Monthly Archives: August 2022

Movie Review: Three Thousand Years of Longing

George Miller, a filmmaker whose filmography is so eclectic as to encompass both the Mad Maxfranchise and Happy Feet, released last week, Three Thousand Years of Longing a story about Djinn (Idris Elba) and scholar of stories (Tilda Swinton.)

Alithea (Swinton) while in Istanbul for a conference where she delivers a talk about how stories once explained the natural world, but the gods and heroes are reduced to simple metaphors. (With a sly visual reference to the D.C. Property of comics, possibly a nod to the never made George Miller’s Justice League.) While shopping for a memento in the famous Grand Bazar she

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purchases a delicate glass bottle that she later learns contains a trapped Djinn (Elba.) the Djinn desperately wants Alithea to speak three wishes from her heart as that will free him from his imprisonment but Alithea as well-versed in the dangerous nature of wishes as any experienced D&D players is reluctant to make any wish fully expecting once fulfilled it will twist and transform from benefit to bane.

The deadlocked characters are the heart and soul of Three Thousand years of Longing with each trying to discover the truth of the other’s nature. Is the Djinn really a trickster seeking to twist her wishes for malintent? Is Alithea as fully contented with not heart’s desire as she professes with nothing that she truly wants to wish for? To answer these questions the characters tell each other their stories transporting each other and us to distant lands and peoples rich with tradition and astonishingly lovely, and yet the throughline for both is loss and yearning.

While director and co-writer George Miller and Cinematographer John Seale has composed a visually stunning film rich and vibrant with color and texture the real reason to watch Three Thousand Years of Longing is Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba in a room, acting off each other. Strip away the special effects and the fantastical elements of plot and the story reduced down to two characters talking and eventually exposing their true selves to one another. With actors as massively talented as this pair that becomes compelling far beyond fantasies of djinn and magic.

Three Thousand Years of Longing is a story about stories, the power of stories as well as the fantasies we tell ourselves when reality proves too harsh to face. It is a film about loneliness, betrayal, and how in the end we can never be sure when that magical touch will appear and transform our live and ourselves.

Three thousand Years of Longing is currently playing and theaters and while it has none of the action of Mad Max: Fury Road it deserves every inch of the big screen as Miller’s thrilling post-apocalyptic fables.

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Streaming Review: Glorious

Streaming Review: Glorious

Released last week to the streaming services Shudder as an exclusive the cosmic horror film Glorious is a very different take on universe spanning threats.

Wes (Ryan Kwanten) is a man in the midst of an emotional crisis. Driving alone and distraught far from freeways and large cities and after a night of drunkenness at a lonely rest stop he finds himself trapped in the bathroom with an ominous voice (J.K. Simmons) speaking to him from the other side of a stall’s ‘glory hole.’ (If you do not know what a ‘glory hole’ is in reference to public spaces I strongly suggest that you do not Google the term from your work computer.) Wes endures horrors, physical and revelational, as the voice implores and compels him for a favor.

Directed by Academic, Scholar, and filmmaker Rebekah McKendry, and co-written by her spouse David Ian McKendry and Joshua Hull, Glorious is a small film that utilizes all of the potential of its limited location and cast in a spare but efficient 79 minutes. McKendry and cinematographer David Matthews continually find inventive ways to frame and shoot their film with a bare handful of locations, keeping clear of the trap of boredom within such a confined space. Like many ‘cosmic horror’ films following in the wake of Stanley’s The Color out of Space the film leans heavily into the purple and violet to convey the unworldliness of Wes’ plight and the looming threat over existence.

Even with its brief running time the script carefully doles out Wes’ backstory and the source of his emotional trauma, judiciously avoiding rushing in to explains too quickly, leaving revelations for the audience as well as the characters.

While the film is not sexually explicit, see above the term you should never Google from work, it is violent, bloody, and not lacking in gore but does not lean into those elements to achieve its effect, but rather uses them to enhance the story being told. One should not watch Glorious if the sight of on-screen blood is disturbing to you.

I very much appreciated that the film did not linger or lazily get to its point. There is nothing wrong with a massive satisfying 3 hour epic but there is also beauty in a story that flies without need for rest breaks.

The standout star of Glorious is J.K. Simmons. While audio manipulation has been employed to enrich the timber of his voice and enlarge its presence it is Simmons’s delivery that make the unseen character come alive with power and menace. Had a lesser talent been engaged here the product would have suffered terribly.

