D.R. Martin's Blog, page 5

Ten Movies That I Watch Again and Again and Again

Recently I did a blog tour with my King Harald books and at one of the stops posted a piece on ten movies that I love to death. It’s reprinted below. If you’re looking for a great flick to watch this weekend, I guarantee you won’t be disappointed with any of these:

There are movies that I love. And then there are movies that I love to death and never tire of watching. I can’t give you a reason why some movies fall into that category for me. Genre doesn’t matter, though humor usually plays a role, in the form of a really witty script or funny physical comedy. Or it may be the ambience or setting, or the visual feast a movie provides. All I know is that for me, these ten flicks are as much fun to watch the tenth time as they were the first.

Moonstruck (1987) My all-time favorite rom-com. We watch it every November and transport ourselves to a magical, romantic Brooklyn of our dreams. Loretta the widowed bookkeeper innocently visits the bakery of her fiancé’s brother, to invite him to the wedding. Cher locks eyes with Nicholas Cage, and sparks fly. Cher is simply luminous in this role. Moonstruck makes me sad that she didn’t act in a lot more movies.

Bringing Up Baby (1938) Put together two of the greatest movie stars ever in a screwball comedy directed by Howard Hawks and what do you get? Hilarity that holds up nearly eighty years later. Cary Grant is the uptight paleontologist who is reluctantly dragged into uproarious disaster by the wacky, crazy-like-a-fox heiress played by Katherine Hepburn. Her character, Susan Vance, always gets what she wants. And what she wants is Grant’s Dr. David Huxley. And who is Baby? The pet leopard Hepburn uses to rope in the man of her dreams.

The Incredibles (2004) Pixar Animation has made a number of classics. But as much as I enjoy the Toy Story movies, Monsters Inc., and Inside Out, this tale of a superhero family gone incognito is my top Pixar flick. Like the best kids’ films, it spins laughs on both kid and grown-up levels. And as a depiction of family dynamics goes, it’s surprisingly sophisticated. Of course, it has lots of great action and adventure, too, and the incredibly funny Edna Mode, voiced by director Brad Bird. Just watched it again for the eleventh time on Christmas Eve.

Diva (1981) If you like sexy, sophisticated thrillers, and you haven’t seen Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Diva, hop on your moped and grab it right now. Our young hero Jules is a moped courier in Paris who makes a bootleg recording of an American opera singer who never records. He ends up meeting her and romance ensues. Somewhere along the line, evidence against a prostitution ring is dropped in Jules’s saddlebag, and the bad guys are after him. The breathtaking moped chase through nocturnal Paris is a white-knuckle classic.

Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989) Animation master Hayao Miyazaki retired last year, but his eleven films continue to delight kids and grown-ups alike. This is my favorite—the adventures of a young witch as she flies forth on her broom to make a career for herself in a new city. Kiki is voiced in English by a very young Kirsten Dunst.

The Birdcage (1996) There’s no movie I enjoy more on a cold winter’s night than this comedy about a gay couple in South Beach who operate a drag nightclub. Based on the French film, it’s not only good for a lot of laughs, but to show that love and family come in many guises. Robin Williams and Nathan Lane are brilliant as the couple trying to convince their son’s conservative in-laws-to-be that they are, in fact, straight.

The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) Tim Burton and Henry Sellick’s genius stop-action musical is a holiday-season regular in our house. In fact, an action figure of the movie’s hero, Jack Skellington, sits proudly next to our flat screen TV. Jack is the fair-haired boy—so to speak—of Halloweentown, a macabre little burg populated by ghosts, ghouls, and goblins. When Jack kidnaps Santa Claus and sets out to do Christmas the Halloweentown way… Well, it’s a monstrous mess. Had our annual viewing a week ago.

The Big Lebowski (1998) One of the great cult films of the nineties, the Coen Brothers’ black comedy follows the misadventures of Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski, as he seeks recompense for his, umm, “soiled” Persian rug. To enter the madcap world of the Dude (Jeff Bridges), and his sidekicks Walter (John Goodman) and Donny (Steve Buscemi), is to enter a sort of comedic nirvana.

