Final Review from 2021: The King’s Man

A prequel to 2014’s Kingsman: The secret Service this film takes place in the run up to and during World War I depicting the events that led to the formation of the private intelligence service.

The Duke of Oxford (Ralph Fiennes) after serving in and suffering the horror of Victoria’s Little Wars at the end of the 19th century has become a dedicated pacifist providing food and medical aid to the people suffering during wars. (Historical points to the film for showing Brittan’s invention of the Concentration Camp during the Boer War in South Africa. Points the film will later forfeit due to gross historical inaccuracy.) As the world if pushed towards the first global war by a shadowy secret conspiracy Oxford along with his man servant (Djimon Hounsou) his housekeeper (Gemma Arterton) and his adult son (Harris Dickerson) try to foil the plot. When war breaks out Oxford finds that his son doesn’t share his dedication to pacifism and is determined to perform his patriotic duty in the Great War. In order to defeat the conspirators’ plot to destroy England by using Imperial Germany as their pawn Oxford and his people involve themselves in events from Russia to Washington D.C.

I did not care much for Kingsman: The Secret Service but the actors and setting of this film enticed me out to the theater. Overall, I enjoyed the movie, finding the familial drama compelling enough and the adventure entertaining enough to serve as a nice ‘popcorn’ distraction. If you have any real historical knowledge of the Great War and how it resolved, you will need to set it all aside during the film’s third act when everything turns on bringing America into the war to provide the force required to defeat Imperial Germany. Germany was starving by 1918 and was already staring defeat in the eyes. Plus, the filmmakers were forced to sweep aside the Lusitania as a cause for American intervention or else somehow make out heroes responsible for her sinking. Still, if you can ignore history this movie is fun and has a few surprising turns in its plot.

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.

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.

Another Trip Around the Great Ellipse

2022, as we reckon it, has started and here’s hoping that this year will see improvements over the one now departed to the ashbin of history.

Have no doubt that the times ahead will still be turbulent, troublesome, and tiring. Politically things will get harder, meaner, and more dangerous before they get better. The great test of American democracy and democracy in general will not be met by this year’s election or even the next presidential cycle but rather over the next decade. Still there is hope. Despair is those who know that there is no hope and only those with perfect foresight can know that.

On other fronts 2022 will still be an interesting year.

It is the year that the 1948 Paramount Decree which forbade Motion Picture Studios from owning theatrical exhibition assets is formally terminated and it would not surprise me in the least if Disney turned around bought AMC launching a frenzy as other studios raced to get back into the showing movies business.

Here’s hoping that 2022 is also when we start getting good results from the newest batch of mRNA vaccines, the ones being tested right now against HIV/AIDS and some cancers.

There are dark times ahead but there is also strong reasons to believe that better times are also coming to meet us. Stay strong, get vaccinated, fight for democracy, and be kind.

My 2021 In Cinema Experience

Below are the twenty films I watched in theaters during 2021. ( Missed counted in yesterday’s post) From January thru April I stayed home due to the pandemic but once I had both shots of my vaccinations and felt more comfortable about brief outing in public I returned to my beloved theaters.

The order if this list is a combination of my subjective opinion on quality, how much I enjoyed watching the features, and how often I thought about them long after leaving the theater. I can honestly say I do not regret seeing any of the film, no matter their placement, in an actual theater.

1 Dune

2 Nightmare Alley

3 Last Night in Soho

4 Spider-Man: No Way Home

5 The Night House

6 No Time to Die

7 Lamb

8 Black Widow

9 The Last Duel

10 The Green Knight

11 Free Guy

12 Cruella

13 Nobody

14 The King’s Man

15 Eternals

16 The Tragedy of Macbeth

17 Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

18 The Suicide Squad

19 Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins

20 Venom: Let There be Carnage

My 2021 In Review

Not going to chat about news, political, or world events this is my 2021 and how it went.

First off and best I did not lose anymore dear friends to this thrice curse plague. Nearlyeveryone I know has been vaccinated and that is quite important to me.

Thanks to the fantastic scientific advancements of the last few decades and my day-job within the health care industry I received my vaccinations and boosters quickly and while I have not yet fully relaxed public gatherings, I have returned to seeing film in the cinema.

Since mid-May, when I treated myself on my birthday, I have seen 20 feature films in theaters and with one more today that will bring my 2021 total to 21. (updated the count as I had forgotten the 1 film I had not watched at an AMC Theater)

I completed my first murder mystery novel. It is of course science-fiction set aboard a generations starship which after 200 years of utopian coexistence faces its first murder. That novel is out on submission and here’s hoping 2022 brings a bit of good fortune on that front.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe shows began streaming on Disney+ and while I have not loved all of them nor have I hated any of them. WandaVision remains the one I enjoyed the most and the one I respect for taking the biggest of swings at doing something different while The Falcon and The Winter Soldier stuck me as the most standard approach of the attempts.

June witnessed another milestone in in aging as I had cataracts removed from both eyes. I am now seeing far better than I have in decades and the experience was quite interesting. Overall, my health was stable and fair during 2021 with all my chronic conditions well managed.

2021 was not the year of liberation that I or many of us had hoped for and its tragic and stupid that this nation saw more deaths from the pandemic after the introduction of the vaccines than before it but personally I and my friends thrived.

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.

The Billion Dollar Movie You’ve Never Seen

2021 has been a rough year for theatrically releases feature films. While their box office takes gave improved over pandemic year one 2020 and Spider-Man: No Way Home sold enough tickets to pass the billion-dollar mark for it parents Sony and Marvel Studios other long-awaited movies failed to get close to a billion dollars or even make it into the top ten global box office earnings. I’m looking at you Dune and Black Widow, but that is not entirely fair because the global box office environment has changed. While Spider-Man‘s latest adventure clawed its way past a billion dollars close on its heels is a film that just squeaked past 900 million, a patriotic, crowd-pleasing, epic war movie that you’ve never seen and likely never heard of; The Battle at Lake Changjin.

