Seriously Cute Blogger Award? Alright...

Danielle La Paglia has bestowed upon me The Seriously Cute Blogger Award. I guess she’s had a stroke or something. Canny people don’t do things like that. Since I am in the habit of humoring stroke victims, I’m playing along. The game is to discuss five books, television shows and/or books you’ve consumed lately. This compliments my new podcast, Consumed, which is entirely about reading, watching and playing things.

1. Apollo 18

My sweet old mother wanted to do whatever I did for my birthday. I wanted to see a movie? Just name the time. Did she know it was about-- But that was okay. She drove, paid for tickets, even smuggled me in a Butterfinger Crisp. She was so chipper about watching the fake documentary about an eighteenth moon mission and the nightmares found up there. So I got to see the woman who gave me life have the crap scared out of her twice by lunar debris. That was pretty cute of her.

2. The Shrinking Man by Richard Matheson

Just finished it this week. Matheson was a great damned storyteller and no book of his has disappointed me yet. Here he turned the gimmick of a gradually shrinking man into a reflection on what masculinity means, and what can replace it when it's taken away. Manages to walk the line between pulpy adventure stories and John Cheever malaise, without the annoying bits of either. And, uhm. He's little. So he's cute.

3. Coffee Samurai

Saw it with a packed theatre in August and tracked down a DVD to buy as soon as I returned home. It is my favorite anything of the year. A Korean short animated film, Coffee Samurai follows the story of a brave warrior who fell in battle centuries ago. As he died, he wished to be reincarnated with an iron body. Fate smiled on him, and he was reborn today: as a coffee vending machine. A drunken girl wheels it home and takes care of it. They fall in love, when they aren’t being attacked by zebra assassins. In half an hour it manages to go through every possible level of absurdity, including deliberately inserting plot holes into itself. It’s the best thing.

4. 127 Hours

Getting your arm smashed under a boulder is cute, right? Listen, the award didn’t specify that my things had to be cute, but I’m making the effort here. The point is: nobody told me 127 Hours was this good. James Franco delivers a deep one-man show of a film trapped in canyon with no one to help him, desperately devising ways to pry his arm from beneath a rock, and just as many ways to stay sane. Danny Boyle (28 Days Later, Slumdog Millionaire) does not mess around as a director. It takes some great acting, lighting and cinematography to make the one set not get dull after an hour. True stories usually wind up weak films because the artists have only so much leeway with reality, but everything about that poor man’s experience is re-crafted into a sharp portrait of grit.

5. Blockade Billy by Stephen King

For much of his career, King was dogged by the unfair assertion that he only wrote Horror. In the latter stage of his career he's dogged by the equally unfair assertion that he only writes needlessly long tomes. So here's a 100-page novella about baseball. As a non-baseball fan, what struck me the hardest was the narrator’s use of jargon and colloquialism. He’s not just colorful. The world of baseball reads like a vibrant Fantasy world, all brought out almost effortlessly, little exposition needed to set up anything, so much with its own terminology and so much accentuated merely through enthusiasm rather than backstory. For non-baseball fans, this might be a better primer on how to write Fantasy than any of King’s actually Fantasy. And I adored Dark Tower.

So that's my five. I stand behind them all. Now for the three recipients...

1. Helen Howell. Often feels like my own personal Twitter grandma. I don't think she's even close to that old; she just has that adorable warmth about her.

2. Sonia Lal. Another Twitter-buddy, one so young she didn't know John Carpenter's The Thing! Young'uns are cute. Plus I admire her pursuit of the classics. Most recently dug into Herbert's Dune.

3. Cathy Webster, the Bride of #fridayflash. I figure she'll go nuts with this one.