The Longest Day (1962) Every June, when the D-Day anniversary comes around, I watch this epic film about the 1944 invasion of Normandy. I remember seeing it in the theater as a kid. It follows easily a dozen story lines and has an incredible cast: John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Robert Mitchum, Sean Connery, Richard Burton, and many others.

Big Trouble in Little China (1986) Take one dim-witted but gutsy truck driver (Kurt Russell), an evil dead wizard of Chinatown, two beautiful kidnapped girls with green eyes, a stolen truck, three demons called The Storms, and a teeming cast of good and bad minions, and you have one of the funniest fantasy-adventures ever made.

Happy Holidays on the Longest Night of the Year!

Evidently Santa’s helpers aren’t as stalwart as we thought they were. At least not according to this endearing image by the Norwegian artist Trygve Davidsen. Davidsen was a watercolorist who died in 1978, and specialized in religious art and whimsical “goblin” scenes like this one. This encounter with a fearsome mouse is from a Christmas card that we sent out years ago. I kept a copy because it was so darned charming. Happy Holidays to all my blog and Facebook followers and friends!

King Harald Enjoyed His 15 Minutes of Fame

My ten-stop King Harald blog tour came to an end a couple of days ago, and I had a great time as my alter ego Richard Audry. I contributed several blog posts that I’ll be reblogging here and received some nice reviews. Here’s what the bloggers had to say:

I love this series, both because I’m crazy fond of the adorable protagonist, that “big mutt” HARALD, but also due to the author’s noted talent in uncovering character. In addition to the ongoing series characters, in each book the author introduces new background characters who of course come trailing their own engrossing plots and mysteries.

~Mallory Heart Reviews

It’s really quite refreshing to have this male point of view into the world of cozy mysteries. I’m not putting the cozy MC heroines down, by any stretch of the imagination, just letting them know it’s ok to make some room on the shelf for the guys.

~Back Porchervations

Anyone who loves dogs will love this series…

~3 Partners in Shopping; Nana, Mommy, &; Sissy too!

I am completely enamored of good natured King Harald. Audry’s descriptions of this wonderful dog are spot on giving us deep characterization as well as meaningful views and commentary. I certainly wouldn’t mind having some ebelskivers and a Biberschwanz Pilsner with Andy and sharing some Slim Jims with King Harald!

~Cozy Up With Kathy

I want to thank Lori Caswell of Escape with Dollycas for organizing the tour. And I would recommend that any other writers of cozy mystery series call on Lori to handle their blog tours. She does a great job. You can reach Lori and Dollycas right here.

Sci Fi for Newbies

After I got through with animal stories and tramp steamer adventures as a kid, I moved into sci fi and fantasy, and stayed there for something like thirty years. It's an incredibly rich, thought-provoking vein of reading pleasure. And if you haven't dipped into it, there's no time like the present.

Wired just published a great list of sci fi and fantasy classics that will get any new fan started—books and movies both. There are classic novels like Dune, The Left Hand of Darkness, and The Foundation Trilogy, and newer faves such as Neal Stephenson, Hugh Howey, and J.K. Rowling. Movies/TV shows include Blade Runner, Alien, Total Recall, Dark City, and Firefly. There are some authors new to me, too, that I'll have to check out, including Lev Grossman, Ernest Cline, and Ann Leckie.

Just click here to go to the Wired list.

King Harald Is Going on Tour!

King Harald and Andy Skyberg are going on a blog tour over the next couple of weeks. (You don’t see them in the picture because they’re already aboard that Ford Tri-Motor, ready to wing their ways to blog readers all over.) There’ll be some reviews of their books, as well as some contributions from me—a couple of Q&As, an interview with Andy, and a Top Ten Movie list.

Here are the big ginger mutt’s appearances, by date. These are live links, so be sure to check out the posts.

November 30 – Back Porchervations

December 1 – A Blue Million Books

December 2 – Mallory Heart Reviews

December 3 – Lori’s Reading Corner

December 4 – 3 Partners in Shopping, Nana, Mommy,  &, Sissy, Too !

December 7 – Frankie Bow

December 8 – Deal Sharing Aunt

December 9 – Brooke Blogs

December 10 – The Self-Taught Cook

December 11 – Cozy Up With Kathy

And let me offer a hearty thanks to Lori Caswell of Escape with Dollycas, who arranged this tour for me. If you love cozy mysteries and haven’t checked out Dollycas, get over there right now at this link.

