Bookshelf:

Captain Blood, et. al.

As nondescript as it seems this past week was, this weekend was just the opposite.

Today was a shopping day. I went by a bike shop and bought a new bike pump. I also looked at new road bicycles, which are quite expensive since mountain bikes have basically eliminated the low-end road bike market. I'd like to buy a new road bike, as mine is ten years old and not quite what I'd like, but probably not this year. Then I hit BookBuyers and picked up some random items with my store credit, and then glommed some gellato afterwards.

I then headed down to Big Guy's Comics which was having a big sale. They'd obviously bought a couple of peoples' collections of 1980s comics, and perhaps also bought out stock from a warehouse, as they had more copies of (say) X-Men #150 than I've ever seen in one place before, and many of these books were being sold for 60% off guide prices. Which meant they weren't quite the deal I'd hoped for (guide prices are usually on the high side of what one can actually buy books for), but still a pretty good deal. I ended up spending about $60 on a pile of stuff, all in excellent condition. So that made me happy.

I also hit the grocery store and drug store on the way home, and then phoned Mom. She's doing well, apparently keeping busy on her summer vacation. I don't think we'd talked in a month, so it was good to catch up.

It was just about a perfect day outside, a fine day for driving around and doing whatever the heck I wanted.

Debbi was supposed to get home today from her business trip, but various factors caused her to be several hours late, and it turned out that her cell phone died and she couldn't phone me. Since I didn't know what her plans were, and didn't want to be twiddling my thumbs all evening in the not-unlikely chance that she didn't get back 'til quite late, I decided to head out at the last possible minute to see Captain Blood (1935).

This was the film which made swashbuckling Errol Flynn a star (at age 26), produced around the dawn of the color age, though it was black-and-white. Flynn plays Peter Blood, an English doctor in the 17th century. Caught in the middle during the civil war against an usurper on the throne, Blood is arrested for treating rebel soldiers, and is sold into slavery on Jamaica. Colonel Bishop (Lionel Atwill) refuses to buy him for his insolence, but his niece Arabella (Olivia de Havilland) falls for him and buy him for ten dollars. He refuses to be grateful, and she gives him to her uncle's care. Through luck and boldness, he and his fellow slaves manage to escape during a pirate attack on the town, and they capture the Spanish pirate ship and become pirates of renown, but with a code of honor. Branded traitors, they drift around the Caribbean, ally with the considerably rougher pirate, Captain Levasseur (Basil Rathbone), and Blood is forced to confront his fears when their ally captures Arabella from a ship returning from England.

Captain Blood is a pretty cheesy film, its plot wandering drunkenly from point to point, and the "fortunate interruption" of the Spanish pirate ship attacking the town at just the right moment is as ridiculous a development as any in cinema (and it seems like director Michael Curtiz knew it). The story's themes of the wronged man and his honor are rarely made subtly; instead, the story blunders into them and then loses its way. The whole subplot with Levasseur is nothing more than an excuse to set up a swordfight between two main characters. And the whole thing feels visually murky in its black-and-white photography.

That said, it's still a rousing adventure, especially in the second half, as Flynn gets to play the man of action and decision, all capped off with an exciting face-off between several pirate ships. (One wonders, though, that anyone bothered to build towns on the coast in those days!) Flynn looks unexpectedly dashing with his clean-shaven face and shoulder-length brown hair, Rathbone seems appropriately menacing, and de Havilland as lovely as anywhere else.

But overall, Captain Blood is just a warm-up for the later Curtiz/Flynn/de Havilland/Rathbone film, The Adventures of Robin Hood (also featuring Claude Rains and Alan Hale Sr.), which I also saw tonight, and which I've described here before. Robin Hood is probably the pinnacle of this sort of adventure film, and it's certainly the one to start with if you want to check out the genre. Plus, it's in color; what more could you want?

Today Debbi came down, having gotten back from her trip about half an hour after I left last night. I'd phoned her when I got home last night, and she was completely zonked out. But she was much better today.

We got lunch (Chinese) and gellato in Mountain View, and then went up into the hills for a hike in the Russian Ridge open space preserve. I'd been hoping that the extensive blackberry bushes would be in full bloom, but the berries were mostly still too sour to eat. Bummer! But we hiked around for a couple of hours, at least, all the way to the picturesque Horseshoe Lake, but climbing some substantial amount of hill, too. Debbi asked, as we climbed a really steep hill on the way back, "Any reason we saved the steepest hill for last?" I said, "To work off all those carbohydrates we had for lunch so we could build some muscle." (Probably the purest horseshit on my part!)

It was hot out - cloudless and sunny and only a little bit breezy - so we sweated it out the whole way. But we had a good time, and had a really good conversation. Overall, it was one of the must fun outings I've had with Debbi since we started dating.

Once home, we showered and lay around like slugs for the rest of the evening. I turned on a baseball game, figuring the Indians/Mariners game would be more interesting than whoever the Dodgers were playing. Well, it looked like I was wrong, since the Mariners - playing a historic season - were up 14-2 by the end of the third inning. But I left it on anyway, and Debbi and I got to watch a game for the ages, as the Indians scored 12 runs in the last 3 innings - including a game-tying 3-run triple by Omar Vizquel with two outs in the bottom of the ninth - to tie and game, and finally Cleveland won 15-14 in the 11th inning. It tied the Major League record for the greatest comeback in history, a feat last performed in 1925.

And that, my friends, is why you don't leave a ballgame in the 7th inning when your team is down 12 runs. Aside from the fact that they still sell beer until the end of the 7th, you never know what you might miss.

Okay, okay, I'll admit that we didn't lie around like slugs for the whole evening, but that's not part of this story. (I'm a stinker, ain't I?)

Before Debbi arrived in the early afternoon, I finished reading Sean Stewart's Resurrection Man.

I'm not really sure what to make of this book. In a world where magic started returning after World War I, Dante Ratkay is an "angel", a focal point for magic and sensitivity in a world with forces greater than they are. His foster-brother, Jet, seems to be cursed, but they're best friends anyway. Dante denies his abilities, until Jet uncovers Dante's own body - dead - lying on his bureau. It's just a duplicate, but it seems a horrible omen.

It's a dark, quiet and haunting story about a rather twisted family, and a couple of men who don't feel a part of it, even though, really, they're the center of it. It has a head-smacking, "of course!" moment in it, and it mostly plays by the rules of magic that it sets up, but it feels more like a vignette than anything else. A snapshot of Dante's life and feelings, without being a rounded picture of who he is. It's like a sudden, raw display of painful emotion, without really strong underpinnings for where it's coming from, or - more importantly - how it's dealt with after it's experienced.

For all its intriguing elements, the book feels kind of empty. I wouldn't particularly recommend for or against it. I guess either you like this sort of book, or you don't. Me, I'm more interested in the broader ramifications of a world in which magic only started returning around 1920. Now that would be interesting. I wonder if Stewart's written that book?