Monthly Archives: July 2023

Movie Review: Barbie (2023)

Warner Brothers Studios.

Great Gerwig’s 2023 film Barbie exits in a state of quantum superposition. Observed from one perspective it is a light, frothy summer movie, exploding in pink and pastels, full of fun, escapism, and the ahistorical innocence for childhood. From another perspective it is a slashing, scathing satire, scorching its targets with sharp, pointed commentary, ridiculing the inflated egos of the self-important and mocking the political patriarchy. And from yet another perspective is nearly a platonic example of everything wrong with modern cinema as a grubby I.P. driven cash-grab, weaponizing naive nostalgia as it concocts from a plotless, storiless, corporate property a feature film script joining the ranks of Battleship, Clue, and The Country Bears.

This is a very difficult film to discuss as its three natures are all worthy of intense study and interrogation.

First let’s review the film in a non-spoilers fashion, covering nothing that was not one of the several trailers.

Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) lives a perfect life of frolic and fun in her dreamhouse in Barbieland alongside all the variants of Barbie and Ken. Disturbed by intrusive morbid thoughts which disrupt her ability to live carefree Barbie journeys with Beach Ken (Ryan Gosling) to the ‘real world’ in search of answers. Their adventures and transgressions across the realities endanger Barbieland and Stereotypical Barbie returns to Barbieland hoping to repair the damage and restore its perfect existence.

The film is a masterpiece in the cinema arts. Production design and cinematography embraced the candy cotton nature of the script, abandoning all attempts at ‘reality’ within Barbieland and in doing so created a suspension of disbelief that allowed the film to achieve a verisimilitude that transcends all artificiality. The actor’s stylized performances, particularly while in Barbieland, create their superposition state being both unreal and emotionally truthful. Gerwing’s direction and Rodrigo Prieto’s camera work are flawless, capturing character, scene, and story in a seamless fashion that belies the difficulty of their objective.

Barbie has been called, liberal, leftwing, and ‘woke.’ This is so blindingly obvious and intentional that film might as well be wearing a beret, speaking in a French accent, with knuckles bloodied from street fights with Fascists for how proudly it wears it political and philosophical colors. Criticizing Barbie on such accounts is as ridiculous as disparaging the conservative nature of 1984’s, Red Dawn as it is the point of the project. It is a film with a message, one it does not shy away from, one it does not attempt to slip unnoticed into the plot, one that it fervently believes in.

Barbie is also a two-hour commercial for Mattel’s doll and its sundry accessories, an I.P. focused product intent on producing profit from already possessed property, joining the ranks of G.I. Joe, He-Man, and Pirates of the Caribbean. Its self-awareness and its cutting satire add value and depth to the film but do not erase the corporate goals it also incorporates.

It is easy to see how Barbie infuriates some, from its appropriation of cinema classics such as 2001: A Space Odyssey to its dismissal of the Snyder edit of Justice League the film stakes out positions and holds them with conviction. The movie that came to my mind as I watched Barbie was not its cinematic fraternal twin Oppenheimer, but 1998’s Star Trek: Insurrection and the relationship between the pair I will have to explore in spoiler containing post.

Barbie is several films coexisting together on that silvered screen, all of them expertly crafted and worth the time and money to see in a good theater,

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Series Review: Secret Invasion

Marvel Studios.

Thirty years after the events of Captain Marvel Nick Fury and Carol Danvers, now aware that the
shapeshifting Skrulls had been the oppressed and not the oppressors and had promised to find
the aliens a world to be their new home, it is revealed that the search for a home has failed and some Skrulls are intent on removing humanity from the Earth and taking it as their own. Secret Invasionfollows Nick Fury as he attempts to save the Earth and humanity from the rebel Skrulls and their genocidal plot.

While Secret Invasion did not actively repulse me as did some non-MCU series such as The Rigand Silo, it failed to engage or enthrall my attention and failed as an example of its subgenre the MCU rendition of a spy story.

