Quick Thoughts on Prologs

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Prologs are a never ending source of debate and contention in the writing community with some saying always avoid and other loving them. The truth, as usual, I think lies in-between.

They are far too often used as a place to dump exposition and world building which is usually a sign that an author doesn’t have confidence in their ability to weave that vital information into the narrative itself.

I have often listened to prologs in critique session and advised cutting them and yet my published novel has one so I cannot be described as a rabid anti-prolog writer.

Here are a few quick guidelines I have for effective prologs.

1) It shouldn’t involve the protagonist. If it does, then it should be part of the main narrative.

2) It should contain information that the protagonist doesn’t know at the start of the story. That is, it is information that primes the reader for what is coming but the characters remain blindsided.

3) It should not be resolved. It’s not its own little short story it is a building block of the larger tale. If everything in the prolog is resolved than the reader has no pull to turn the page. The prolog is a harbinger of things to come, not a neat little package complete and finished.

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Movie Review: Star Trek: Section 31

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Let me be upfront with the limitation of this review, I did not finish the film and abandoned it part way through its runtime of an hour and thirty-five minutes. That alone should tell you my opinion of this project.

Paramount +

Now, there are those who have been annoyed with ‘new Trek’ for political reasons; I am not counted among them. There are those that are annoyed with it for canon and continuity reasons, nor am I counted among those people. Star Trek: Discovery did not capture my attention, and I give up after a few episodes. However, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds I adore and cannot wait for the new season this year.

I went into Star Trek: Section 31 with limited knowledge, that ‘Section 31’ was effectively the ‘Black Ops’ division of Starfleet and with an open mind. Let the movie be the movie and see if I was entertained by it.

 

I despaired when it began with a ponderous and overly dramatic prolog. Prologs are tricky things, particularly when they ask the reader or viewer to accept things that are highly improbable, such as a ‘hunger games’ kind of deal to selected random persons who will become an Emperor. Despotic governments aren’t well-known for rigidly adhering to rules concerning the transfer of power.

Fine, we get through the prolog and go into another misused technique, the voice-over exposition, where Jamie Lee Curtis gives us the background for a central character. Minutes and minutes of screen time have been wasted that only served as exposition creating neither dramatic nor emotional tension. Now, with that past, the story itself can finally get going.

In a scene that was supposed to establish Phillipa’s (Michelle Yeoh) acute perceptions as she identifies the special ops team in her space bar the script comes to yet another screeching halt for more ham-handed exposition describing the team, which we get twice as the team leader goes over it again. It doesn’t not help that the team is comprised of stock, flat characters wholly devoid of any sense of any inner life.

Okay, we can get to the mission and at least start the story. Things go a little wonky and there’s a big special effects driven pseudo-martial arts fight scene that drags, is hideously edited and lacking in any dramatic or emotional weight because all we have been severed to this point is frying pan to the face exposition.

I mentioned that the film has a run time of 95 minutes, when this fight ended, we were about halfway through that. Mw sweetie-wife and I bored by the tedious affair stopped the stream and spent the rest of our evening playing the deck building game Dominion on-line.

As you can see Star Trek: Section 31 never engaged me on any level. There wasn’t enough story to be emotionally invested, the characters, what little time we had with them, were too bland and flat to care about and the plot never turned interesting. I could find nothing in this production that was worth any attention at all. We shall not finish it as life is too short to waste of such bland formless material.

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A New Year a New 12 Month Film Festival

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A local cinephile club, Film Geeks San Diego, among other events they hold presents a year-long film festival hosted by the local micro-theater Digital Gym. Last year’s festival celebrated the 70th anniversary of the king of the monsters Godzilla and after a tie vote this year’s has two themes, neo-noir and Foreign Horror. The festival kicked off with the British neo-noir Get Carter.

MGM-EMI

Adapted from the novel Jack’s Return Home, the film follows Jack Carter (Michael Caine) returning to his hated hometown of Newcastle in the north of England to investigate the mysterious death of his brother. Jack, a mob enforcer, stirs up trouble with both the local criminal underworld and his employers to discover the truth about his brother’s automobile ‘accident.’

Both Director Mike Hodges and cinematographer Wolfgang Suschitzky history of working with documentaries provide them with the skills to present Get Carter in a realistic and dirty manner. This is not a movie the idealizes its gangster characters or their lives but rather shows that their world is red in tooth and claw where life is nasty, brutish, and short. Jack is no hero. His motivations are purely familial and the pain, suffering, and death that follow in his wake have little weight on his conscience. The story and the mood remain deeply cynical right to the film’s dark and uncompromising final shots.

