Monthly Archives: June 2023

Movie Review: Asteroid City

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I do not have a deep history with Wes Anderson having seen only two of his films before yesterday’s screening of Asteroid City. (The two films being Rushmore which did not emotionally connect with me in any manner, and The Grand Budapest Hotel, which I thoroughly enjoyed.)

Asteroid City is more like The Grand Budapest Hotel in tone and visual style than Rushmoreand as such I was happy to roll the dice and see this in the theater with my sweetie-wife.

The film is structed as a story within a story with the framing narrative a television broadcast,

Focus Features

presented in black & white and in television’s aspect ratio, about the writing and performance of the play Asteroid City, which deals with a collection of disparate and quirky characters that fate has brought together in the titular town and is the interior narrative of the structure.

The film struck me as more of an expression of tone than rather a more traditional narrative exercise. While there are character arcs and plot obstacles in both the frame and the interior stories, neither are presented as the principal reason for experiencing this production. Rather it is the emotional reaction that is the driving force of the script. Anderson frames, films, and directs the performances of his immensely talented cast in a manner that creates an unreal artificiality, informing the audience that while the events are heightened abstract versions of plot elements but leaving the emotional resonances untouched.

Asteroid City is not a film for everyone. It’s highly stylized production and performance will be distancing to some but charming and engaging to others. However if The Grand Budapest Hotel, which utilized very similar devices, worked for you than it is likely your will find your time stranded in Asteroid City equally enjoyable.

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Bits and Pieces

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Here are my thoughts on a few scattered subjects.

The Titan Tragedy

The loss of the vessel with the five people aboard was a tragedy. Albeit an avoidable tragedy and one that is wholly unsurprising given the history of the company and its attitude towards safety. The only grace in the terrible affair is that the people aboard almost certainly had no awareness of their demise. A catastrophic failure of the pressure hull at depth is an event that would be measure in milliseconds involving energies comparable to several sticks of dynamite.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2

Quite happy to see this series return. I am an old fart and much of the recent Star Trekofferings have not worked particularly well for me. Granted episode one gave us yet another massive court-martial event that will be swept under the rug further supporting the jest to advance in Star Fleet an officer must at some time commit mutiny, the series remains enjoyed with interesting characters and a fine cast.

Marvel’s Secret Invasion

Off to a good start. Fun paranoia dealing with shape shifters and the eternal question of ‘who can you trust?’ A definite ‘gut punch’ of an ending at the first episode as stakes rose considerably. Of course, it won’t be until the story is concluded that I can render a final judgement. Endings are critical and a bad one can ruin an experience. e.g., Game of Thrones

Adventures in ‘Pantsing’ a novel

My experiment continues along. My first novel length attempt at horror combined with an attempt to craft the novel without an outline has now reached about 25000 words of an expected 80,000 to 100,000 word target. I suspect that the current act, Act 2 of 5, will be the most challenging and if I can get through this bit the rest should fall into place.

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Quatermass The Conclusion (1979)

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Bernard Quatermass the brilliant rocket scientist of Nigel Kneale’s writing embarked on numerous adventures, starting with 1953 The Quatermass Experiment a television serial adapted later into a film The Quatermass Xperiment, through my favorite version Quatermass and the Pit (Released in the USA as 5 Million Years to Earth) and then finally concluding in 1979 with another television series Quatermass also known as Quatermass the Conclusion.

Aired in 1979 Quatermass sees the famed scientist aged, and distraught as he searches for his lost granddaughter, a young woman seemingly taken by the same madness infecting the young adults of the world, as society on both sides of the Iron Curtain crumbles. Set in the waning years of the 20th century, the world of Quatermass is a world of decay, societal, governmental, and institutional. Gang battle in the streets of London without police intervention, mass executions are held in sports stadiums, and the cult like ‘Planet People’ disillusioned youth around the world await the aliens that will take them to another world of peace and love.

