American Cinematic Morality

American Cinematic Morality

Here’s a clip from the classic film Casablanca (1942) where Victor and Isla escape while Rick makes sure no one interferes.

What I find fascinating is that Rick doesn’t shoot Major Strasser until Strasser has pulled his own piston and it even looks like, at least from the twin clouds of smoke, that the major even got off a shot but being a villain naturally missed.

This is a perfect example of the morality that used to permeate American movies. The hero could never shoot down anyone, not evil a NAZI, who was not armed and directly posing a threat.

Another film from a decade later High Noon (1952) displays a similar take on this morality with the vicious Frank Miller, and you know what kind of man Frank Miller is, and his gang of three coming back to town for vengeance the Marshall who has been unable to rouse any help from the frightened townsfolk can’t lie in wait and pick Miller and other off from concealment with a rifle but must forcefully and frontally confront Miller before the gunfight begins.

By the 70’s this morality was fully abandoned. The Production Code, a self-enforced code of censorship from the studios was finally scrapped in the late 60’s and replaced by the first version of the modern rating system though the code had been largely ignored as early as 1960 with Psycho.

The Godfather (1972) is a clear rebuke of American Cinematic Morality it’s protagonists Michael Corleone while denying that he is like his family embraces the criminal life, personally murders his enemies without the cliche of letting them arm themselves or with even any warning and by the end of the tale has orchestrated events so that he is the undisputed crime boss of New York City becoming a greater gangster than his father had ever attained. No justice is ever delivered to Michael, his victory is a defeat of classical film ethics and a direct violation of the historic production code.

With the adoption of the rating system in 1968 I wonder which film was the first to have its hero shoot someone who was either unarmed or unaware of the coming attack?

 

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Trump Has Done It Again

With one race called for Warnock and the other looking very promising for Ossoff it looks very likely that the Democratic Party will gain control of the senate with a 50-50 split with ties being broken by the new vice-president Harris.

Early results seem to indicate that GOP voters simply did not turn out in the numbers that they have in the past.

With control of the Senate hanging in the balance and more than 800 million dollars spent on the race you would think that the GOP would have crawled over broken glass to keep their upper hand in the upper chamber but weeks of questionings the legitimacy of our election process and specifically in the state of Georgia sowed the seeds of this morning’s harvest.

It helped that the GOP ran a couple of money-grubbing corrupt politicians perfectly willing to use a global pandemic that has killed more than 350,000 to line their own pockets. That sorts of heartless greed would normally invoke three destressing spectral visits but instead it has help to shift control of the government.

Mind you the GOP will not learn from this lesson. Later today more than one hundred members of the House and a dozen or more Senators will stand in their chambers and for the love of a narcissist and hive followers happily violate their oaths to defend our constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic.

As it has been said, everything Trump touches dies and so goes control of the Senate and all honor from the GOP.

 

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First Noir of the Year: The Killers

First Noir of the Year: The Killers

There are so many lauded classic noirs that I haven’t yet seen and on Sunday evening one more was scratched off the list with The Killers.

Directed by Robert Siodmak and debuting Burt Lancaster The Killers is adapted from a short story by Ernest Hemingway though as is par for the industry the screenplay differs significantly from the source material. With additional stars Edmund O’Brien and Ava Gardner, The Killers is a taunt exploration of a man’s life following his violent murder. With its fragmented flashback construction, the film is very nearly a noir Citizen Kane but with a more definitive conclusion.

The film opens with a pair of hired killers, including a wonderfully menacing performance by William Conrad, arriving in the early morning hours into the town of Brentwood New Jersey.  Locating their target, the ‘Swede,’ they gun him down in his boarding house room and though warned of the assassins’ approach Swede neither flees nor fights for his life but seemingly accepts his murder as punishment. The rest of the film follows Insurance investigator Reardon (O’Brien) as he tries to discover the murdered man real identity and the reason for his killing. An investigation that reopens old crimes and romances prompting fresh threats.

Released in 1946 The Killers is a wonderful example of film noirwith its morally ambiguous central character played by then unknown Burt Lancaster, its dark moody cinematography, and its sharp punchy dialog the films deftly explores the underside of American life and how closely intertwined the criminal world was with the rest of society. In addition to launching Lancaster’s career the film also propelled Gardner from relative obscurity to star with her compelling and captivating performance as Kitty, the obsessive interest of both the Swede and one of the city’s gangland bosses.

Nominated for a slew of Academy awards in 1947 including best Director, Editing, Screenplay, The Killers has been included in the National Film registry.

The Killers is available for rent via VOD and is currently streaming for free on the Roku channel Film Movie Classics.

