Monthly Archives: July 2020

Cinematic Social Commentary: Robocop vs They Live

 

In the essay I will not be taking a position on the merits of either films observations. I trust my readers are more than competent to make their own value judgements and evaluations politically but rather I am looking at how the films made their comments and which films, in my opinion, succeeded more adeptly at its intentions.

In 1987, the penultimate year of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop was released to theaters, the story Alex Murphy, husband, father, cop, who is murdered and then scientifically resurrected as Robocop makes important comments on the nature of humanity and identity but its sharpest social observations are on conservatism and Reaganism.

The next year John Carpenter’s They Live debuted and under the guise of an alien invasion movie spoke to the same social commentary about its views on conservatives and the effects of the Reagan presidency.

They Live posits aliens living amongst us that are subtly controlling and directly all facets of human life and social development. The title refers to the ‘waking sleep,’ created by a signal broadcasted by aliens, that keeps people from seeing the aliens around them and the subliminal messaging used to control the population. Global pollution is not a side effect of unregulated industrialization but rather a deliberate project of ‘terraforming’ the Earth to alien standards. Capitalism is an alien system imposed upon humanity for the purpose of extracting the planet’s wealth to the aliens and corrupting select human into acting as quislings for the invaders. Aliens live amongst us at every level of society but most importantly solely occupy the commanding heights of our cultural and political institutions.

The commentary here is not subtle. The direct one to one mapping of capitalist, the wealthy, and the powerful as a parasitic and controlling force with the alien invaders is a clear analog to class-based observations of our real-world economies, However, the worldbuilding is sloppy and not thought out in any logical manner. How the aliens extract wealth is hand waved away. The illogic of aliens travelling hundreds if not thousands of lightyears at great expense of energy to live as beat cops and bank tellers is ludicrous mudding Carpenter’s social commentary allowing neo-Nazis to reinterpret the text in an anti-Semitic screed. The fact that extremists on the right can see the commentary as supporting their racists position rather than attacking the economic system  they favor speaks volumes to the film’s failure to build any coherent statement.

Robocop is set in an undefined near future where crime is rampant and social services are nearly non-existent. The city of Detroit is crumbling under the lack of resources as the tax base evaporates and crime runs uncontrolled in the streets. Changes in the tax codes have benefited corporations concentrating wealth and privatization has turned social services such as prisons, hospitals, and schools over to corporate control and as the film open the fiction OCP corporation takes over management of Detroit’s police force. While corporate control of social services is presented in a plain and unflattering light the factions within OCP, standing in for all of corporate America, are given a richer and more nuanced portrayal. Dick Jones, a senior vice-president who is in bed with the city’s criminal boss, is a greedy immoral man only interested in the wealth and power he can extract from his positions. Bob Morton is a corporate climber and ambitious young man but seems to believe that the corporation can be a force for good and actually wants to deliver beneficial services. The ‘Old Man’ heading OCP is more of an enigma, it is unclear if he is even aware of the corruption within the company or if his ‘it’s time to give back’ speech is heartful or merely for appearances.

What is clear is that the film’s stand that corporate government is an ill is quite clear. Despite the story being about social disintegration and collapse there is no representation of actual government. Aside from a brief use as hostages, and there’s powerful symbolism in that, there is no mayor or civic leader presented in the film. The people and their representatives are whole absent a comment on their invisibility to corporate views.

As social commentary Robocop succeeds for better than They Live

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Corona vs Chernobyl

For some strange and unknowable reason here in the depth of a global pandemic I have started re-watching HBOs Chernobyl mini-series. Brainchild of show runner and writer Craig Mazin the five-episode series follows the historical disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear powerplant following the explosion that ruptured the core and endangered million with its radioactive contamination. The series has won a number of awards around the globe and garnered praise for its acting, direction, and writing.

