Category Archives: SF

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.

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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.

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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.

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Movie Review: Everything Everywhere All at Once

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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.

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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+.

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My Upcoming Geeky Artistic Weekend

Which artistically is starting tonight, Thursday.

Tonight, I plan to go out and see the foreign language Finnish horror film Hatching before it vanishes from theaters in my area. (I must admit I adore my AMC A-List subscription that makes rolling the dice on movie so much easier.)

Also tonight is Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. My sweetie-wife and I will be giving the series a try. Now, I’ll confess that lately the trek shows have not been working for me but hope springs eternal.

Saturday evening I plan to venture to San Diego’s Balboa Park for more experiments in night photography. Last weekend when I left the secret morgue I spied the California Tower lit by colored lights and thought it would be a good subject for my meager photographic skills.

Sunday morning my sweetie-wife and I will go out and catch the new Doctor Stranger movie.

All in all I am looking forward to this weekend.

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The Three Lorraines of Back to the Future

 

In this essay I am going to look at the three representations of the character Lorraine Baines-McFly presented in 1985’s Back to the Future and what might be suggested about the character and her history. This piece will not deal with subsequent variants presented in the two sequels.

Lorrain — Prime

Lorraine McFly as she first appears in the film is a woman struggling with alcoholism, a prudish defensive approach to sexuality, and who is deeply unhappy. She doesn’t give voice to the unhappiness, having long ago surrendered to her despair with all traces of self-confidence and agency vanished from her personality. She is in short, a broken person. Adding to the tragedy is that her pain, her shattered nature is invisible to the men in her life. Her husband, George McFly, blindly laughs at the dinner table while watching re-runs wholly unaware of his wife’s grief. Neither of her son appear to notice. the painful evening, the large amount of alcohol is so routine as to be invisible. This suggests that Lorraine’s fractured psyche is decades old.

The only other male present in the prime timeline that has any notice of Lorraine is the bully Biff Tannen. While the two characters have no direct interaction in the establishing scenes of the film Biff does tell Marty, Lorraine’s youngest son and the story protagonist, ‘tell your mom I said hi.’ An innocuous statement but actor Thomas F Wilson’s line reading fills it with menace and meaning. There is a clear implication of a deep and unsettling history.

Lorrain — Base

Lorraine Baine, Marty’s mother before marriage and a lifetime of crushing pain, in 1955 is a vibrant, outgoing, and bold teenager. She is unafraid in her risk taking, groping crushes under the dinner table with her parents present, venturing to a stranger’s house in pursuit of that crush, and adventurous in her dating, willing to make confident first moves rather than wait on her partner. It would seem to be inconvincible that this self-confident teenage loses all her fire and vitality simply from the confines of matrimony.

Lorraine — variant

After Marty’s excursion to 1955 and his interference with his parent’s courtship and lives, including alteration that prompted to his father to interrupt Biff sexually assaulting Lorrain, Marty returns to discover that his entire world has changed.

Lorraine now is fit, healthy, and confidence. Vanished has all traces of her sexual prudishness and defensiveness as she exhibits both an open sexuality with her husband, a George variant that is successful and confident, and accepting of her son’s sexual life. The Lorraine variant is logical progression of the teenage Lorraine the audience was introduced to. Marty’s meddling has dramatically changed both his parents.

What broke Lorraine prime?

It would seem to be down to two possible explanations. Life with a George that never found his self-confidence or success drained Lorraine of his own agency and vitality. This explanation reduces Lorraine to simply an extension of George and would seem to be tension with the Lorrain that existed before George entered her life. It also ignores the relationship between Biff and Lorraine. 30 years after their high school days Biff still feels the need to make vague and unsettling comments about Lorraine.

Everything seems to suggest that Lorraine suffered a deep and shattering trauma that psychologically damaged her and coming to adulthood in an era that disparaged psychological health and treatments she was left to suffer, dealing with her trauma by self-medication with alcohol.

The alteration of history with George interrupting Biff’s sexual assault in a manner that forever reduced Biff to simpering subservient character is the also the event that prevented Lorraine’s trauma, providing her with the space to blossom into the woman she always had the potential to be.

Perhaps not the night of the ‘Enchantment under the Sea’ dance as it happened in the Marty altered timeline, but it would seem likely that at some point in the original timeline Biff completed his sexual assault on Lorraine, and bereft of resources and mental health treatments, she shattered.

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Halfway There

After the brief suspension of daily writing while I looked after my sweetie-wife and then the week and a half it took to return to full speed clocking in around a thousand words per day at lunch, I have passed the halfway point of my current novel in progress.

This novel certainly has had a long meandering and strange journey. The central core concept, a telepath that planting ideas in your head but your inner monologue remains in your ‘voice’, so you are unaware that it is not your thought, dates to the late 1980s. Since then, the whole setting has been crafted, short stories, both of this idea and others in the same setting, have been written, and more than one novel has been written.

Yesterday the word count passed 53,000 words and with the momentum back I hope to have the first draft completed in about two months. Luckily for me my first drafts in terms of character, plot, and events, are fairly close to my final drafts. (An advantage to detailed outlining.) And subsequent drafts are principally about editing and proofing.

I will be thrilled to finish this novel and get it out the door. (Though sadden because one editor who had seen a novel of mine in the same setting and liked the character has now retired.) I am thrilled because I can’t wait to research and write my next novel a d dark noir sf set on Mars.

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Finally Getting Back my Rhythm

 

The last month has been quite hectic. Early in March my Sweetie-Wife underwent a total hip replacement for one of her hips and I took two weeks of paid family leave to look after my sweetie as she recovered.

She has recovered and the medical procedure went swimmingly, so all is good there.

Before the surgery I was writing north of 1000 words a day on my next Military SF adventure novel but braked to a complete stop as I transitioned to care giver for the recovery period.

When I did return to work, I found it difficult to regain my writing’s momentum. This is a fact of my writing process. A project that gets paused or halted becomes very difficult to restart. It is why I cannot write more than one project at a time. One with always end up the preferred one and the project ‘paused’ simply dies.

Last week I was averaging 800-900 words a day but yesterday I passed the 1000 words at lunch mark. The momentum is back and now I just have to keep the thing rolling.

It’s a particular challenge right now because a second surgery will be taking place and my mind has been racing on a new novel idea that has me very excited but requires a ton of research.

 

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My Favorite April Fool’s Joke of 2022

Mostly April Fool’s jokes are tired tedious and not for me. Howvere this year there was one that I throughly enjoyed.

WWII in real time is a Youtube channel that is following the events of the Second World War week by week. (They are currently in April of 1943.)

This was the special episode that aired on Friday April 1st. (I particularly like the David Hasselhoff deep cut.)

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