Spy fiction exists along a spectrum with Ian Fleming’s super-spy James Bond, filled with gadgets, glamor, and megalomaniacal villains at one end and John le Carré’s George Smiley’s world of disloyalty, moral compromises, and cynicism at the other. Secret Invasion however seems to exist outside of the spectrum, playing closer to the superhero nature of its universe and ignoring the spy element of its central protagonist, Nick Fury. The series is neither the clear good vs evil romp that many Bond plots are nor does it delve beyond the surface concerning the moral costs and corruption of intelligence work. Without either element the series floats from set piece to set piece, each other its own escalating stakes but missing the essential tones that creates genre. This is not a failing due to due to the story being placed within the MCU, WandaVision embraced, exploited, and satirized the American sitcom genre while still exploring grief, destiny, and superpowers. Captain American: The Winter Soldier, while remaining an extension of Steve Rodgers’s MCU journey, captured the paranoia and feel of a 70s political thriller. Secret Invasion’s failure at genre leaves it lackluster and pointless, serving only to setup other franchise entries and having no essential reason for its own existence.

In addition to its failing as a spy genre Secret Invasion also presented plot inconsistencies that undermine the show’s suspension of disbelief. For 30 years Captain Marvel and Fury has searched for a new home for the Skrull population and failed to find a single planet for them. Really? In a universe as teaming with life among the star, see all the aliens represented in Guardians of the Galaxyfranchise, which also posits that there are abandoned habitable worlds, the failure to discover a place for the Skrulls becomes a leap of logic too great for a setting that includes magic and talking trees.

For a story about shapeshifting aliens and a secret world-wide threat, Secret Invasion does so little with this element that it is utterly lacking in paranoia. The story doesn’t utilize the concept that everyone is suspect because anyone might be the worst person to interact with. Bond usually had the ‘bad Bond girl,’ le Carré is rife with ‘who can you trust?’ issues but Secret Invasion rarely employs such a rich plot point and when it does it lacks any real weight.

Secret Invasion is not bad, but neither it is good. Of the newest television series, I have added to my recent watching it is the least interesting. I do not regret the time I spent with the series, but I shall not be looking to experience it again as I did with Loki or WandaVision.

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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The Real-World Trolley Problem

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With the release of Oppenheimer, the debate, one that will never be resolved, over the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have once again become more active.

Pondering these issues for an uncounted time it struck me that these bombings and the decision to proceed with them are a real-world example of the famous philosophical ‘the Trolley Problem.’

The Trolley Problem posits an out-of-control streetcar hurtling down a track. The car cannot be stopped and without any action taken will strike and kill five pedestrians. However, if a switch is thrown it will go onto a different track where it will kill ‘only’ one person. The unresolvable question is which is more ethical to do nothing and allow five to die or to take an action with intent that will kill one?

World War II in the Pacific is the out-of-control trolley. It will kill people until it is ended. The course of the war prior to August 1945 supports the assumption that an invasion of the home island will result in massive loss of life for both the invading allied armies and the Japanese population. One can argue that a demonstrate display of the atomic bomb might have prompted an unconditional surrender, but a counter-factual cannot be proven and even after two cities had been struck with the terrible weapons the militarist faction wanted to continue the war. One can also argue that the requirement that the surrender be unconditional could have been dropped to end the war, however the United States was not the sole combatant allied against the Empire and it is doubtful that the Chinese would have settled for a conditional surrender. These other histories remain counter-factual.

On the other side it can be argued that the Invasion of the home islands may not have caused such horrific casualties as the level of starvation already striking the populace would have prompted a total collapse. Again, a counter-factual cannot be proved and the actions shown earlier in the war displayed an almost unimaginable resolve by both the armed forces of Japan and its people.

The conclusions debating if the bombings were justified, if they were an evil, if they saved more lives than they cost, all depend on the counter-factuals accepted as given and the ones rejected as unsupported rendering the debate not only unresolved but unresolvable. Not matter where you stand on the issue just be aware that you stand on counter-factual interpretations of the war, and no one has a lock on the ‘truth’ of what would have happened had events proceeded differently.

