Day 524

It’s Sunday and Amazon delivered the new Chuck Palahniuk book ‘Adjustment Day’ and ‘John Carpenter: The Prince of Darkness’, an extended interview covering his early teen years up to ‘Ghosts Of Mars’. As of typing this I haven’t read Mr Palahniuk’s new book, but I have read the John Carpenter book and it's an interesting read. It doesn’t go into massive detail about each film, but over the course of the interview you get the impression that Mr Carpenter likes to let his films speak for themselves, is a weird mix of idealist and hard-nosed pragmatist. One thing it defo did was make me want to re-watch all of Mr Carpenter’s films.

As it was a nice sunny day, I spent a bit of time in the garden:

…and read Nancy Drew #1 and Shanghai Red #1, both are great first issues and make you want the next issue now!

I primarily got Nancy Drew because of Tula Lotay’s cover, but it’s a great story, modern, but with a kinda hard-boiled/nourish base, kinda like a 2010’s Veronica Mars. Shanghai Red is a great revenge story and sets up Red, her backstory and where she’s at now. It also kinda works as a one-shot, even if you don’t pick up #2 you still get a whole story.

I also re-watched Skeleton Key and watched Suburbicon:

Skeleton Key is a great Southern-noir thriller horror story, with the tension building until the climax and Twilight Zoneish twistish ending and you’re left thinking ‘damn, you should never have taken that job!’ and it's got a great soundtrack. 

Suburbicon is well shot and acted, but is kinda weird, there’s the main story about a break-in and murder and then there’s a b-story about a black family moving into the neighbour and, as the film is set in the ‘50’s, how their white neighbours hound them out. But, we never really get to know them as proper people, we see the mother get refused service in a supermarket and the son playing with the white son from next door, but we don’t see them as individuals, it’s always in relation to a white character(s) being racist. Meanwhile, the break-in and murder story sways between serious and farcical/humorous but doesn’t find a good balance between the two extremes. Not sure if I would re-watch it.