gullyfoyle

Movie review: Hundreds of Beavers

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 02:00:50 GMT

Here's a review from two years ago that may help to tide us over whilst we await Coyote vs. Acme.

I watched a movie titled Hundreds of Beavers. (Let's us pause a moment to give the filthy-minded preverts out there time to stop sniggering....) Anyways, imagine a live action (more or less) Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner cartoon -- and like those, sans dialog, although there is one very good song -- except the setting instead of The Desert is wintry Wisconsin, Wile E. is an ex-applejack maker turned fur trapper, and his quarry is, well, hundreds of beavers, as well as other fur-bearing animals. Except there are no animals in the movie. All the larger animals -- beavers, rabbits, dogs, wolves, raccoons, and one lonely horse -- are played by people wearing outfits of the sort worn by mascots for sports teams. Smaller animals like birds, fish, flies, and maggots are apparently made from whatever scraps were laying around the costume shop, then animated. The movie has a bit of a Wes Anderson feel to it, if Wes were drunk off his ass and had a budget of acorns and tacks. Amongst the constant silliness you'll see hat tips to cheap 1970s martial arts films, Monty Python, Indiana Jones movies, Attack of the Clones, Frau im Mond, and "Ultraman," and like all great movies, it ends with a nuclear explosion.

Not for everyone, but still highly recommended.

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take my money

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 00:16:54 GMT

If anyone here buys albums in mp3 format, where do you shop? I'm looking for a vendor other than Amazon or iTunes. It's time I got the last two Rolling Stones albums.

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"This is also for the ladies, but sometimes I have to run some water through it"

Sat, 20 Jun 2026 03:59:43 GMT

The new Sir Peter corner of the living room. I've had the Stunt Man poster for decades, and my lovely wife recently gifted me with the magnificent Lawrence one. So glad to be able to hang them together.

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Streetlight Shadows

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 02:46:25 GMT

Here's some of the funkiness that can result when a broadleaf tree grows up around a streetlight that consists of multiple LEDs.

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one flier, one not so much

Wed, 03 Jun 2026 01:59:47 GMT

Found these two yesterday in the partially enclosed walkway between my office building and the parking deck. The Eastern Tiger Swallowtail butterfly flew away quickly when I showed it the exit, but the Luna moth appeared near death.

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dogs on a blanket

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 04:22:15 GMT

Cece and Bucky share the good blanket, the one so good that Cece refuses to cede the space to Bucky like she usually does. Their keen senses are deployed to their utmost to detect any possible indications that dinner may be imminent.

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now that you think about it

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 03:49:01 GMT

Even though "One Battle After Another" beat out "Sinners" for the Best Picture Oscar, it doesn't change the fact that in November 2024 over 77 million people voted for a pedophile.

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every year every year

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 07:42:06 GMT

"Don't Let Us Get Sick" by the incomparable Warren Zevon. A song about redemption and hope. Happy New Year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_gC2vmm79U&list=RDs_gC2vmm79U&start_radio=1&pp=ygUiZG9uJ3QgbGV0IHVzIGdldCBzaWNrIHdhcnJlbiB6ZXZvbqAHAQ%3D%3D

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concrete wormhole

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 03:46:52 GMT

Light and shadows and lines that caught my eye today at work. I may drop by on New Year's Day if it's sunny and try this again when hopefully the blue car won't be there.

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thas 'bout rhait

Sat, 27 Dec 2025 23:18:01 GMT

This Christmas I was gifted by my wife with only one book, but it's a doozy. 1225 pages of the speech of my people. I'll be enjoying this one for a dog's life.