I have seen Get Carter before, at home on DVD but even in a tiny theater the film exudes power on this large screen that is often absent when viewed casually in the living room.

There have been two other cinematic adaptation of this novel a remake with the same title in 2000 starring Sylvester Stallone which jettisons much of the cynicism that make the British film so powerful and a blaxploitation adaptation The Hitman in 1972. (I must hunt that one down.)

Next month the festival continues with the 1955 French film Diabolique.

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A lovely pairing

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This week my sweetie-wife and I started a rewatch of a beloved television series. It’s about a Federal detective who comes to investigate crime in an isolated logging town that harbors dark and supernatural secrets.

Oh, and last week we finished our re-watch of the groundbreaking American television series Twin Peaks what we started this week was Jordskot from Sweden.

It was December of 2020 when we watched the first season of this series and thoroughly enjoyed it. Even then without a fresh rewatch of Lynch/Frost’s bizarre and nightmare like Twin Peaks still echoing in my mind Jordskott provoked that comparison. Both shows start off as stories that present their fictional worlds as one that match ours, populated by varying kinds of people, good and bad, but rules by rational sane natural laws. Then things begin to twist, to turn, to become something darker with secrets older than the scientific method pushing the plot’s progression until what had been a police procedural has mutated almost imperceptibly into horror.

In 2020 when we watched for the first time both seasons were streaming on Shudder but before we could begin the next, the show vanished from the service. Over the next year or so I keep searching to see if it’d pop up on some other streaming site, but it did not and while it was never entirely forgotten it did fade from memory.

Late last year I wanted to look for it again, but the Swedish title had faded entirely from my mind, and it was a few weeks before I cracked locating the title and resuming my search.

Jordskott remained unlisted by all streaming services but for Christmas my sweetie-wife got me the DVDs imported from the UK. (I have never regretted purchasing a region free player) And so it is from disc that we have begun our rewatch and eventually our first watch of the second season.

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When You Join a Group, the Group Changes You

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Among my political reading and podcasts are former Republicans who have walked away from their party since the rise of Trump. It has been fascinating to see what changes has taken place in their worldview as they now think write, and debate outside of the borders of what had once been their ideological home. Particularly interesting is their view back at their colleagues and friends and former friends that remained ‘good’ Republicans and have drifted more and more into mindsets that these formers have a hard time comprehending.

Here is a fallacy many people believe; that people choose a political party based on how much that party matches with their own internal set of beliefs and policies. That’s not how it works. What happens is there are one or two really important issues for the person, and they gravitate to the party to matches those very limited concerns. It may be right for an under representative group, it may be a specific thing like abortion or guns, or it can be more nebulous like ‘traditional mores’ but it’s mostly a very limited set of things. Then once the person is in the party, in the social grouping, theybegin to change their beliefs and attitudes to match the larger group. These ‘minor’ issues aren’t what brought them there, but they adopt them just the same. Humans are social animals, and it is our evolved nature to conform to the society we wish to belong to.

What has happened with the Republican Party under Trump is a similar sequence except instead of joining a clique the clique changed and the people who remained in it changed to stay accepted members. It is not a conscious and intended act these changes; it happens below the level on intention action. The person makes slight, minor alterations to their speech, their actions, and eventually to their thoughts.

These people who stayed with their party for whatever reason that they found compelling were buffeted by the new changed GOP and it’s ideology and standards. Some left the dissonance between their image of themselves and the party to great to bridge but many stayed. They stayed and convinced themselves that they hadn’t really changed, not had their goals, only the tools and methods had changed. Like Saruman they didn’t and don’t think of themselves are being in the wrong, only bending to necessity. But as time drags on and the process is never ending like water eroding away a mountain the results are inevitable. They become the thing that they said they stood against without any defining moment save the first that one can point to as when it flipped. It’s that first moment, that second when you decide to do something that is wrong, but you have argued yourself that it’s really for the best that is the fall.

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The Dreamer will not Awaken

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Filmmaker, Artist, and dreamer David Lynch as died. All artists are unique voices and visions, but few have the dreamlike quality that impacts generations such as was the films of David Lynch.

I first encountered Lynch’s visual language when along with a pack of friends I went to a local arthouse theater for a double feature of Roger Corman’s Little Shop of Horrors and David Lynch’s Eraserhead. I still have clear memories of sitting in that darkened theater telling myself that eventually the movie Eraserhead would start making sense. It never did, but its images stayed parked powerfully in my mind.

