I needed that... I've not been having a great week, what with a very sick cat (he has a blockage in the windpipe), waiting for the vets to decide if they can operate or not, watching my credit card balance go up, being disappointed by the new Argento film (Mother of Tears), can't seem to get my post-BEA energy back, etc. Then today this cool young guy comes into the bookstore while three of us are working around the front counter. "Can you recommend any good horror books?" he asks. The other two of course remain silent while I field this one. "Have you read anything in the genre you liked?" I ask. "Yeah, I read that Dark Delicacies book. I liked most of it, but there were a couple I really liked. I think the first one..." "Ahh," I say, nodding, "yeah, the Bradbury." "No, not that one," he says. "I think it was the next one, about this guy who..." At this point snickering is starting to ensue. The kid is smart enough to pick up on this, and ask, "Hey, are...are one of you in the book?" I fess up. "Yeah, I am. I've got the story about the abalone hunter." The young fellow's eyes pop a little. "And he's left his wife in the truck, and - ?" "Yeah." "I LOVED that story, that was the best one. That thing scared the shit out of me!" Life got a little better after that. (He ended up leaving with a copy of Salem's Lot, after confessing that the only Kings he'd read were The Tommyknockers and The Dead Zone. We were out of all the other stuff I tried to recommend.) (1 Comment |Comment on this)