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A city, no worse than any other

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 04:36:33 GMT

We're visiting family in Los Angeles. Today we went to ROW DTLA, located, according to Google Maps, south of Skid Row and between the Fashion District and the Arts District. It's a big outdoor shopping area that was originally built starting in 1917 as the L.A. Terminal Market, which was one of the biggest wholesale markets in the world in its heyday. Imagine several extremely long, quite thin buildings where hundreds of trucks came every day to distribute a good chunk of California agricultural produce. The picture here was taken in the middle of Dock Street, named I assume for the continuous loading docks that fronted the buildings. There aren't many shops there now where I, at heart a rustic male boomer, would buy anything, but there was a booth in the Smorgasburg food and arts & craft market that was selling horror and fantasy books, so I picked up a copy of Tananarive Due's THE REFORMATORY, about which I've heard many laudatory things. And we got to pet a dachshund, so overall, not a bad way to spend a little time out in the sun and 70 degree temperature on the shortest day of the year. Apparently in two days flood are expected.

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review of Claude Rains: An Actor's Voice

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 01:29:34 GMT

Thanks to the convenience of interlibrary loan, I had the pleasure of reading Claude Rains: An Actor’s Voice, by David J. Skal and Jessica Rains (Claude’s daughter). I requested it almost as a lark since I’ve never had a burning desire to know much more about Rains than the rudiments with which I was already familiar, but I’d seen a couple of his movies lately and something about his style clicked with me. When I went to look up a biography, this was the first one I came across, and having read a couple of Skal’s other books – Hollywood Gothic and The Monster Show, both quite good -- I thought, why not?

The biographical portion of the book is only 184 pages, and much of that is basically “and then he was in this play and then he was in that play,” so it’s a quick read. There’s a good selection of photographs. The 75-page appendix lists pretty much every play, film, and television or radio show that he ever did, and there are non-extensive bibliographic notes and an index. If you want to know about his work, what he did and with whom and where they did it and how much he was paid, this book has that covered. If you want to know why he did it, you may be disappointed.

Rains never published any in-depth memoirs, although he attempted them at least twice. He intended to call them Lost and Found because, he said, “I was lost for many years. I was a wretched little boy, you know, with no education, and for the most part, still am.” But late in life Rains sat with journalist Jonathan Root for many hours of recorded interviews that Root intended to turn into a biography. Unfortunately, Root died unexpectedly with very little written, and Rains died not long thereafter. It is these recordings, provided by Rains’ estate, along with contributions and guidance from Jessica Rains, that Skal uses to explore Rains’ career and character.

Skal admirably captures the career, and he certainly gives us the flavor of Rains’ personality. But Rains was too skilled and too constant an actor for this approach to get to the heart of who he was. To give Skal credit, I think he realized this and wasn’t interested in trying to illuminate Rains through a particular psychoanalytical or sociological lens. Perhaps there is more along those lines in the longer Claude Rains – An Invisible Man from 2022 by Toby I. Cohen. Surprisingly, that and Skal’s book appear to be the only book-length general biographies of Rains to date. Here are some tidbits from the book:

• Rains married six times and divorced five, and was apparently irresistible to women. His frequent co-star and good friend Bette Davis lusted for him, but he rebuked her, and managed to do it without inciting her wrath, as they were lifelong friends. While apparently many other women were much more successful in their pursuit of Rains, none of them were, like Davis, world-famous Hollywood stars. While Rains’ third wife was the moderately well-known actress Beatrix Thomson, he did not appear to be interested in women who might also be competitors.

• As a young stagehand he developed the habit of memorizing entire scripts so he could feed lines to any actor who needed one. During the filming of Casablanca, Peter Lorre and other cast members, bemused at Rains’ perfectionism and wanting to lighten the mood on set, wrote a fake scene and contrived to be rehearsing it one day when Rains arrived on set. Lorre: “When he…saw us rehearing the [fake] scene, he was frantic. He called me aside and said, ‘Peter, something terrible has happened to me. I can’t remember a single line.’ We all broke up and he wasn’t even mad – just relieved that his memory wasn’t failing.”