When a crowd of ‘Planet People’ are vaporized by an unknown energy from space it is clear that some ancient alien force is at work, an alien force that may have visited the Earth some 5000 years earlier. Working with a radio astronomer and a collection of aged scientists, who by their advanced years are immune to the alien’s call, Quatermass feverishly attempts to discover the truth of the attacks, devise a counter, and find his missing granddaughter.

Quatermass is a dark dystopic tale of a world that has quite possibly crumbled beyond restoration. Where the earlier stories had elements of darkness and ancient powers none presented the nature of humanity, even with Martian heritage, a cynical as this limited series. While Kneale was merely 57 when the series aired it has the feeling of an old man grumbling about the disrespectful youth and that the world he had known has fallen into decadence and filth. No one in this series is protected by ‘plot armor’ and Kneale deals death as indiscriminately as reality sadness does. It is surprising that in a post Star Wars environment the BBC produced something are dire and doom filled as this program. Quatermass might very well be the final gasp of the cynical seventies before the coming of the endless mindless adventure stories of the 80s.

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Zoo Photos Sunday June 18th, 2023

 

Yesterday, being a Sunday without a feature film for me and my sweetie-wife was a day to go to the zoo. I had expected it to be quite busy on account of Father’s Day, but when we arrived at 9:15 am the crowds were quite spare.

The Snow Leopard was posing for the guests, and I am very happy with this photo.

The Grizzly bears had been fed and the cool morning had them unusually active.

Like the Grizzlies, the Mountain Lions were also very active. As we watched them a small side door opened and one mountain lion exited immediately while the other in true cat fashion came to the door and then paused for a lengthy period torn between going through the door or staying put.

We ended our visit with a trip to the burrowing owls, one of my sweetie-wife’s favorite spots.

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37 Counts

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It is hardly shocking, surprising, or even unanticipated but thoroughly unprecedented that the former president and leading Republican candidate for that office has been charged with 37 serious criminal felonies.

Nor it is it unexpected that scrums of Republican pols flock like birds to his defense. Oh, there are a few, very few, willing to mouth some platitudes that these charges are serious, but their protestations are the elaborations of bad liars.

There are voices speaking out from beyond the party in hopes that this time the fever will break that this time things will be different. They insist that these are serious charges, that the evidence is too solid, the facts too damning for the former guy’s support to remain intact. And in my head a tiny voice from a fantastic film answers them.

The Republican party, the one built over decades of poisonous politics, insisting that anything to their left was complete and utter communism, the party that invited, welcomed, and nurtured bigots under the delusion that they could safely harvest their votes with ever actually granting them power, has been utterly captured by these illiberal anti-democratic forces and I do not see that ending for a decade.

Today Trump is to be arraigned but with only the most modest of legal actions this will be dragged out beyond the election. There will be no trial before November of next year unless Trump is his unmatched idiocy allows it. The future of our nation and the world’s rational order is at stake. It is up to us to save it.

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Movie Coming in 2023 That Interest Me

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I am a cinephile and there are several film due to the be released yet this year that have levels of interest for me from ‘That could be fun’ to ‘I can’t miss.’ Here are a few in release order.

The Flash I am not a big fan of the DC films. A few have been good; several have been terrible but the more I hear about this one the more intrigued I become.

Asteroid City, Of this director’s work I have only seen, The Grand Budapest Hotel, but this one has tickled my interest.

Indian Jones and the Dial of Destiny This franchise is tired and frankly I suspect that there is little chance of a truly good movie, however it is helmed by the man that brought us Logan and Ford v Ferrari, both of which I really liked, so he’s getting a shot with this one.

Oppenheimer Nolan has only bored me once, Following, and he’s earned my interest with this dramatization of history.

Barbie Is this a melding of Lynchian imagery with crass commercialization? I don’t know but I will find out.

Last Voyage of the Demeter an entire film from a single chapter in Dracula, you have my curiosity.

Dune Part 2 The conclusion of the adaptation of Herbert’s novel with more major stars and talents brought in to complete the story.