Happy Turkey Day!

The turkeys on this antique postcard seem to have figured out what’s on the menu on Thanksgiving Day. Jailbreak! They must have had smarter birds a century ago.

Since I’ve been living in 1902 for the past few months—working on my third Mary MacDougall mystery—I’ve occasionally had reason to consult one of the most popular cookbooks of the day for menu ideas, The Whitehouse Cookbook by Fanny Gillette. Here’s what was on the White House dinner menu for Thanksgiving c. 1887:

Oysters on the Half Shell
Cream of Chicken Soup
Fried Smelts with Sauce Tartare
Roast Turkey
Cranberry Sauce
Mashed Potatoes
Baked Squash
Boiled Onions
Parsnip Fritters
Olives
Chicken Salad
Venison Pastry
Pumpkin Pie
Mince Pie
Charlotte Russe
Almond Ice Cream
Lemon Jelly
Hickory Nut Cake
Cheese
Fruits
Coffee

All I can say to that is, “Please pass the Tums.” Anyway, I hope you all have a great Turkey Day. And to you inveterate shoppers, happy Black Friday, as well.

A New Seaplane for the Ordinary Guy or Gal

 

One of the things I loved doing when I was writing the first two Johnny Graphic novels was my research about the age of the flying boat. That was in the 1920s and '30s, when the big international airline routes were being flown by aircraft that landed and took off in water—planes like the great Pan Am Clipper, the Boeing 314. Johnny and his chums spent a lot of time flying around the globe in the Como Eagle (my version of the 314) and the tri-motor Gianelli float plane (that was a copy of an Italian aircraft).

So when I run across any news relating to flying boats or other aquatic aircraft, I like to share it here. And today in The Verge, I ran across this item about a new amphibious seaplane called the Icon A5.

The basic A5 will sell for $200,000, which for a new airplane is not that expensive. As the article suggests, maybe folks will buy one of these instead of that new Ferrari. It's a simple aircraft meant to be flown during the day, at lower altitude, in clear weather, outside of any heavy traffic. You can learn to fly it in only 20 hours. It'll break down to travel on a trailer and the engine even runs on ordinary gasoline.

I guess I'll just have to wait to get that Ferrari. I'll take the Icon A5 instead.

Frederik Pohl’s Definition of a Good Editor

I just sent the manuscript of my third Mary MacDougall adventure off to my beta readers and my editor. This book is a full-length novel, in which my plucky heroine goes on vacation with her aunt Christena in the summer of 1902. Their destination is Mackinac Island, but along the way Mary stops to do a little detecting on behalf of her first paying client.

Did the woman’s mother really die in the fictional town of Dillmont, Michigan? Or, to paraphrase the Bard of Avon, is there something rotten in Dillmont?

My beta readers are friends whose taste and insights I trust implicitly. From them, I will get the reactions of dedicated book lovers. Although they are always diplomatic in their criticism, they will, in the end, tell me what worked and what didn’t work for them.

My editor Marlo will do a much more thorough review. She will dissect the various plot points and help me hone in on what needs improvement and why. I always learn something new from each of her critiques, and I try to carry that knowledge over into the next book writing project.

Every time I send out a new book for editing, I’m reminded of an interview I did with Frederik Pohl, the great science fiction writer and editor. He talked about the necessity of being edited by someone who is merciless—“the person who looks for your weak spots and jabs you where it hurts.” The editor, he implied, is your very necessary adversary. And he said that knowing editors too long or becoming too friendly with them made it difficult “to get the final acerbic, violent response that is useful.” (You can read the entire interview in my ebook Four Science Fiction Masters.)

I do believe that the pain I might feel at a thorough scrubbing of my prose will, in the end, make it a stronger final product. You’ll be able to judge how well the process went when the third Mary debuts early next year. I have a wonderful cover which I will show you soon.