• Rains could lighten the mood himself. After director Michael Curtiz kept asking him to make an entrance with “more energy,” Rains burst through the door, energetically, on a bicycle. It’s unclear if this happened during the making of Casablanca or of another of the several other movies that Rains made with Curtiz. • Rains last appearance on Broadway, in 1956, was in “The Night of the Auk,” a science fiction play in blank verse by Arch Oboler, creator of “Chicken Heart” – yes, the one that Bill Cosby riffed on – and many other creepy stories in the seminal radio series Lights Out, as well as one of the earlier post-atomic war movies, the well-regarded Five, and the less well-regarded The Twonky, adapted from the Lewis Padgett (Catherine Moore and Henry Kuttner) story of the same name. Rains’ castmates in this oddity were Wendell Corey, Christopher Plummer, Dick York, and Martin Brooks. It closed after eight performances. Probably too cerebral, right?

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art v artist

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 03:41:31 GMT

The following came up on my Facebook Memories from 2018 and I thought it possibly trenchant enough to deserve immortalizing here on Dreamwidth.

I know it's perilous to try to draw links between an artist's work and their politics, if the artist isn't especially trying to be political in their art. But....

I read a couple of Dan Simmons' horror novels recently, "Summer of Night" and "Children of the Night," and years ago read "Carrion Comfort" and "Song of Kali." The latter two are well-deserved classics. I greatly enjoyed "Summer of Night" although I guess some criticized it for being too similar to Stephen King's "It." (That didn't bother me.) "Children of the Night" overall felt too much like a potboiler, but it too has moments of brilliance.

One thing all four novels have in common is that the protagonists are struggling against a shadowy, evil group that's orchestrating events from the dark but sometimes are hidden in plain sight: Kali worshippers, a race of psychic vampires, acolytes and minions of whatever the hell is up in the old belfry, or a race of literal bloodsucking vampires. All plural, all "them."

Contrast this with the horrors in many of Stephen King's works: bad places (the Overlook, the Pet Sematary, the ship in "Tommyknockers"), singular bad entities (It, Cujo, Randall Flagg, Greg Stillson, Barlow, various ghosts and other creepy crawlies), bad situations, and sometimes the other side of the figurative mirror (e.g. "The Dark Half"). Now there's a lot of King's work I haven't gotten around to reading yet, but in general it sure seems like his horrors are much more specific and personal than those of Simmons' novels. In a couple of words, "it" vs "them."

And that is what makes me wonder if King's liberal bent and Simmons' sad slide into wingnuttery after 9/11 are connected to the artistic impulses that produce those two different kinds of horrors in their works? Fear of "them" is for damn sure big in conservative thinking these days.

I don't know, maybe I'm just blowing smoke. I was just wondering. Anybody care to comment? Be polite.

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buddies

Sat, 01 Nov 2025 03:22:14 GMT

It's nice to spend Halloween with a friend!

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it's spinning, not rolling

Sun, 26 Oct 2025 02:10:54 GMT

This was the only photo I took today at the N. C. State Fair, from inside Dorton Arena. I kinda wish I'd snapped one of the 2.1 ton pumpkin or the giant surly tom turkey or the little girl after her father told her what would probably happen to that turkey next month, but I think all along I was unconsciously looking for one picture to symbolize the whole shebang, and this one will do.

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autumn shadows

Wed, 15 Oct 2025 03:16:55 GMT

Shadows on autumn trees, 6:30 PM Oct. 14, 2025, Research Triangle Park, NC.

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Puddle jellyfish

Fri, 26 Sep 2025 00:35:46 GMT

A puddle jellyfish spotted this evening in the parking deck at work. The phone camera amped up the color; it was much more subdued to the naked eye. I made no alterations myself to the photo.

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A review of "A Little Prayer"

Tue, 23 Sep 2025 03:53:48 GMT

What exactly is the titular little prayer of writer-director Angus MacLachlan’s 2023 feature A Little Prayer? The movie does not tell or show us, although we do see one character sitting silently for a few moments then uttering a quiet “Amen.” All the central characters in A Little Prayer have something, or someone, to pray for, but it’s left as an exercise for us the viewers to try to figure out what, or who, they may be praying for.

