Monthly Archives: May 2022

Movie Review: MEN

From writer/director Alex Garland, screenwriter of 28 Days Later, Sunshine, Dredd, Ex Machina, and Annihilation and director of the final pair of that list comes the strange horror film Men.

Harper Marlowe (Jessie Buckley), retreating for two weeks in a rental house in the English countryside following the traumatic loss of her husband James, finds that all the men in the local village, all played by Rory Kinnear, are demanding, disturbing, and vaguely threatening,

A24 Studios

from the tween insisting on playing hide and seek with her to the naked vagrant who follows her home. Harper is confronted by both internal threats, guilt, and sorrow over her husband James, and external, the men of the village, while trying to come to a new emotional balance.

Rory Kinnear’s multi-part performance is non-diegetic, Harper shows no reaction to the fact that all the men she encounters are all variations on the same individual and as such it is a symbolic expression intended solely for the audience.

Garland’s previous scripts can be roughly divided into straight forward descriptive narratives, 28 Days Later, Sunshine, Dredd where the images on the screen represent an objective reality, and symbolic expressions such as Annihilation, where the scenes represent emotional, psychological states of the characters. Men lives deeply in the symbolic side of Garland’s creative process. The film follows its own nightmarish dream logic, particularly in its third act when objective reality is apparently discarded entirely. And yet the final sequences of the movie would seem to indicate that the fantastical events of the story climax were also reality the chaos’ detritus is seen by characters beyond Harper.

Men is a brilliantly crafted film that luxuriates in long shots and sequences that layer tension but the open to interpretation and symbolically charged elements of the imagery I found, while expertly executed, difficult to connect with and unclear in their meaning.

This movie is no doubt someone’s jam, and I have no question that it will be divisive, but I found it impossible to lose myself in the film as I was constantly battered by the question if I should be taking this literally or symbolically? Garland never gave me a clear direction on that and so I left the theater confused and without any strong emotional reaction.

Men is highly subjective, and it is a film that is impossible to either recommend or oppose as each individuals reaction is likely to be highly idiosyncratic.

Streaming Review: Suddenly, Last Summer (1959)

Doctor John Cukrowicz (Montgomery Clift) is a talented and empathetic neurosurgeon working in a deeply under-funded southern hospital just before the outbreak of world war II. A wealthy local widow Violet Venable (Kathrine Hepburn) offers to fund an expansion of the hospital, but she wants her niece Katherine (Elizabeth Taylor), currently confined to a Catholic asylum, treated by Cukrowicz’s lobotomy technique. However, when he examines Katherine, he

Columbia Pictures

suspects that Venable is more interested in suppressing the truth of her son’s death while vacationing with Katherine than in her niece’s wellbeing. With the future of the hospital at stake and relatives pressing for the procedure to please the family’s matriarch Cukrowicz is in a race against time to discover the truth that has unbalanced and disturbed Katherine before another specialist, one not so constrained ethically as himself, is brought in to lobotomize the young woman.

Suddenly, Last Summer is actually my fist encounter with the works of celebrated playwright Tennessee Williams, though the screenplay was adapted by Gore Vidal. The film is an example of Southern Gothic replete with eccentric characters, mystery, and a dark heart. The driving mystery of the film is the death of Mrs. Venable’s son, Sebastian, a poet, and charming person adored by all who knew him and portrayed in the film to preserve the illusion of a person uniquely different from the rest of his family and society. While the official cause of Sebastian death is reported as heart attack it is clear that this is a cover story and the doctor’s attempts to uncover the truth and help Katherine confront the terrible memory lay at the story’s emotional heart.

I must admit that my enjoyment of this film was somewhat depressed by the fact that I was already aware of the truth of Sebastian’s demise from the documentary that sparked interest in this film, but I will neither reveal the mystery nor the documentary instead suggesting that you see this film blind and unspoiled for its full effect.

