Here are a selection of photographs from today San Diego Zoo Trip
Zoo Photo 30 June 2019
Monthly Archives: June 2019
Down to the Wire
As many of you know I enter regularly in the Writers of the Future Contest. Winning the contest has launched quite a few careers in the SF and Fantasy genres but for me the biggest prize isn’t the money, or the entry on my CV but rather the weeklong seminar that the winners attended that is led by one of my favorite writers, Tim Powers.
The contest is open to authors who do not have profession grade publication credits and after checking with the contest administrator I confirmed that I remain eligible until Flame Tree Press publishes my novel. Given that it is my plan to enter every quarter that I remain eligible.
And this quarter has turned into a bit of race.
Every short story I started this quarter has sputtered and died in the middle and with the deadline for entering this Sunday evening I truly thought I was going to have to skip this submission.
And then an idea came together as I as falling asleep last Sunday. It’s all there, a strong narrative, an SF idea, and a character with a terrible choice before them.
I am nearly done with the first draft and I think I can complete it today, which leaves just Saturday and Sunday for polish and edits.
It’s a race.
Further Thoughts on Aladdin 2019
So my mind keeps circling this year’s release of Disney’s Live-Action version of Aladdin.It feels to me that the movie just didn’t quite work and as a writer I want to dissect the corpse and find out why. I may not have found the primary cause but I think at the very least I diagnosed a serious complication and contributing factor.
In the 1992 release the character of Jasmine, Aladdin’s love interest, is principally a human McGuffin. The set-up of the story is that Jasmine, by law, must marry before she turns sixteen, as the only offspring of the ruling Sultan, Jasmine becomes the route to power. Her husband will rule and Jafar, the scheming adviser/sorcerer, wants to marry her for that power while Aladdin, the good hearted ‘diamond in the rough’ wants to marry her for love and thus will wield that power more justly. Jasmine simply wants to choose for herself and not be ordered to marry someone she doesn’t love. Jafar and Aladdin have opposed goals, only one can achieve their desired end and as such the plot has conflict between its two poles of good and evil. Jasmine has no song in the 1992 version because there is very little she is trying to achieve and very little character beneath her surface motivations.
The 2019 release of the story has made critical changes to the plot. Jasmine is no longer forced to marry on any timeline, removing the ticking clock that helped drive the earlier version. Jafar, with somewhat deeper motivations, has plots to seize power without the requirements of a royal marriage, which removes the conflicting goal between him and Aladdin. The two characters are no long directly opposed ceasing to be well-defined protagonist and antagonist.
Complicating matter from a structural standpoint Jasmine has now been given her own goals and motivations and a song. She is presented as smart, capable, and with a burning desire to serve her people as a leader, but thwarted in this because of her sex. She wants the throne not for vain glory or to make the Kingdom a great power but because she wants what is best for the populace, placing her in direct conflict with Jafar. It terms of the plot Jasmine and Jafar are now our respective protagonist and antagonist.
This would be perfectly fine if the script had been re-written with the dynamic had formed the spine of the story but the movie insists that Aladdin is the hero, he is the protagonist in a story in which his stakes are secondary when compared to other characters.
Look at the stakes for each character.
Jafar, failure means loss of position, imprisonment, or death because if you move against the Sultan and fail it will end badly.
Jasmine, failure means the people loss her leadership, her empathy, and she is consigned to a lifetime of watching an evil man ground the populace in the war plans.
Aladdin, failure means he continues his life of poverty. Aladdin’s stakes are improvement of his life or stasis; he stays where he is. No ticking clock, no disaster befalls him, not the sort of things the Jasmine and Jafar are facing.
To fix this they needed to either give Aladdin stakes that mattered as much as Jasmine’s or Jafar’s or they need to re-conceive the story with Jasmine as the lead, the protagonist, the hero.
Thoughts on the Mueller Report
Yes, the report has been out for months and the reporting on the report has been extensive but I finally found time to read portions of the document myself and of course I have thoughts.
First off the mainstream media has been pretty much spot on about the report and what it contains. Some of the most explosive though ignored passages are taken verbatim from the document.
Second, the conservative media has done a disservice to their readers and viewers by making light of the reports serious and credible allegations. It is a display of power and partisanship over all principle.
Third, it is an established fact that the Russian government interfered with our 2016 Presidential election not out of a prankish goal of making things harder and more muddled for Hillary Clinton, whom Putin despises, but out of a clear preference for the election of Donald Trump. The intelligence operation to influence the election was broad, well funded, and sophisticated and began well before anyone suspected or feared the Trump would take the nomination. To be clear the Russian interference started in the primary with the clear goal of securing the nomination and eventually the Presidency for their candidate of choice, Donald Trump. This instance is far beyond the allegation that Senator Edward Kennedy sought support and assistance from the Soviet Union, an allegation supported by a single uncorroborated source.