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Movie Review: Oppenheimer

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While I certainly enjoy Christopher Nolan films and consider many to be truly great, I would not count myself as a Nolan Fanboy. Some of his films are simply too flawed for my tastes, with Interstellar far too cynical to the point that it confuses cynicism for wisdom and Following has a plot that in my opinion is less credible than Tenant.

That said the three-hour opus Oppenheimer dramatizing the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer from University through his later years is a magnificent piece of cinema and an outstanding
Universal Studiosachievement. The runtime passed for me quickly as the film propulsive plot, and not entirely about the development of an implosion plutonium device, is always compelling and never without character driven human drama. I have watched movie less than half-as long that felt twice the runtime.

Robert Oppenheimer [Oppie] played by Cillian Murphy, a complex man driven equally by ego and curiosity, is most remember as the project head for the Los Alamos Laboratory that developed the first functional, practical atomic weapon. The film touches on the major elements and challenges of Oppie’s life, his association with Communists before the war and during the first ‘Red Scare,’ his elevation to a media figure for his work in the Atomic bomb project, his philandering and affairs including with the tragic Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), and his hounding from government programs for being a suspected communist.

In a film that is packed with star power, the story is principally carried by two performances, Murphy’s as Oppenheimer and Robert Downey Jr Lewis Strauss as the story’s antagonist. Much of the film is told with the Strauss’s confirmation as Secretary of Commerce hearings acting as both as a framing device and tool to jump to specific points in the Strauss/Oppenheimer feud.

Photographed beautifully by Nolan’s long-time cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema Oppenheimer presents a lush, lavish, and sweeping frame well encompassing Hoytema’s talents and Nolan’s passion for large format cameras.

Oppenheimer, Nolan’s first feature for his new home at Universal Studios, is an achievement in scope, scale, and humanity that the filmmaker has been building towards for decades, and a movie well-deserving of as theatrical viewing.

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The Deep Background of Vulcan’s Forge

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My SF/Noir novel Vulcan’s Forge, published March 2020 by Flametree Press, is set on the distant

Flame Tree Publishing

and isolated human colony of Nocturnia, but the events of the story takes place centuries and centuries after the destruction of the Earth.

In the early 22nd century, after fusion power plants had become common, Artificial intelligences practical, and humanity has settlements, some quite large, throughout the inner solar system, a rouge brown dwarf is discovered with an orbit that will take through the solar system, disrupting and destroying the rocky inner planets.

Face with extinction humanity designs, constructs, and launches hundreds of automated solar sail arks. These arks do not carry crew or people but rather the egg and sperm of animals and people along with sophisticated A.I.s and the equipment to construct human colonies. Once an ark has reached its target system, should it have survived the centuries long voyage still functional, and provided there is a planet suitable for terrestrial life, the A.I. build the colony and its required infrastructure, and then utilizing artificial wombs, birth the first generation of human born on alien worlds, preserving humanity and numerous other Earth species.

Surprisingly cheap, due to plentiful fusion power, the resources of the solar system, and artificial intelligence each ark cost in today’s dollars about half a billion to build, equip, and launch. With the arks so affordable they are not the sole domain of governments and numerous cultures, religions, sub-cultures, and even a few individuals commission arks in a bid to save and ensure to continuity of their ways of life. There is even a couple of arks dedicated to making sure that out there among the star Texas continues to survive and thrive.

The colony of Nocturnia was settled by an ark commission by a group who fetishized Urban Americana of the 1950s. Believing that mid-twentieth century America represented some sort of ideal culture they programed the A.I.s of the ark to disseminate this as the colony’s sole culture. Naturally their ideas of what comprised an ‘ideal’ culture from one which more than a century and a half separated them were based more of myth and misunderstanding.

The novel picks up on Nocturnia as the third generation has come into its own and Jason Kessler, a man ill-suited to the social conformity of the 50s discovers that the colony harbors a deep and deadly secret.

As a traditionally published novel Vulcan’s Forge can be ordered from wherever books are sold. I am including links to San Diego premier specialty bookstore Mysterious Galaxy along with links to Amazon.

