Well, ten days since my last post! Both of my loyal readers must be wondering what's happening!

Not much, which may be why I'm not blogging much.  My writing seems to go in a feast or famine cycle--either I'm working on 2 books, 2 blog entries, and an essay all at once, or I've got nothing much going on.

Also, it may well be that twitter is killing my blogging.   It's actually somewhat challenging to me--it turns out that many things I want to tell the world can, in fact, be boiled down to 140 characters, which calls into question this entire blogging enterprise. (wanna follow me on twitter?  all the cool kids are doing it!)

Or possibly I'm still smarting from arguing with a humorless zealot on the interwebs.  Which is of course like banging your head against a brick wall--the wall doesn't care, and it feels good when you stop.

It may also be the fact that my dog has been recovering from surgery.  I often find myself talking to fellow dog walkers about various pop cultural phenomena, and those ideas often make it into the blog

Or maybe I'm just lazy.

Anyway, enough metablogging. 

My wife and I sat down to watch The Bad Seed the other night, and may I say, holy crap, what a movie!  (Here is the trailer, which apparently predates the idea that trailers should make you want to see the movie.  Still, it will give you a lil' taste of the flavor of the movie)

Now, I've seen evil kid movies before, but this one really took me by surprise because of the psychological realism.  So it's not enough that the evil titular character kills a classmate (in a fashion most awesomely cruel that only comes out at the end)--we actually see the dead kid's mom, half-mad with booze and grief, show up and spill her raw emotions all over the place. 

This was actually a bit hard for me to watch--it poked me in uncomfortable parental places--but it impressed the hell out of me because it was fundamentally more serious than a lot of movies like this. Most movies that involve death don't really deal with the messy grieving process of the people left behind, and this one did.

Adding to the psychological realism was the way the mom dealt with discovering that her kid was a sociopath.  She was genuinely tormented and never stopped loving the kid, which also felt authentic. 

Great performances and far less stilted acting than you often see in old movies,and the music is great--they use the little angel's piano practice melody to great and creepy effect.

Yes, there are some quibbles--long, dull scenes discussing the possibility of children being  born bad, which were interesting only in a historical sense--they really show how different our understanding of things like that is now.  A couple of characters talk about how it's just complete hogwash to imagine that anything other than environment is involved in shaping character, and this newfangled idea that heredity might be involved is just crazy.

And--SPOILER-- the last three minutes of the movie should really be chopped out.  It's clear that because it was 1956, they were afraid to have evil triumphant at the end of the movie as it obviously should be.  Again, it shows what a different world this movie takes place in.  After decades of movies where the bad guy lives to fight another day, or evil triumphs entirely, we're used to the idea, but apparently it was so shocking in 1956 that they actually had to have an almost literal Deus Ex Machina ending, as the Bad Seed (her name was Rhoda, but that name will always belong to Valerie Harper in my mind) is struck by lightning, as though the presence of such evil in the world was such an abomination that the Lord himself decided to eliminate her.