Monthly Archives: February 2021

Streaming Review: The Dig

 

The Dig is a dramatization of the discovery of a 6th century burial ship on an English estate by a self-trained archaeologist, Basil Brown (Ralph Fiennes) and the estates owner the widow Edith Pretty (Carey Mulligan.) The movie details their struggles with acceptance, resistance from the accredited community, and deteriorating health all as England the world plunge into the cataclysmic horror of the Second World War.

This is a quiet, sedate, drama without anyone pulling a weapon or even raising their voice and it still crackled with tension as the characters faces trials and tribulations. It is a perfect example of that uniquely British style of drama that is motivated by class and manners, where the stakes are defines by expectations and the cost of defying them. In years past The Dig would have played to great success on the silver screen but not only due to the pandemic but also changing audience patterns niche channels and streaming services are now the home for this sort of dramatic fare. The truth of the matter is that fewer and fewer people are willing to pay more than twenty dollars a piece for non-spectacle cinema. That is not a slight on spectacle films but rather an acceptance that audiences have changed.

The performances in The Dig are superb. Fiennes adopts a Suffolk accent that is simply charming, Mulligan radiates sympathy a widowed wife facing not only the challenge of raising a son alone with also while dealing with a terrible condition all without ever devolving into maudlin pits of self-pity. The supporting cast is equally talented including Lilly James as a young archaeologist faced with sexism from academia and the horror that she has married the wrong man.

Cinematographer Mike Eley captures haunting and lovely images of the English country giving the fog a ghostly and timeless luminosity that feels as though it has passed through the centuries with the buried burial site.

Screenwriter Moira Buffini’s script shows a deft competence and subtilty that trusts the audience to understand the situation and the characters’ inner lives and motivations without needlessly wordy exposition.

Under the helm of Director Simon Stone all of these elements come together for a moving portrait of people and an age that has now passed.

The Dig is streaming on Netflix.

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WandaVision’s Critical Questions

 

We are now five episodes and on the eve of the sixth into Marvel Studios’ television project WandaVision and in my mind there a few essential mysterious questions propelling the plot. Naturally to even pose the questions is a bit of a spoiler so consider this lede your warning.

In No particular Order.

1) Who is Agnes? Other recurring and important residents of Westview NJ have been identified but on the big board Agnes still has no real-world identification. This coupled with her knowledge and acceptance of Wanda’s powers along with her ‘coincidental’ arrival at key plot points indicates she is a principally important piece of the puzzle.

2) Who or What are Wanda’s Children” It’s been established Wanda or the ‘Hex’ doesn’t created matter but rearranges it and the twins are real but like Agnes without real counterparts. Connecting question; Why are they immune to Wanda’s abilities?

3) What is the purpose of the broadcast’s commercials? In the four commercials all present elements key to Wanda’s backstory before the series. Stark Industries whose weapons killed her parents, Strucker who led the experiment that enhanced her and her twin brother, Hydra the organization that Struker served, and Lagos the site of her mishap that resulted in the death of Wakandans and helped initiate the Sokovian Accords regulating super powered individuals.

4) When ‘Norm’ temporarily freed of the Hex’s influence begs Vision to stop ‘her’ who is ‘her?’ A casual interpretation would be Wanda but the using only a pronoun is a classic way to mask the actual identity.

5) What was SWORD doing with Vision’s corpse? In episode five security records show Wanda stealing Vision’s corpse from a SWORD facility but it was clear that the corpse was not merely in storage but being subjecting to study and or tests. In the comics SWORD stands for Sentient World Observation Response Division but in the Cinematic Universe World has been replaced with Weapon and I can think of only three such ‘items’ in the MCU, AIDA from season 4 of Agents of Shield, Ultron from Avengers: Age of Ultron, and Vision. Of that list all have been destroyed but one has been in some matter returned to functionality, Vision.

6) Why is SWORD Director Hayward so intent of presenting Wanda as a terrorist and willing to move to lethal force so quickly?

So, these are the questions I think are essential elements to the final resolution of the series and the answers will determine if the story works or fails.

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Late to the Game: Star Trek Discovery

 

Though the series is in its third season it was only just this week that I started watching Star Trek: Discovery.

My affiliation with Star Trek goes all the way back to the series’ original run in the mid to late 1960s, though as a child my understanding of the episodes at that time was quite spotty. By the mid 70s with syndication I became quite familiar with the series and a lifelong fan. To this day the words Star Trek always conjure the 60s television show before all other images.