Fourth, the evidence does not support with a degree of certainty that rises to criminal charges that the Trump campaign coordinated with the Russians to win the election. The facts support that the Russian interfered, including offering illegal assistance to the Trump campaign. The Trump campaign gladly accepted the assistance, knowing it came from an adversarial foreign power, but the evidence is thin that the two organizations plotted or planned together to win the election.
Fifth, on the subject of Obstruction of Justice the Mueller report reached no definitive conclusion other than that they could not state unequivocally that Trump did not commit obstruction and left that question to the political process.
To me it is clear that Trump, his inner circle, and perhaps more are compromised by a foreign power, and that’s without getting into the cash corruption of foreign agents and the President’s business holdings.
It is also clear that the loud conservative voice screaming about ‘Rule of Law’ during the Clinton administration are in fact hypocrites. It is a patriotic duty to secure our elections and be certain that the process reflects the will of the American people and not foreign interests, a duty the GOP is refusing to accept.
Movie Review: The Dead Don’t Die
It is said that when a genre cycle nears the end of the ‘life’ and the dramatic idea within that genre run dry the artists turn to comedy. I am not sure I buy that even as a general rule and I certainly do not buy in to that for the subset of horror movies built around zombies as flesh eating undead. 2004’s Shaun of the Dead is often credited as a film that helped re-launch the zombie movie and its comedic nature is undeniable. An even older than that example is Return of the Living Dead from 1986, a direct sequel to 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, a dark comedy, and the movie that forever implanted in popular culture the concept that zombies eat brains. So the release of this month’s zombie comedy The Dead Don’t Die is not in my book a sure sign that the genre had reached its end. Though I will admit that finding really good zombie movies is always a difficult pastime.
Written and Directed by Jim Jarmusch the filmmaker behind the vampire movie Only Lovers Left Alive The Dead Don’t Die is a story of the zombie apocalypse as experienced in the small one horse town of Centerville USA. Roughly centered on Police Chief Cliff 
Robertson (Bill Murray) and police officer Ronnie Peterson (Adam Driver) the film follows a diverse set of quirky characters including Farmer Frank Miller (Steve Buscemi), Hermit Bob (Tom Waits), and new comer to the town and apparently a Scottish samurai undertaker Zelda Winston (Tilda Swinton) and a smattering of other famous actors and musicians playing smaller parts.
Unlike most comedies this movie is paced, quite deliberately, at a quite sedate speed. Things unfold in a slow steady progression and scenes play out with a languid sense of timing. Some of the humor comes from character and context but this film also plays with the a meta-narrative that has at least some of the characters seeming aware of the convention of zombies film and even through own more questionable reality. While there is zombie flesh eating action it is far from graphic in this presentation and Jarmusch replaces zombie blood and gore with a wispy black smoke effect that makes this a nearly bloodless horror film. Near the resolution in the movie’s third act I was reminded of the Spierig’s brother low-budget indie zombie comedy Undead, but only is a passing manner due to a few shared story elements.
The Dead Don’t Die is not a film for everyone. The humor is often understated, the pacing more fitting to a foreign film than a typical US theatrical release, and the meta-narrative keeps the viewer at distance, but conversely there are some terrifically understated performances, Bill Murray gives perhaps his quietest comedic line readings ever, several interesting ideas are presented on the nature of life versus unlife, and throughout the movie’s run time I was never bored as I was with the much faster paced Dark Phoenix.
Movie Review: Dark Phoenix
One of the many signs that a movie is in trouble is when I am saying the lines of dialog before the character utter them. That usually indicates that the writers have taken the first and blatantly obvious choices in constructing their scenes. Throughout Dark PhoenixI predicted the characters’ dialog many times word for word.
The fourth installment in the re-booted X-Menfranchise Dark Phoenix is the second attempt to adapt an iconic storyline from the source material onto the silver screen and while it is not the garbage fire that the most recent entry in the series was this movie managed to provoke big action boredom. Set in 1995 with an utter disregard to all of the characters’ ages, remember that the re-boot of this series started in 1962 by mixing mutants into the Cuban Missile 
Crisis and now thirty-three years have passed and none of the characters have appropriately aged, the X-men are now beloved by the world as heroes and saviors. Jean Grey, seen briefly in the previous installment, participates in rescue of a NASA shuttle crew and become empowered with a strange cosmic force. Wielding her newly enhanced abilities Jean, for *reasons* (I’m sarcastic there nothing in the film is properly motivated.) engages in destructive behavior, assaults local police that responded to an unauthorized jet landing, and is then on the run from her friends and the law, all while being pursued by malevolent aliens who want her cosmic powers but are also somehow unable to possess them.