Philip Marlowe in a Time Warp

The Long Goodbye was Raymond Chandler’s favorite from among his novels. It was not made into a film until 1973, when Robert Altman tackled it. A few days ago I pulled it off my DVD shelf, and Sue and I watched it for the fifth or sixth time. I had forgotten how much I loved this movie. And a great thing about the DVD is that it came with interviews of Altman and Elliot Gould, who played Philip Marlowe

Now a lot of folks don’t like Robert Altman’s revisionist take on the Chandler classic. But when Altman explains it in one of the extras, it makes sense. He reset the murder mystery twenty years after the book was published (1953), with gumshoe Marlowe as “Rip Van Marlowe,” turning up in the hip, glib, go-go early ’70s. Marlowe even drives a 1948 Lincoln (that Gould owned). Moreover, the provenance of the script is impeccable—by Leigh Brackett, who wrote the script for The Big Sleep (1946), starring Bogie and directed by Howard Hawks.

Marlowe’s friend Terry is accused of murdering his wife, but turns up dead himself. Marlowe sets out to prove his friend’s innocence—running afoul of many shady and corrupt characters. There’s the drunk, impotent novelist who can’t write, and his gorgeous, inscrutable wife. There’s the gangster who wants back the 350 grand that Terry stole from him. There’s the treatment center shrink who is owed money. There are lots of cynical cops. The space-cadet neighbor gals who meditate topless. Marlowe ends up in the clink, gets beaten up repeatedly, tries to stop a suicide, loses his cat, and finally figures out what Terry did, and with whom. It’s noir of the highest order, though not in the traditional style.

The cast is to die for. Elliot Gould is an eccentric, laid-back Marlowe—a far cry from the tough guy in the trench coat and fedora. Sterling Hayden  gives a raw, powerful performance of the drunken Hemingway-like novelist who is crashing. He steals every scene he’s in. The actor/director Mark Rydell is remorseless and scary as the gangster, especially when he uses his girlfriend’s face and a broken bottle to motivate Marlowe. Henry Gibson (of Laugh In fame) is the uber-creepy little shrink. Major league pitcher Jim Bouton plays the venal, slippery Terry. Nina Van Pallandt plays the novelist’s panicked, stressed-out wife. And one of the gangster’s muscle-bound thugs is none other than former Governor Schwarzenegger—who doesn’t even get a line.

As we were watching the film, I reminded Sue that we attended a screening of it about fifteen years ago at a theater near the campus of the University of Minnesota. The movie was followed by a Q&A with the star, Elliot Gould. We both remember that he was a little crotchety, which would be in keeping with his reputation. It was a treat to see him in person and hear his recollections of making this terrific flick.

A Bouquet of Pheasants

Many years ago, at Christmastime, my mother and I went to an old bookstore called the Bookpost, not too far from the house where I did most of my growing up. It operated in a former post office and it was a delightful place to browse through the shelves. I vividly remember that day, because it was one of the last times I saw my mother looking healthy—before a serious illness claimed her final year and a half. She had given me my marching orders: Find four or five books you'd really like. It was her Christmas present to me in her second-to-last holiday season.

I picked several books that I've totally forgotten about. But one was something special, something my mother had heard about, called An Exaltation of Larks, by James Lipton. It was a slender volume devoted almost entirely to the collective nouns that describe groups of people and animals—gaggle, flock, herd, school, host, things like that. Here are some examples.

A murder of crows...A gang of elk...A melody of harpists...A clowder of cats...A scurry of squirrels...A bouquet of pheasants...A bevy of beauties...A skulk of foxes...An odium of politicians...A failing of students...A parliament of owls...A murmuration of starlings

The book is full of hundreds of these delightful collective names. I thought of it recently, when I saw a piece by Jim Gilbert in the Star Tribune newspaper, talking about collective names of birds. He pointed out that the same bird can have several collective names. For example, geese are different depending on where they are. On dry land, they are a flock. On the water they are a gaggle. Up in the air they are a skein.

Inspired, I've tried to come up with a few new collective names of my own devising. A scribble of writers. A daub of painters. A shower of meteorologists. A chirp of crickets. A hatchet of butchers. A squint of readers. A trumpet of elephants. A rumble of tympanists. A docket of judges.

An Exaltation of Larks is still in print after nearly fifty years. If you love names and language, you owe it to yourself to get hold of a copy.