Monthly Archives: July 2019

Quick Thoughts: The Lion King (2019)

Not a full review but just a few of my impressions about Disney’s remake of the Animated classic.

The technical achievements are mind blowing. It is not a live action movie but a photo-realistic CGI animated film and the photo-realism is spot on. There were very few moments, and those were fleeting, where I felt the computer’s presence but rather this looked, utterly, like a menagerie of African animals acting on the savanna. The lions’ fur during rain was particularly impressive.

The technical artistry was also the feature principal failing. As many reviewers have notes the animals’ feature are so faithfully reproduced that emotional expressiveness is absent. The angled od the head and movement of the ears are the most overt indicators of a character’s emotional state, more than any other animated feature this one relies heavily, too heavily, on the vocal performances. (Which were fine but the lack of emotional eyes damages the film.)

Why of why did they have to screw-up my favorite song?

I adore the original’s rendition of Be Prepared, and while I have never heard Chiwetel Ejiofor sing (One of these days I am going to have to rent Kinky Boots) the spoken and broken cadence of this version of my favorite song grated.

While I am on the subject of the villains, the revising of the plot to elevate the hyenas as more active while devaluing Scar’s agency did not work at all and muddled a perfectly balanced plot into one that while not a mess lacked a strong dramatic though line as in the original.

 

If you are a fan of the original this movie is not really worth the time.

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A Strange Dry Period

When it comes to my writing productivity this year has been curious. Earlier I sold my first novel to Flame Tree Press and that was exciting, thrilling, and informative. I look forward to the stages and processes yet to come, the cover reveals, and ultimately the book’s release early next year.

Now, you would think having achieved something that has been long sought after, fought for, and dreamt about would be a vitalizing incident spurring an explosion of creativity and output but it’s been rather the opposite. Every short story I attempted for months following the contract stalled and crashed. It seemed that I could start a story but following through to completion seemed impossible.

Last moth as we hurtled towards the deadline for the quarter for the Writers of the Future contest, something I will remain eligible to enter and win until early next year when the novel is published, it seemed I was going to have to skip entering as none of those accursed shorts would land instead of crashing. Then, with less than six days before the deadline a new idea burst in my skull. At first I had thought to rewrite an idea from many years ago but sudden inspiration transformed it into a new concept with wholly new themes. A furious several days passed and the story, this time, behaved, coming to a dark and hopefully satisfying conclusion.

Since that submission my creative energies have been growing and I have begun work on a new novel, tacking for the first time in a novel length work an alien as a central character. It would seem that the strange and mystifying dry period that followed signing the contract has ended.

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Movie Review: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood …

Quentin Tarantino’s films for me are a hit or miss affair, some I adore, some or passable, and with some my suspension of disbelief is shattered rendering them pointless. Of the nine movies directed, so far, by Tarantino, my favorite three arePulp Fiction, Inglorious Basterds, and now Once Upon A Time in Hollywood ….

Once  is centered on the relationship between Rick Dalton, (Leonardo DiCaprio) a television westerns actor whose career has begun to fade and his Stunt Double/Driver/ and friend Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt.) Set in 1969 a period where the former glory of Hollywood had faded away with the collapse of the studio system in the 1950s and just before the rise of personal filmmaking of the 70s that would usher in the likes of Scorsese, Coppola, Lucas, and Spielberg, With his western series Bounty Law  canceled Rick has turned to guest appearances on other shows, often playing the heavy, as his prospects continue to dry up while Cliff, dogged by an unresolved scandal, finds work as a stuntman difficult to book. In this dying and decaying period with the blush vanishing from the Free Love Hippie movement Rick finds himself suddenly neighbors with Hollywood’s latest Golden Couple, Roman Polanski, still riding high from his smash success Rosemary’s Baby and his actress/wife Sharon Tate. Throughout the film the audience is given three storylines to follow, Rick’s struggle to remain relevant and find his voice again as an artist, Sharon’s satisfaction in his art and at the prospect of becoming a mother, and Cliff’s course crossing paths with the dangerous and murderous Manson Cult that has taken up residence on an abandoned western movie ranch.  The film’s final act deals with the tragic events that for many shattered Hollywood’s illusions of safety and privilege in a rapidly changing culture.