Mazin centers the themes of truth and lies at the heart of his scripts for Chernobyl opening the series with the question, ‘What is the cost of lies?’Given the lengthy time for writing, pre-production, and production Mazin’s work was not a direct comment on the Trump presidency but the applicability of those themes and questions are unavoidable.

The Chernobyl nuclear reactor number 4 exploded because of lies and because of the reliance of the system upon not only lies but that the lies of the authorities were never to be questioned. Lies hampered the recognition of the disaster and hampered attempts to mitigate its lethal consequences.

And yet dozens of scientists and engineers and bureaucrats managed to evade the lies and with the dangerous work of hundreds of thousands more and the sacrifice of millions more confront and contain the contamination. The Soviet system when confronted with the awful truth of the explosion and what it imperiled spent vast amounts of treasure and resources doing what was required. Mikhail Gorbachev the final General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union has expressed the belief that the economic cost of the Chernobyl disaster was a critical factor in the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Which brings me to the global COVID-19 Pandemic.

The government of the United States, the world’s wealthiest and most technologically advanced nation/state, under the presidency of Donald Trump, aided and abetted by support from his governing party the Republicans, has lacked the courage shown by the brutal communist government of the former USSR.

The Administration has failed to spend the treasure necessary, has failed to muster the resources required, has left its citizenry to face the crisis alone and instead has continually counseled with lies resulting in a count of 150,000 thousand dead, a count that continue to rise.

Trump and his GOP enablers have plugged their ears, squeezed their eyes shut and like children pretended that the mess simply doesn’t exist.

This is not to praise the Soviet System. It was a brutal, monstrous, and evil empire responsible for the murder of millions. It subjugated and enslaved its own citizenry and that of its neighbors the world is better off with its collapse.

It is shocking however that a system so utterly reliant upon lies and the denial of truth rose to a crisis while a party that prides itself on virtual signaling its patriotism leaves its country to burn.

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Leave Fiction in its Period

Last night my sweetie-wife and I watched a portion of the BBC’s live presentation of The Quatermass Experiment. Written by Nigel Kneale and originally produced as live television in 1953 the shows centers on Bernard Quatermass and Britain’s first men into space with the disastrous and horrifying consequences of that first rocket flight. Kneale is one of my favorite television and film genre writers who produced material that was both thrilling and thoughtful. His ghost story The Stone Tape remains a beloved production to me.

In 2005 the BBC recreated the energy of live television with this new production of The Quatermass Experiment. Transposing the action to the modern-day United Kingdom. Instead of Quatermass’ Experimental Rocket Group being part of the British government it now stood as a private space launch concern. However, much of the dialog and drama revolves around the concept of a first flight into space and for 2005 that’s a concept that simply doesn’t carry a lot of sense of the unknown. The mystery of where the spacecraft flew to simply can’t be sustained in our current technological world. And while 500,000 miles is further than any manned flight actually flown it’s still in our own neighborhood and unlikely to yield up a story about aliens and monsters.

The Quatermass Experiment belong to its period just as numerous other stories that shouldn’t be ‘modernized’ such as The Manchurian Candidate or Fail-Safe, another experiment into revitalizing live television.

Works of art are products of their time, the social pressures and environments that both inspired and constrained the artists as they created and it is in their time they should remain.

 

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Fiction Reveals the Author

There’s often a huge cry from some quarters that that creatives need to keep their politics out of their arts. The arts are there for simple entertainment not any form a grandstanding.

Naturally this is an ignorant position. Art has the most lasting value when it speaks to values and that can’t be done without stepping on toes.

This is all very evident in movies, television, and literature but even in other matters of creativity the worldview and positions of the author or authors influences the art.

I run an in-person Role Playing Game, or at least I did before the pandemic shut everything down, of Space Opera a massive game from the very early 80s with an amazing detailed, if poorly edited, set of rules. In order to make the game flow quicker and easier once we can assemble to players again, I have been crafting spreadsheets to handle the more tedious and complex calculations the game often calls for. One the objectives were met I decided to expand the project and create a spreadsheet that would use the rules to automatically general star sectors and that has been an interesting experience. Certainly, my Microsoft Excel skills have been expanding but it has also revealed interesting biases of the game’s authors.

