Monthly Archives: April 2019

Movie Review: Hotel Mumbai

Based on the terrorist attacks launched into Mumbai November 2008 Hotel Mumbai, is a taunt, emotionally draining film reliving those attacks from a very personal character oriented point of view. As with any narrative film that is ‘based on real events’ or a ‘true story’ it is important to understand that fiction film is a terrible way to learn anything about history. What really good historical film can do is capture the emotional reality of an event, a place, or a time, allowing audiences to connect as human beings to the people who lived though the depicted events and hopefully come away with a better and more empathic understanding of what those events meant.

With the exception of the Raj Hotel’s chief chef Oberoi, played perfectly by Anupam Kher, the characters of the film are either entirely fictional or loosely combined from multiple sources however the characters themselves were not given and significant ‘Hollywood’ treatment and allowed to exist within a sphere of action that retained a strong sense of reality about them.

For those unaware of the history on November 26th 2008 a terrorist group, the Lashkar-e-Taiba, launched into Mumbai a series of murderous attacks. Arriving by boat they coordinated across 12 locations attacking crowds and landmarks with gunfire and explosives. The series of attacks lasted three days until November 29th when the last of the terrorists was killed. Killing 166 and wounding over 300 the Mumbai attacks represents one of the worst and most prolonged terrors incident. Lashkar, unlike many other Islamic-inspired terrorists organizations, held the belief that taking ones life by one’s own hands was always sinful but that dying at the action of the enemy was a path to martyrdom. These terrorists never intended to survive their operation and intended to kill as many unarmed, innocent people as possible before being killed by police or military. PBS’s Frontlinehas an excellent documentary from 2015 about the attacks and the critical role one American played in its planning and execution.

We witness the events of Hotel Mumbai  through the eyes of several characters, Arjun, a waiter and devote Sikh played by Dev Patel, The married couple David (Armie Hammer) and Zahra (Nazanin Boniadi) who have arrived at the hotel with their infant son and his nanny (Tilda Cobham-Hervey) and Vasili a rough Russian played by one of my favorite actors Jason Isaacs. This is not a story of unarmed people taking heroic action to overpower armed evil men. It should be said that the violence of the movie is handled quite expertly; never so graphically as to numb the viewers nor so distantly that it ceases to have emotional weight. There are heroes in the story and there is great tragedy but it is not one of thrilling action set pieces but rather horrific encounters with unrestrained hate and violence. The terrorists murdered with remorse and witnessing the recreated events I was moved to hatred of the attackers, terror for the victims, and emotionally wrung out as no one in the film has a cloak of invulnerability provided by neat story arcs and act structures. The film works, it is a powerful piece of art that conveys an emotional truth about these events while staying in some areas of the historical record. For example the movie compresses events down to a single night instead of the protracted siege that took place at the Hotel Raj, but the film’s deviations from the records are not of the sort that would make the project into propaganda or empty honorifics.

I can heartily recommend Hotel Mumbai if you are the sort of person who can endure a film that uncompromising depicts evil and expects a lot emotionally from its audience.

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The Day has Come

Sorry for the couple of days missed at this blog but things have been a little hectic. Good hectic as I am about to tell you but hectic all the same.

So after sitting on the news while I wait for all the details to be finalized and all the signatures collected I can now announce that I sold my SF/Noir novel ‘Vulcan’s Forge’ to Flame Tree Press and it is currently slotted for publication May 2020.

This has been quite a road and there have been a number of lessons learned as I traveled it. I won’t go into too many details as I think some of them will be better served in dedicated posting but here are a couple of highlights of lessons learned.

One: write what you love. I did not write ‘Vulcan’s Forge’ with any sort of an eye to the market, rather it was my own desire to see a blending of science-fiction with noir that spoke to my sensibilities. There are plenty of fine SF stories that blend with the noir traditions but the vast majority of them do so through the lens of the private detective and I wanted something that came at it from more a James M. Caine perspective where ordinary people get in over their heads in the sordid criminal life. When I outlined and wrote the novel my plans were to self publish it because it was more for myself than anyone else.

Two: Never self reject. I mentioned my plans were for self-publication but I still examined the publishing market and Flame Tree who publishes both crime and SF novels seemed to be the kind of house that might publish my cynical noir. If I had not submitted the book and self published it I would have never discovered that there are others who share this taste that I explored.  Always submit the material.

I am thrilled to be working with Flame Tree Press and I am over the moon excited about bringing ‘Vulcan’s Forge’ to market next year.

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All Too Predictable

Perhaps what I read was a terribly April Fool’s jest but given the history that is an outcome I find highly improbable. I generally spend some of my mornings doing political reading, news and opinion pieces from left and right to get a sense what may but on the active discussions and minds of political actors. This morning I read a piece by Rod Dreher titled ‘The Little Steps In Between.’ Quoting from a non-fiction book ‘They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933 – 1945.’ a survey of ten German citizen that lived through the rise and fall of Nazi Germany and published in 1955. The long quote pulled recounts how the decent into a murderous hate filled ideology did not happen suddenly but in gradual steps, bit by bit the people were brought along until it was far too late.

If you are familiar with Dreher’s work you undoubtedly see the twist coming to the foundations of his argument. Dreher is not speaking about the corruption of the conservative movement, a movement that professes a devotion to morality, often an explicit Christiane morality, a movement that professes a commitment to the value of each individual, a movement that professes a commitment to the notion of Truth, and yet this same movement has in steps accepted and embraced bigotry, lies, and torture. This is not the gradual steps towards Nazi’s that concerns Dreher but rather the ‘intolerable’ condition that public institutions are no longer allowed to engage in bigotry under the cover of ‘personal religious convictions,’ a fiction used the justify bigotry in the nation throughout its history. No the United States is not being submerged into hatred ideology by the rise of the alt-right, by openly white supremacist representatives, or a bigoted president that praises a gather of neo-Nazis as containing ‘very fine people,’ but rather by the mild insistence that public institutions are not allowed to discriminate.

To be clear I think that there is a clear difference between individuals and institutions, particularly public institutions that exist and gain tangible benefits from legal structures that derive from our common governments. A company or a corporation exist because we created the legal framework for them and they confer protections to the individuals that band together to create them, such as shielding personal assets from corporate misdeeds. Companies and corporation are not their owners and should not have the same rights and privileges as persons. Oh course the Christian Right has been hypocritical on this point. I recall quite clearly when California’s Prop 8, seeking enshrine in state constitution a legal definition of marriage as one man one woman, was fought in the public sphere and the Christian Right objected to boycotts of businesses whose owners had donated to the campaign to pass the amendment. They argued that private political actions and personal beliefs had no connection to their businesses and such linkages were unjust. Now that they have lost both the political and cultural battle over marriage they argue the exact opposite, that a business such as a hobby shop or bakery are extensions of their owners’ personal beliefs and sacrosanct under their personal religious freedom.

No Dreher is of course terrified if equality, engaging in the perpetual Christian Right fantasy of modern martyrdom. Like Jordan Petersen and his delusion of the ‘Murderous Equity Doctrine’ there is no end to the right playing themselves as the victim which not only makes them look ridiculous, encourages violence from their unbalanced members, but also robs them of genuine sympathy when their rights are under assault.

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