Review of Limitless, the film based on The Dark Fields by Alan Glynn

So, I actually got to go see a film. On a real date. With my husband and no one else. We went to see Limitless. The movie was enjoyable, and it created discussion that lasted the whole drive home, which I always enjoy.

The movie's premise is thus: Eddie Mora, a writer struggling with writer's block, is offered a new drug that is supposed to unlock his brain's full potential. It does so, and he gets a large enough supply of the drug to last long enough to completely alter his life and thrust him into a world of money, women, and highly motivated opponents, leaving him to sort his way through while trying not to die from various causes.

The first hint of danger comes right as Eddie's decided to be his ex-brother-in-law Vernon's bitch, doing whatever it takes for Eddie to keep getting the NZT drug from him. He returns from picking up lunch and the dry cleaning to find his ex-bro murdered. Stunned and afraid, Eddie dials 911. But while the cops are en route, Eddie takes a more serious look around and realizes that the killer trashed the apartment looking for something...and maybe he didn't find it, which resulted in the ex-bro's death. Well, glory be, Eddie's contribution to the ransacking is rewarded, with a fat bag of NZT (which look like hard contact lenses, btw).

Eddie goes home, pulls facts out of his arse like rainbows to impress (and lay) the landlady, then opens up a can of Fly Lady on his tiny apartment. And then he decides to sit down and pound out 90 pages of his novel for his editor.

Being a writer, I strove to calculate how much writing that would actually be, and whether he could do it before the next morning, when the following scene began. It wasn't clear whether Eddie stayed up all night or not. Ninety pages @250 words per page, in double-spaced Courier font = 22,500 words. If he was an expert typist and had zero hesitation time, he could have pounded that out in under four hours. But that assumes he had a plot laid out and scenes in mind ahead of time, and it wasn't clear whether he did or not. I got the impression he slammed out his 90 pages in just a few hours, and that's at least physically possible, if not mentally. However, he proceeded to finish the rest of his novel manuscript in the next few days, and I had to wonder where the scene was of him with ice on his wrists. Or maybe that's just me and my tendinitis.

Moving on: Eddie has big plans, though unrevealed. To finance them, he begins to dabble in the stock market. Most of the rest of the movie follows the results of this choice. He does well, he gets a loan from a Russian loan shark to get more money faster, he attracts the attention of Mr. van Loon (De Niro), he works on a merger between van Loon and another mogul named Atwood.

The NZT was having negative effects on Eddie. He got accused of a murder and had to hire a lawyer. He tried to track down what he believed were other clients of Vernon's NZT-pimping business, and found that they were dead or gravely ill. He was being followed by a hatchet-faced, silent greasy type.

It was at the end, when things were supposed to be tying together, that I noticed they weren't. The movie was focused too much on Eddie and what his new braininess was doing for him to bother looking back at plot strands.

It was never revealed who killed Vernon. There were only a couple of killer characters in the movie, and only one probably did it, and his motive was probably X, but why it got to that point, the point where murder seemed the only option, simply reveals another plot hole.

Several characters, on-screen and off, had some experience taking NZT. Yet, Eddie's the only one smart enough to figure out a way around the drug's nasty side effects? Others on the drug can't avoid letting things deteriorate to murder? Sorry, but the throw-away line "it helps if you're already smart" just can't explain that hole away for me. ALL those people were on NZT, and NONE of them realized or attempted to combat that fatal loophole? What, were the pills handed out at the midnight showing of the latest Twilight movie?

A minor but annoying plot divot kicked in with the "no service" issue on Eddie's cell phone. (That's not the divot; it could have been explained in the scene, but wasn't.) He flees into a sort of safe room...and there's a land line phone in there, but he doesn't use it! Cary Elwes and the cell phone much? Gah.

Okay, Twi-hards, I'm sorry I bashed your movie. To make it up to you, let me say that Limitless has the drinking of blood in it. There, happy? Well, I wasn't. The drinking (okay, slurping) has a specific purpose, but in order to achieve said purpose, the amount of blood that needed to be slurped should have been at least a couple of pints. But nooo, the blood pool is nearly untouched when the next bit of action takes over. Come on, people! Especially in a "geniuses everywhere" movie! Shame.