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Pantsing a Novel: What I Have Learned So Far

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“Pantsing” is writing a novel by the seat of your pants, without an outline. Until this novel, currently codenames The Colors of Their Trade I have also worked from detailed outlines. My most intensive outline was more than 80 pages with the story broken down to almost each and every scene.

Trade started with just a vague odea of exploring the subtextual themes in Kurt Siodak’s 1941 screenplay for The Wolf-Man. Then a single scene occurred to me, I wrote it and my fellow scribes in our writing group seemed to enjoy it. Now I am 17,000 words into a novel that IO hope lands between 80,000 and 100,00 words and I have learned a bit about what it is like in world of pantsers.

First off, in addition to the document I am writing I need to have a companion document open at the same time where I can keep a list of the characters and their traits. Instead of having worked them out ahead of time and usually documented in a database of sorts, I need to make these notes as they appear because in four or five chapters I may not remember their details if I do not.

Second, I am not flying entirely blind into the dark night of the plot. As a proponent of the 5-act structure, I have in my mind a mental map of how the story should be shaped. I may not have an outline for each act with every major twist and turn laid out as map, but I do have destinations in sight and those, hopefully, will be enough to keep me on course.

Third, trust my instincts. Major characters have appeared in scenes where I had not expected any characters to make an entrance. Intuition inspired a chance meeting and that intuition has been cultivated by decades of writing and analyzing stories and their structures. So, when Tony Packard appears and steps forward as the pastor of the new church with its twisted Christian ideology, I have learned to let him.

Fourth, don’t sweat solutions to problems that haven’t yet appeared in the text. I knew that certain world-building and supernatural processes needed to be crafted for this modern horror novel. When I worked by outline, I would have stopped and solved those issues before committing to composing the outline, here I have not. I have trusted that I will be able to solve the puzzle when the time arrives, and I have already. last night as sleep snuck into my brain an answer, consistent with the characters, the theme, and the tone burst from my synapses.

So, with the novel about 1/5 drafted I am surprisingly confident I might make this work. Certainly, the years of writing and critiquing has helped, but so have decades of running Role Play Games where plot and story are often hastily laid down just ahead of the player’s speed locomotive have also contributed to this book.

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Classic Noir Review: Don’t Bother to Knock

 

Nell (Marilyn Monroe), a young woman shattered by grief and with only a tenuous grasp on

20th Century Fox Studios

reality, has, thanks to her Uncle Eddie (Elisha Cook Jr.) an elevator operator, been hired to baby sit Bunny, an eight-year-old, in a posh hotel while her parents attend a convention banquet. Elsewhere in the hotel Jed Towers (Richard Widmark) is coming to grips with his lady love, Lyn (Anne Bancroft) ending their relationship because Jed is not empathic with a cold heart. Spotting each other in their respective hotel room across a courtyard, Jed and Nell begin a flirtation that dangerously unhinges Nell from reality with potentially lethal outcomes.

On screen, I have seen Ms. Monroe in all sorts of emotional states, she has been ditzy, she has been sexy, she has been conniving but until last night I had never experience Marilyn Monroe as frightening. More than once in the film when Nell, disturbed and distraught, viewed her babysitting charge as an impediment the cold, calculating, and evil intent upon her face as she contemplated murdering a child was more horrific than many modern blood and gore movies.

The simple, spare direction of Roy Ward Baker, here simply credited as Roy Baker, elevates the taunt tension filled atmosphere of the film. With its brief running time and limited set, the entire story unfolds in the hotel over a single evening, Don’t Bother to Knock could very have been a B picture but there is nothing ‘B’ about Marilyn Monroe’s chilling performance.

Don’t Bother to Knock is currently playing on The Criterion Channel as part of the collection ‘Starring Marilyn Monroe,’ and available on VOD for rental elsewhere.