Mysterious Galaxy Paperback

Mysterious Galaxy eBook

Amazon Paperback

Amazon eBook

 

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Silo: Season One, Final Thoughts

Apple TV.

Here’s my thoughts on Silo in a single sentence; I will not be back for season two.

I will go into more detailed thoughts about this series, but it will be spoiler filled, so if all you want to know is if I liked or not, I direct you back to the opening sentence.

Silo is centered on Jules Nichols (Rebecca Fergusson) as she uncovers a vast and hidden conspiracy within the close-ecology world of ‘the silo’ where some 10,000 people live hundreds of years following a global undefined ecological catastrophe. The outside world, viewed only through wall sized screen is devoid of life. Individuals exiled from the silo, though given precious resources in the form of a sealed contamination suit, die within a few dozen meters. Investigating the murder of her lover Jules discovers hints and elements of the secret powers that controls and monitors every aspect of the Silo’s life and in the end is exiled. But because her friends make sure she has working sealant tape on her contamination suit she doesn’t die and discovers amid the devastated world dozens of ‘silos’ dotting the landscape.

Stories and settings like Silo require a solid foundation of world building so everything that follows is credible. Once the world building cracks the suspension of disbelief is shattered and everything else unravels. Illogical element after illogical element are compounded throughout the season that reveal shoddy and ill-thought-out world building. The Silo has only one generator to power the vast structure and it is never taken offline for maintenance. Imagine starting your car and running it for years, decades, only added gasoline as needed. It won’t work, that can’t happen. People eat bacon and eggs in a setting where the only rational choice is vegetarianism. With such tight, limited space and resources, it makes no sense and would not be sustainable to grow calories to feed to animals so you can get fewer calories. For a place that has been utterly isolated and with such shoddy recycling as what is shown the silo is amazingly well stocked with new, clean, and pristine plastics. Nothing about how this environment is set up actually works if you give it a moment’s thought.

Even if you wave away all the illogical and irrational world building, Silo is still in my tastes fatally flawed within its own rule set.

At one point late in the season Jules is escaping the dreaded ‘judicial’, the people behind the conspiracy, and is forced to climb between levels in a garbage chute. It is stated in the dialog that she disappeared on ‘level 20’ and she and her compatriots emerge on ‘level 122’. One hundred levels climbing a vertical ladder. If a level is just 8 feet, and they look much taller than that in the sets, they just climbed 800 feet! Yet they emerge not exhausted, tired, cramped, or even sweaty. The writers simply are not thinking at all about what they have just put onto the page.

As part of the conspiracy, we seen the surveillance room where a staff of seven or eight watch many monitors visually scanning the entire silo. Let’s say its seven people, three eight-hour shifts, that 21 people. Add in another shift so you can rotate days off and we have 28 people. However, you need people who aren’t watching to maintain the equipment, so let’s say they brings you up to 35 or 40 people. But you need still more people in this conspiracy. All that equipment draws power from the electric grid, and someone would notice that the ‘janitor’s closet’ is using kilowatts upon kilowatts of juice. So, you have to have people in engineering who are covering up all that missing electricity. A conspiracy so vast simply cannot go on unknown. People talk, it’s a fact of human existence.

Silo excepts too much to be simply waved away for what at its heart is not that compelling of a story nor that interesting collection of characters.

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Productive Again

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I was quite fearful that this damned flu was going to derail my work-in-progress novel. Knocked out of commission for nearly two weeks as I hacked and wheezed and barely maintained any coherent thought my book languished without any active editing or composing.

Normally if something derails my writing and editing after the interruption, I return to work by re-reading the outline. This returns me to the mindset of the novel, puts the characters back into my head, primes the pump for more creativity. Writing this beast without an outline meant I couldn’t do that this time.

Instead of an outline I re-read the chapter that was in progress and either by luck or due to a story that was still going strong in my subconscious I fell right back into the world or Wallace Point and it’s terrifying secret. (Well, at least I hope it’s terrifying. That’s for the readers to determine.)

I know that I have fully gotten back into the flow of the novel because for the last couple of nights as I lay in bed waiting for blissful sleep to arrive my brain has exploded with solutions to vexing plot problems.

