One of my favorite movies of all time is Support Your Local Sheriff, a western spoof starring James Garner, Bruce Dern, Harry Morgan, Walter Brennan, and a whole host of other faces you’d recognize immediately. We got the DVD some while back, and every so often when I’m tired and I just want to sit down and veg I’ll pull it out and be happy for an hour or so.

Garner drifts into a small Western town where there’s recently been a goldstrike. The town has grown enormously in just a short time, and law is in short supply. The chief bad guys are a family of ranchers from out of town; their spread just happens to sit across the route to the railroad station. So not only do the townsmen have to put up the rancher’s bad behavior, they have to pay them a tariff to get their gold out of town.

What with the gold-induced inflation, Garner can’t afford to stay in town for more than about two hours; on the other hand, he really needs a stake to get him to Australia. That’s the frontier, you know (“I thought we lived on the frontier,” says one of the mine owners). As a result, he takes the job of town sheriff. Will he survive longer than the last three? Will he clean up the town? Will he wed the mayor’s pretty if accident prone daughter?

What do you think?

This movie is a gem, and I think it’s for the same reason that Singing in the Rain is also a gem (though, admittedly, a larger one)–a group of talented people got together and had one heck of a good time doing something they loved.

I bring it up now for two reasons. First, because Garner’s side kick is played by Jack Elam, who passed away at 84 just a few days ago. He appears here in his first comic role–a marvelous, glorious instance of casting against type, for he usually played the really, really bad guys.

And second, before I could manage to write something up about him, Terry Teachout beat me to it–and pointed to Support Your Local Sheriff as his best role.

First Looney Tunes, now Support Your Local Sheriff. I’ve got to hand it to Mr. Teachout: he might be the arts critic for the Wall Street Journal, but he’s no snob.

This is the latest (I think) in Harrison’s long-running “Stainless Steel
Rat” series, and I confess I have mixed feelings about it.

Slippery Jim diGriz is a thief, fraudster, and bank robber–a
self-proclaimed rat living in the walls of modern society. And he’s a
stainless steel rat, because in his world “modern society” is high-tech
indeed, spanning thousands or hundreds of thousands of worlds all across
the galaxy. At times, diGriz has been an agent of the Special Corps, the
galactic police force, following the old “set a thief to catch a thief”
principle.

The series is written for laughs, and historically has included some of the
best light comedy in science fiction. But the quality is spotty–a
Stainless Steel Rat book is generally a good time, but it’s the
difference between a top-notch rollercoaster at a theme park and those
rattly little things they sometimes have at neighborhood carnivals to
scare the five-year-olds.

What’s unusual about this particular volume is that the quality varies
from neighborhood carnival to theme park just over the course of the book.

The first half or so has some amusing moments, but is mostly just dumb.
Slippery Jim spends virtually all of it sitting around and imbibing
alcoholic beverages while his wife and sons pull rabbits out of hats in
the best deus ex machina fashion. I began to think that Harrison
had completely lost it.

The last half picks up considerably. Every Stainless Steel Rat book has
elements of the caper novel, and it’s only in the last half that they
show up, along with a sense of real danger, so that the characters are no
longer just drifting about with drinks in their hands but are actually
doing things.

I dunno. At the time I read it I was in the mood for something light and
airy, and it kept me occupied for a few hours. But Harrison really is
capable of better.

This is a competently written novel, but I confess that though I usually
like Robert Barnard I didn’t like it much.

It’s a police procedural. A quadruple murder occurs in a photo studio
belonging to a skin magazine called Bodies. Superintendant Percy
Trethowan must dig into the weird world of elite body building to find
out whodunnit.

Didn’t much like Percy, didn’t much like the folks who helped him, didn’t
know any of the victims, didn’t much care whodunnit.

Which is sad, because as I say it was technically speaking not a bad
mystery. It just didn’t appeal to me.

So my three kids are off to a Halloween party tonight, and my wife gets them dressed in their costumes. The boys are dressed as snakes (snakes? but they have arms and legs? They’re snakes, Will, get over it), and sweet little Anne, my two-year-old, is dressed as a sweet little pony, white with a long brown mane.

She’s just the cutest thing. And what does she do as soon as she has the costume on? She starts chasing her brothers–and roaring at them, hands outstretched to claw the flesh from their bones.

Yep–that’s one pretty pony.

…for a couple of days. I’m suffering from a head cold, and it’s left me dopey and unenthusiastic. And let’s face it–if I were sufficiently with it to write anything worth reading, I’d be at work now.

(The really annoying thing is that I don’t feel that bad, physically. I’m just too dopey for words. Lack of sleep, that’ll do it every time.)

This is yet another collection of tall tales of the outdoor life by
humorist McManus, the second that I’ve read. Not bad–McManus doesn’t
hit my funnybone square on the way some authors do, but I nevertheless
laughed out loud at regular intervals.

This isn’t a book to sit down and read straight through; the individual
pieces are quite short, rather like potato chips, and like potato chips
a surfeit of them is an unpleasant meal. But it’s great for dipping
into every so often.