I enjoyed The Next Generation seasons 3 thru 5 finding the first two a little dry and the having lost interest later as the stories became to fantastical and too often resolved by hand waving rather than character motivations. Deep Space Nine was amusing but not compelling to me. I switched off Voyager by the third episode and bounced of Enterprise’s pilot, so the announcement of a new series did not exactly excite me. With the added hurdle it required subscribing to yet another pay streaming service I simply never watched Star Trek: Discovery.

A subscription deal by way of one of my credit card companies along with the promise of a much larger library of Paramount films induced me to finally try the service and now I have watched the first three episode of Discovery.

I’m enjoying it.

The stories so far are much more character based with flawed and imperfect people propelling the plot by their motivations, mistakes, and misapprehensions rather than relying on ‘It’s science-fiction so we can do anything!’ plotting.

Don’t get me wrong, the science of the show is still far from rigorous, but the same can be said of the original series. I like it when an SF property works hard to get their science right but one can be entertained by compelling characters without the edge of hard SF.

I recognize that the series is at odds with what many consider cannon for the Federation Universe but again the original show, produced during the heyday of episodic television where every episode stood alone, never bent knee to the gods of continuity. So much so that modern younger fans watching the original episodes conclude that General Order 24 in A Taste of Armageddon  must be a bluff rather than that the beloved United Federation of Planets actually has a general order for the destruction of a civilization. Old Trek and new trek have never been fully compatible.

So, recognizing those points, I like the show and it’s take on the characters. I enjoy the concept of a central human character who was raised on Vulcan and whose identity is conflicted by being biological human of culturally Vulcan. It’s possible that the first three episodes have misled me and if that is the case there are other programs to occupy my time but for now I am a fan and it has become part of my unwind ritual before bedtime.

Star Trek: Discovery currently streams on CBS All Access soon to be rebranded as Paramount +.

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Republican Nihilism

 

The hard truth is that the Republican party believes in nothing. It has not always been this way but as it is currently constituted there is no base philosophical or political beliefs that is the foundation of the party or its movement. There are instead policy goals and factions that will embrace any position and any ploy to advance their own narrow interest. Less gun regulation, reducing taxation on the wealthy, allowing greater totals of pollution, harsher regulation of immigration, forcing pregnancies to term, and more are all policy positions without a governing philosophical basis.

During the Cold War when the West was locked into a Global Struggle with the Soviet Union the GOP insisted that it fought for freedom, for self-determination, and self-rule, for democracy over the authoritarianism of the communist block and it is true then but such ideals have been abandoned for the power to implement policy.

The 2020 election brought a popular vote total with the Democratic party beating the Republican by 7 million votes. Self-rule and democratic ideals meant nothing to the GOP as it backed its corrupt leader’s attempt to subvert and overthrow the election.

The Republican Party for my entire voting life has proclaimed itself the defenders of the American Constitution and derided its opponents as people willing to openly disregard that document in pursuit of their preferred outcomes. The GOP may have believed that but in the light of the current day it is factually false.

The 2020 election has no systemic, pervasive, or significant fraud or election failures and when the clear and plain interpretation of the Constitution ran counter to the GOP retaining the power to implement policy, they abandoned the Constitution wholesale. 126 House Republicans sought to overturn the legal, fair, constitutional election because the results were not to their liking.

The Republican Party is not the party of freedom, not for states or for individuals, it is the party of power and now that it has lost it it will cry and scream and beg that its opponents must respect ‘norms’ and ‘traditions’ that the GOP has forsaken long ago. Those are lies and we must not be deceived by them.

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Streaming Review: House (1977)

Streaming Review: House (1977)

On paper the plot of Japan’s 1977’s unique horror film House is deceptively simple. Seven teenage girls spending their summer vacation in a remote and isolated house face deadly supernatural peril. Variations on this set-up have prompted everything from competent well crafted horror film to direct to video exploitive fare but nothing is like Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House.

Most movies take extraordinary care to never spoil the illusion of reality they are trying to achieve, to never remind the audiences that there are in fact watching a film but written by Chiho Katura and directed by Obayashi House, leaning heavily into the artifice of filmmaking, never lets you forget that this is fact entirely artificial. From obvious stages, painted backdrops for landscapes, animated sequences, to characters interacting with a diegetic backstory flashback House revels in shattering the facade between the art and the observer.

The artificiality is further enhanced by the names for the seven teenage girls with each only referred by a nickname that typifies that girl’s defining characteristic, Gorgeous for the beautiful daughter of a film composer, Prof for the girl drawn to intellectual talents, Kung Fu for the martial artist and athlete, Fantasy for the dreamer and so on. The characters are deliberately

Kumiko Oba (“Fantasy”), Masayo Miyako (“Sweet”), Eriko Tanaka (“Melody”), Kimiko Ikegami (“Gorgeous”), Ai Matsubara (“Prof”), Mieko Sato (“Mac”), Miki Jinbo (“Kung Fu”); seated: Yoko Minamida (“Gorgeous’s Aunt”)

drawn in the most simplistic terms existing as archetypes versus fully realized and motivated people but it is clearly a deliberate choice by the writer and director rather than a deficit of talent on either of their parts.