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An Open Letter to Senators: Romney, Murkowski, and Sasse

The United States of America joined in the first World War to ‘Make the world safe for Democracy.’

We fought in the Second World War to defeat fascism in the west and in the east, liberating millions of people and bringing them into the light of self-governance.

We stood with the United Nations and saved the people of South Korean from subjugation by the anti-democratic forces of communism.

Our nation stood guard and paid with both blood and treasure to defend the free world against the tyranny of Soviet Communism defending the rights of all people to self-determination.

In the struggle for self-determination and democratic ideals the Republican Party led the way, always ready to defend democracy.

Today, that party stands against democracy.

It stands against free, fair, and legitimate elections favoring power over principle. GOP’s leading voices are calling to the disenfranchisement of millions of Americans, to subvert and overthrow an election that they lost for the ego and greed of one man, to make a mockery of a century of defending freedom, and the leadership of the party shows no intention to rebuke or punish those throwing aside our most cherished ideal, self-determination.

The new Senate is coming into session and normally the decision with which party to caucus is scarcely a decision at all, but these are scarcely normal times. To caucus with the Republican Party is to reward that party for its anti-democratic behavior with an extension of the power it is already abusing.

No reduction of marginal tax rates will erase that fact.

No amount of sensible de-regulation will defend our elections.

No appeal to traditional values will restore the defense of democracy.

If you caucus with the Republican party the good works you have done will be destroyed and you will simply be part of the machinery griding to dust what has been built for generations. That is a deeply unpleasant fact.

If you caucus with the Democratic Party, the entire conservative community will turn on you like ravenous wolves and it is likely that you will lose your positions and your offices, but you will not be destitute, none of you, and it is best to remember that hundreds of thousands of Americans have died for these rights and these ideals and now it is your turn to sacrifice so much less than they did.

The choice is yours and yours alone.

You three have the power, no matter the outcome of tomorrow’s election, to decide the course of this nation and your party and for better or worse it is what you will be remembered for.

 

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First Review of 2021: Wonder Woman 84

First Review of 2021: Wonder Woman 84

It is said that every movie is made three times, first when it is written as a script, second when it is photographed, and third when it is edited. In principle the stages allow for revisions the bring the final film closed to the ideal that had propelled the project but often diverging voices, power struggles, and a lack of focus allows the stages to muddy the waters and create chaos instead of coherence. This appears the be the case with Wonder Woman 84.

Except for a prolog set in the indeterminate time when Diana was a child, and really this sequence would have been better and easier to suspend disbelief for had they portrayed her as a young teen instead, the film takes place 66 years after the close of the previous entry in the franchise. Diana Prince (Gal Gadot) lives as a historical expert at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. still mourning the loss of her love Steve Trevor in 1918. Kristen Wiig plays Barbara Minerva a cliche version of a woman overlooked and ignored by the world while Pedro Pascal plays Max Lord the central villain of the piece conman and television personality the propels what passes as the central plot of the movie.

Drowning itself in the period’s clothing and style, Wonder Woman 84 is a mess. Elaborate and expensive sequences take place that have no function in furthering the plot or developing the characters. No thought is present for the actual consequences of the choices the writers made when they crafted the script. The special effects suffer from the issue that the digital characters seem to lack weight and float when they should not and perhaps worse of all the plot suffers from that most horrid comic book trope Powers ex machina, with Wonder Woman developing sudden abilities that exist solely to resolve an immediate plot complication and are then discarded.

I found it impossible to surrender myself to the story and was constantly reminded the artifice with repeated errors of the type. Wonder Woman I found to be charming and fun though far from perfect and its sequel, though far from the dour, depressing, Objectivist works of the Snyder Batman and Superman films, I cannot recommend at all.

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Good Riddance to a Rubbish year

It is the last day of the year for 2020 and in just a few hours we will begin the first year of a new decade. I need not remind anyone that the year 2020 has been an unholy trash fire with few redeeming elements.

Personally, my year started off fairly well. I was optimistically looking forward to the publication of my debut novel Vulcan’s Forge from Flametree press and in February I spent the day with a dear friend at Disneyland pre-celebrating that novel’s release.

Early March saw me nervously preparing for my book launch event at the unparallel book seller Mysterious Galaxy, and signed copies of my novel are still available there. Then the world shut down.

Lockdowns, first here in California but very quickly across the country and around the world as people scrambled to deal with the emerging global pandemic.

At my day-job the staff were quickly given computer systems and monitors and sent to work from home while I volunteered to be one of the few office-working staff. We weathered the transition well and while there were bumps and issues, we continued to meet the needs of our member/patients and unluck so many people in worse situations fully employed. The wall calendar at my work where people record their upcoming time off still displays March 2020.

