For this week I have been working with a new piece of software as I work on my new novel, Command and Control. This software package, Scriveners has been developed as a tool for writers, particularly of novels. It is much more than just a word processing program, but it is a tool for collating and organizing the data that you can generate when writing your tome. Continue reading
This weekend I will not be watching a Sunday Night Movie feature. (which is apparently the number driver of traffic to this blog.) Instead I will be hosting a Harry Potter weekend. All eight Harry Potter films, screened over two days. I picked up the blu-ray of all the film in November and now I going to watch the series over the weekend. I have friends coming over and my dear sweetie wife is talking about making us chili. (Because I have no tolerance for spicy food this has become known as Bob’s False Alarm Chili.) Continue reading
SOULLESS by Gail Carriger
Published in 2009 to great reviews and tremendous sales Gail Carriger’s Soulless, is a whimsical steam punk paranormal romance with Vampires, Werewolves, and Parasols 
(please, never umbrellas.) It is the first of the Parasol Protectorate series, which concludes this March with the publication of Timeless.
The book’s protagonist is Alexia Tarabotti, who lives life under a number of difficult conditions. She is soulless, though that is a guarded secret from most of the world, her father, with whom she shares a complexion, was Italian, an ancestry hardly praised in Victorian London, and she’s a spinster, her marriage prospects considered to be non-existent as totters on in the advanced age of twenty-something.
Alexia’s London is not our Victorian setting, but one where the werewolves, vampires, ghosts, and other unworldly creatures of the night have become part of English Society, influencing fashion, politics, and colonialism.
Alexia’s comfortable if somewhat boring life is disrupted when an unknown, hiveless vampire attacks her and she is forced to dispatch the creature. Being soulless, a trait the unfortunate vampire seemed terminally ignorant about; Alexia’s touch negates all supernatural abilities. QueenVictoriadispatches an investigator, the Scottish werewolf Lord Canall Maccon whom harbors ill feeling towards Alexia over ‘the hedgehog incident’. not only to probe into the unlawful destruction of this vampire, but into his mysterious origins as a hiveless vampire is the best knowledge, impossible as all vampire are products of the a hive queen.
Alexia is quickly drawn into a adventure of mysterious appearing vampire and mysteriously disappearing werewolves while dealing with the infuriating Lord Maccon and bothersome American scientists.
Soulless is a fun read, wonderfully free of angst and best described as whimsical. The book is a light, fast read that promotes giggling and isn’t afraid to look silly. Escapism gets a bad rap in entertainment, but there is a place and a need for escapist fare. One cannot dine happily upon staid state dinners every evening, the occasional good times, good drink, and good food with friends are also good dining and Soulless is to books what these fun diner days are to posh restaurants. The characters are well drawn and distinctive, each bringing a set of traits that promotes comedic effect rather than having comedy forced upon them. The plot moves quickly and yet takes the time to hint, display, and illuminate Gail’s marvelous world building. While her vampires are inspired from the same traditions of Dracula and her werewolves are clearly derived from, as are nearly everyone’s these days, Sidomak’s Wolf-Man, she adds more than enough to make each fresh and her own.
The most memorable misstep in the novel was that Gail explained the ‘hedgehog incident,’ an event that should have forever remained unknown and therefore of limitless possibilities in her fans’ minds, but really that is a very small flaw in my opinion.
This is a book I would have not read had I not known the author personally, and I would have been poorer for that loss.
A few weeks ago a couple of friends and myself sat down and watched on Blu-ray the remake of 90’s vampire flick, Fright Night.
I had seen the original film during its first run in 1985 and while I didn’t haste the film, nor did I love. My friends were more favorably inclined towards the original. Continue reading
While there are many things I am looking forward to in 2012, there are also sadly many things I would love to do or take part in that I know I will have to give a miss this year.
So, now let’s look at the second of 2012 and see what sort of thing your humble host and narrator might be interested in.
So, the other day I was thinking about plans in the offing and I realized there seemed to be a lot of things I was looking forward to in 2012. So here are a few lines each about the things I am happily awaiting in this coming year.
Continue reading
For Christmas my sweetie-wife gave me a copy of the 50th Anniversary Edition of Ben-Hur on Blu-ray. We spent several evening going through the three documentaries associated with the set (lovely bonus material) be diving into the epic film. (For those not in the know, Ben-Hur an example of massive movie making from the Studio System is better then three hours long.)
The full title is Ben-Hur: A Tale of The Christ and given that title it is as you would expect set in and about the purported time of Christ in the Roman Empire. Christ however is not the main character, though he a central character and event in the film. The Film is about Juda Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston) a prince of the Hebrew, a rich merchant and land-owner in Judea under the Romans. Ben-Hur’s boyhood best friend forever, Massala (Stephen Boyd) A Roman has returned as Tribune to the new governor. Times are not good for Judea, rebellion is in the air and the Romans do not tolerate rebellion. Clumsily trying to enlist Ben-Hur against the Jewish rebels, Massala turns Ben-Hur into an enemy and on a flase pretext, arrests Ben-Hur for attempting to murder the new Governor.