Produced and distributed by and for the Chinese film market Lake Changjin tells the story of the Chinese army’s entrance into the Korean War and the hardships, struggle, and heroism in pushing the American forces out of North Korea. (Note: Lake Changjin is known to Americans as Chosin Reservoir.)

Naturally a film financed by the publicity department of the Chinese Communist Party as an element of celebrating the centennial of their founding is going to be patriotic and jingoistic, but I am not here to discuss the film’s historical accuracies or inaccuracies. Rather its existence and its massive financial score is what I am interested in today.

For the last few decades, the Chinese film market has been a vital component of the American studios global strategy. Large, action-filled, noisy, films that require minimal language and cultural translations have traveled well overseas and particularly in China. As recently as all the top ten global box offices films were American movies. This year three of those slots were occupied by Chinese produced feature films, the aforementioned The Battle at Lake Changjin, Hi, Mom and Detective Chinatown 3. (See, it’s not just Hollywood obsessed with IP and sequela.)

This is not just an effect of theaters stayed closed long the US due to pandemic restrictions, all three of the Marvel Cinematic Universe films released this year, Spider-Man: No Way Home, Black Widow, and Eternals were denied access to the Chinese market. The Chinese Communist Party, who in my opinion are now communist in name only, used American blockbuster to build their domestic market, invited productions to learn the trade, craft, and art, of film making, and now are closing that door confident and competent that not only can they fill their market with locally produced and ideologically approved features but that they will soon be positioned to challenge Hollywood’s century-long global dominance.

This is more than money. This is a prime vector for transmitting ideology, culture, and values. It may very well be our future will be influence by Chinese cinema over American.

After The Wolf

We’re all familiar with the fable of the boy who cried wolf. How charged with guarding the flock at night he falsely twice cried out alarm of the wolf, turned out the adults and laughed at them then on the third alarm when the wolf has actually appeared no one came and, the way it was told to me, he was eaten by the wolf. A cautionary tale against telling lies for when you will need to be believed you won’t be.

But what happened the day after the wolf?

No doubt with the boy killed and the flock in danger the adult sprang into action, formed hunting parties, beat the wood and either drove off or killed the wolf.

It is the follow up that interests me as next year it appears more than likely that our 6 person majority court will strike down Roe v Wade and take back a right from Americans. For years, literally for decades, we have heard the alarms that this was the goal of the right. The cry went up in every campaign that this danger was approaching and following the campaigns the ruling wasn’t overturned. Now those who raised these warnings were not the boy who cried wolf for they were not lying, they saw clearly the looming threat, but the length of time required for the right to gain the power to achieve their goals dulled the alarm and reduced the warning to background radiation of our nuclear war politics. But now it appears the boy will be eaten and what will the response be?

I have heard voices on the right dismissing any political blowback as alarmism. They point to exits polls and how few people voted on the abortion issue alone, but this may very well be a poor extrapolation. There is a very real difference between a hypothetical event, be warned that a danger may exist, and a real event that crashes into the political landscape like an asteroid. Nearly three generations of people have lived with the accepted knowledge that this right existed, its sudden extinction may very well be a shocking, traumatic, and mobilizing event just months before a national election.

Maybe.

We have not been in the situation before. Until this case the progress has been expanding rights of the individual not eliminating them and the past gives us very little upon which to see the future.

Noir Review: The Crimson Kimono

The Crimson Kimono will never be counted among my favorite noirs but despite its flaws it is an intriguing film and an entertaining one.

The story centers on two LAPD homicide detectives, Joe Kojaku (James Shigeta, perhaps best known as Mr. Takagi from 1984’s Die Hard.) and Charlie Bancroft (Glenn Corbett) investigating the shooting murder of a celebrated stripper. The detectives, friends, partners, and roommates, following their service together in the Korean War, have little to go on to solve the murder save the stripper’s plans for a new act inspired by Japanese culture. Their investigation brings them into contact with local painter Christine Downs (Victoria Shaw) and a romantic triable between the two detectives and Christine forms threatening both the investigation and Joe’s and Charlie’s friendship.

The Crimson Kimono is bold in its depiction of interracial romance in defiance of the Production Code still a year out from its official abandonment in 1968. Joe Kojaku and the other Asian characters, both Korean and Japanese, are treated with respect and written as fully developed characters with their ethnicity as an aspect of their characters and not the sole defining elements. the friendship between Joe and Charlie feels real and has the depth that writer/Director Sam Fuller often explored in men who have seen brutal combat. Christine is a little less fully developed but does have at least a few layers to her personality.

Fuller’s script is clumsy in handling the twin plots of this brief 82-minute movie, never quite grasping a pleasing balance between investigation and romantic drama with large sections that make it seem like the other thread has been forgotten. While the film deals with racism and is plainly anti-racist in its views it also is hampered by a naivete as to racism’s prevalence in American society. I found it impossible to accept Joe’s assertion that he had never encountered anti-Japanese racism once in the Army or on the LAPD force. The declaration dramatically undercut the tension when Joe has mistakenly believed that Charlie’s animosity is in part racially inspired.

The film is further harmed by a score that attempts to incorporate traditional Western and Asian musical themes but does so in a manner that feels cheap and inauthentic with the Asian motifs sounding more like parody or satire.

However even with those fairly blatant flaws The Crimson Kimono remains a brave piece of fiction depicting love, romantic and otherwise, between characters of different races and manages to thematically tie the murder at the center of the mystery to this premise.

Robert Mitchell Evans

Literary Saboteur