The resulting film is unique, frenetic, and hallucinatory, as though the filmmakers were simultaneously riding a sugar-high while tripping on LSD.

House is a difficult film to either recommend or to dissuade anyone from watching as it is so unique and unlike any other horror movie that everyone person watching it is liable to have a reaction as unique as the film itself. It is the truest melding of ‘art house’ with the horror genre I have ever experienced making such films a Midsommar or The Wicker Man appear as sedate and conventional as 70s prime time dramas. If you have a taste for experimental film and the description ‘Lynchian’ is familiar and not a turn-off then Obayashi’s House may be just right for you.

House is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.

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The Bulwark vs The Dispatch

 

Among my political readings and podcasts there are two distinctly conservative voices, The Bulwark and The Dispatch. Both are staunchly ‘Never Trumpers’ who did not support and have consistently argued against and fought the Trump takeover of the Republican Party.

The Dispatch includes a number of writers exiled from National Review for their anti-Trump views including David French, Steve Hayes, and Jonah Goldberg. The Bulwark rose from the ashes of The Weekly Standard and includes the likes of Charlie Sykes, Jonathan V. Last, and Bill Kristol.

Among the ‘Never Trumpers’ one common divisor is the ‘Burn it All Down’ camp vs the “Reformers” camp, the former believing that the current GOP and its leaders must be driven from public life before conservatism can be reclaimed and the latter supporting a more limited expulsion of Trump supporters but not of the core GOP elected officers.  The Bulwark, while not uniformly, is pretty much a ‘Burn it All Down’ establishment and The Dispatch are ‘Reformers.’

Perhaps the most significant difference between these two conservative voices is the level of self-reflection they are willing to tolerate. Both camps hate Trump and his enthusiastic cult-like followers and call out the authoritarian bent that led to the Jan 6 2021 attempt to overthrow the election and the incoming legitimate government but there is a difference when it comes to the reason Trump took their party.

The Bulwark team has been much more willing to look much earlier than 2015 and search for what made it possible for a vile, corrupt, bigoted conman to leapfrog to the head of the GOP primary while The Dispatch’s team seem much more willing to label Trump a bolt from the blue, a strange and unique occurrence abetted by media influence, that is unlikely to repeat.

Frankly, I am with The Bulwark on this. Trump did not spring from the GOP fully formed like Athena from Zeus. The voting base of the GOP had been primed, cultivated, and molded for years into the sort of force that would respond to Trump’s brand of cruelty and without recognizing that fact and destroying that foundation there is no salvaging of any movement on the right.

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New Nordic Noir: The Bridge

 

Okay, it is not ‘new’ as the television series has 4 seasons released on home media but it is ‘new’ to me so I am sticking with the post’s title.

The Bridge is a Swedish/Danish co-production centered on investigations that bridge the nations of Sweden and Denmark. Its protagonist is Saga Noren a Swedish homicide investigator. Saga is brilliant but socially awkward and many viewers feel, though it has not been confirmed, that her character exist along the Autism spectrum.

The first season opens with the lights on the bridge between the Swedish City of Malmo and the Danish capitol of Copenhagen going out and in the intervening darkness, an unknown person leaves the corpse of a murdered woman on the bridge with half in Swedish jurisdiction and half in the Danish.

Murder mysteries tend to fall into two major camps, one centered on realistic portrayals of murders and investigators grounded in ruthless reality and the other focused on hyper-competent detectives facing villains of extraordinary brilliance and skill. The Bridge belongs to the latter category. While Saga’s partners and associates are not presented as bumbling like Holmes’ Lestrade often is portrayed, she exists on a different level of skill and talent. Likewise, the murderer of season one possesses a keen brilliance and has made detailed plans for nearly every contingency years ahead of their plot. If you go into The Bridgelooking for gritty realism, while the story and themes are grounds in societal ills, the execution is less concerned with realism than twist and reveals in the plot.

Sadly, The Bridge is not currently streaming anywhere available to the USA. My sweetie-wife who wanted to see the series after reading about it purchased season 1-4 on the UK Blu-ray release and we have been watching it that way.

