Monthly Archives: January 2011

Sunday Night Movie: The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai Across The 8th Dimension

So it looks like I will get to my Sunday Night Movie feature after all! Anyway after a spate of fairly serious and heavy films I was in the mood this sunday for fare that was lighter and just fun to watch. It had been a piece of time since I last pulled out my DVD of The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai Across The 8th Dimension so between time and mood this was the perfect film for me.

Buckaroo Banzai is a film that has a very idiosyncratic response in people who see it. Either people fall in love with this stranger quirky movie and quote it for years, or they scratch their heads and wonder how anyone could like something so utterly stupid. There seems to be almost no middle-ground reaction.

This film is at heart a pulp adventure, much along the lines of say a Doc Savage story, if you are familiar with those books. The titular character, Buckaroo Banzai is at once, a physicist, a surgeon, and a rock star. On all these fields he is perhaps the best. He has surrounded himself with a talented team of characters at the Banzai Institute. They combat evil, improve mankind lot in the world, and play concerts to adoring fans. If this is all too over the top for your, then this movie is not for you. It has the feel not only of a pulp adventure, but also of someone role playing game writ large and with credible actors playing the parts. Continue reading →

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A quote that cheered me up

“Books aren’t written. They’re rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn’t quite done it.” Michael Crichton.

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The potential Arab Awakening

I fully support the rights to peoples across the world to overthrow their dictators and live in freedom. I hope that the events from Tunsia and Egypt are the pebbles at the start of a landslide.

I;’ve heard commenters here in the US framing this both as indicative of the success and failure of Bush 41 policies. I will not sully the courage of democratic protesters by suggesting that every event in the world is about our liberal/conservative squabbles.

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Depression Lifting

Last Friday I slipped into a fairly deep funk. Most of it had passed by the next day with only lingering effect through the next week. Today was the first day I truly felt like I had shaken off this depression. I know exactly what prompted this feeling.

As you know if you have been reading my blog I recently got my official rejection from a major publishing house for my military SF novel, Love and Loyalty. When I looked at chapter one with an eye to reading it at the Mysterious Galaxy Writers group I saw that I could improve the quality of the writing and decided to do a new line edit through the enitre novel.

Friday at my day job I was working on Love and Loyalty ,(during breaks and lunch, my boss get his money’s worth out of me) and suddenly I was struck just how ineptly I had written the book the first time. Mind you this was a manuscript that I had written, edited, gotten beta-read feedback on, re-written and then re-edited.  It had been through at least two full line level of editing.

Despite that the lines looked utterly crappy to me. I had been blind to my crap and the enormity of it staggered me. I was so upset that I think if someone had said a cross word to me I might have wept.

Just look at the number of changes and corrections I have scribbled onto this one page. A page that has been changed and corrected more than twice before. I don’t know why it hurt and devastated me so badly Friday, but there is no doubting that it did do just that.

I have kept working at it, hoping that the crap I am blind to is not as major as the crap I had been blind to.

I will not quite. I adore my characters and the adventure, but I do get discouraged.

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A very pleasant surprise Juggernaut

Last week when I stayed home from the day-job with a migraine one of the things I did in the afternoon when I was feeling better was surf the Netflix instant view queue.

For those not in the know, if you have a Netflix account and a Netflix compatible device, such as an Xbox 360 or Playstation 3, you can stream select movies from Netflix directly to your television. Sometimes even in high-def.

Juggernaut was a film I discovered by surfing what was available for streaming. I did not watch the movie that day, my headache was still too intense to allow full concentration. Last night after we finished watching our recordings of The Daily Show & The Colbert Report my sweetie-wife and went to the Netflix queue for something to watch. She spotted the Juggernaut in the ‘recently viewed’ queue — I had watched a few minutes to get a feeling for the quality of the production — and after a short bit of internet research she decided she wanted to watch the film as well.

