What’s wrong with the Republican Party?

First off let me set a couple of ground rules if you’re going to comment. 1) If you’re liberal/left/progressive, I am not interested in snarky insulting comments. Insults are not discourse. 2) If you are right/Republican/conservative I’m not interested in ‘Squirrel’ posts where you start pointing a finger at liberals/Democrats and such. This post is about Republicans, not Democrats.

I watching the current primary season and I just can’t fully fathom what if going on with the Republican Party. As I type this the top two leading candidates (Trump and Carson) for president of the united states are polling a combined 48.8 percent and neither is a person who would normally be considered a serious contender for the position.

Setting aside philosophical and policy issues, it perfectly fine to have deep and serious disagreement with many of the stands presented by the Republican Party, heaven knows I do, what going on right now is bonkers.

Look at what has happened already in the race. Two governors, both with re-elections under their belt, were tossed aside, never seriously considered by the general population of the party while a carnival barker and surgeon without any government executive experience rocket to the top. Right now the distance from Carson to the next leading contender (Rubio) is a whopping 13 points. People with real standing and real experience as trailing what should be fringe candidates.

This is not normal. Last presidential cycle we have a parade of not-Romney candidates because the base really did not trust or like Romney. However the establishment backed him, and those not-Romney tended to flame out fairly quickly. That’s not the dynamic this time around.

There is no single candidate that fully has the establishment’s backing, and the summer has evolved into fall with winter coming and Carson and Trump show no signs of crashing. Why?

Has the population of the Republican electorate changed that much? Did younger voters go elsewhere while too many members, like me, left in disgust? Is the field so weak that bombast fills in for seriousness? Have eight years of ‘no compromise’ conditioned an electorate to view anything except rigid purity as unacceptable?

I hold as an article of faith that someone other than Trump or Carson will win the nomination, but I don;t know who or how. In the meantime, I watch as one of America’s two parties thrashes in the throes of madness.

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Bad Movie Review: The Colossus of New York (1958)

I will leave it as an exercise to my few readers to parse if I mean the a review of bad movies or that these reviews are in themselves bad.

1-colossus_of_new_york_xlgA couple of weeks ago Paramount Studios launched a youtube channel the Paramount Vault. On this channel, they present clips from some of their most popular films and for older library titles with sparse home video value the have posted the entire movie. I certainly hope more studios follow suit. By way of this new channel, I watched The Colossus of New York a B SF movie from 1958 than until youtube I was only aware of thanks to Bill Warren’s Book Keep Watching the Skies.

Lots of spoilers ahead, but you really don’t care do you?

 

And here is the film you are brave and true:


The plot is this predictable film is simple. First there is the brilliant scientist, Jeremy ‘Jerry’ Spensser. He’s really really smart. The movie starts with him winning the Nobel prize and this is just a stepping stone. He’s expected to be the salvation of mankind because of his good nature and utter utter brilliance. In fact, his family are geniuses, his father a surgeon unparalleled, and his brother Henry a master of automated machinery. But neither we are told hold a flicker of a candle to Jerry’s intellect.

Well, coming home from the Sweden, Jerry’s son loses his toy airplane to the wind and Jerry, that man with an unmatched mind, chases it into traffic and is hit by a truck.

Father Spensser can’t bear the world losing his saint-like genius son and removed Jerry’s brain, keeping it alive and functioning in a tank. He convinces Henry to build an android body for Jerry. Though henry has reservations about a man without a soul and all that he of course complies. (He also starts an affair with Jerry’s cutie-pie wife, He’s not really a sleaze. He cares about the kid and all that, but you can see where this will end.)

Jerry at first rejects his machine life but finally agrees to continue his work on making the Artic into Earth’s newest farmland. Sadly, Henry was right about that soul thing. Without one, just like in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Jerry goes evil.

Now, you would think making Jerry a super strong machine man would be enough but apparently henry had to overcompensate in the robot’s design. Jerry can no hypnotize people with his flashing peepers. (Nope this ability is not established at all) Also when he does catch up with his brother on the whole cutie-pie front it turns out those flashing peepers are also a death ray. (Really Henry, what did you think you were designing?)

Manipulating his father Jerry goes to the UN and starts a killing spree. (He takes the high ground and this nasty eye are effective, even if he himself lacks any motivation for such slaughter.) In the end when confronted by the innocence of his son he realized the horror he has become and, because he can’t reach the switch himself, has his son turn him off.

I’ve watched  a lot of bad movies in my bay and this one joins the list.

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Movie Review:Crimson Peak

1-crimson-peak-posterLet say that I have been a fan of Guillermo Del Toro ever since I saw his film Chronos in the theater during its initial release. That is not to say I am a fan of all of Del Toro’s films, the first Hellboy didn’t work for me and the same can be said for Pacific Rim. It a happy circumstance that I can say I truly loved Crimson Peak.

Crimson Peak is under-performing at the box office and if you have a desire to see this on the big screen you should probably move quickly. before I give a non-spoiler review of the film let me tell you what this movie is not.