At the center of the movie is the Brass family, and at the center of the family is patriarch Bill, played by the always excellent David Strathairn. Bill owns a small business where his son David (Will Pullen) is the accountant, and Bill is beginning to suspect that David’s books – his own personal moral books, not the company’s – are not in order. David and his wife Tammy (Jane Levy) live in the guest house adjacent to the home of Bill and his wife, Venida (Celia Weston, the marvelous Southern character actress who provides most of the humor in the movie). Bill adores his daughter-in-law Tammy, and he fears that his son is cheating on her. The movie is not a mystery where David doggedly unravels the unpleasant truth. No, the movie is about David and his family simply trying to figure out what’s going on and what they should do, just as we all try to do, every day.

A Little Prayer begins with singing, a gorgeous hymn we hear as the camera tracks down a suburban street and comes to the Brass’s house. Someone in the neighborhood sings, soulfully, early in the morning. The characters never see her, nor do we. Like so much in the movie and in the lives of these characters, the singer remains offscreen, and it’s up to us to imagine who she might be and why she’s singing and for whom. Some in the Brass family love the singing and the mystery it presents and represents; for others in the family, it’s a nuisance approaching a public disturbance. Likewise, for the Brasses, events have a way of being both happy and sad. Bill and Venida are happy to see their daughter Patti and granddaughter Hadley arrive unexpectedly, but it’s because Patti’s fleeing a dubious domestic situation. Are the flighty Patti’s reports of the dire situation back home accurate, or does she just need money (again)? The Brasses dote over granddaughter Hadley, but why doesn’t she talk? What’s really going on?

The characters may not really know. We may not really know. Such is life. Such is this movie. It feels like the most realistic movie I’ve seen in years. The characters, the situations, the events, and the locations all combine to produce a cinematic reality that comes damn close to what’s generally acknowledged, at least in some quarters, as the real reality. As I watched, I kept thinking yes, that makes sense, that’s how people actually act, how they live, how they celebrate and how they suffer. Director MacLachlan and cinematographer Scott Miller make excellent use of locations in and around Winston-Salem; I wouldn’t be surprised if the low-budget movie was shot entirely on location and without studio sets. That of course adds to the realism.

A Little Prayer obviously can be compared to MacLachlan’s 2004 indie hit Junebug since both deal with contemporary North Carolina families under stress. But the movie I kept thinking of as I watched A Little Prayer was another movie about an aging man trying to hold himself and his family, such as it is, together: David Lynch’s sublime The Straight Story. In the latter, the old man is physically – and so of course also metaphorically – trying to reach his ailing brother. Here, Strathairn’s character isn’t being physically challenged, since he sees his son every day, but he is metaphorically foundering on the rocks of the younger man’s guilt, fear, lies, and anger. Another point of comparison is that both movies are informed by the effects of war and military service. Like Alvin Straight, both Bill and David Brass are combat veterans, Bill in Vietnam and David in Afghanistan or possibly Iraq. Several scenes in A Little Prayer are set in the local VFW hall, and one outside a funeral for another vet. Finally, both movies exude the feel of the real world, perhaps incongruously due to The Straight Story being a David Lynch film, but more acutely for the same reason. [Side note: I looked up the details on The Straight Story to make sure I had remembered the character’s name correctly, and I had. It’s been twenty-five years since I’ve seen it, and my memory isn’t what it used to be. Take that as an indication of how powerfully the movie affected me and how much I enjoyed it.]

So is there a happy ending? Yes and no. Is it a tragedy? Yes and no. It’s like real life. The characters adapt, sometimes they only endure, sometimes they return to the place from whence they came, but their stories go on. A Little Prayer reminds us that things can be happy and sad, hard and easy, rewarding and torturing. While speaking with a mother-to-be, a stunned and stricken Bill, having just had his worst fears about his son confirmed, says (and I paraphrase, not having written it down or with access to check the script) “You have children thinking they belong to you, but they don’t. They are their own persons. And they’ll grow up to break your heart.” Then he goes and gets drunk, and then the next morning life continues and he keeps doing what he hopes is right and best for his family. Maybe he’ll succeed, maybe he won’t, but it feels real. That’s reason enough to see this movie.