For example, a society in Space Opera is rated for its social strength on a scale from 1- 10, with a  1 signifying a society that has collapsed or is in collapse, the world of Mad Max both the original film and its sequels, while a 10 represents a society able to withstand nearly any serious shock with it institutions remaining functional and intact.

The gamemaster rolls a 10-sided die for the social strength and then modifies it based on the type of society and those modifiers express the authors’ biases.

“Open Societies” no modifier, it is whatever is rolled though the game’s heroic Terran Union no planet will score below a 5.

“Corporate Society” no modifiers, somehow you can have both corporate societies that are falling apart which seems illogical, without rule of law there cannot be corporation and societies rock solid and unshakable.

“Aristocratic Society” no modifiers, lord, ladies, kings and all that can be utterly stable withstanding any shock.

“Socialist Society” Max social strength 8, 9s and 10s must be re-generated. hmm socialist systems, without providing a real definition of that means find true stability impossible.

And in case you thought ‘Socialist’ means USSR because this game is a product of late 70s engineering.

“Communist Society” max social strength is 7 with result 8-10 re-rolled.

There buried in the rules in the modifiers are the authors’ political belief that open, capitalist societies are inherently more stable than other systems.

All art, even gaming,  is political.

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Comic Con Online

I won’t have a lot to say about this as I have never been a regular attendee of San Diego’s famous Comic-Con. My interest in the Comic industry has always been light, never a collector myself but during the 80s reading the issues purchased by my collector friends. That said I am not putting down the Comic-Con. It’s a tremendous event that now puts a global spotlight on things geeky and nerdy and I am thrilled that so many of my friends have such a good time most years.

The pandemic, just as it has with some many other fun events, canceled in person Comic-Con but the organizers have thrown together a virtual convention with panel discussions and presentations now available on YouTube. Yesterday my sweetie-wife and I watched a pair of these, first a cast discussion for What We Do in the Shadows, FX’s hit vampire comedy and this was quite enjoyable and then an interview discussion with Charlize Theron about her evolution in an action star and general all around badass on-screen.

The online presentation is a poor substitute for the crowded chaos that is Comic-Con and I dearly hope that my friends can soon return to in person geekery.

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The GOP MUST be Burnt Down

Yesterday as part of my political podcast world I listened to The Dispatchwhich is part of the conservative but not pro-Trump continuum. I listen to mainstream news and political discusses from both the right and the left in part because I am not going to judge any faction by what their opponents say but rather what I hear from them myself. One of the topics of the Podcast raised by writer David French was on the desirability of the election removing Trump from office but without serious damage to the Republican office holders below the level of President. French seems concerned with ‘collective’ punishment being unfairly handed to the GOP at large.

“Collective’ punishment conjures up impressions of innocent member of a community being unjustly punished for the actions of a minority of the person who by mere happenstance are also member of the community.

That is not what has happened with Trump and the Republican Party.

First off, Trump did not fall out of the sky into the position of Leader of the GOP. He was the party’s leading choice from the moment he entered the race. The GOP had spent decades preparing a political ecosystem where someone of Trump character would thrive. They are Doctor Frankenstein and he is their monster; the responsibility is theirs.

Next, the Republican Office holders with a clear view of the man’s corruption and incompetence did not thing to limit his damage to our nation. Satisfied with tax cuts and judges and terrified of the base that they themselves had cultivated they stood by, abandoning their duty, their oaths, and their honor as they turned a blind eye to his maleficence. The culminated in, at their hands and their hands alone, the cowardice of his acquittal.

Faced with Trump corruption, criminality, and incompetence the Senate republicans turned their backs on the United States of America, pushed their fingers into the ears, squeezed their eyes shut and desperately wished for it all to just go away. The result of this abdication is the death of tens of thousands of Americans.

