Monthly Archives: April 2021

The GOP Doesn’t Care

The GOP Doesn’t Care

 

The GOP doesn’t care if you contract and die from COVID 19.

The GOP does care about drag queens reading fairytales to kids.

The GOP doesn’t care if you a killed in a mass shooting.

The GOP does care which bathroom you use.

The GOP doesn’t care if you are poisoned by lead in in your drinking water.

The GOP does care if wealthy people pay more in taxes.

The GOP doesn’t care if you die because you cannot afford your insulin.

The GOP does care if children’s books with racism are withheld from the public.

The GOP doesn’t care if you get cancer from pollution.

The GOP does care that your employer can determine your healthcare.

The GOP doesn’t care for democracy.

But the GOP adores their golden god-king Trump.

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Chekov (Chekhov – corrected) Would Be Very Disappointed

 

I recently watched about a third of a horror movie, Game of Death, currently streaming on Shudder and it is a perfect example of how not to construct a story.

This movie has the very brief running time of a meager 73 minutes. Given such a short length this is the sort of movie that needs to hit the ground already sprinting at full speed perhaps in mid-action with flashback to fill in the audience on how the set-up was established.

But that is not how Game of Death (2017) starts. No, the movie wastes 8 full minutes more than 10 percent of the entire film watching the seven ‘characters’ party at rural home. This extended sequence does very little to reveal character, I honestly couldn’t tell you any of the defining elements of any of their personalities, present no dramatic tension or conflict, and carries no foreshadowing of doom. It is fully wasted time.

Eventually the characters take a break from drugs, swimming, the least erotic sexual scenes I have witnessed in a long time to play the titular board game and get the plot moving. Naturally they do not understand the ‘rules’ of the game and when they fail to make their first kill before the timer expires, a timer I might add that display no countdown so neither the characters nor the audience can judge how dire the situation is, the first of the seven has his head explode. The cast misinterpret this as someone shooting at time and when a neighbor appears concerning about the vast amount of screaming coming from the home. They take him hostage assuming that he was the shooter. To do this one of the guys produces a pistol and I asked the same question the rest of the cast voiced, ‘where did you get that?’ Yup, a gun that proves to be vital as that character, and his terrible trigger discipline, force the others to kill random people to sate the game’s appetite, appears wholly unestablished not even in those wasted 8 minutes from the start.

People do not do this in your films, short stories, or novels. Vital and critical elements of your story must be established before they are employed.

I switched off the movie and removed it from my Shudder queue. There are far too many decent and great films to waste my time watching something this spectacularly bad.

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Various Thoughts

 

I have been suffering eye strain headaches so the posting here might be a little sporadic this week. So here are just some random thoughts.

  • The Netflix movie Stowaway is not good science and not engaging fiction. Just streaming something else.
  • Game of Death, a horror movie about seven young adults playing a boardgame that compels them to kill people or die themselves, is even worse and I did not finish it. More than 10 percent of the movie’s running time is wasted up front and watching the characters party but without performing any establishment of character development.
  • The GOP doesn’t care if you die. Remember that in the voting booth.
  • 20 years on The Wire is still spectacularly good television.
  • WorldCon this year has been moved to December and I have no intent of experiencing Washington DC in winter. This makes me sad.

 

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Streaming Review: A Nordic Nightmare: Koko-Di Koko-Da

 

Of late I have been watching a lot of Nordic Noir television programming with my Sweetie-Wife and then stumbled across this Swedish horror film Koko Di Koko Da. (The nonsense title is a sung refrain from a nursery rhyme.)

Married couple Tobias and Elin, three years after the sudden death of their daughter, camp in an isolated wood trying to repair their relationship. While camping they are besieged by three murderous characters from the nursery rhyme that inspired the film’s title and are killed. The sequence of events repeated in a Groundhog Day style loop with only Tobias remember each repeating cycle.

I am sorry to report that this movie simply did not work for me. There are two major factors why I found this movie unsatisfying.