Tarantino has love been hailed and derided for his scripts’ ubiquitous cinematic and pop-cultural references and here with a subject matter firmly set in the middle of that melting pop he does nothing to restrain those impulses. That said it is clear that this reflects a deep and committed love for movies and for this film the references and the nods and the adoration deepens the story’s reality even as the director takes significant liberties with the historical record. Even as the plot drives relentless towards an evening that has become seared in popular consciousness for it’s brutality and its horror Once  never loses sight of the essential humanity of its characters, both fictional and historical. In the end the resolutions is not so much about cults and mad insane violence as it is about the deep emotional bond between two men who have lived entangled in each other’s lives.

This film is not for everyone. For some the long diversions into the minutia of the character’s lives, scenes that simply illustrate their lived experiences without advancing narrative of ticking off plot points may seem to drag and bore but for me I could spend several more hours following Rick and Cliff as they navigate a difficult friendship and the industry’s ever changing structure. Like most Tarantino films when the violence does erupt it is bloody, visceral, graphic, and even somewhat cartoonish, however if your knowledge of the real events on that isolated drive give you hesitation about seeing this movie, I certainly felt that, set your concerns aside. This is a love letter to a lost period, to an art form, and not a celebration, veneration, or even exploitation of Manson and his ‘family.’

 

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Terrific Art, Terrible Person

As a consumer what do you do when the artist is a terrible person?

In this day and age when less and less of what was once considered ‘private’ become public and common knowledge more and more anyone who is idealized and lionized is revealed to have not just feet of clay but dark black hearts as well.

I am not speaking of just the abrasive personality, the demanding and tyrannical nature of their relations with coworkers and assistants but deeds that are criminal and often unforgivable. I need not give a detailed listing of the recent and distant scandals that reveals some artists, performers, and creators to be truly reprehensible people.

What should you do?

There are no easy or one-size fits all answers. To each of us lies our individual moral duty and obligations and as shepherds of our own consciences we have to find the answers alone, but I can share some of what guides me and perhaps that might illuminate for myself and other how to approach the difficult and fraught choices.

I have to ask myself does the art endorse, reflect, promote, or otherwise give support to the actions that I found reprehensible?

Kevin Spacey is a talented actor and apparently, yet to be proven in a court of law, a terrible person when it comes his behavior. Does his art endorse the sort of actions he has been credibly accused of? It doesn’t seem so to me.

It is easier separate the artist and the art when the art lies completely apart from the artist’s reprehensible actions, Polanski’s Macbeth is my favorite film adaptation of the classic play and has nothing to do with the man’s criminal actions. I can enjoy the filmmaking, the artistry, and still support the position that he deserves the jail time he escaped.

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Nazis, Socialism, and Madonna’s First Movie

It has been brought to my attention recently that there are still, and I imagine going on forever, people insisting that Nazis are actually socialists and by extension left wing politically. The arguments fail to convince me and I’ve laid out in other posts why I think the Nazi fall clearly on the right. What I find fascinating about this argument is contorted logics employed in services of preconceived conclusions; they are rationalizations and not reasons.

Back in 1985 I engaged in the strange habit of renting the worse movies I could possibly locate on VHS. A little mom-and-pop shop just around the corner from where I lived had the most interesting collection of odd movies with titles such as Hitchhike to Hell  and then one night the gem A Certain Sacrifice  appeared on the shelves. This micro-budgeted movie shot in 1979 and 1980 and looking as though the film stock was all of 8 mm wide included an unknown performer, Madonna. By the mid 1980s her stardom had exploded and the filmmaker capitalized on this by releasing his movie on home video. Thought Madonna attempt to stop the release she failed in the courts and I was treated to a truly terrible movie.

What does this have to do with the question if Nazis were or were not socialists?

After watching the film with my roommate one of the games I engaged in was arguing that A Certain Sacrifice  was not in fact a bad movie but a masterpiece of filmmaking rich with metaphor and symbolism. My arguments were artistically sound and of course utterly untrue. The fact that I could spin a consistent narrative that ‘explained’ all the bad film choices as something smart and creative did nothing to change the facts of the matter. The same is true in this political argument.

You can quote from the early years of the Nazi party to prove points, ignoring the uncomfortable truth that those elements were brutally eliminated during the night of long knives. You can construct logical arguments that proceed from a foundation that everything totalitarian is socialist and get to your preferred conclusions, but linguistic dexterity and slippery arguments do not change facts on the ground.

But how can we know the facts on the ground? How can we test this concept?

Easy, watch actual Nazis and see where they place themselves politically.

It is on the right.

People giving Nazi salutes election night 2016 were not bemoaning a loss.