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Life during wartime

Mon, 04 Aug 2025 06:20:49 GMT

Somehow I'd never managed to read Lucius Shepard's Nebula-winning novella "R & R" (1986) until tonight. It performs not exactly a balancing, but instead a melding of science and fantasy, of surrealism and science fiction, of madness and clarity, of magic and whatever you want to call not-magic, but don't call it reality, the likes of which I'm not sure I've ever encountered before. Here was Shepard at the absolute top of his form, his writing at one moment stately and lush and measured as a hymn, then suddenly a punctuation of imagery as vivid and sharp as a needle to a nerve. It chronicles a few days in the life of an American soldier in a near-future war in Central America. On some levels -- the ones inside the protagonist, Mingolla (do I hear an echo of "Mandella" from The Forever War? -- apart from some of the technology, which includes berserker drugs, it could be any war, any time. But Shepard grounds the story in his expertly realized jungles, battlefields, towns and rivers of a war-riven Guatemala.

I find it incredible and saddening that, according to ISFDB, "R & R" has not appeared in an anthology since 1988, although its 80-page length may have worked against it in that regard. No matter. It was collected into The Best of Lucius Shepard in 2008, and the ebook of that is available for as little as $3.00. If you, like I, don't care for some of the stylistic excesses that appear in some of Shepard's stories, don't worry. The Best Of collection is easily worth it just for "R & R" alone. If I were a writer of stories, I'd consider myself lucky and blessed to write at least one during my life with the scope, depth, and emotional and visceral impact of "R & R."

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lucky!

Fri, 20 Jun 2025 02:28:07 GMT

Picture taken from our dining room window a little while ago. We had a line of strong storms come through. This was the biggest oak tree in the back yard, easily 3 or 4 feet across. It demolished a couple of substantial pines too as well as a big section of fence. But no damage to house, people, or domesticated animals. That was the tree where I once saw a flying squirrel, the only time I've ever seen one. The deck and house are gonna be getting a lot more sun. The tree fell directly away from the house, hence: lucky! But I know of at least one house in the neighborhood that suffered a hole in the roof.

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Me...and my....Shaaaaadow

Mon, 16 Jun 2025 04:08:58 GMT

I wasn't as scared as this picture makes me look, really. I enjoyed the quirky little Cryptozoology and Paranormal Museum in Littleton, NC. No link since their web site got hacked. The owner's currently having a hard time, so the place may not be around for much longer. Glad I finally got to see it. Now I'd really like to see the the big one in Maine.

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not Readerconning this year

Mon, 16 Jun 2025 03:51:48 GMT

I had a good time at the last couple of Readercons, but I won't be attending this year. That weekend, friends and family will be gathering in N.C. to celebrate my father-in-law's ninetieth birthday. Hopefully I'll be back to the con next year, and I'm thinking of maybe trying for my first Boskone as well.

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One

Sun, 15 Jun 2025 04:32:26 GMT

The bush that produced this one beautiful rose behind our mailbox died, I thought, a couple of years ago. But this year it grew back enough to produce this single flower which caught my eye today. It's been rainy recently and we're at the peak of near-tropical, lush, Ballardian green fecundity. But it's this speck of red that stands out for me.

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Mercy

Sat, 14 Jun 2025 03:18:49 GMT

This popped up on my Facebook Memories page today, from 9 years ago. I don't remember posting it. But man do I like the song. It doesn't speak to me, it speaks for me.

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I am a leaf on the wind - watch how I soar

Sat, 07 Jun 2025 04:57:11 GMT

I know my brain chemistry's probably, let's say "eccentric," but I swear, in this picture I think he looks like Alan Tudyk.

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