Of this film’s many great failings is the lack of a central story or even consistent theme. There are the bones and threads of an emotional and impactful story here about hubris, lies, and what happens when we start to believe our own press releases, but none of that is developed with any skill or tact. Characters speak in the plainest fashion, always revealing inner thoughts that most people obscure or in an overly expository explaining to each other what they already know. Things that might have been emotional reveals if held back as secrets as revealed in a straightforward linear fashion, draining later scenes of stakes and meaning. Characters are forced into the plot because the actors are under contract not because they belong in this story, yes I am looking at you Magneto, and set-piece battles happen because they are expected to happen at this act break.
Over all this film was dull, plodding, and wasted the talents of many fine actors, not worth your time at any price.
Hypocrisy Exposed
The truth is what I am about to say is pointless, those who agree with me will at best quote Die Hard with the line ‘Welcome to the party, pal’ and those who disagree I think can never be persuaded but here goes anyway.
When the GOP pursues voter I.D. laws across the country their refrain is that the actions are required to protect the sanctity of our elections. That these laws and changed to election systems are necessary to prevent voter fraud because nothing can be more important the safeguarding out election. It is outrageous that some voice suggest that the true purpose of these changes are in fact to suppress vote totals that may favor the GOP’s electoral opponents.
Of course at the time there was already plenty of evidence that ‘safeguarding election’ had nothing to do with the GOP’s intent. Absentee ballots already a rich source for vote tampering, see North Carolina’s 9th district as an example, and a source of votes that favors the GOP never seemed in need of protection. Now we have even greater proof that the GOP’s concern has always been victory over principle.
Naturally I am referring to Russia’s interference in our 2016 Presidential election and the Intelligence community’s assessment that they plan to continue attempting to influence the outcomes of our electoral processed. These are cold facts. Russian had a preferred candidate in the 2016 Presidential campaign, they orchestrated a sophisticated intelligencer operations stretching across many front and achieved their goals, and their preferred candidate now sits in the highest office of the land.
Even before the Mueller Report was completed and published Russian interference was a known fact and the GOP did nothing.
When the GOP controlled both Houses of the congress and could have passed laws taking sole credit for ‘safeguarding our election’ they did nothing.
When the President makes an open invitation for foreign powers to help his re-election the GOP does nothing.
Of you can find ‘statement’ and ‘deep concern’ but talk is cheap and character is revealed by action or in this case inaction.
It has never been about electoral integrity, integrity has never had anything to do with the GOPs actions. It is about power, pure and simple.
These are not the actions of patriots.
Movie Review: Guardians (2017-Russian)
Not to be left out in the gold rush of Superhero film franchises Russian entered the fray with 2017s Guardians, an answer to Marvel’s The Avengersthough with even less set-up than DC’s Justice League.
In the film’s backstory, during the Cold War, for you youngsters out there a period from 1947 through 1989 when the world’s superpowers the USA and USSR stood ready with nuclear annihilation in their bitter rivalry, the USSR experimented on people, creating the Guardians, super-powered individuals. After the Soviet’s collapse these people dispersed to the four winds, losing 
themselves in the vast terrain of the Russian Federation. Simultaneously a competing Cold War project to protect the motherland, which focused on mechanical powers created by the mad scientist August Kuratov, succeed in giving Kuratov the ability to control any machine. Now Kuratov is back and bent on world domination. With the military’s vast forces neutralized by his ability to usurp control of all their weapon systems it is up to Major Elena Larina to locate and reunite the Guardians in the hopes that thy can defeat Kuratov.
As a set up that doesn’t exactly suck, but the movie Guardians, suffers from both a lack and over abundance of character issues to create a compelling plot. The film seems to have no central character to act as a point of view and with a brief running time of a mere 88 minutes it simply can’t explore all the set-ups that it attempts to utilize. There’s the question, where have the Guardians gone? Well, that’s knocked out in a fast montage of computer searches and rapid-fire location changes as Major Larina seeks and recruits the four members. Instead of any tension the sequence becomes route exposition and introduction. Each of the Guardians presented in the film have deep character issues, but without the focus on any particular character all of the issues are given short shrift and thus come as flat and uninteresting.
The movie picks up in the third act with a climatic battle against a villain atop a tower in a metropolitan center surrounded by a force-field with the Guardians having to learn to fight and work together to save the world from domination.
Overall this was slightly less than passable with much missed promise.
Recalling Clinton’s Impeachment
With the never-ending discussion of Trump’s actions and the desire by some to impeach him I find myself thinking about the most recent Presidential impeachment. In particular I have been thinking about August 20th 1998.