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Pride 2023 Terrifies Me

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It is not what Pride celebrates that scares me, since the late 1970s I have found the legal and social discrimination against the gays and their brethren utterly evil and idiotic. I am old enough to remember the Anita Bryant kerfuffle and recognized even then just how wrong and hateful her campaign was no matter how many times they repeated the delusional incantation, ‘love the sinner hate the sin.’ No, Pride represents the beginning of the real fight for freedom and equality and for aspect of our nation is it as important as the 4th of July.

What terrifies me is the poisonous atmosphere of 2023 with its escalating number of mass shootings along with the rising tide of Family Values Fascism.

Mass shootings are a social contagion, with each instance acting like a chemical catalyst lowering the activation energy of the process, accelerating the reaction brings more shootings and more death. As reported by the BBC there have been more than 200 hundred mass shootings in 2023. The contagion is running unchecked.

The political environment is particularly dire. An entire political party in our two-party system is succumbing to an anti-democratic dogma that can best be described as neo-fascist. Abandoning the rule of law and democratic norms they have embraced hatred and scapegoating as tools to seize power. Still bitter over marriage equality, but recognizing that the tide had turned against them, they targeted another sexual minority for their hatred, lies, and venom, the transsexual community. Empowered by their reactionary fury they stoke fear, anger, and hatred in a base already inclined to violence.

These twin lethal cultural currents are what terrifies me about Pride 2023. It is my most sincere hope we can get to the 4th of July without any deadly violence at Pride events but there will be no shock or surprise if we do not.

Should Pride events be canceled during this terrifying time?

No.

The danger must be recognized and dealt with, but it must not be appeased. That only empowers it more. Pride must go on.

I am terrified but I am also hopeful. These are the dying spasms of an older ideology and generation, survive these and better days are ahead.

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Thoughts on the 2024 Presidential Contest

 

Though it is more than a year in the future the next presidential contest will be upon us fast and horrid.

THE PRIMARIES

On the Democratic side, barring any extraordinary exogenous event, such as a serious health event, Joe Biden will be the nominee. Robert F Kennedy jr., despite a name of Democratic royalty, will be a gadfly and I fully expect that vaccine denying idiot to be tossed aside and not present any serious threat.

For the Republicans things are much dicer, dangerous, and chaotic.

No declared and soon to be declared candidate has shown the chop, the skill, and the willingness to be a ‘Trump killer’ if such a thing is possible within the poisonous voter base the GOP has built over the last 30 years. So, there will a fight across the primaries, and I suspect right on to the convention floor, unless Trump simply wins the primary contest right out. If Trump wins the delegates count in the primary the GOP will stay true to their runny, warm jello spines and supplicate themselves again the macaroni Mussolini. IF Trump does not win the primaries, then he will challenge each and every loss as stolen, turning to the courts and the local party apparatus, the latter which he has gained a firm hand on, to take the delegates anyway.

Should Trump fail to steal the delegates in the courts or in the local committees, then the floor fight will start, and it will not be a calm, considered conflict, but a vicious brawl waged with Trump’s well-known restraint.

Should he win that fight he will go into the election with the GOP fractured, a weakened but not a defeated candidate.

Should he lose that fight, I do not think, as many do, that he will run as a third-party pick, but rather he will stand on the side and throw figurative eggs at the GOP candidate. Pettiness and vengeance are much more powerful emotions for Trump than any form of reason. This alternate future I think would give Biden his best chance for a clean and easy victory.

Th worst outcome for Biden, the nation, and democracy would be for Trump to clearly win the primary contests, putting him in the strongest position to win.

Remember, while Biden racked up millions more votes than Trump in 2020, he actually won by only 40 or 50 thousand votes. 2024 could go to Trump with Biden having an even larger popular vote win.

I do not think the court cases, or the criminal charges will seriously damage Trump with the GOP base. These events only ‘prove’ that the liberal system is out to get him, further enhancing the ‘persecuted’ complex of the modern GOP. Nor will he be in jail, even if convicted, he will be free on appeal, as all rich people are, and that appeal process will turn slowly, leaving him free to chase that election.

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