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One Last Act to Perform

 

I’m quite pleased with how my WIP in coming along. Last night I completed Act 4, the character is now isolated and under official sanction if she continues the investigation but the truth compels her onward. I have one more act to write. If Act 5 comes in around projected sized my first draft should land just shy of 100,000 words.

Once the final act is completed, that’s another 2-3 weeks of writing, then I have a few major revisions to implement and a serious decision to make.

When I first conceived this novel early on in the backstory, I had two major paths to decide between in how things worked. I went with path B now as I near the end I cannot for the life of me remember why path B was the superior one and I have to consider that possibly it wasn’t and part of the revisions should be putting everything on A. It would not be a ground up rewriting, its direct effect on the plot in fact is rather minimal but I find it terribly frustrating that I can’t recall the reason for my decision.

Oh well, the good news is that the characters and the story are progressing very nicely and I’m pleased with the overall effect. We’ll see if beta readers feel the same way.

 

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Post-Apocalyptic Progenitor: Deluge

Post-Apocalyptic Progenitor: Deluge

Recently on an episode of the podcast Junk Food Cinema one of the hosts, C. Robert Cargill, made a brief foray into the history of post-apocalyptic movies as part of their discussion centered on the satirical movie A Boy and his Dog. In that history when he talked about the original post-apocalyptic film, I expected him to detail 1936’s The Shape of Things to Come by H.G. Wells which covers a war that shatter civilization, the barbarity that followed, and the eventual enlightened society that developed. (It is really a fascinating movie with a look at the horrors another world war might bring created during the interwar period.) Instead of that film Cargill talked about an earlier movie 1933’s Deluge.After a little bit of searching, I found a Roku channel that streamed the movie and watched it last night.

Clocking in at a lean 70 minutes Deluge wastes no time in telling its story. Centered on three principal characters Martin and Helen Webster along with their two small children and Claire an athletic swimming champion socialite. However, none of the three are present much in the film’s establishing act. Scientists are concerned by strange weather patterns portending massive storms. A series of earthquakes moving eastward that submerge the entirety of the US’s West Coast along with reports of similar seismic events from Europe indicate a global catastrophe that crashes all of civilization. Martin and Helen attempt to endure the terrible storms but are separated leaving Martin as the apparently sole survivor of the family on an isolated spit of land. Claire finds herself at the hands of a pair of men as equally uncivilized at the landscape. She escapes and discovers Martin where they form a bond in the struggle to survive. Helen, not killed during the cataclysm, has ended up with a settlement of survivors and all three set of characters are forced to deal with a violent marauding band in the area. Deluge’s final act centers not on combating the marauders but resolving the romantic triangle of Martin/Helen/Claire.

Deluge was a far more entertaining film that I had expected. There’s no doubt that many of the tropes we still see in post-apocalyptic fictions are present in the pre-code piece of cinema which depicts the harsh times following the disaster with an unexpected brutality. I appreciate that the filmmakers made no attempt to actually explain the causes of the worldwide disaster. Sometimes in speculative fiction it is better to just have the fantastic happen and not explain than to try and craft a justification that doesn’t work. It is an interesting sociological note that the film opens with a title card reminding the audience that this is a work of fantasy because in the bible God had promised to never flood the world again.

I do not regret at all spending just over an hour watching Deluge and for people fascinated by disaster films it is well worth a watch to see the progenitor of so many cinematic cliches.

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Three Days Post Vaccination

 

Friday, because I work in the healthcare industry as my day job, I received my first does of the Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccine.

First let me complement the nurse, Amanda, for her excellent skills handling the syringe. Despite this being an intermuscular injection vs a subcutaneous one I really did not feel the piercing at all. Well Done!

Onto side effects, or as they are known in the industry, Adverse Events.

On Saturday I had muscular soreness and fatigue in the arm that received the injection but no where else. This was not an effect from the needle, I inject medication every week for other conditions and I am quite familiar with injection site pain. This was sort of like a flu muscular ache but restricted to the upper arm that received the vaccine.

Also by late Saturday, despite having gotten a good night sleep with my replacement CPAP machine, my energy levels plummeted and a strong lethargy permeated me.

Bu Sunday both of these effects dissipated away and I felt fine.

I urge everyone to get the vaccine. It is the primary way we are going to end the pandemic that has claimed nearly half a million American lives. You may hear in various news sources about the vaccine not being one hundred percent effective possibly and even less so against new variants of the disease. This true in that it doesn’t stop 100 percent of all infections, but it does stop death. No one in the 75,000-person trial of the Pfizer vaccine died from COVID-19 and very few had any serious illness. Those 5% form whom the vaccine was ‘not effective’ suffered a mild form of the disease much like a weak flu. Getting vaccinated is literally the difference between living and dying, get it.

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