First off, Tobias is a thoroughly unlikeable character, and his treatment of Elin is abominable. It is clear that she does not want to camp but he ignores her feelings entirely for his own desires. In addition to neglect and thoughtlessness Tobias after he is aware of the time-loop that they character are trapped within more than once abandons Elin even before the murderous characters appear. By the midpoint of the movie, I wanted nothing more than for him to die terribly and for Elin to escape. Mind Elin is not a very pleasant person either but as a character she is far more sympathetic than Tobias.

Secondly, more than once the film shatters its point of view with animated intermissions and unmotivated shifting to another character. I think the filmmakers were going for a more stylized and symbolic approach but instead of crafting emotional responses that created only confusion.

The ending holds no catharsis and no resolution but simply terminates the story without explanation or rhyme or reason. This may work for some but for me it was a disappointment.

Koko-di Koko-da is currently streaming on Shudder.

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Wants, Needs, and Character Arcs

Wants, Needs, and Character Arcs

 

StudioBinder is a computer application for film production but they also host a YouTube channel about film that can be very enlightening into all aspects of cinema including story structure. Recently I came across a series of video they made on story endings and how they break down into 4 large categories. That has spurned a lot of thought some of which I’m sharing here.

First off, the core concept they put forward is that characters have wants and needs. I would describe wants as what drive plot and needs as to what fulfills story.

The want is the character defined objective and its associated obstacles. The wants are malleable and often change as the plot progressed. In Moonraker Bond starts out wanting to know who stole the missing space shuttle but by the third act his want is to prevent Drax from killing humanity. The want is what the character is actively trying to achieve.

The need ties directly to character and their growth or fail to grow across the story. Need is the elements of the character that changes and what they need defines the nature of their change. In Moonraker as with many movies in the Bond franchise, Bond has no need. Psychologically and emotionally, he is complete and exits the story as exactly the same character that entered it. However, setting aside episodic story telling most characters have an arc, a change that transforms them in the story and that is tied to their need. Often a character is blindly unaware or in denial of their need. It is the lack of self-awareness about their need that hobbles the character and holds them back from achieving a more well-rounded emotional level.

If you follow the link, you’ll see that the people at StudioBinder define a happy ending as one where both the character’s wants and needs are fulfilled but I will voice an objection to that. Yes, it can be true, but it can also be true that meeting the need alone makes a happy ending. There are stories where what the character wants is wrong and the need when fulfilled supersedes the want and it is something that the character no longer desires and so failing to achieve it is not bitter-sweet or semi-sweet, but actually sweet. A good example of this is The Sure Thing an early romantic comedy from Rob Reiner. In it Gib’s, John Cusack’s character, want is to have commitment free sex with a blond bombshell, his need is to learn to have a deep emotionally adult relationship. Being a rom com, he achieves this when he learns to truly love and never has the free sex he chased after. His want is unfulfilled but satisfying his need changed his character so dramatically that the want simply sublimated away.

In Iron Man Tony Stark’s wants change and evolve with the plot, starting out he wants to party and have fun, then he wants to escape, and he wants to stop selling weapons and eventually he wants to stop Obadiah. His need is to find a purpose to his life and that is fulfilled by becoming Iron Man.

The results are flipped for Steve Rogers Captain America: The First Avenger. Steve’s want is to do his part in the war, and he does, spectacularly. His need is to ‘find the right partner’ the woman that loves and understands him as he is. Peggy is that woman but to fulfill his want Steve has to sacrifice his need, placing his duty before himself, because the need is tied to character not plot, and puts the plane down into the artic to what he believes will be his death.

Wants, Needs, characters and plots, there is a lot to think over here.

 

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Reconnecting: The Wire

 

A number of years ago my friend Brian popped over for a weekend of gaming and afterwards pulled out some DVDs he had brought along and thus was my introduction to HBO’s Cops and Druggies drama The Wire.