Glorious will not be to everyone’s taste. It is dark, it is disturbing, and its humor, where employed, though effective can be nausea inducing if that is your inclination. That said the 79 minutes I spent watching the film were thoroughly enjoyable and if this sounds remotely appealing to your tastes then you should surf over to Shudder and give it a go.

A gentle reminder that I have my own SF novel available from any bookseller. Vulcan’s Forge is about the final human colony, one that attempt to live by the social standard of 1950s America and the sole surviving outpost following Earth’s destruction. Jason Kessler doesn’t fit into the repressive 50s social constraints, and he desire for a more libertine lifestyle leads him into conspiracies and crime.

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Series Review: The Sandman

 

Sorry for the lack weekday updates this week. Tuesday evening, I got to experience something new to me, a gout flare. Wednesday was spent in quite a bit of pain and many hours at the kaiser Urgent Care, and by Thursday night it had nearly all passed. So now when I watch the musical 1776 and Franklin is wishing that King George felt like his big toe, but all over, I fully understand the kevel vitriol he is throwing in the crown’s direction.
Last night my sweetie-wife and I completed the Netflix series adaptation of Gaiman’s The

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Sandman. The 10-episode series follows Dream/Morpheus (Tom Sturridge) one of the Endless, personifications of enduring concepts interregnal to humanity. Morpheus is the Lord of Dreams and some of the other Endless are Death, Desire, and so on. Following a century long imprisonment when human sorcerers were attempting to capture Death, Morpheus embarks upon a quest to reclaim stolen items of power, rebuild his decayed kingdom of The Dreaming, and recapture escaped nightmares of major Arcana who has in his absence troubled the waking world.
I have never read the original Comic run from which the series is adapted and as such I cannot speak to the quality of transformation but merely react as it is currently presented.
I like the show. It’s fantastic elements meld with the reality of the ‘waking’ world quite nicely and rarely does the show lose itself in deep lore and heavy bouts of exposition. (Always a tricky balancing act with genre fiction.) The cast Are quite engaging and well placed in their parts. (There has been controversy over the gender-flipping nature of some of the parts but I found no issues with any of the cast.) Sturridge had a particularly difficult task; he is the show’s lead and central character, and he must carry the show while playing a withdrawn and more silent than not personification. The part required that subtle tics and posture inform the audience to the character’s inner turmoil and crisis a challenge that Sturridge proved equal to.
The story slides easy between sweet fantasy and disturbing horror, particularly in episode 5 which centers on the horrific events over a single day and night in a diner where a troubled man lifts the veil of lies that often makes life bearable to terrible consequences.
Over all the series is well worth a watch and here’s hoping that it is successful enough for Netflix to engage another season.

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It’s Never Simply Policy

I recently got into a very brief exchange, cordial and pleasant, were as they complained about West Virginia Senator Joe Machin I advised that at this time this was the very best they could hope for out of a state that went for Trump by nearly 40 points. They were unconvinced and spoke of winning WV with ‘Democratic Values.’

Here’s the thing, helping people with their medical bills, lowering the costs of vital medicines, protecting them from predatory corporations, and exploitation by their employers seems to many like winning arguments and intuitively self-obvious reasons to support Democratic candidates. But people only sometime vote by policy. I think much more often and much more powerfully it is ‘vibes’ and culture that move people and provide incentives to action. You cannot win people’s support, no matter how generous the policy, if the price is perceived to be an attack on their culture and thus an attack on the people themselves. How many progressives would accept a deal where the nation gets fully socialized healthcare for every single person in the country, but every school is also required to tech that anything other than heterosexual coupling is ‘abnormal’ and a ‘perversion.’ Very few I suspect, and they would be right to reject such a thing. The hypothetical deal is absurd and fallacy of extremes, but the core concept is sound, people will reject material advantages for ‘cultural’ issues. Culture can and does change and it can be guided, poked, and prodded along so what is true today culturally is not what will be true in a decade or two but to win in places such as West Virginia at the very least you must not offend the people by attacking their culture.

This is an element often ignore or progressives are ignorant of when attacking Trump. He is a vile, racist, authoritarian bully and I desperately want to see him in prison orange, stripped of his make-up and his wig. However, when I see elites attacking him for things such as his love of junk and fast food I am angered. They are too blinded by their desire to attack the piece of shit that they fail to see they are also attacking scores of people for whom KFC or McDonalds are normal and enjoyable fare. Creating that division of ‘us’ and ‘them’ only binds them to the orange man-baby tighter. There is no policy argument that will win over such basic tribal identity as that one.