Crimson Peak is not a horror film and it is not a ghost story. Certainly looking at the trailers, posters, and images you could easily come away thinking it is both those things, but that would be a mistake Crimson Peak best fits the genre Gothic Romance. (That is a genre I am not overly familiar with and I am told that Peak inverts the tropes of that genre. this I have to take on faith.)

The movie is a story about a headstrong, capable woman, confident in herself and her arts suddenly courted and swept up in passion for a tall handsome European noble. (Yes, I did just call and Englishman a European, he can live with it.) She soon is off to be married to the dashing dreamer with a dark soul and a dark sister. The mood of the film is carried off perfectly, the imagery is haunting and like a masterpiece painting, the cast are wonderful and play their characters believably.  Now, I found I did predict the twists and turns of the plot, but I also consider plotting to be one of my strengths as a writer and it is the rare script that can justifiably surprise me in its plotting.

The film is violent, but not gratuitous or exploitive in is depiction or use. This is not a film that insists upon an on-screen death every ten minutes. There are ghosts, but it is not a ghost story. To quote the movie ‘It is not a ghost story; it is a story with ghosts.’ It is not for those easily upset by imagery or violence and it continues with Del toro’s persistent theme that the truly monstrous is the truly human.

If you are a fan of his work such as Pan’s Labyrinth this is worth seeing.

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A Different Approach to School Shootings

So yesterday morning as my sweetie-wife and I were en route to my day I caught a very interesting piece on NPR’s Morning Edition. They were interviewing writer Malcolm Gladwell and he proposed a radical take on the growing phenomenon of mass school shootings. The interview was prompted by a piece Gladwell had written for the current issue of the New Yorker Magazine and can be found here. It’s worth the time to read.

What he says and the sociological theory of riots he applied to school shooters all make sense to me and maps fairly well with what I know about these events. To be clear, these are a very different from workplace shootings and also very different from politically motivated mass killings. Gladwell avoids the simplistic approach of mental illness and looks at a much more frightening mechanism. The mob effect and in my opinion the status seeking motivation.

Particularly upsetting it the idea that traditional mass media is no longer a relevant factor as a status conferring mechanism. The internet drives a lot more of this now. This matches with what I do know about these schools shooters. They often, if not always, obsessed on-line over previous events, often analyze the shooters methods and outcomes, and seek to — for lack of a more apt word — improve on the results.

I have confided privately to a friend that my personal belief is that this wave is going to continue to a generation, perhaps two while our culture deals with the shock waves induced by massive change. (It is not a coincidence that the shooters are nearly always young men. The only except I know is the Brenda Spencer case and that’s more than 40 years old.) My friend if a gun collector and I predicted that it was likely the US would see more and more restrictive gun laws passed and that these would likely have little to minimal effect on the wave. (The laws that are possible, assault weapon bans, background checks, magazine capacity limits, are unlikely to make any serious change to these sorts of killings and a total gun ban is simply unrealistic for this country.)

However, this article sparked an idea. The problem is identifying these gunmen and killers before they act. More and more they have no history of serious mental illness that could be used in a reliably predictive manner. A position I hear repeatedly from psychiatric professionals on this matter. there simply is now way to screen to the vast population of angry young men and sort out the shooters from the non-shooters.

But they may be sending up flags we can use. On-line. If they are obsessing on-line about previous events, sharing information in forums and chatrooms, and leaving a digital trail of their intentions then it should be possible too use that information to identify, isolate, and prevent them from acting on their murderous fixations.

In order words, treat them like the terrorists they are and utilize the full power of the intelligence agencies to deal with this problem.

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Bad Movie Review: Death Ship (1980)

death_shipI have no idea why this movie suddenly popped up into my thoughts. I do remember that I had seen it during its initial theatrical run. That would be a difficult event to not remember. I was 19, in the Navy, and just getting seriously into RPGs. On that weekend Friday night me and my friends started a marathon AD&D game. We did not sleep but gamed right through the night and on into Saturday. by later Saturday we decided on a break in the game and went to the movies — Death Ship. After the movie we went back and continued gaming. Ah, the energies of youth.

I do remember I was not impressed with the film and tiny bits and pieces have stayed with me but really nearly off the movie was dumped by my data storage. Now, 35 years later I found myself thinking about the film and wondering what it really was like. Find a copy to watch proved to be a task, but one I completed sucessfully and earned out some e.p.

Death Ship is the story of a band of people who survive a cruise ship collision and find themselves adrift on debris in the Atlantic Ocean. Unfortunately for them the cause of their collision is the aforementioned Death Ship and when they spot it the next morning(?) (Not sure about that the lapse dissolves used after they are adrift makes any reasonable time estimation impossible.) They climb aboard its old and rusting hull. At once the ship proceeds to start killing them, throwing the Jewish comedian overboard.

A series of events pass when bad things happen to the survivors and one become possibly possessed by the ship, or perhaps simply enamored with it. the distinction is never made clear. There are psychotic breaks, or breaks in space/time, again the distinction is not clear, and eventually some of the survivors escape to rescue.

I made a post recently about the difference in my opinion between story and plot. This film is all plot, and very bad plot that is illogical and acausal, without any story. There are no characters of note, only the thinnest cardboard cutouts doing things to make the next scary event occur.