Had the Senate removed Trump as their clearly needed to it we would but have faced a pandemic with an incompetent, fragile ego, narcissistic failed businessman and reality television star as President. While people can have their issue with Vice President Pence, we would have stood a much better shot at a competent response to the crisis and that would have saved lives. Thousands of lives.

Of course, I am not saying that the senate knew the pandemic was rising. But they knew, we all knew, Trump was incapable of rising to a crisis and for the US President a crisis is always on the horizon.

It is not ‘collective punishment’ to hold them accountable for their inaction. An 18-year-old infantry man who through cowardice gets his unit killed and wounded would not be excepted from the consequences of his failure and neither should his elected officials be excused simply because they may advance a policy you desire. They are not being held accountable for Trump’s actions but for their own. The GOP cannot be an honorable party if it is comprised of dishonorable members.

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Quick Hits for July 23rd

No long form essay today just a few quick thoughts to kick off the morning.

 

Ladyhawke this film from 1985 doesn’t get the love that it deserves. A romantic fantasy directed by Richard Donner and starring Mathew Broderick, Rutger Hauer, and Michelle Pfeiffer this movie has it all, action, comedy, romance, and one of the best magical curses ever devised and yet it doesn’t get a tenth of the fan love and devotion as The Princess Bride. Both movies deserve to be in the Fan Cannon.

 

The year 2020 sucks. Not a new or shocking revelation but one I think constantly. I never expected that the year I debuted as a published novelist would be so terrible.

 

It’s hard getting people to leave reviews on Amazon. Please if you’ve read Vulcan’s Forge leave a review even if it is one star and you hated the book. Though of course I pleased that so far people seem to really like it and got what I was shooting for. Reviews raise visibility on the shopping sites and all of this year’s debut authors need the help.

 

Though it doesn’t look like I will return in in-person role play gaming before next year I have been hard at work on my Space Opera Campaign. I’ve been spending weekends working on Excel spreadsheet to do the tedious calculations that slow down the flow of play and last night I had an epiphany for solving a calculation that has been bugging me.

 

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Streaming Review: The Old Guard

This month Netflix added to its catalog the adventure The Old Guard. Starring and produced by Charlize Theron The Old Guard is an adaptation of a comic book about a band of warriors who are nearly immortal.

Theron plays ‘Andy,’ the leader of the mercenaries and the eldest having been at this since antiquity. Kiki Layne plays Niles Freeman a U.S. Marine and she is the newest addition to the squad providing an audience surrogate and a handy target for backstory and exposition. Attempts to stay in the shadows of the modern world fails for the Andy and her team leading to confrontation with a greedy pharma corporation and the discovery that truly are fates worse than death.

The Old Guard is a solid action movie without any glaring flaws or shortcomings. Theron plays both action and emotional beats with skill and as a producer she has shown a talent for bring in productions that have a deeper construction than a surface gloss. All of the performances in the film are competent and the script moves at a pleasing clip. There are turns and reveals in the story and it may be because I am a writer myself but none of these were truly surprising but neither are they damaging to the movie’s dramatic narrative. The combat is brutal and the effects of violence, even on those who heal magically, is never ignored. A moment at the film’s resolution echoed another film about immortality Chronos but aside from that I thoroughly enjoyed by hair of two hours it took to watch this film.

Overall if you have a Netflix account and enjoy films of the fantastic this is worth your time.

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How Did I Ever Run This Game in the 80s?

I have been a role play gamer since 1979 when my friend Jim, whom I met in Basic Training for the U.S. Navy, introduced me to AD&D. Very quickly I experimented with number of other RPG game systems in those early years when new game systems appeared like mushrooms after a moist summer evening. Fantasy Games Unlimited provided two of the system I played the most besides AD&D, Villains and Vigilantes, a comic book role playing game where with the right dice rolls a normal person’s punch could do more damage than a nuclear weapon, and Space Operaa game of high adventure among the stars that allowed everything from Star Trek style campaigns to Star Wars and everything in between.