Damn, this was one well made movie. The plot is simple. An extortionist has planted several large bombs on an ocean liner, he his demanding a large sum of money or he will not reveal how to deactivate the bombs. 1200 people are aboard the ocean and a mid-Atlantic gale prevents them from being evacuated. Time is running out until the bombs explode.

Now a plot like that can be done well and you will get a taunt suspenseful film, or it can be done badly and you get mindless action and explosions. This film was done well. For a bonus look at this cast. Richard Harris, Anthony Hopkins, Omar Sharif, Ian Holm, and a slate of character actors you’re sure to recognize when you see them. The tension in the film was quite strong, watching at home, with a headache, in a well lit room, I still felt it tightening my muscles. This is a movie I would never hesitate to show to someone. See it if you can.

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Not much of a post tonight

I am suffering from a headache. Nasty enough to put me off my editing and posting tonight.

I was going to post a length essay on 2001: A Space Odyssey , but instead I will leave you with this challenge. IN that famous SF film, before thing start going wrong aboard Discovery, how many scenes can you find that have a dramatic nature and not a purely expository nature?

For a scene to have a dramatic nature it must posses a character, that character must have a goal, and there must be an obstruction to that goal. An Expository scene conveys information about the setting or character or plot that the viewer needs to understand the events of the film. (I would also posit that the expository scenes in 2001: A Space Odyssey do a particularly  poor job of exposition.)

Personally I cannot think of any scenes before we are on the Discovery that were not of a purely expository nature. Drama simple did not exist in that film until HAL went nuts.

**shudder**

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Sunday Night Movie: Soylent Green

So this week over at Star Trek Re-watch we reviewed the third season episode, The Mark Of Gideon and that put me in the mood for an overpopulation story done correctly. The best overpopulation film is the 1973 classic Soylent Green. Even if you disagree withe presumptions and politics of this film it is still one of the best Sf films out of Hollywood.

As I stated when I made Rollerball my Sunday Night Movie a while back, the 1970’s were a time for thoughtful and intelligent SF movies. Soylent Green is special beyond that because it is part of the Charlton Heston trifecta of SF movies, Planet Of The Apes, Soylent Green, and The Omega Man. These were A-list films not cheap sci-fi tossed off for the teenager drive-in market.

Soylent Green is set in the year 2022 (hey, only 11 years away!) in a  New York City with a population of 40 million and 50% unemployment. It is very loosely based upon the 1966 novel by noted SF author Harry Harrison ‘Make Room, Make Room.’

Heston plays Detective Thorn, an overworked and pettily corrupt police office. When a rich and power man is murdered during a thuggish robbery, Thorn draws the case to add to the other three murderers he is chasing down. The world in 2022 is vastly overpopulated with resources nearly exhausted. To discover any information Detective Thorn relies in his ‘book,’ Salomon Roth (Edward G. Robinson.) A live-in friend who has ‘a hand full of twenty year old reference materials.’ When the facts of the murder start to point to assassination and conspiracy Thorn knows he can’t sweep this case under the rug or it might mean his job. Without his job he’d be sleeping on the street, scrounging for survival. Amid political pressure and dwinliing time Thorn has to uncover a secret so terrible not only are some wiling to murder for it, but it makes the victim welcomes his assassin.

Continue reading →

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Not my finest hour

So todayI relaxed with my friend ‘Bear’ playing a game of Federation Commander. Bear has a theory that two ships of the same point value are superior to a single ship of the same point value. For for example two ships with a combat value of 75 should best a single ship of 150. Today’s game was to test that theory.

Alas I screwed up my Erratic Maneuvering and allowed him some close in shots I really shouldn’t have, but that was my largest mistake. No, my big mistake was in ready the point values of the ships. Federation Commander has two scales, fleet and squadron. Fleet scale the points are cut in half and the ships are half as armed and powered. When I picked out his ships for the encounter I looked at the fleet scale, not the correct scale of squadron.

He out pointed me by 2 – 1. It’s no surprise then that he won easily.

We will try again.

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