I next ran into Lynch with his big budget studio production of Dune, the least David Lynch film that man ever released. It is so unlike his vision that extended television versions do not credit him at his insistence.

My next encounter however transformed me into a fan when I went to the theater to see Blue Velvet. I came out of that screen struck with the beauty and the horror of his mind. The glory of a good and simple life, the depravity of a bad one and just how closely interlocked the two truly were.

When Twin Peaks hit the air, my take was that Lynch had brought Blue Velvet to television, but of course the series was both far darker and for more normal than that movie had been.

I cannot say I have seen all of his work, but what I have watched has stayed with me and haunts my thoughts more than most financial blockbusters.

Every death is the loss of a voice and every one touches the world in ways that vast and complex. Lynch touched many of us and he lives on in our dreams and nightmares.

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The Art and The Artist Part One Million

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With the further and now apparently well documented allegations that paint Neil Gaiman as a rather nasty piece of work we are once again thrust into the unresolved and unresolvable debate concerning separating the artists from the art.

First off, it is decision of personal moral standards. I hold no ill will or any negative opinion for anyone that decides to boycott or who continues to support the art an artist. We each make our own choices about how much compromise the broken world demands of us. No one can live in this universe pure and unsullied. Every choice we make has consequences and moral implications.

Personally, I think one defining line is asking how much of the art promotes the objectionable stands, beliefs, or actions of the artist. Roman Polanski should be rotting in a prison cell for forcibly raping a child. yet, his cinematic production of Macbeth or Chinatown do not promote such a world view and while both have a cynical approach to evil in the world, both recognize and clearly delineate that the evil is real and not an arbitrary illusion crafted by mere mortals.

Bryan Singer a talented filmmaker is always accosted with more than a little credibility of also sexually abusing minors. If true he should face legal consequences. But it is also true that his film X-Men is an allegory for the mistreatment of minorities and takes a stand against such bigotry.

Kevin Spacey’s career was derailed by allegations of sexual abuse and he cowardly tried to use he newly disclosed sexuality as a shield. A dodge that did not work and he was ejected from a number of productions. Spacey’s portray of Jack Vincennes as morally corrupt cop who comes to realize the evil he has helped perpetuate and tried to correct it is a deeply moving and touching job that gives hope to the concept of redemption.

In each of these cases and others I would argue that the art is not corrupted by the evils of the artist. These are also all films, and I think the boycotting of film productions if particularly problematic.

Film is a collaborative art and to boycott a film is not just a harm to the objectionable artist but to all the artist that work and profit from that production. Boycott the Harry Potter films due to Rowlings despicable beliefs and you also are striking against Radcliff who gives every appearance of a devoted ally. Boycotting film, for me personally, has too high of a ration of collateral damage to target.

Books are a different matter.

Only three entities profit from the sale of a book, the book seller, the publisher, and the author. Everyone else has already been paid and compensated for their time and labor. If you are one to buy books then your support for the book seller is unlikely to change, leaving just the publisher and the author. Given that I find the boycotting of books from questionable artist much easier to justify.

Luckily for me I was never much of a Gaiman fan with his novels, so not buying them isn’t so much a boycott as life as normal. For you, well that’s your decision.

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Celebrity is a Performance

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The Neil Gaiman story which went much wider this week with a long and disturbing account of his alleged sexual assaults and other nasty work has stirred up some very deep feelings of betrayal among his fans in the fantasy and horror communities.

I don’t blame them for feeling betrayed. Gaiman had constructed a nearly perfect public persona that invited respect and admiration. He doled out advice that encouraged artists of all stripes as they struggled with impostor syndrome, his stories celebrated the outsider, and they presented a level of inclusion that welcome many groups of people form whom society has always felt excluding and threatening.

But it his public persona was all for show, and the most vital lesson we need to take away from all this is that all public personas are for show.

Gaiman, Whedon, Cosby are but a few names of men with public faces that made them admired are people who lifted up others and presented what appeared to be images of our better selves. The truth for each of these turned far darker than most expected.

Everyone who is some form of celebrity presents a public face that is not their true self. Some do it to market themselves and their art. Some do it to cover up an inner insecurity that never leaves them. Some do it because their true selves are not readily accepted in wider society. This is particularly true for those in the closet. But some do it to conceal their monstrous nature.