Set in Baltimore in 2002, when the series aired, The Wireparticularly the first season focused on a special police unit established to investigate and charge a local drug lord. What set The Wire apart from so many other crime and police shows was its intense dedication of depicting the reality of crime and policing on the streets of Baltimore. It is a police show where the police officers never engage in gun battles with the bad guys and are more often screwed over by departmental politics than and clever criminal conniving. Equally the drug dealers, from the teens on the corner to the masterminds are fully realized three dimensional characters removed from a simplistic portrayal of either being all good or all bad with the same humanity shown to the addicts trapped in their wretched lives. The Wire showed us people trapped in system not of their own making and which curtailed their choices and both police and criminals made choices that were both good and bad. After the first season the focus drifted a bit and while always interesting that lack of clear intent did seem to diminish the series.

Two weeks ago, I queued up the first episode intending simply to watch a few minutes before heading off the sleep. Instead, I was sucked into the intense personal drama and now I am watching an episode a night. I shall likely drop this re-watch once the season ends but it is good to see that quality acting, production, and writing remain irresistible nearly twenty years after its creation.

The Wire streams on HBOMax and HBO.

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Disorganized Chauvin Trail Thoughts

 

It is difficult to judge a jury’s verdict from news reports. There is a vast difference between sitting the court room hearing all the testimony not hearing things that are reported and repeated to the public and coming to a conclusion based upon the fragments in reporting but with all that said to me it looks like they came to the right conclusion, guilty on all counts.

While some of my conservative friends try to dismiss race as any factor in police misconduct and some of my liberal friends seem to see it as the only factor, I try to have what I hope is a more holistic view.

To me there is no doubt that race and racism is a factor, an important one, but far from the only element that contributes to the terrible outcomes in the manner in which our nations police’s its population.

Another vital element is the legal precept of ‘Qualified Immunity’ which shields so many police officers from the consequences of their actions. If actions are free from consequences that there is no incentive to correct future behavior.

The culture of policing in this nation is also a factor in its abuse. Police do not behave as public servants but as an occupying force. The very concept that citizens are referred to as ‘civilians’ reenforces the mindset of an invasive military force. Coupled with the self-segregation and the ‘blue code’ of silence and you have a powerful cocktail for high-handed abuse.

But police culture is a sub-culture of the broader American culture and that is a major contributing factor as well.

American culture is violent. We engaged in violence more often than other western cultures, we celebrate violence in a media, we idolize its practitioners, it is no surprise that American Football is far more popular here than international version, so is it really that surprising that our police forces are also exceptionally violent? The police, for all their self-segregation and isolation remain products of our culture a culture whose dominate myth is the lone man taming a vast wilderness with violence.

There are no easy, fast solutions to our troubles and the road ahead remains difficult.

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Streaming Review: Operation Finale

Saturday night, along with a friend, I watched 2018’s historical drama Operation Finale a dramatization about the covert mission to capture Adolf Eichmann, the man principally for the design, implementation, and operation of the NAZI extermination camps. Let us be absolutely fucking clear on one point, Eichmann is not solely responsible for the Holocaust, he contributed his skills, talent, and abilities to make the systemic murder ‘efficient’ but the entire rotten NAZI system from the top down was responsible.

Not covered in the film is that Eichmann was captured by the Allies but escaped and after surviving on the run for a number of years in occupied Germany, slipped out of the continent fleeing to Argentina with his wife and family.

Operation Finale focuses on Mossad agent Peter Malkin (Oscar Isaac, who was also a producer on the production) whose reputation is less than sterling when he caused a low-level NAZI to be executed in the field after misidentifying him as Eichmann. When Eichmann (Ben Kingsley) is discovered in Argentina because his son Klaus has an unlikely encounter with a holocaust survivor, Israel authorizes a covert mission to verify, capture, and extract Eichmann for trail. The team infiltrates Argentina and despite tensions about brining Eichmann back safely for trail versus extra-judicially executing him, they capture Eichmann only to discover that their plan route out has been delayed by ten days and now must keep him confined as local NAZIs with assistance of the authorities search for Eichmann.

