Category Archives: Television

Icelandic Folk Horror: Tilbury

Icelandic Folk Horror: Tilbury

Made for Icelandic television in 1987 Tilbury is a short, just 53-minute, folk horror set during the British occupation of Iceland in 1940.

Audun is young man from rural Iceland. When he is sent near Reykjavik to part of the labor force building up defenses for the occupying British forces, he’s asked by the village priest to check in on a young woman, the priest’s daughter, who traveled there earlier and who has now fallen out of contact.

Out of place and naive Audun eventually finds the young woman but begins to suspect that a British officer she’s having an affair with may in fact be an imp from Icelandic folklore. As Audun investigates his experiences become more and more nightmarish.

Despite the limitations of television and budget Tilbury has much to offer; Lynchian dream logic sequences, amusing portrayals of British and American stereotypes by Icelandic performers, and a different vibe of folk horror.

The follow bit of text I am striking through. Please see my follow-up post but essentially it was wrong and I regret the error.

That said it must be noted that halfway through the run time the piece takes an ugly anti-Semitic turn that is truly baffling and utterly unnecessary to story or plot. At first these viewpoints can be dismissed as a character’s bigotry but the movie’s climatic sequence present imagery that invalidates such an interpretation.

With such an ugly turn I cannot recommend anyone support what otherwise might have been an interesting discovery.

Tilbury is currently streaming on Shudder.

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Stolen Infirmity

 

If you follow politics, you are likely familiar with the concept of Stolen Valor where someone claims a military history or deeds that are untrue. They served in combat when in reality they never left the base admin offices and so on.

Hollywood, the most creative place on Earth, has rebooted and reimagined the concept and created what I’m calling Stolen Infirmity.

Over the least several decades there has been a general awakening in American culture to be more supportive, sympathetic, and understanding of people suffering from addictions, disorders, and past trauma. This is a good thing and these people need our attention and our compassion.

However, individuals accused of evil acts are stealing and claiming infirmities as a shield against any and all responsibility for their heinous actions.

People in actual therapy for these serious issues take responsibility for their behavior, for the harm that they have done to others, for their actions but these celebrities do just the opposite. The actions are not their fault but a result of their condition, their drinking, their sex addiction, certainly not themselves.

You can see this on full display in the recent interview where once beloved geek icon Joss Wheadon attempts to rehab his reputation. Despite numerous accusations from numerous people from nearly every production he has led. Somehow none of this true, somehow none of this is hisfault. Somehow, it’s all down to his trauma, and that actors somehow can’t understand his words.

An entire field of bulls would stink as badly.

 

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The Power of Mystery

When an audience or reader has a deficit of information one of two possibilities is likely. They may become frustrated and confused, disengaging with the piece or they may become intrigued and start filling in the missing bits from their own imagination.

In 1975’s Jaws, the mechanical shark worked rarely, and the filmmakers were forced to scrap plans that would have shown the beast on screen much more than the final film. With clever tension building techniques they crafted a taunt masterpiece around not seeing the shark until the final act.

In the television series Babylon 5 the Vorlons and Shadows were powerful mysterious being playing at some struggle that stretched over eons. They captivated the imagination and speculation. Then, once their background was explained, these master races were reduced to disappointed children of a cosmic divorce.

Hannibal Lector, pulled from a supporting role in the novel The Silence of the Lambs to a central thematic element in the film adaptation sparked endless fascination now neutered by endless backstory excavations and explanations.

This brings me to Boba Fett.

Fett, ignoring the animated sequence in the Holiday Special, first appeared in Star Wars: The Empires Strikes Back as the laconic bounty hunter that outwitted Han Solo and captured him for Darth Bader and the Empire. Other than showing a cleverness equal to or greater than Solo’s and successfully backtalking to Darth Vader the character did very little and never revealed his face. A perfect combination to create mystery and fascination with exploded almost immediately. The characters casual end in the next film ignited outrage as already a myth had grown up around him.

Now we are treated to a limited series The Book of Boba Fett centered on the character and as he is seen and heard more and more, he has lost nearly all of his mythic standing.

Having watched 3 of seven episodes I can’t say that anything about the character is worthy of his legendary status. As a guest character in The Mandalorian he was able to maintain that air of mystery that supported him as a mythic character. Front and center of his own series, his own story, he cannot remain an unexplained mystery and like Hannibal Lecter he shrinks in stature.

Mystery is a delicate element in storytelling. Use too much and your story if befuddled and confused, reveal too much as is happening here and there is little to entice.

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4 Things That Annoy Me About Firearms in Media

 

In lieu of writing about the Republican insurrection one year ago today I am instead going to write about several repeating aspects of guns in popular media that always irritate me when they appear.

1) Throwing People: Over and over again guns are depicted as violating Newton’s Law of Motion. A target hit by a round is lifting into the air and flung backwards. Targets weighting hundreds of pounds. If such forced was being delivered to the target an equal force in the opposite direct would be applied to the shooter. In the case of handguns to their wrists. People are not thrown by bullets and very often don’t even collapse or fall down when hit.