On the outside looking in we cannot not their true selves, we can only know what they project, the image that they create and distribute for their own purposes, some of which are mercenary, some self-protecting, and some nefarious. This is way it is important to never place anyone on that pedestal of admiration.

Praise the art, praise the skill of the artist, but do not believe that simply because of the art that they are good. They may be, there are noble, good, and great people everywhere, but you cannot know them save by their actions and even then, your data set is limited by what they want you to know.

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Folk Horror Review: Robin Redbreast

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Produced and broadcast December 1970 as part of the BBC anthology program A Play for Today is a modern set piece of folk horror. Originally broadcast in color the only surviving elements are a 16mm B&W copy due to the BBC’s notorious penny-pinching habit of recording over their master tapes.

BBC

Norah (Anna Cropper) a thoroughly modern woman, having been dumped by her boyfriend of eight years, decides to abandon the city and live for a few months in a country cottage that she and her ex-had purchased just before the dissolution of their relationship.

The isolated village and its inhabitant are quaint and strange to Norah’s modern sensibilities with the woman she hired to help clean and maintain the cottage a busybody and gossip. When Norah discovers that there is an infestation of field mice in her cottage she’s directed to seek out Robin a local man who can perform the extermination. She finds Robin (Andrew Bradford) in the forest practicing martial arts nude.

Robin, though simple-minded, attracts the lonely Norah but slowly it begins to seem that the villagers have arranged everything to induced Norah and Robin into a relationship with some dark unspecified purpose at their goal.

I first heard of Robin Redbreast on the documentary about Folk Horror but at that time aside from one massive collection of films, it what not available anywhere to view. Recently it has become available to stream in the Ad-supported service Tubi and at a brisk one hour and twenty minutes it doesn’t require a deep commitment of time.

I think that the accident of only as B&W element surviving actually works in the film’s favor, giving it the village a feel of something not quite of modern times, very fitting for folk horror which is nearly always about the collision between tradition and modernity.

Limitations of both budget and technical capability do hamper some aspects of the production. A sequence that is supposed to be from a frightened bird’s perspective is achieved solely through crash zooms and whip pans of the camera that are quite off putting. There are a few conveniences of plot but overall while not approaching becoming a favorite for me of the folk horror genre Robin Redbreast was worth at least a watch.

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Series Review: The Penguin

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2022 saw the release of Matt Reeves’ interpretation of the classic DC Comics character Batman. Taking a more film noir approach the movie emphasized Batman as a detective over the character as a martial artist. The movie also introduced us the Colin Ferrell as Oswald Cobb, The Penguin. Reimagined as a lower class criminal hungry to make a name for himself and now HBO/Max has released a limited series focusing on the character.

HBO/Max

The series opens just weeks after the events of The Batman, the underworld is in chaos following the downfall of its leading mafia bosses, the poorest areas of Gotham are devastated by disaster, and corruption remains king in the city and its administration. Oz, (Colin Farrell) doesn’t so much seize the opportunity created by the chaos as his hand is forced due to his impulsive nature and fragile pride. Scrambling to stay ahead of vicious gangsters including Sofia Falcone (Cristin Miliot) recently released from Arkham Asylum, and the consequences of his own poorly thought-out actions Oz has only on his side a naive street kid, Victor (Rhenzy Feliz), left homeless by disaster and Oz’s own mother slowly succumbing to a terrible wasting neurological disease.

Where The Batman lived with the constraints of an MPAA PG-13 rating, The Penguin thrives as a gritty R-rating equivalent, awash with language and violence that is only tolerated by the rarest of comic book movies. The series is part organized crime thriller with only a single shot to drive home that this is the home of Batman and deep character study of a people trapped and formed by their tragic histories.

The past weekend Colin Farrel took home a Golden Globe for his performance in The Penguin. Farrell is utterly transformed not only by the magical make-up effects that hold up even under insanely tight close-ups but by Farrell’s own fantastic performance. His voice, his accent, his physicality all belong to a man named Oswald Cobb (yest that changed it from Cobbelpot.) and it’s a powerful and moving depiction of a man that can charm and lie and always has his own best interests at heart.

Cristin Milioti, a performed I was unfamiliar with before this series, is another stand out talent in a cast packed with talent. With the subtlest facial expressions she informs the audience that this character’s mental health is always in question and the danger she presents is never far from the surface.

The Penguin is an outstanding series that twists and turns as it walks the viewer into the hell that is Gotham’s underworld where hope has long since died.

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