Mind you article of impeachment did not pass from the House until December of 1998, but in August of that year the currents were flowing fast and the prospect of putting the President on trial in the Senate loomed over everything. But August was a busy month in 1998 and world events did not take a pause while American politics descended into warfare. On August 7th 1998US Embassies were bombed in Kenya and Tanzania killing over 200 people and injuring more than 4000. Al-Qaeda, led by the terrorist Osama bin Laden, carried the deadly attacks proving the organization to be more than a run-of-the-mill terrorist association. On August 20th President Bill Clinton operating on actionable intelligence about bin Laden’s location, launched missile strikes into al-Qaeda’s training camps in Afghanistan in a attempt that failed by a few hours to remove the terrorist from game board.
What does this military action have to do with Clinton’s looming impeachment?
Also on August 20th 1998 Monica Lewinsky returned to court continuing her Gran Jury testimony. Unlike the Mueller investigation Ken Starr’s office leaked like the Titanic after it’s impact and from numerous secret sources, including Grand Jury testimony information spilled freely.
The missile strikes taking place on the same day that Lewinsky returned to the Grand Jury sparked endless accusations that Clinton had ordered the strike to push the political mess off the new cycle. My conservative friends, and full disclosure at the time I was still a registered Republican voter, asserted that it was simply beyond any credibility that the Intelligence and Lewinsky’s testimony were mere coincidence certain that Clinton had ordered military action for mere temporary political position. It was quite a few years later that the evidence, now declassified, verified that indeed such a coincidence had taken place.
What does this have to do with Trump?
For all his failings and personal issues Bill Clinton still behaved more or less as a typical President but the same cannot be said for Trump. One has to look at his abuse of ’emergency’ declarations and tariffs to see that this president dis not bound by convention. Should the House move to impeach Trump, something that couldn’t be pushed off the news with an outrageous tweet, I cannot be certain that this man would not launch a few missiles to distract but rather initiate something far more serious to take over the news cycle. With the GOPs abandonment of all pretenses of responsibility and principle in their defense of Trump even such a blatant abuse of powers I can’t honestly give them the good will to expect that this would provoke the conservatives to hold him in any measure of responsible.
I think it is very possible that starting an actual impeachment of Trump will cost real lives, it is imperative that every other option be explored before that trigger is pulled.
Movie Review: Rocketman
A common thing I hear is to compare this film Rocketman to last year’s movie Bohemian Rhapsody. Both movies explore the history of well know rock performers from the 1970s and 1980 but truly I do not think that these films are really all that similar. Bohemian Rhapsody is a much more standard example of a biographical narrative film such as I Saw The Light Hank Williams or Sweet Dreams with Patsy Cline. In all three movies well respected actors take on the roles of iconic musical legends, either perform or lip synch some of their most famous songs while recreating those musicians musical performances this is not what happens with here.
Rocketman is a biopic exploring the life of rock icon Elton John but this movie is a full on musical using the best-known song from John’s catalog as their vehicle into his life. There are a few examples in the movie of ‘here’s Elton John performing at this famous venue’ but 
unlike the other films I have mentions these performances are the exception and not the form of Rocket Man. With little regard to the chronology this film has the characters bursting into these famous tunes as a method of exploring the emotional inner lives and this is not limited to Elton, but rather to a wide swath of the cast. If you go hoping to find the source of the inspiration to songs such as Saturday Night’s Alright, or Your Song, then you will be disappointed. This is much closer to a movie such as The Sound of Musicthan Bohemian Rhapsody.
t is very meta but also a wonderful tool using the music of Elton John to explore what it felt like to be Elton John. Taron Egerton plays adult Elton john and his performance is one that gut punched me. There are moments where with a single expression Taron fully involved me in Elton’s pain and torment as he struggled with his life, his music, and his identity. His acting is open, accessible, and raw, a very far cry from the performance I witnessed in Kingsman: The Secret Service. Jamie bell plays Elton’s long time collaborator and lyricist Bernie Taupin and together they give us a rare thing in today’s major motion picture, a deep, very emotional, and very real relationship between two men that isn’t built upon sex. Of course the movie explore Elton’s journey into his sexuality but the core dramatic issue if John’s battles with drugs and alcohol. In addition to using the famous tunes as entry points into the psyche of the characters the film also using the unreality of the medium to give visual poetry to their inner lives. In the trailers you can see people literally floating off the ground as they are lifted by his performance but the fantasy aspect run much deeper than that demonstration but rather the movie often becomes much more interpretive than descriptive and frankly this works much better than a simple linear narrative. When the movie ended I felt as if I had shared in the emotional truth of the character’s life though I doubt I learned anything of an actual factual nature. This is not a documentary with musical interludes but rather emotional exploration via images and music in search of tone, a feeling, which hopes to capture an essence that reflects Elton John. It is well worth seeing.