The film never found either the box office or critical love that I think it deserves. The script is tight remaining credible in its depiction of spy craft and finds tension both the dangerous situation the agents work in and the emotionally charges air between captor and captive never losing its focus on Peter and his haunted visions of people lost in the Holocaust. The filmmaking is restrained without overly showing camera moves or cinematography surefooted in its character-based approach. The only production element that nagged at me while viewing the movie was the use of 75 yar old Ben Kingsley as Adolf Eichmann who was 51 at the time of his capture, make-up, and a light digital touch during WWII flashback attempt to maintain the illusion but are never fully convincing.

That said Operation Finale is a damn fine film and well worth the investment of two hour.

Operation Finale is currently streaming on Netflix.

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Streaming Review: Ragnarök (2013)

 

As I have commented on with two posting here, I am currently and thoroughly enjoying the Swedish/Danish television co-production of the Nordic Noir series The Bridge. Particularly impressive has been Sofia Helin’s performance as Detective Saga Noren and I went looking for other projects that she appeared in to compare her performances there and that lead me to Ragnarök.

Released in 2013 Ragnarök is a Norwegian monster movie about an archeologist, Sigurd, that follows clues about a Viking voyage to Finnmark in the extreme north of Norway and an abandoned fenced off zone between Norway and Russia where he finds not only the archeological evidence to support his theories but an ancient aquatic beast. Trapped with his two children and a couple of associates Sigurd must discover the nature of the beats and with little supplies and no weapons see everyone safely out of the dark and dangerous forest.

Sofia Helin plays Elisabeth one of Sigurd’s companions and is in a supporting role in the production. While she is given little actual character work to do, she displays that her work in The Bridge is actually from a great deal of range.

Ragnarök itself is a middling film. It is not bad, and it is not great. The action sequences of tense and taut, the plot takes turns that moved it away from predictability. (When they were trapped in the caverns, I fully expected the rest of the film to take place underground, but both the characters and the writers were more inventive than that.) The cinematography is lovely, fully capturing the deep and isolating wilderness the characters find themselves trapped in while the special effects for the monster are credible and still hold up eight years later which cannot be said about many higher budgeted productions.

The film’s failings are that as a dramatic story there is not enough meat on the bones of the character’s conflict to drive a full feature and as a monster movie the beast arrives too late in the story. The ‘monster movie’ elements of Ragnarök takes place entirely in the films third act and while well-paced and well thought out the late arrival of the film central premise damages the final product.

Still, I do no regret taking the time to watch this film and at a scant hour and a half it doesn’t require a massive commitment.

Ragnarök in Norwegian with English subtitles is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

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Gaming on the Horizon

 

With the novel currently not taking up very many computational cycles now that I have dispatched it to the beta readers and with my gaming group gaining immunity as we get vaccinated, I am turning my thoughts to my Space Opera RPG that will soon resume.

This will be an intensely bitter-sweet. I look forward to hanging out with friends I have not gamed with in more than a year and picking up the campaign where we suspended it, (Rescuing the cousin of a constitutional monarch currently trapped on a post-apocalyptic fallen world.) but it will also be quite sad as the pandemic stole one of our members from us.

It has been a very long time since I have had to deal with the death of a friend and active member of my gaming campaign. While sadly in recent decades friends have passed, the march of time does that to us all, it hasn’t been since the early 80s that death took one of my friends that was actively gaming with us so unexpectedly. We will remember Craig and I will give his character a respectful exit from the story of my campaign.

On a more nuts and bolts level this will also be a chance for me to implement the spreadsheet tools I created last summer to help me manage my Space Opera Campaign.

FGU’s RPG Space Opera has a lot of detailed calculations and data that needs to be tracked for the characters and their vessel. During the pandemic I had a flash of inspiration on how to manage some of it with a continually updated spreadsheet and one the first worked I devised several more of other aspect of the game. I now have tools to track the progress of skill training and to compute to odds of skill advancement, distance between star systems along with travel times and fuel consumption, and current calendar dating.

I miss my friends and Craig I will miss forever.

 

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