This is definitely a guys' movie. Eddie has a gorgeous girlfriend who dumps him as nicely as humanly possible at the beginning of the movie, even though he's a total unwashed loser. Then he bangs the landlady. Then he bangs a bunch of hot rich chicks at a foreign beach house. Then he gets his girlfriend back and bangs her. Then he has a massive blackout due to NZT and vaguely remembers banging a couple of girls in the same night. This covers about, oh, two weeks? And he never suffers any consequences for his playboy lifestyle. This must be the "oh, shut up, you know you'd do it too, dude" part of the movie. My husband's opinion on the proclivities of the women of New York City makes me wonder whether he's secretly been watching Sex and the City.

The cinematography in this movie was awesome. Whenever Eddie (or whoever) was "on", the light changed from a dry, dark tone to warm and comfy. A play on "suddenly the light came on", and all sorts of references to enlightenment come to mind. Visual effects were sparse, but used to great effect in representing the mental processes that Eddie was going through. I especially loved the letters raining from the ceiling as he wrote those first ninety pages of his novel (the title of which was a nod to Glynn's original).

I had an epiphany after the movie had ended. At the beginning of the film, Eddie's struggling to explain the yet-to-be-written novel's plot to a guy in a bar. He eventually says something like this: "it's masquerading as a sci-fi, but underneath it's all about how we're all struggling". Well, perhaps the movie is smart, after all, being that self-aware. :)

The ending was something I didn't see coming, actually. I was sure I knew who was going to live and who was going to die, but I was wrong. The ending was happier than I was expecting, considering the earlier tone of the movie. So much so that, contrary to my usual preference, I might actually have enjoyed a darker ending. It would probably feel more realistic.

I'd recommend seeing it as a fun strategy/action flick, but don't try to follow the logic. It's followable, of course, but I kept getting frustrated that here, and not there, was where the genius led. Just let it ride. And if someone offers you something that looks like a hard contact lens, maybe ask if they have the blue pill instead.

Flash Fiction: The Coffee Quest

She could smell it--even over the jungle’s heady bouquet of decay and life. Its rich aroma called to her olfactory sense and drew her eagerly to find it. She changed direction, stumbling over rocks hidden beneath the mass of ferns she was struggling through. Her hands sunk an inch deep into the thick soil, crushing young green fiddleheads back into the earth. Her dress, once the epitome of fashion, and now sweat-soaked and reeking, ground into the soil beneath her knees.

Gaining her feet again, she paused to look around. Walls of yellow-green vines rose up the sheer cliff nearby, its top swathed with giant, branching trees. The smell came from that way; she fervently hoped she wouldn’t need to attempt to climb the mass of vines to the top. Her blue satin Manolo pumps lost miles ago, she stepped wearily, determinedly, on aching, bleeding bare feet, toward the vines.

Reaching the cliff’s base, she struggled through thick verdant brush that reached her waist as she searched about for the spot where the smell was strongest. The foot of the cliff was not straight, though, and a faint breeze wafted the scent she sought in and out of the weaving niches in the rock.

And there, miraculously, was her salvation: behind the living green curtain of vines and their small yellow heart-shaped leaves, she found a small cave entrance. The scent was nearly overpowering.

She dropped uncaringly to her skinned and bruised knees, peering into the meter-high, irregular opening. The light-colored stone striated away into blackness, but along the left wall, several meters in, she could ever so faintly see something moving, falling, glinting in the murky dimness. And now there was the sound of it, as well--she could hardly believe her luck, after all this time! She had found it!

Crawling in, minding her head, she made her way breathlessly to her prize. The scent nearly overpowered her in these close confines. It was within reach; hardly believing it was real, she stretched out a trembling hand that clutched a cracked porcelain cup. Her hand got splashed in her excitement.

She flinched.

A scream of sheer and utter devastation rocked the jungle birds from their arboreal homes for miles around.

The Fountain of the Everlasting Quad Ristretto Split Shot Dark Chocolate Mocha Mint Light Foam Coffee was not hot--it was iced!

Amazon Has Discounted My Shanallar Series

I just noticed that Amazon has lowered the price on the print version of The Wicked Heroine, and of Oathen, by four dollars each. The books contain 250k words all told, and used to sell for the full price of $13.99 apiece. Now they're each marked down to $10.07. I have no idea why they've selected this book for such a markdown, nor how long it will last. But if you want a print copy of it, this is your opportune moment.