2) Inhuman Accuracy: The greatest offenders here are the John Woo films and his imitators and Zombie movies where people firing with a piston in each hand, moving from speeding vehicles, and leaping through the air, sometimes all three at the same time, hits distant or difficult targets. Accuracy with a firearm is much easier to obtain than with a bow but such shooting is beyond the realm of possibility.

3) Lasers on Sniper Rifles: The point of mounting a laser on a gun is to assist in accuracy. The concept being that where the ‘dot’ appears is where the bullet will impact. This is true over relatively short distances, but it is not true over scores or hundreds of yards with a sniper rifle. A bullet the instant it leaves the barrel falls toward the ground with an acceleration of 32 feet per second/per second. If a round travels at 2700 feet per second, after 100 yards it has traveled 1/9 of a second and will be 3 feet 10 inches below when that little red dot. Mounting a laser on a rifle is purely there so the ‘hero’ can spot the tell-tale dot and avoid getting shot.

4) Steady Scope Images: Related to the laser but preceding it in history is the moment in TV and film where an assassin is holding a scoped rifle to their shoulder and we get a shot of what they see through the scope, a perfectly still telescopic image of the target. No wobble or shake because the camera is mounted on a tripod but take out your smartphone and zoom to a distant object and see how steady that image appears. Through a high-powered with a tripod or bracing the image will bounced and shake unless the assassin is an android.

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My Sweetie-Wife’s Latest UK Discovery

My sweetie-wife is a real Anglophile and always finding interesting UK films and programs to introduce me to and the latest is the long running panel game/comedy show Would I Lie to You?(WILTY)

Two teams of three celebrities, with consistent team captains David Mitchell and Lee Mack, participants recount brief statements about themselves and the opposing team through often hilarious questioning must determine if the statement is true or a lie. Mid-Game a guest is brought out and each member of one team, alternating between the teams on a weekly basis, claims the guest has a special connection with them, such as being a member of the same Morris dancing troupe or having produced a song version of Hamlet’s ‘To be or Not to Be’ speech they recorded, or gave them a ride in a steam locomotive. The program is hosted by actor/impressionist/comedian Rob Brydon.

There are no prizes for winning further stressing that this is a show about comedy, and I must admit that there have been episodes where it was difficult to stop laughing. The participants are generally quick-witted, and landing a joke always takes precedence over discovering a truth.

The program has an official YouTube page where previous seasons episodes can be watched without angering the gods of copyright.


 

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A Lackluster Opening: The Book of Boba Fett

 

A common piece of advice given to writers starting out in their craft is to avoid prologs. Far too often am inexperienced writer will use a prolog, particularly with fantasy and science-fiction stories to dump onto the poor unsuspecting reader pages and pages of backstory and world building rather then give the reader character and conflict. That is not to say that a prolog is never to be used, there are brilliant prologs out there including the one that opens The Fellowship of the Ring.

The Book of Boba Fett, like The Mandalorian before it, refers to episodes as ‘Chapters’ within a larger story but episode one, Stranger in a Strange Land (And deduct marks for using the title of one of SF’s most famous books even if both are biblical references), stank of a poor prolog.

The episode depicts two plot threads, one set nine years earlier following Fett’s survival after Return of the Jedi and the troubles he faced in the harsh Tatooine desert, while the other shows his current situation as the new crime lord of Mos Espa. The flashback storyline has little dramatic tension since it is a flashback and we are well aware of the character’s survival and thriving, and the current storyline has very little story content. Elements are established for future use, that is to say world-building, and a bit of combat is thrown in the to give the illusion of stakes, but ultimately the only thing this chapter does is set-up coming payoffs.

I have hopes for a decent series and story but Chapter one failed to pull me in, make me care, or do anything more than lay out the world to come.

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Scary Season #6: Squid Game (Concluded)

 

Spoilers Ahead

 

 

 

 

 

I have now finished all nine episode of the Korean import Squid Game a fictional setting financially that depicts financially desperate people playing children’s games with the stakes being great riches or death upon losing.

The central character is Seong Gi-hun (Surname first as is traditional in Korean culture.) Gi-hun is a reprobate who whines and gambles and stealing money from his elderly mother’s bank account. In episode one I found Gi-hun thoroughly unlikeable and as other characters whose dire straight were not so directly a product of their own selfish choices entered the game my sympathies for Gi-hun diminished even further.

But though the writing displaying Gi-hun compassion for less fortunate players more likely to be eliminated and his willingness to take risks to save them along with actor Lee Jung-jae’s incredible charisma the character won me over as Gi-hun grew exponentially. Even as my sympathies for Gi-hun grew I also rooted for the tragically doomed Ali, a foreign worker abused by his employer, and Sae-byeok a young woman who had escaped from North Korea and now needed cash to save her brother from a South Korean orphanage and her mother still in the North. The most seemingly lost and tragic character was Oh Il-nam, an elderly man suffering from a brain tumor and seeming dementia and to whom Gi-hun develops a friendship and sense of protectiveness that is betrayed when in the final episode it is reveals Il-nam was one of the super wealthy hosting the game with its violence and death to alleviate the wealth created boredom.