For me, like many people of my generation, WWI took place back in the mists of
history. I never heard stories of the war told at family gatherings. Movies
don’t really deal with it much anymore. And when I studied history in
college, it was the aftermath with the League of Nations and the reparations
payments that were more interesting than the actual war itself. WWII, Korea,
Vietnam were the wars that were real to me as a young person. The horror of
Auschwitz and the body bag counts on the nightly news were the realities of
war. Later, it was terms like “surgical strikes” and “collateral damage.”

Then, when my kids were small and I was a broke, stay home mommy shopping at
Goodwill for clothes and books and everything else I could find cheap, I
picked up a book called “Testament of Youth” by a woman named Vera Brittain.
It cost a dime. I took it home and found a whole generation I had completely
missed. It’s a book about a nurse’s experience before, during and after the
war and it wasn’t a pretty book to read. It made a huge impression.

Now I have read this book. It’s well known and on the bookshelves at all the
bookstores. It doesn’t take long; it’s short and the writing is easy and
accessible. That is fortunate because the words tell a story more horrific
than anything I have read in a long, long time. It hit me in the gut and
made me sick. It made me cry and it made me angry. I could probably do a
nifty analysis on the use of Nature as a backdrop to the works of Man or the
development of the character but realistically, I don’t want to. I don’t
even want to do a plot synopsis. I want to give this book to everyone I
know and say “Read it. Read it now and think about it.” I want to give it to
national leaders and clergy and farmers and New York intellectuals and say
“Read it!”

Read it.

This is one strange film.

Long-time readers will remember that after buying Spirited Away on
Ian Hamet‘s recommendation I was so
impressed that I went out and got a number of other Miyazaki movies. This
is the last of the set so far.

And it is one strange film.

First, some things that stand out. The animation is stunning; I’m not
sure I’ve ever seen it equaled, even in Miyazaki’s other movies. There
are some shots that reminded my friend and I of Kurosawa’s movies. Second,
this movie is definitely not for kids. Some of this is simply the
language, which is a little more colorful than usual; there’s some (very
mild) profanity, and frequent references to certain of the characters as
being (reformed) brothel girls. On the one hand my kids have certainly
heard worse; on the other hand, I’d rather not explain brothel girls to
them.

But the language is more a reflection that the English adaptation wasn’t
done by Disney. The thing that really makes it kid-unfriendly is the
blood and gore–as Ian Hamet described it to me some time ago, “The first
decapitation surprised me.” There’s lots of blood, lots of arms lopped
off (along with the occasional head), and some really horrific monsters,
all exquisitely animated.

None of this makes it a bad movie, just a movie intended for grown-ups.
And it isn’t this that gives the movie its strangeness either–it’s just
out of character for Miyazaki.

No, what makes this movie strange is the plot and the characters.

At first, things seem to make sense–at least, if you think about it you
can come up with explanations that make things fit. But ultimately, too
much is unexplained. Why are samurais attacking Iron Town? And why does
our hero care? Princess Mononoke was raised by wolves–but if she’s a
princess, who are her parents? What’s she the princess of? And in fact
the name “Princess Mononoke” is used only once–and how does the person
who uses it know that that’s the girl’s name? It’s not what she calls
herself. What’s with the brothel girls? How come lepers are so good at
designing guns? (You might think that it’s a comment on the sort of
people who make guns, but it doesn’t seem to be.)

A lot of the movie resonates with the kind of
anti-technological spiritual-but-not-religious worship of nature that I
associate with New Agers and Hollywood stars–but not quite. It’s all
very strange, and the characters’ motivations become increasingly hard
to understand as the movie progresses.

Perhaps it’s just a Japanese thing that doesn’t translate well; perhaps
the movie depends on some Japanese legend that fills in the gaps. I
don’t know.

Bottom line: I loved the animation, which was easily enough to hold my
attention. It was truly gorgeous. The story, such as it was, left
me cold.

Capsule summary: We loved it.

I’ve been known to read a new Bujold novel to Jane in one weekend; my
throat was sore for a week. This one took us eight evenings, because I
read no more than four chapters a night to save my voice. (I did
overdo it on the last day, so we could finish up.)

This is a sequel to The Curse of Chalion, though it can be
read independently. It concerns Ista dy Chalion, the dowager royina
(she’s the mother of Royina Iselle, the reigning monarch). During the
dark days of the curse which was the topic of the previous book, Ista
was thought to be mad. In fact, she pretty well was mad, thanks to
getting a really raw deal from the gods.

See, this is a fantasy series, but it’s almost what you might call
theological science fiction. That is to say, Bujold has invented a
theology (a very interesting one, I might add) and a religion to go with
it–and then, having set up the rules, she’s seeing where they take her.

So Ista is now a youngish 40, she’s no longer mad, and she’s being
stifled by idiot ladies-in-waiting who treat her like she’s made of
china and won’t leave her alone for fear she’ll throw herself off
of a tower. She married Roya Ias as a young woman, was caught up in the
curse, and has had little but hell since then. She finally has a chance
to have a life of her own, if she can rid herself of her protectors.
If only the gods will leave her alone…

…but they won’t, of course.

Then you might want to read this.