Sadly, that battle has already been lost. Nearly seven years of snobbish attacks have well welded these people culturally to Trump but that is not enough to assure him electoral victory. I beg progressives do not go for the cheap shot and the stereotype attacks but please try and think about where you can win with culture in addition to policy. Our nation depends upon it.

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Movie Review: PREY

1987 saw the release of Predator itself inspired by the 1980 wholly lackluster low-budget movie Without Warning, both films used the premise of an alien hunter come to Earth for the sport of hunting humans. Unlike the 1980 movie Predator exploded at the box office quickly becoming a massive success spawning 4 direct follow-on film and melding it with the studio’s other Sf/horror franchise Alien.

Prey, the latest franchise entry, is set in North America during the early 18th century as a band of Comanche deal with a predator-hunter come to Earth. The film’s central character, Naru, (Amber Midthunder) a young woman skilled in healing arts but with a burning desire to a tribal hunter, finds herself struggling to survive the alien’s stalking while navigating the difficult waters of both her tribal politics and the further encroaching of the Europeans into the continent.

There are many who are praising Prey as not only a great sequel but superior to the original 1987 film. This is overly enthusiastic. Granted compared to the lackluster Predator 2, The Predator (2018), or any of the Alien v Predator entries Prey stands out as solid, enjoyable filmmaking. Only it and 20103s Predators took the central premise and did anything more than simply copy the form with cut-and-paste caricatures. That said I think none of the subsequent movies surprise the surprise, tension, and thematic depths of the original film. Predator’s commentary of the emptiness of bravado, and as Lucifer in Sandman might say, the traps of tools, is something that rings true today 35 years later. Prey like all the other films in the Predator franchise has its moments that shatter disbelief. However, it does not layer these issues repeatedly and thus audiences can recover their acceptance of the story as it unfolds. The incongruity that has stayed with me is that any herbal concoction that lowers your body’s temperature to background is simply lethal. No mammal gets to survive that experience.

That is not to say that Prey is a bad film, it is not. Prey boasts interesting characters, who act and react with authenticity. Something that is far too often lacking in popular genre media. (Yes, I am looking at you X.) The tribal characters are engaging, realized human beings with the writers avoid both the cliche of the ‘noble savage’ wise in all things, and the ‘brutal savage’ untamed and untamable. Little can be said for the French fur trappers that who make a brief appearance in the film as all of their dialog is un-subtitled and your humble reviewer speaks no French. Jeff Cutter’s cinematography capture the scale, scope, and beauty of Canada doubling as the American wilderness reminiscent of the fantastic vista often found in John Ford’s best westerns. Director Dan Trachtenberg, previously best known for 10 Cloverfield Lane a tight, confined thriller with a fantastic performance by John Goodman, delivers on the action and tension inherent in a Predatormovie. Naru’s escape and refuge in a beaver lodge is a particularly powerful if short sequence that displays both the character’s quick intelligence and Trachtenberg’s confident directorial skills.

The visual effects are competent and largely invisible. (That pun fully intended.) With CGI creatures and beast flawlessly integrated into the picture. The grizzly is particularly well executed. Prey unfortunately has no theatrical release, and it is possible the VFX would not survive on massive screens but on my 55″ 4K television is worked perfectly.

Prey is well worth watching and is currently streaming on Hulu.

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The Chain that Broke My Novel

Late March 2020 saw the release of my traditionally published novel Vulcan’s Forge that played with Artificial Intelligence, the fetishization of 50’s Americana, the relationship between the

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individual and their larger culture, crime, Film Noir, and loads of movie references. It was a novel that I had written solely for myself and yest was purchased by the first editor I presented it to.

Late March 2020 is also the time the world shuttered, going into a prolonged lock-down as a pandemic, the likes of which had not been seen in a century, swept the globe, disrupting every aspect of life and killing far too many people. (Including a friend I had known for nearly 40 years.)

Needless to say, that was a very bad time to release a debut novel. As if a global pandemic was not enough to throw at my arrival as a novelist the fates had more hurdles to place. The publishing house was transition between physical distributors, snagging and disrupting sales to bookstores and they had just ended the contract with the studio that produced their audio versions, leaving Vulcan’s Forge without an audiobook not only as their format continued to grow but as that very format became more readily accepted during the pandemic.