The evening have also seen the return of my editing as I have now edited the first five chapters of the work and been pleasantly surprised that this rudderless approach hasn’t yielded a meandering aimless story.

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In The Arcade Of Life, You Get One Quarter

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A few years ago, an analogy became popular that cis white men were playing the video game of life on ‘easy’ mode and anyone else played at increasing levels of difficulty. A decent analogy but not the one I am going to deploy today.

Life is like a well-stocked arcade with lots and lots of game cabinets for us to enjoy but we have only the one quarter. Death has surrounded me my entire life and if there is one thing that has been beaten into me it is that death comes for us all and none knows when that final moment will be upon us.

Now, you might think that the message I am going for in this piece is ‘seize the day,’ ‘live life to the fullest,’ or ‘follow you dreams,’ all good message but not the one I intend today.

No, today I say:

STOP FUCKING WITH OTHER PEOPLE’S GAMES!

I do not know what it is like to live my life as Trans, gay, bi-sexual, poly, non-white, or any other of the near infinite varieties of human but I do know that like me, like everyone else, they get only one life. They are here only once and death stalks them with the same lack of remorse as it does me. I don’t care what it takes for them to live their single life fully and truthfully. As long as they are hurting no one else, it’s not my fucking business. And it’s no one else’s either!

I have no patience for those who think that their way of life is something to impose upon others. Life is hard and far too short. I have no interest in making it harder for anyone else, particularly for such petty reasons.

Every resource can be recycled, reclaimed, or replaced except time. So to those who aren’t going to listen to me anyone, stop fucking with their games and let them live their truthful lives.

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A Quick Update

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This blog has been quiescent for several days because this author has been battling the worst flu/cold he has suffered in something like 15 years.

Thursday July 6th symptoms began with a nasty cough that made it seem like tiny workmen with sandpaper were busily resurfacing by brachia. I managed to get to my day job on the 7th and after that I was down and out.

Last week was a terrible collage of coughing, hacking, and sweating. I managed to return to work on Friday and even this weekend had far more coughing than I would have cared for.

Now that the worst is behind me, I hope to return to work on my novel and perhaps even make it out to a film.

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Movie Review: Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

Disney/LucasFilm

 

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Raiders of the Lost Ark remains the best film in the Indiana Jones Franchise. The order of the following four movies in the series then depends upon personal taste. I would list the second-best entry as being The Last Crusade and third best would go to James Mangold’s Dial of Destiny.

After an extended sequence set near the end of the Second World War, with digital ‘de-aging’ to present Dr. Jones (Harrison Ford) as he might have appeared in that period and establishing some critical characters and events, Dial of Destiny is set in 1969, with a world that looks to futures in space rather than antiquity and Dr. Jones retiring from academia. Jones is no longer the man he once was, in addition to living alone in a dingy second-rate apartment, his once infectious charm has vanished, and he is unable to inspire even his student bored and listless in his class.

When his goddaughter Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) arrives looking for information on a device that Jones and her father discovered in loot stolen by then Nazis, a globe spanning adventure begins as the pair are pursued by CIA agents, murderous thugs, organized criminals, and Nazi scientists bitter over the war’s outcome. The fate of the world will once again be determined by Indiana Jones and his ingenuity.

Director James Mangold (Logan, Ford v Ferrari) does a perfectly serviceable job helming this adventure. The film’s most serious weakness in my opinion is that some of the chase/action sequences are too lengthy. The character work is on point and there isn’t a scene with Phoebe Waller-Bridge that I did not find delightful. Mad Mikkelsen, as always, delivers a credible and threatening villain. There are enough call backs in the film to be fun without feeling that it lived only for ‘fan service.’

Dial of Destiny is ahead of the thematic breaking Crystal Skull and the continuity breaking Temple of Doom, (Isn’t it amazing that Dr Jones doesn’t believe in that hocus pocus stuff after his encounter in India?) but doesn’t quite have the personal character growth and arc of either Last Crusade or Raiders.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is playing in theaters.

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