Taking a break and awful movies

Warning:  This post contains spoilers for a movie that is so poorly written that there are not enough letters in the alphabet to give it a sufficiently low ranking.  If you don't want me to spoil the movie for you, then you may want to stop reading htis post when I start talking about it.  But if you want my advice, the movie is spoiled, full stop, and you'd be doing yourself a favor by jut reading what I write about it here and skipping it.

I didn't do any writing (Note: I don't count blogging as writing) last week.  I decided I wanted a break.  I figure I'm over 40,000 words on the novel, I deserve a break.  Plus, I have two more months to get the rough draft done.

Granted, I'm a little nervous about my choice.  Whenever I take a break, I worry that I won't start back up again.  It's pretty silly at this point, as so far, I've always gone back to writing.  Granted, sometimes I've scrapped a current project to start a new one in the process, and I don't want to scrap the novel I'm working on now.  But a week break is just that, and the ideas are still coming to me for this particular project.  That's a good sign.

I may have to quickly finish up my current scene and jump ahead to a new one, however.  I'm just not sure what to do with the current scene.  Well, that's not true, or I'd just scrap it altogether.  I just don't know how to write it right now.  So I'm thinking I may just put in a brief placeholder or barebones skeleton and move on ahead.  After all, I alread know I want to edit this over the summer.  I can add stuff then.  Editing isn't limited to just deleting or revising.

I spent a good bit of time watching stuff on Netflix this weekend.  It was a "badly made movie" weekend in many ways.  It started out when I watched "A Little Bit Zombie," which was a neat idea but poorly executed.  And that ending?  What was up with that?  Did Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman write the script?

A screen shot from "A Siren in the Dark."  As sensual as
it is, the story about these two characters is horrifyingly
creepy.

But the movie that absolutely disappointed me was "A Siren in the Dark."  To be honest, part of the reason I watched this movie was that Netflix's description of it (Something like "a psychic cop talks to a gay teen about his lover's disappearance and ends up exploring something really hinky") made it sound like a movie that had managed to escape the gay movie ghetto.  In a sense, it had.  Except that about the only thing the movie had going for it (other than a neat premise that was poorly executed then strangled) was that it had a bunch of scenes with young guys being naked with each other.

First of all, the movie was told almost entirely as a flashback, where Danny told Cameron the cop what had already happened.  I admit I don't like that story-telling device.  Flashbacks are meant to relay key pieces of information about the past that is relevant to the story's plotline.  So when Danny finished his story, I was like "finally, we can get to the action moving forward."  Then the closing credits started rolling thirty seconds later and I was like, "What the hell?"

Add to this the fact that the movie kept repeating scenes and not everything was told in order.  It almost felt like someone was trying to pull the whole Memento effect without having any reason to do that in the movie.  No one's perception was messed up by short term memory loss or anything like that.  So in this instance, it made the movie unnecessarily confusing (whereas in Memento, the confusing nature was intentional and necessary to the point the movie was making.)

Then there was the whole fact that they never really explained the purpose or nature of the relationship between the woman (who they kept calling a "girl" despite the fact that she was obviously at least in her thirties) at Harvest and Joshua.  Nor did they really explain the (admittedly hot) scenes with Cameron's brother and the other boy he was talking to via webcam other than to mention that Cameron has a deeply troubled past due to sexual abuse (which was hardly referenced during the rest of the movie, so why even bring it up?).  And how did Danny survive when the woman from Harvest stabbed him?  How did he eventually get home?  Or was his interview with Cameron not real and some sort of psychic thing?

Then you have the bit at the end of the movie where Cameron is giving Ariel a ride home (the scene was actually repeated at the start of the movie).  It turns out that Ariel is actually Joshua simply trying to lure in a straight victim rather than a gay one this time around.  That would have been a cool idea, if the whole movie wasn't a complete waste up until that point.

I'm serious, this isn't a "B" movie.  This isn't even a "Z" movie.  There isn't a letter far enough down any alphabet to describe this movie.  I've seen better stories used as segues between scenes in porn.  In a lot of ways, I think that's what this "story" was, a bunch of very short (30 second or less) sordid scenes of sex and drug use with bits of poorly done "story" strewn around them.