Within eight weeks bookstore had worked out virtual launch events and people had begun to adjust to a new way of living during shut down, but the damage had been done and Vulcan’s Forgenever recovered from its debut.

Such is life. There are always factors in life far beyond your control or even influence. I don’t waste time crying over what has happened and cannot be changed. Life moves in one direction, forward, and that is the focus of your attention with the past providing lessons to improve your choice of paths into that future.

Now, I have not mentioned the most important link in the calamitous chain that broke my novel and the lesson I and others can learn from it.

Vulcan’s Forge sat on my agent’s desk for a year, unread and unrepresented.

When I discovered that my agent had lied to me and withheld critical information about his position at the agency, I contacted his boss and that is when he dropped me as a client. But for months I had been harboring doubts and considering dropping him. And that is the lesson, not all agents are good for you. In fact, they can hurt you in ways you cannot foresee. That is not to say you should never have an agent, but you must always remember that they work for you. If they are a poor employee, fire them and find another.

It can feel scary, nay terrifying, most of us search for years, enduring rejection after rejection searching for that representation but do not let that blind you to the truth. If they are not helping you then they are hurting you. There is no neutral position.

Vulcan’s Forge is history, though you can still order copies, but my future novels are not. I have a murder mystery/sf Novel under serious consideration at a major SF publisher, I am finishing up a military SF novel now and will then move onto crime and corruption on Mars. There is only one direction to life. Forward.

A gentle reminder that I have my own SF novel available from any bookseller. Vulcan’s Forge is about the final human colony, one that attempt to live by the social standard of 1950s America and the sole surviving outpost following Earth’s destruction. Jason Kessler doesn’t fit into the repressive 50s social constraints, and he desire for a more libertine lifestyle leads him into conspiracies and crime.

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My Writing Method

Some general nattering about how I approach writing.

As I have said in other posts, I am a plotter. I cannot start writing a story until I know how it ends. To me ending are where it all comes together and produces the satisfaction for the journey. For short stories I can begin just knowing where I start and where I end the few thousand word between the two I can discover. However, for novels I have to outline, sometimes just six or seven thousand words and sometimes nearly twenty-thousand words laying out character, world, story, and plot.

When I write I must write from start to finish. I cannot, as some other writers do, leap ahead, and write scenes near the end before I have gotten there in the manuscript. This may seem strange since as I have planned out the story and plot, I already know what the scenes do and why, but the truth of the matter is I can’t feel the scenes ahead of time.

Those hours and hours writing the sequences before a scene are an emotional journey not only for the fictional characters but for me as a writer. (And hopefully, for the readers as well.) I must experience the emotional journey to understand and feel the emotions in a scene I am writing. I may know that this is the scene where the scales fall from the hero’s eyes and they see the betrayal, but I can’t feel the devastation, the despair unless I have walked in their shoes and lived their trust. Other writers can leap into those souls more easily than I can. That is neither good nor bad. It is their process, and this is mine.

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The Racist Titration of the GOP

On a recent podcast I heard conservative commentator Mona Charen state that she was shocked at how quickly the GOP became Trump’s GOP. The host, Charlie Sykes, repeated his long-presented view that the racist authoritarian streak in the GOP had been a ‘recessive gene’ that has now become dominate but this is a terrible analogy for what has happened, absolving all those ‘good’ conservatives for their action and inaction that created the current condition. A better analogy is found in chemistry class: Titration.

In titration one liquid is slowly, drop by drop, added to another. The base liquid is clear and colorless and at first e3ach drop appears to do nothing. The swirl the mixture but it remains clear, colorless. Then after a number of drop colors appears but fades quickly away in the swirling returning to the clear colorless form. But at some point, a single drop transforms the mixture and now the flask is filled with a colored fluid that had just moments before been colorless. It has changed and seeming from a single drop but of course it was a process that had been carried out over time.