Elizabeth Taylor was 27 when she made Suddenly, Last Summer and, having drawn on personal tragedy to power her performance, was reportedly inconsolable after filming Katherine’s emotionally fraught recounting of the tragic death at the film’s climax. Hepburn dominates every scene she speaks in with a patrician’s command and turns in a stunning performance as the cold matriarch hiding a dark secret.

Suddenly, Last Summer is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel but leaves at the end of May.

Science and Science Fictional Thoughts

Recently, I’ve been thinking about star and star system formation a lot.

The basics, I understand it, runs something like this.

1) A large cloud of gas, the remnants from previous stellar explosions, begins collapsing under its gravitational attraction.

2) Angular momentum spins faster compressing it into an accretion disk. In the disk denser clumps begin gathering and forming the seeds of planets.

3) Most of the cloud is pulled to the center forming a massive body whose center becomes more and more compressed raising the temperature.

4) When the temperature and pressure get high enough the star ignites and blows out the last vestiges of the cloud. Leaving a star and forming planets.

I have questions.

As the cloud compresses into a star but before fusion starts hoe dense does that gas get? Do we get atmospheres of pressure reaching from the core out to the orbital distances of the future planets? Would it be dense enough for aerodynamic forces? Do we potentially have dense enough gas that there is effectively an atmosphere between the soon to be star and it’s forming planets? Could electric charges build up in this massive cloud producing planet-sized or large lightning bolts?

When the fusion starts how fast is that process? Is it thousands or millions of years between ignition and having a star or is much shorter and explosive? What sort of pressure is generating in the remaining cloud as a blast wave that sweeps through the emerging star system?

Welcome to the late-night thoughts of a science fiction writer.

Quick Thoughts on the Leaker SCOTUS Draft

First off let me be plain, I am pro Choice on the issue of abortion. There are lots of arguments why but one I see too little of that to me is hugely determinative is that giving birth is life-threatening, particularly in the American health care system, especially so for people of color and poor economic resources. The decision to rick one’s life should only rest with the person whose life is being risked.

Alito’s leaked draft opinion is some 98 pages long and my summation of his argument will be both reductive and from a non-lawyer’s perspective. From what I can determine listening to sources both left and right his basic argument flows like this.

Abortion is not specifically named as a right in the constitution.

The constitution does protect right which are not specifically named. (The 9th Amendment.)

To determine if something is an unnamed right one looks to history and tradition as it was understood at the time of the 9th amendment and the 14th. (part of the legal dismantling of slavery following the civil war.)

In Alito’s view abortion was not part of the history and tradition of accepted rights in either the 18th or 19th centuries, therefor it could not be counted among the unnamed rights of the 9th amendment nor among the privileges and immunities of the 14th.

Given that Alito concludes that there is no right to abortion and at the time of the leak has persuaded four other conservative justices to agree to this reasoning, terminating, for the first time ever in American history, and individual right.

To me there are several philosophical troubles with this reasoning.

First it presumes that the unnamed rights of the constitution are a close set, limited in number, and restricted to only what could have been conceived of at the time by while male slavers. Rather than interpreting the galaxy of unnamed right to be an evolving set matching culture as it changed it is a static set but one without any definition to guide future person in that determination.

It relies upon reading minds, from a distance of more than two hundred years, of men who recognized no rights for women in self-determination to adjudicate the rights of people in the 21st century.

It presumes that the men who wrote and adopted the constitution were so limited in their minds and imagination that they were incapable of conceiving of rights not yet considered by history and tradition.

There is a school of thought, generally conservative, that rights are not granted by governments but rather recognized by them and that their true source is a divine power. But if you accept this theory on the source of rights then Alito’s opinion is even more insane. Alito is then saying though God, all knowing throughout all time, imbues people with rights he was incapable of granting rights fallen humans were unable to think of in 1789 or 1868.

In my opinion Alito conclusions, and the agreement of his fellow justices, is nothing more than highly motivated reasoning. This is something I have seen in my past time, tabletop gaming. A player has a predetermined conclusion that would benefit their game and suddenly the interpreting of rules becomes quite fluid and twisted logic is employed to arrive at the desired outcome. The conservatives want to overturn Roe and the method of getting there matters very little. As it has been said on one legal podcast the vibe is very much ‘Stare decisis is for suckers.’