Vulcan’s Forge launched in the first week of lockdowns and naturally the sales were hammered like Thor beating on Thanos.

In June the pandemic took my dear friend of 40 years. We shall never see his like again.

Ealy fall I submitted a proposal for a second novel to my editors who professed great excitement at the story but the publisher, working from the pitiful pandemic slammed sales numbers of my first book declined any more novels from me.

That book that is already 60,000 words written and I’m quite happy with it so either through traditional publication or self-publication it will very likely see the light of day.

November brought the election of a sane non-corrupt man to the office of President of the United States and we can begin the very long process of rebuilding our nation’s reputation.

The final month of the year gave us not one but two vaccines utilizing new technologies to fight this scourge that had killed more than 300,000 thousand in America, 1 in every 1000, and so we have reason to see light in 2021 but that new dawn is still faint the there is much darkness to endure before we are warmed that that new day.

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A Strange Little Idea

Last night as I was drifting off to sleep an idea sparked in my head for plotting stories in a visual manner. This is not about discovering or working out the plot beats to a story but rather finding a way to show them visually as a potential tool for analysis and revision.

Using a spreadsheet, the idea would be to assign each chapter a value positive of negative for how the events in that chapter have impacted the protagonist for good or ill. Things better for the character would be a positive number and things getting worse would be a negative one with the size of the number reflecting just how much better or worse the event was.

Then these values could be graphed with the X-Axis being the chapter numbers and the Y-Axis the event values. This would produce a line going up with ever ‘good’ turn in the story and descending for every ‘bad’ one. The sections could be further labeled with the acts to see how well the written matches against the expectations of structure.

I’m going to make such a graph after the first draft of my new novel is completed and see just what it tells me, if anything. This idea may be a waste of time or it may be a new and valuable tool. We shall see.

 

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Quick Hits

Yesterday was the least productive writing day for me since October, after interrupted sleep Sunday night I managed just 500 words and an evening or mindless tube watching with a tv that has no tubes.

Via HBO Max I have been watching in bits and pieces Wonder Woman 84. It is quite the disappointment. It insults the audience’s intelligence by explaining the meaning of scenes, and not deep thematic meaning put plain here’s what happened meaning.

While the GOP engages in insane plots to subvert democratic rule in the United States my conservative friends rank rant about cancel culture apparently having forgotten the real reason the USSR was a threat was not their gun control laws.

On the brighter side January will bring Series two of Staged and the debut of WandaVision so 2021 doesn’t look entirely bleak.

 

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Season’s Review: Rare Exports

Season’s Review: Rare Exports

There are loads of traditional Christmas films that people watch each year, It’s A Wonderful Life, A Christmas Story, The Muppet Christmas Carol and Die Hard to name just a few but in our household one of the movies on the season’s playlist is the charming Finnish Horror/Comedy Rare Exports.

Like The Nightmare Before Christmas, Rare Exports is a Christmas film from which Christmas cannot be removed without destroying the story and yet the film in absolutely not about the story or moral of Christmas in either the religious or secular senses. There is no learning to love your fellow man, no hearts grow three sizes larger, no understanding of the value of your life and all that it touches but rather to the simple tale of a young boy who discovers that origins of the winter holiday is much darker, much more fearsome, than the fairytale he had been told and that the Americans digging in the mountain are about to awaken ancient spirits that will descend upon the naughty.

Set in an isolated Sami border town in the frozen reaches of Lapland Rare Exports follows Pietari a young boy in the days before Christmas. Explosive excavations atop the nearby mountain of Korvatunturi has upset the local ecology and the reindeer herd that the Sami rely upon for their income is devastated threatening everyone’s livelihood including Pietari’s father Rauno. When Rauno’s illegal wolf pit captures something else the films turns from family dram to horror and the discovery of something monstrous in Mt. Joulupukki threatens more than just income.

Rare Exports is that exceptional film able to blend comedy, drama, and horror seamlessly into one story. Some have found the film to have jarring tonal shifts but that is not my experience. Each development of the story leads organically into the next as the characters are drawn into more dire and desperate actions trying to save their town and themselves. With gorgeous cinematography by Mika Orasmaa the film looks stunning and the now dated CGI effects match the tone and style of the photography perfectly. Director Jalmari Helander manages to make his budget of 1.8 million Euros look like a much more substantial production.  The bulk of the film is in Finnish with subtitles that as is common with Finnish production anytime characters of different nationalities are speaking English is the default tongue spoken.

I heartily recommend Rare Exports which is currently streaming on Shudder and Hulu.

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