What follows is a story of loss, enslavement, revenge, love, and in the end, redemption. The film was shot in MGM 65, a big format wide-screen process developed for films of epic scope and nothing says epic better than this movie.
The blu-ray is from a fully restored print that has been carefully transferred. I have never seen Ben-Hur projected, but I can say that this presentation is stunningly beautiful. The colors are sharp and vibrant, the blacks are deep, the sounds wonderful (Thought for my sweetie-wife’s sake the sub-woofer was off, I suspect the chariot race would have blown us out of our seats.) and the clarity unrivaled. This is exactly the sort of the thing that can be achieved with blu-ray, but all too often is not due to budgeting in the transfer.
Sometimes a single scene or even image can come to dominate a story. It can be a revelation, Such as with the Sixth Sense, it can be a moment of sacrifice as in The Wrath Of Khan, or even something unscripted such as “you’re going to need a bigger boat.” from Jaws. Last year, 2011 now, I experience such a moment and it continues to haunt my thoughts and nibbles at my creative urges, hoping one day to become the theme to a story.
During 2011 I had the pleasure of seeing two productions of “The Tempest’ by Williams Shakespeare. The first, my only live Shakespeare to dat, was a stage performance at the Old Globe Theater in Balboa Park, and the second was the film version starring Helen Mirren, both very good and engaging production of the story about love, monsters, magic and revenge.
Act five Scene one Prospero the wizard consult with his servant the spirit Ariel. Ariel and Prospero have trapped Prospero’s enemies in a grove of trees and some are being tormented with phantasmal vision and dangerous, while the weep at their predicament. Ariel informs Prospero that these men, who have stolen his title, lands, and exiled him and his infant daughter to die at see are so distraught with unseen terrors that if Prospero beheld them he would know his feelings would be sympathetic . Prospero questions this and Ariel responds, “Mine would, sir, were I human.” Prospero taken aback by the admission from the inhuman Ariel, realizes the futility of revenge and starts to redeem himself and in the process his enemies as well.
“Were I human” continues to echo in my mind. The though that a creature of inhuman emotions, something very alien, having greater sympathy for human plight than the supposed main character is, for me, a very powerful image. It’s at heart a concept very much at home in science-fiction, and yet one absent from the SF interpretation of “The Tempest”, “Forbidden Planet.” (Not faulting “Forbidden Planet,” they were playing along different lines.)
I keeping think on what it mean to be a person who consumed with your own obsessions that an alien understands your fellow people better than you do. One day, who knows maybe soon, but perhaps distant I find a plot to make this theme a story for my own prose.
I look forward to that epiphany.
This past Monday, while enjoying a pleasant vacation day due to the New Year’s Holiday, my sweetie-wife and I left our home in the morning for our traditional weekend walks at the San Diego Zoo. (World Famous I’ll have you know.) Before getting to the zoo we swung by our local art house movie theater, The Ken, to pick up their guide to upcoming releases playing there.
Flipping through the pamphlet, my sweetie noticed a mention of A Dangerous Method that was from the month before and commented that she had hoped to see that but sadly it slipped past us unnoticed. I pulled out my iPhone, fired up the Flixter app and determined that the film was still paying locally and a show time was available to us before noon. In a move that was uncharacteristic of us, we aborted the plans for Zoo, took in an early lunch, and then headed to the movies.
A Dangerous Method is sort of a biopic, the topic of the film being Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and his relationship with a troubled patient, Sabina Speilrein (Kiera Knightly), and Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen). Jung is a married man, expecting his first child when Sabina is admitted to the university hospital in Switzerland. Jung, and admirer of Freud’s work, determines that Sabina is a perfect candidate for Freud’s radical idea, the ‘Talking Cure.” Prompted by his wife, Jung overcomes his awe of Freud and writes the professor about Sabina intriguing case.
The film follows two parallel plots, one dealing with Jung and Sabina, their highly unethical relationship and her progression from patient through student and finally to colleague. The second plot line is the relationship between Jung and Freud, following them through Master and Student, through colleagues and into rivalry. The Jung/Freud story is by far the more interesting one. Jung and Sabina’s affair is a dull story, without any real elements that lift it from the usual powerful man takes a mistress predictability.
The fault cannot lie with the actors, as all three turned in truly wonderful performances. Viggo brought Freud to life, reducing him from historic icon to a flesh and blood person with virtuosity that makes it clear why Viggo considers himself an actor and not a star. Fassbender’s very good again, I have seen him in three films and in each his performance is exactly modulated to the tone and the character, be that the frenetic Inglorious Basterds, the expansive X-Men: First Class, or this quiet close movie. Kiera Knightly portrays both her characters insanity and ethnicity with skill and originality. She manages facial contortions during her episodes that were simply fascinating.
No, the fault with the film lies in the script. It’s uneven, giving us terrific scenes and story between Freud and Jung, but falling flat when dealing with Jung personal life and slipping into sensationalism to hold the audience’s interest.
This is not a film I can recommend going out to see, but it’s worth a look on Netflix whe it is released on home video.