Movie Review: Firestarter (2022)

Previously adapted in 1984 from Steven King’s novel of the same title Firestarter is another go at bring the story to the screen and like the 1984 adaptation this one also ultimately fails.

In 1984 the lead role of Charlie, a young girl with pyrokinetic powers, was performed by 8-year-old Drew Barrymore, and, while she has become an accomplished actor and producers, at 7 she was not ready to carry a film, few that young are, and that, along with middling production values and lackluster cinematography produced a lifeless dull film.

The 2022 interpretation is led by 11-year-old Ryan Kiera Armstrong and the three additional

Credit: Blumhouse Picture

years are a multiplier for her to shoulder the burden of lead character in a major motion picture, yielding a more credible performance and with greater emotional depth. 2022’s Firestarter also sports more talented filmmaking, less exaggerated physical acting, and a subtle light touch to the photography that raises the film’s quality considerably.

Sadly, the script in the final act crashes and burns, jettisoning the story line of emotional manipulation and abuse for a fire spectacle for a finale with a final resolution that breaks all disbelief and insults the character’s trauma and breaks entirely with the source material.

At a quick hour and a half the filmmakers still managed to wedge in pointless scenes that had they been edited out no one would have noticed. What should have been a slow burn, pun intended, of tension drags in flat chemistry-less scenes. The story’s antagonists, are both all-knowing in their surveillance, spotting a random heat spike on a FLIR camera when supposed they had no concept of Charlie’s locations, and monumental ignorant of how to proceed.

The film is not worth your time, and I would suggest if you have a burning, again intentional, curiosity to see it, wait for cable or streaming.

How a Conservative Columnist Displayed Both His Ignorance and His Bias

Elements of the geeky internet awoke yesterday when the ironically name conservative writer David Marcus (Also the name of the fictional son of Trek’s James T. Kirk) accused the new slate of shows of going where it has never gone before ‘woke’ politics.

Now many have already leapt into the conversation with numerous examples od how Star Trek from its very inception had always displayed a more liberal political viewpoint. However, I think that there is more interesting facet to examine in Marcus’ factually wrong essay that displays his own quite strong inherent bias.

First let’s look at a blatant factual inaccuracy. Marcus writes.

“Since its creation in 1966 the franchise has had myriad iterations on big screen and small, basically invented the sci-fi convention, and has charmed audiences across every generation.”

This might be true of Media conventions but there were 29 World Science Fiction Conventions dispensing coveted award before the first large Star Trek convention. (Setting aside a smaller gather in a library conference room.) It is clear that the author has very little practical knowledge of fandom or its history.

Next Marcus takes issues with the casting of politician Stacey Abrams as the President of the United Federation of Planets in the streaming series Picard. Stunt casting is a long and stories tradition in Hollywood, when Babylon 5 moved to TNT there was pressure to cast some the networks wrestling stars in the series for cross promotion and Star Trek in its original 60’s incarnation cast famed celebrity lawyer Melvin Belli as a corrupting alien ghost. Star Trek: The Next Generation saw the casting of real-life astronaut Mae Jemison. This sort of stunt casting is hardly new and not at all new to Trek.

But apparently what set this essay in motion for Marcus, and that’s my opinion from reading the piece, is the brief video from the 2021 insurrection and riot at the US Capitol.

Again, from Marcus’ piece.

The second was a weird plot twist in the pilot of new show, Strange New Worlds in which the 2020 capitol riot is depicted and blamed for starting a Second American Civil War and the destruction of the planet. To put it more succinctly, Orange man bad.

It is illuminating that Marcus see it in this light when in the actual text of the show the character narrating the events is hopes of preventing an alien culture from engaging in a global extinction

CBS Ventures (Screen Cap)

level war describe the start as a ‘fight for freedoms,’ makes no mention who started what, or assigns any blame. Only that the fight grew and grew and grew until it nearly destroyed humanity. And there’s not even a the barest of refences to any currently politician.

