The good — 4100 more words of Shapeshifted written tonight! That’s 10k in just two days. If I can keep it up, which I think I can *kisses outline*, I’ll hit the end of this draft this week, which’ll leave all next week for a sweet final polish.
The bad — do not go see the Devil Inside. I go see shitty horror movies because it’s what my girlfriend and I do, it’s fun. But i can not conscionably recommend anyone else see this film, much less pay for the privilege. It was actually decent for awhile, as exorcism films go — there was fast-creepy, and subtle-creepy, and they managed to cover all of their plot points, albeit unrealistically. The girl somehow gets her rogue priests time with her possessed mom because of her “mom’s right to privacy”. Girl, when you’re a danger to others or a danger to yourself, you don’t get any privacy on the inside, ever again. But I sort of appreciate the shout out to reality, rather than them pretending that everything was fine.
What was bad, was when they — SPOILERS — couldn’t figure out how to end the film, and so crashed the car that all the remaining characters were in. It was on film. There was a tumble. Black. More tumble. More black. And then a still inner smashed up car. Annnd…more black. And then….A COMMERCIAL. I shit you not. There was a, “Hey, if you want to see what happens next, go here” cue card with an url. Everyone in the theater we were in laughed at that. I. Think. Not.
I realized they’d reached the apogee of exorcism films. There wasn’t anywhere else left to go. They’d made the demon out to be so bad, and the church so ignorant, that there was nothing left for it. If they’d ended it after the first clip to black, i would have been bemused but OK. It was the multiple tumbles that kept me wondering if there was going to be a flashback, like at the end of Paranormal Activity, where you see the protag dashing away. And even that would have been fine. But without that…and with the commerical…it was balls. And if they wanted to turn it into some sort of sequel machine, as Paranormal Activity seems to be, well, they were sorely mistaken if they thought the end of the first film was the time to try and juice that.
On the way home from the theater, my girlfriend and I (she was driving me) saw a blind guy walking down the middle of the road. We swerved around him and observed him long enough to see that he was drunk or altered. He caught up to us while we were calling 911, and scraped himself up the side of her car, patting along it with his hands and his cane.
Perhaps because we’d just seen an exorcism movie we were being unkind — or perhaps because he was wearing a leather trenchcoat, had a top had on, and long stringy blonde hair and he looked like a comic book villain — we didn’t get out of the car to help him. She just followed behind him to keep other traffic slow as I talked to police. When we got to the highway, he started crawling across the road — luckily soon after that the cops showed up.
That was quite more frightening and weird than the Devil Inside turned out to be.
The ugly is, of course, SOPA. If you’re in American and an artist in any way shape or form, or you at all enjoy art, you should be against this dumbass bill. I’m a more than a little frightened that the future of the internet is being determined by elderly people in congress who think that the internet is full of tubes. You should be too. (Although if you’re here, you probably already knew about it.)