Space Opera has three credited authors two fat core rule books, and apparently no editor. The rule books are riddled with typos, inconsistencies, and no logical organizational layout. Character creation can be a lengthy process taking hours to perform all the rolls, computations, and decisions in establishing your hero. In addition to all that the rules can get quite detailed in trying to model nearly every conceivable situation. Literally there are paragraphs devoted to performing a hand-off when one character has to pass an item to another character during combat or chaotic events.

Despite all this Space Opera turned out to be the sweet spot for my style as a game master. During the early to late 80s I ran a number of campaigns many of which are still fondly remembered. The wide-open setting, the rules that encompassed nearly every conceivable science-fiction trope, and the sheer imagination made this my favorite to run and a favorite among my players.

But, all the fiddly rules, calculations, and record keeping were a serious challenge. Space Opera, if you run as Lieutenant Saavik would, that is by the book, creates vast amounts of record keeping, some of which I kept up with, some of which I ignored, and some I fudged. Certainly, many of the detailed calculations I approximated rather than compute to their final precise answer.

Last year, after discovering I still had my original rulebooks and that all of the materials were available for purchase as PDFs online, I, at the urging of my players, launched  a new Space Opera campaign.

In the intervening decades I have become a little more focused on following game rules and of course that makes Space Opera quite a challenge. With the game decades out of print there is little, but not zero, fan support on the internet. When this game was published there was no internet and advanced players socialized through BBS. I have found a few data sheets that help turn the game into something more manageable and provide some assistance in the more detailed bits such as an excel spreadsheet for character creation.

Now I have turned my weak spreadsheet skills to the task and have started creating my own game aids. I have completed a worksheet for computing a character’s chance of advancing a level in a particular skill. One cell required an IF statement that was nested 18 times, but it works. Next up a ship’s log to record fuel use, maintenance requirements, and travel time computation. After that a campaign calendar to track these things for my players.

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Movie Review: Little Monsters (2019)

Little Monsters a 2019 Zombie-Comedy is a bit of a ‘bait and switch.’ The trailer and promotional material pushes the storyline of Miss Caroline (Lupita Nyong’o) as a kindergarten teacher who must keep her charges safe during a zombie outbreak while simultaneously keeping the small children from understanding the truth of their dire situation by making it all an elaborate game. Those plot elements do make up a substantial portion of the film’s second and thirds acts but Miss Caroline is not the story’s protagonist.

The story’s main character is David, a pot-addicted, obscenity spewing, failed street busking musician, man-child. So, the core plot of Little Monstersis a very tired one, the immature man forced into adulthood. David intersects with Miss Caroline and her class because his nephew Felix is one of her students and after becoming enamored with Miss Caroline David accompanies her and the class on the field trip where the zombie outbreak take place.

A third central character is Teddy McGiggles played by comedian Josh Gad, a popular American children’s television host on tour through Australia where the film is set. in another expedition to trope-ville Teddy is a boozing, foul, kid-hating character with little to differentiate him from similar characters that have come before.

What saved Little Monsters and made the viewing enjoyable was the immense talent of Lupita Nyong’o. This woman as an actor is simply credible in everything she plays and can draw in a viewer while making a character that on the page feels rather worn fresh and complex. Had the movie been centered on her character rather than the fairly typical David the movie would have been greatly enhanced and it is no surprise that the marketing focused on the movie’s greatest asset.

In this movie much of the comedy works though there is a fair amount of ‘cringe’ comedy focused on a character’s lack 0f self-realization that brings public embarrassment, so on that front your mileage may vary. The story’s approach to the nephew Felix is charming and the both the young actor and the character are endearing enough to pull the viewer into serious concern when he is threatened.

Overall this is worth at least one viewing though you must remember that it is not until the second act that the film’s real star and emotional heart arrives.

Little Monsters is currently streaming on Hulu as a Hulu Original.

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