It is not surprising that I remembered so little of the movie as it contains nothing memorable.

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Hypothetical Trump Stopper

Trumps commanding rise in the Republican Primary is a black swan event. An unpredictable occurrence. When he first announced many people assumed, and I am included in that set, that he would flare and die as more serious candidates took the lead. The silly summer stretched on and Trump’s lead in the polls only grew.

No, I do not think he will be the nominee. TGhe party will rage and eventually kill his chances, but if they do that without gutting his support who knows what backlash his supporters may unleash? To safely remove Trump from the race he has to crater in the polls, but what might prompt that?

Not policy. He’s already all over the map with positions taken that would have killed any other candidate. His supporters simply don’t care.

Personality? Not likely, he is and remains who his public persona has always been, an arrogant, insulting, loud mouth, braggart and with each insult his numbers climb.

Attacks from the establishment? Hell, his supporters love him because he’s giving to the establishment. Every time the elders try to take him to task they strength him like Godzilla feeding at a nuclear reactor.

All the typical tool appear useless. I do think I have one way, but only Trump can do it.

Go watch a movie call ‘A Face in the Crowd.’ The character lonesome Rhodes suffers his downfall — spoilers — when an open mike lets his followers know exactly what he thinks of them.  Mitt Romney was hurt in the general election with his famous 47% comment, Trump supports would eat that up and ask for more, but if Trump were to be caught talking about the idiot and losers who listen to him and how he uses them, then he’d be toast.

But, I don’t know if he feels that way, or is in anyway likely to spout such sentiments.

Without that? I have no idea where you’ll find an oxygen destroyer that works on Trump.

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Story vs Plot

Lately I’ve been thinking about the intersection and differences between have a plot and have a story. What follows is necessarily just one person’s opinion and so take it or leave as you will.

Here are my basic definitions. A plot is a character with an objective and an intervening obstacle. A story is about a character in transformation, a character who is progressing through an arc and is changed irreversibly by the arc.

I’ll illustrate the differences between with two James Bond films, Moonraker and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. (Naturally there will be spoilers)

Moonraker is all plot and no story. Bond has a series objectives, Discover what happen to the stolen shuttle. Survived the attempts on his life by the villain Hugo Drax. Uncover the plot to destroy all human life, and finally prevent the nerve gassing of the planet. He succeeds at all of this, saves the world and has space nookie. The key thing that makes this all plot and no story is that James Bond in the first reel is exactly the same person as James Bond in the final reel. He has endured no tests of character, only of skill. You can replace him with any super-humanly competent secret agent and the events will transpire in essentially the same manner. James Bond himself makes no difference to the outcome only his skills.

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is a story with a plot. Bond has a series of obstacles to overcome, infiltrating the villain’s lair, discovering the threat to world agriculture, saving the world. In this aspect it is not very different than Moonraker, just with a less ludicrous set of events. However in this film Bonds meets Tracy and falls so hard for her that he marries her and resigns from the service. Blofeld, thwarted in his scheme, attempts to kill bond and kills only Tracy. Bond is shattered and broken in the movie’s final scene muttering over his wife’s corpse ‘We have all the time in the world.’

This is a story. Replace Bond with some other super-competent agent and while the world may be saved and the plot resolved, the character transformation will be missing. Tracy and James, quite unlike most other Bond girls, make this a story about choices and loss.

There in a nutshell is I how to cleave the difference between story and plot.

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Celebratory Trip

As many of you are aware, two months age I signed with the Virgina Kidd Literary agency.  (I am still somewhat boggled by that. They are a premier agency for SF/Fantasy writers.) Also in the month of June I twisted my knee and reinflamed its old injury. Now after weeks and weeks of work with my chiropractor, the knee is doing well. (The WorldCon was a test and I was able to walk 4.5 miles a day without pain.)

So now that the knee was recovered I could do what I wanted to do in celebration, go to Universal Studios Hollywood. My sweetie-wife doesn’t care for theme parks and the rides are certainly not her cup of tea, so this trip was a solo trip. That is sometimes a good thing. I am an introvert by nature and 10-12 hours on my own is good for my emotional state and usually give my brain time to ponder writing issues.

The sun beat down mercilessly on the park today, but I had  the foresight to apply sunscreen meaning I am not burned. There had been a few changes from my last trip in May. (I am an annual pass holder, so I go fairly often.) The Fast and Furious bit has been added to the tram tour/ride. It works pretty well. They use some sort of transparent screen to project footage in such a way that without glass there is a three-d effect. That’s only for the introduction, the main ride is pretty much like the King Kong 360 3D. You wear the glasses and are fully immersed in a fast action scene with events happening all the way around the tram. It’s a fairly well-executed illusion.

Raptor Encounters have been added as a character in the park. It’s very much based on the event sin Jurassic World where a trained works with the ‘tamed’ raptor. The suit/puppet for the raptor was impressive with articulated jaws and eye-lids. The Raptor performers I watched did an excellent job playing the beasts.

Photos and videos are up over at my facebook page. All in all I had a good day.

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