This is what has happened to the GOP. Listen to ‘Never Trumpers’ and after a short time someone will remind you that in the old days, they threw out the crazy Birchers, that the party used to enforce rationality. But that was in the early 60s by the late 60s Nixon played his Southern Strategy, inviting in the racists whom the Democrats had enraged with the Civil Right legislation of the great society. The drops of racism began to be added to the GOP, but it wasn’t much, and it didn’t really change the nature of the party. Then there was Nixon’s War on Drugs and that was quite deliberately not enforced equally across racial lines. More Drops into the mixture. Welfare Queens, Crack babies, and more and more drops added to the mixture, flashes of racist color but with enough swirling you could make them go away. Crime Bills and torture for brown people were more drops added to the liquid, along with ballot initiatives against ‘illegal immigrants’ that really targeted more brown people. Throughout this process the left ceased to be political opponents and were the enemy of the nation.

Trump didn’t ‘change the GOP,’ he was the final drops the completed its titration into a neo-fascist, racist, caricature of the party that had thrown out the Bircher only to crawl back into bed with them.

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The Muse Has Returned to Olympus

Yesterday the word spread officially that singer, actor, and activist Olivia Newton-John has died. With a performing and philanthropic career that spanned five decades ONJ left an indelible mark on popular culture by far not the least of which was her role as Sandy in the feature film production of the musical Grease.

I cannot remember the first album I purchased back in the 70s, but it was almost certainly either Barry Manilow’s Greatest Hits or Olivia Newton-John’s Greatest Hits. As a fan of easy listening, great vocals, and romantic songs, her music has been with me since adolescence. It was not easy being a teenage male in the 1970s and preferring love songs and pop when the rest of the world seemed consumed with rock and hair the coming of the hair bands.

Those who know me know that my favorite film was one in which she starred, Xanadu. Now, Xanadu is in fact a terrible movie. Starting production to participate in the brief roller-disco craze of the late 70s it suffered constant and extensive rewrites throughout filming and lacking in strong central narrative or character growth the film bombed at the box office while igniting

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the musical charts with its soundtrack of Electric Light Orchestra and ONJ songs. The feature found additional life as a cult movie and eventually an Ironic stage musical. Underneath the trashed production, inconsistent plot, and truly ineffable ending the film touched hearts due to it sincere adoration of dreams and dreamers wrapped up in its theme that ‘Dreams don’t die. Not by themselves, we kill them.’ Like Tinkerbell, the dream survives as long as you believe. Olivia has passed, her dream and ours remain.

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Sunday Night Noir: Hell Drivers

Joe ‘Tom’ Yeatly (Stanley Baker), a drifter who has learned of an open position as a driver delivering loads of gravel due, after passing an interview from the company manager (William Hartnell) and a test run to verify that he is reckless enough for the demanding pace, is hired as the driver for truck 13. Tom, a loner who isolated from the rest of roughneck drivers, quickly
becomes friends with the other outcast Gino Rossi (Herbert Lom) and Italian POW who remained in the UK after the war and Lucy (Peggy Cummins) becoming entangled in a romantic triangle as Lucy’s fascination with Tom grows. In addition to the dangerous pace required by the manager, to meet their trip quotas the all the drivers speed and endanger themselves and other cars on the road, Tom must also contend with the bullying and cruel driver foreman ‘Red’ Redman (Patrick McGoohan.) Protecting the secret of why he is a drifter and without a recent employment record, Tom has to navigate the treacherous waters of a love triangle and the distrust and hostility of his fellow drivers.

All the elements of a decent-to-good noir are present in Hell Drivers and yet the actual assembly leaves much to be desired. Most of the character motivations are simply too rudimentary to inspire much engagement. The truckers are crude lot, drinking and squabbling without anything to define them as characters and not caricatures. I commented to my sweetie-wife as we watched that all of the men could be used as example of ‘toxic’ masculinity. Without any actual depth to the characters, it is less a story more just a plot. It is late in the film’s running time that we see what is motivating Tom’s need for money and had that been hinted at earlier as a mystery it could have provided a hook upon which to hang the audience’s interest.

Another element of the filmmaking that it difficult to suspend disbelief is the reliance on ‘undercranking’ the camera to simulate the speeding of the dump trucks. The motion was speeded up artificially it was impossible to accept that these trucks were cornering without rolling side-over-side.

That said, an additional bit of interest in Hell Drivers is the numerous future stars that appear in small roles. Beyond the actors already mentioned in my review this film also boasts, pre-Bond Sean Connery, Pre-Man from Uncle David MacCallum, and Jill Ireland. With a slightly tighter script this could have been a 1st class noir instead it is closer to a melodrama and at that it is merely serviceable.

The entire film can be found on YouTube.

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