The video footage from the insurrection lasts a total of six seconds. From this bit of lifted archival footage Marcus constructs an alternate reality worthy of the Daniels’ multiverse where humanity has hotdogs for fingers. He sees the shows creative team putting all the blame for Trek’sWorld War 3 cannon firmly on the conservative shoulders when the text makes nothing like that argument.

Why does he jump so readily to that conclusion?

To me the answer is plain but is to be fair conjecture. It is because he knows that the violence and death are the product of the modern conservative culture. He desperately wishes it were not so, he desperately, like all of us, wants to be the hero and not the villain. Facts are stubborn things, and the facts are clear it was conservatives that stormed the capitol with murderous intent unwilling to accept the legal, fair, and democratic process that had defeated them. It is far more soothing to the ego to point fingers, accuse others of propaganda, and play the victim than to look into the mirror recognize that you are the evil man.

Marcus’ histrionic response to six seconds of archival footage reveals that he is aware that his faction are the villains, and his response is deep and deadly denial.

Birthday Beg

Saturday is my birthday, and I will be spending it with friends playing the tabletop RPG Space Opera.

While others are quite charitable on Facebook using their birthdays to raise funds for causes this year, I am going to be self-centered and greedy and tell you what I want more than anything for my birthday.

Reviews

My novel, Vulcan’s Forge, has gathered a mere 11 reviews over two years and I desperately need more to appease the god algorithm.

If you have read the book, which can kind of be described as WandaVision meets Raised by Wolves (Humans raised by A.I.s obsessed with mid-twentieth century Americana) w a heavy dash of film noir, then please go to Amazon and leave a review. Even if you hated it, be honest, I am not asking nor wanting anyone to leave false flattering reviews, just reviews.

Movie Review: Everything Everywhere All at Once

Sunday evening, after seeing the latest MCU film that morning, I went and watched Everything Everywhere All at Once (EEAO) from A24 Studios and ‘The Daniels,’ (Dan Kwan & Daniel Scheinert) another multiverse hopping storyline with a villain threatening all of existence.

Michelle Yeoh plays Evelyn a woman estranged from her very western daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu), her very Chinese Father Gong Gong (James Hong), and who ignores her geeky and meek husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan.) With both their laundromat business and marriage failing

A24 Studios

Evelyn and her husband, accompanied by Gong Gong who due to infirmity cannot be left home, are summoned to the local IRS office to confront a cold and unsympathetic auditor Deirdre (Jamie Lee Curtis) but everything is derailed when Waymond from an alternate timeline confronts Evelyn and insists she is the key to saving the universe from Jobu Tupaki, a pan-universal creature bent on chaos and destruction.

EEAO gives its actors a real meal of characters to portray, meek, bold, strong, weak, heroic and depressed most of the cast gets a shot at playing wide and diverse versions of their characters. Despite the on-screen insanity, fun, and sheer inventiveness at its heart the film grapples with extensional dread and the nihilistic fear that nothing at all truly matters. Love, Joy, Happiness, and even life itself is fleeting eventually becoming nothing but dust. The script doesn’t shy away from this truth but also finds ways to recognize that those fleet moments are the value and that because there is no permanence doesn’t mean that there is no meaning.

The film’s characters speak in combination of English and Chinese with liberal use of subtitling for those like me who are stuck as a monolingual talent. While dealing with heavy themes such as the meaning of life and the push and pull of generations and culture EEAO also dips into crude humor and exhilarating action presenting a mixture of tones and styles as diverse as life itself.

I thoroughly enjoyed Everything Everywhere All at Once and I am already looking forward to some future repeat viewing.

Movie Review (Spoiler Free): Doctor Strange in The Multiverse of Madness

Six years, and after several appearances in other franchise properties, Doctor Strange has its the sequel in Doctor Strange in The Multiverse of Madness (MOM).

Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch), master of the mystic arts, grappling with lost years dues to snapture (Hat tip to NPR’s Glenn Weldon for that) and lost loves as Christine Palmer (Rachel McAdams) marries another is drawn into a multi-universal threat rescuing a teenage, America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez), witchcraft summoned demons intent of capturing the young

Disney Pictures

woman for their master’s plan. Recognizing that this is witchcraft and not sorcery Strange seeks out Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) for assistance kicking off a chase across parallel universes, cameos from Marvel characters yet established in the MCU’s cannon and director’s Raimi’s long-time collaborator Bruce Campbell, with homages to their cult classic The Evil Dead, climaxing in CGI saturated battles but with a resolution that ultimately turns on seeing oneself as you truly are rather than how you think you are.

MOM is not the worst MVU films to play the silver screen, but neither is it the best. While heavy handed with some exposition it doesn’t fully its narrative momentum in the second act as did Eternals nor is it as light in character drama as The Incredible Hulk, but Strange’s emotional arc is flat, nearly absent, and with minor script changes that could have been corrected without signification plot deviations. Newcomer Xochitl Gomez does an impressive job holding her own in the presence of such acting talents as Cumberbatch, Olsen, and the film’s other Benedict, Wong, selling her character’s emotional truth without big expansive expressive displays

That said the film’s MVP actor is Elizabeth Olsen. In addition to playing variants of her character she excelled as the displaying depths for these individuals, giving a natural realism that penetrated the plots incredible nature and the CGI’s attempts to steal attention with spectacle. While Strange’s name is in the title the film is really her and I do wonder what viewers who have not seen WanaVision, whose theme composer Danny Elfman slipped into the score, made of Wanda’s principal motivation?

I did find the visual effects not quite on target, but I do not think it was primarily a failure of good rendering or models but rather the final composting left a disquieting disconnect to the varies elements harming the verisimilitude.

Overall, I would rank this MCU entry in the 3rd quarter with about half of the franchise better than and about a quarter not as good.

Doctor Strange in The Multiverse of Madness is currently playing theatrically.

Streaming Review: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

Be aware that I am an old fart and the first thing that comes to mind when someone says ‘Star Trek’ to me is the original series and the original actors, much of the newer batches, particularly the newest, have little call for me.

That said I was excited by the news of Star Trek: Strange New World which proposes to go back to when the Enterprise was commanded by Captain Christopher Pike as seen in Trek’s original pilot The Cage.

In the pilot when we meet Pike (Anson Mount) he is deeply troubled by some haunting past event which he doesn’t share even with his S.O. (Significant Other not Supply Officer) An event

Credit: Paramount Pictures

that has him grounded and doubting himself. However, when his first officer, Number One (Rebecca Romijn) goes missing on a first contact mission Pike resumes command of the Enterprise and launches a mission to save her. During the rescue and first contact mission Pike must come to grips with his trauma and rediscovers, partially through Lt. Noonien-Sign (Christina Chong) a survivor of a horrific event, what it means to live fully under a terrible cloud. An understanding reinforced by his friendship with his science office Spock (Ethan Peck)

Strange New Worlds tips its hat and pay homage to the original series in a number of ways but also breaks canon continuity so your milage may vary on how well it integrates with the franchise as a whole. Secondary characters from the original series appear as crew members, Doctor M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun) appeared in only a couple of episodes in the original show is now the ship’s primary medical officer, assisted by Nurse Christine Chapel (Jess Bush). Additional original series characters include Cadet Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding) and Chief Kyle (Andre Dae Kim) though he looks far too young to be a Chief.

Production design and set decor also took inspiration from the original series while not sacrificing a modern appearance. Graphics that appear on the bridge monitors are directly referencing original low-tech graphics of the original show and control even have some of the domed color button that always looked so candy-like to me.

However, the show is not without its flaws. The distances between star systems is preposterously brief, particularly in respect to the original series. Also Lt. Noonien-Singh’s background is clear break with continuity as James Kirk famously made first contact with the Gorns. There is a tendency to use advanced technology as magic and I doubt that will fade away in subsequent episodes.

But, overall, I enjoyed the pilot and will return next week for more.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds streams Thursdays on Paramount+.

Robert Mitchell Evans

Literary Saboteur