Reviews more than welcome.

Review for Maggody and the Moonbeams, by Joan Hess

I've read a few of Hess' Claire Malloy books, and this series appears very different, in several negative ways. Or maybe I just got the lamest book of the Maggody series.

Arly gets roped into chaperoning some horny teenagers up at a youth camp for a week, where they mess around, scream, fight, and build a few bleachers. Some cute guy wanders in now and again, and several of the locals at the nearest town and among the Moonbeams have secrets that Arly must learn. And for some reason, a handful of people back in Maggody, 75 miles away, get subplots completely unrelated to the murder. Go figure.

Book themes: everyone either is horny or believes everyone else to be horny; people who have never lived outside Maggody/Dunkicker are uneducated, inbred backwater hicks with thick accents and mental faculties that run slower than molasses in February; all religious people have something to hide/are hypocrites, and the protagonist, being an atheist, is the only sane person around.

I get that this is supposed to be a comedy, but I couldn't ever find the groove where anything that happened in the book amused me. I expect it's just a cultural gap I couldn't bridge, not being familiar with the Southern school of thought. Between hillbillies and the Bible Belt, I'd imagine that a lot of the humor in the book was self-deprecating. But it all felt foreign to me.

I couldn't find much reason to like Arly. All of the youth group kids and chaperones seemed to be little more than caricatures, reduced to a single overblown feature. I had no idea why the book followed characters who had nothing to do with the murder plot or any of its subplots. Their scenes appeared in third person, and occasionally head-hopped. It appeared to be series creep, which I've only encountered in fantasy thus far: the author doesn't know when to stop writing about minor characters' lives (see WoT, aSoIaF), making subsequent books longer and longer and straying further from the central plot.

The plot itself was generally sufficient, but between the preponderance of teenage histrionics, religious freak-outs and other minor distractions of similar caliber, it was hard to make room for the actual case. In fact, the actual guilty party and their motive made for quite an awesome plot. Unfortunately, the reveal was pretty well buried. The dramatic conclusion was related by one character through flashback dialogue.

Lowbrow comedy and murder do not mix for me. Give me Dorothy Cannell's Ellie Haskell any time, but I'm just not the target audience for Arly and her town of Maggody.

1 of 5 stars.

Review for Damsels in Distress, by Joan Hess

A Renaissance Fair is coming to town, and Claire and Caron get roped into helping by a purple-tights-clad Fool. But as they meet the local "nobility" and experience the fun and silly delights of the Fair itself, they realize there are numerous undercurrents. When someone is killed at the Fair, Claire tries her best to keep out of it for a while, but then, once again, delves into the mystery.

I had a harder time accepting Claire's brash actions in this book. She did more illegal things and seemed to care less about them, which, considering the issue her fiancé, Lieutenant Rosen, has with that, seemed especially out of character. Their wedding being only two months away and all. It felt like, to accomplish this plot, the author put Rosen out of town because he wouldn't have let Claire do what she did, and the only reason Claire had to do what she did was because the author purposely wants to portray Claire as Chaotic Neutral in this book. Mission accomplished.

The Ren Fair characters were all larger than life, as well as improbably horny. Sure, any good Ren Fair is full of suggestive jokes, but to imply that everyone involved is taking that literally, well, it felt unnecessary. SPOILER And it ended up being a red herring anyway. END SPOILER

The character set felt a little imbalanced. There were the locals, there were the Ren Fair folks, and there were the victims/murderer, who crossed lines left and right, but those who were involved in the crimes felt unnaturally close-knit and isolated. It felt like a letdown to have them feature so largely in the final details. SPOILER And unlike Sue Henry, Joan Hess does not seem capable of writing a sociopath. END SPOILER

Having attended the Renaissance Faire at Black Rock religiously during my college years, I was excited to get into this book. Probably too excited. The Fair portrayed in the book played a very small role, and most of the characters from it spent their pages in other locations. The plot focuses on their interpersonal relationships quite heavily, which made for a whole new set of mysteries, but I was sad not to spend more time goggling at the awesomeness of the Fair.

The writing was smooth, with only a sprinkling of errors, but, yes, I noticed them, as always. It baffles me that people paid to make sure books are flawless do a worse job of it than I do as a casual reader.

3 of 5 stars.