While the violence of the series has attracted much attention as well as its commentary on social inequality to me the show’s greatest impact is in the inter-personal dynamics. The personal costs each character accumulates as the dangers and deaths grows, the dependency and betrayals are the emotional heart of the story. When Gi-hun wins but prefers an impoverished life to tainted wealth the show makes its most compelling study of both character and theme.

Squid Game also has a sub-plot as Police Detective Hwang Jun-ho infiltrates the game searching for a brother who has gone missing. The conclusion is somewhat underwhelming but thematically fitting for the show’s dark and cynical view of humanity.

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Odds and Ends

 

It’s mind numbingly stupid that in all likelihood more Americans are going to die of COVID 19 after a safe and effective vaccine is available than before there was such an option.

 

The Internet has performed an artistic trick that a hundred years of cinema could not pull off, making foreign language television and movies popular with Americans.

 

I wonder if any marginal Republican districts are going to change hands because the GOP has successfully convinced their base that death is the way to ‘own the libs?’

 

Colin Powell screwed up supporting the invasion of Iraq, but he was magnitudes less evil and less dangerous that all of those in close orbit with Trump.

 

 

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Scary Season #2: Squid Game (2 episodes in)

 

The new Netflix sensation, from South Korea, is Squid Game a television series where desperate people play games from childhood with failure meaning their deaths and a promise of great financial reward.

There certainly are a lot of varied and interesting film and tv projects coming out of South Korea from the Academy Award winning film Parasite to perhaps the best zombie movie ever produced Train to Busan the creative cloud from that peninsula has been fruitful. Squid Game promises tension, suspense, and graphic violence with the right amount of social commentary blended into the story.

Two Episodes into the 9 we seem to have settled on to five principal characters:

Seong Gi-hun: A gambling addict and petty thief whose irresponsibility has cost him his daughter and threatens his mother’s health.

Cho Sang-woo: Primary schoolmate of Gi-hun. His family and the neighborhood believe that Sang-woo escape the poverty of their neighborhood by a college education and business success, but embezzlement and fraud has placed him deeply in debt.

Kang sae-byeok: A young woman who escape North Korea with her younger brother and is now desperate for fund to smuggle her parent into South Korea.

Abdul Ali: A Pakistani worker who has been exploited by an unscrupulous employer and has a wife and child to support.

Jang Deok-su: A mid-level gangster on the run from his criminal gang because of stolen funds to feed to gambling debts to foreign casinos.

Of these five characters I have the most sympathy for Sae-Byeok and Ali who seem to have the least responsibility for their dire plights. Gi-hun was the character we met first but his constant whining, refusal to take responsibility, and stealing from his mother’s bank account made the character wholly unlikeable.

That said Squid Game is a series centered on character and though the violence perpetrated is graphic and on-screen the central question is how far will these people go for cash and how much responsibility does the system bear for their plights? The production values are high with the series displaying talent in front and behind the camera. If graphic violence is not a dealbreaker for you then Squid Game on Netflix is worth a shot.

My SF/Noir Vulcan’s Forge is available from Amazon and all booksellers. The novel is dark, cynical, and packed with movie references,

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Another Reason What the GOT Ending Doesn’t Work

 

When HBO’s fantasy series Game of Thrones ended after 8 seasons many fans were disappointed. After leaving the source material behind because they had simply run out of novel to adapt the series changed in tone and pacing with the vast distances now seemingly crossed quickly with ease, the complex social/political dynamic reduced to dispatched plot points, and a final resolution so rushed it failed to build to the emotional punch required and instead felt to many as a disrespect of one of the story’s most beloved characters. (How’s that for summing it up without spoiling?)

I would argue an additional trouble came from the sequencing of the plotlines. Two massing concurrently running plots were, How to Deal with the Army of the Dead and Who is going to take the Iron Throne and rule the Seven Kingdoms?

The Army of the Dead seek to extinguish all life. The Iron Throne while consequential is a lesser issue. If everyone is dead no one is going to sit on that throne and whoever sits on that throne is only going to be there for a few decades and can be removed by revolt if needed. A bad person sitting on the throne is a resolvable issue being dead cannot be fixed. No matter how you slice it the Army of the Dead is the much more important issue. It is the issue the series resolved first.

Once the Army of the Dead is defeated and life preserved in the world the issue of the throne just doesn’t carry the same weight. Mind you they didn’t treat the Throne Issue as a denouement, something to resolve as the story ended but rather of the final six episodes of season eight half are after the more serious issue has been solved. Hours and Hours dealing with badly with a lesser problem. It just one more reason why the series left the rail and crashed.

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