People marching by torchlight and chanting ‘Jews will not Replace Us’ did not organize a ‘United the Left’ protest.

It was not the Democratic Party that found itself represented by an actual Nazi in the 2018 congressional elections.

Nazis nearly always self-sort to the right, their behavior betrays their natural placement on the ideological spectrum.

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Movie Review: Maleficent

With the trailers for Maleficent: Mistress of Evilplaying in theaters and online prompting some interest from me I decided it was time to see the 2014 feature starring Angelina Jolie.

According to the Wikipedia entry the script for Maleficentwent through 15 drafts and in my opinion it needed 15 more.

The movie is a retelling of Sleeping Beautybut centering the story on the original’s villain, Maleficent. Beginning with a ponderous voiceover narration that suffers from all the worst aspects of prologs the film laboriously goes through the motion of establishing its central characters motivation but devoid of any real characterization. A good half of the movie is spent just establishing elements that have no emotional weight. This is made worse by sub-standard CGI that extends the ‘uncanny valley’ from characters to actual valleys, as the virtual sets never allow a full suspension of disbelief.

Perhaps most damning is that Maleficent herself is a terribly passive character. Yes they give her villainy a reason but she has no goals in the film, there is nothing that she is desperate to achieve and no consequence of failure. By the time the film rolled into its third act I found it impossible to care about the curse, the fairies, or anything at all taking place on the screen. And rather than give us an evil character with understandable motivations and goal Maleficentends with redemption making the transition to the sequel problematic. As with Alien 3you can only get to the sequel by insisting that anyone who did invested emotionally with the previous story were suckers. A sequel should never put the audience in the position of having to discard what they cared for in the previous installments.

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Complicity, Willful Ignorance, or Denial

The most recent racist attacks by President trump are not the straws that broke any camel’s back. Politically accepting that Trump has a multitude of racist bones in his body was established when he took that escalator ride down into the Trump Tower Lobby and proclaimed Mexican people as ‘criminals’ and ‘rapists’ while reserving the privilege of assuming that ‘some’ were good people. The reports of Trump’s deep racial animosity stretches back throughout the entirety of his public life, including Federal law suits over his refusal to rent to African-Americans, and the ‘understanding’ of his casino floor managers that when trump visited to move African-Americans employees out of sight.  Nothing he has done as a businessman, public figure, or elected servant has contradicted this portrayal. Simply put, Donald Trump is racist.

The question is what do the rest of us do about it?

For independents and members of the Democratic Party this answer is obvious, oppose him, fight to defeat him, and drive him from the public square. But that’s a goal the Democrats and many others would have regardless of Trump bigotry.

For Republicans the challenge is far more consequential and very few appear to have the moral courage to meet it. At this date if one is unwilling to denounce and defeat this vile racism then you are left with just three options.

Complicity – you are a part of it. Your silence and refusal to take action make you into an ally in his smears, slanders, and bigotry.

Willful Ignorance – you ignore the facts, studiously avoid learning any of the man’s history, and pretend that in this media saturated environment you somehow have remained unaware of the truth.

Denial — One of my favorite authors once wrote ‘Mankind is not a rational animal but a rationalizing animal.’ This is never truer then when people invent fantastic leaps of logic in order to avoid the simplest and most obvious of conclusions. If you are finding byzantine explanation for how these numerous and repeated attacks are not ‘really racist’ congratulations you are in the state of Denial.

So which state is yours?

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Revisiting: Train to Busan

Last night I completed a two-night re-watch of the South Korean zombie film Train to Busan.I originally reviewed this movie January 2017 when I had the good fortune to see it in a local micro-theater. At that time I gushed over the film and for Christmas my sweetie-wife gifted me with the Blu-ray edition. So, how does it hold up two years later? Have scales fallen from my eyes and have flaws now made themselves suddenly prominent in the bit of cinema?

No.

Off the top of my head and without digging deep into the history of zombie movies I’d place this film within the top three zombie movies of all time. Mind you I am speaking of quality and not importance. Train to Busan ranks along side the 1978 Dawn of the Dead  and 2004’s Shaun of the Dead as zombie movies that transcend genre and move into the realm of art. Where Dawn  using it’s time to slyly comment on consumerist culture and Shaun  uses it’s rom-com format to address life when it is unexamined, Train with its passengers slicing through the various strata of Korean society, comments on the nature of individuals and their relationship to each other, most exemplified by the estrangement between the lead and his daughter, but the theme echoes in interactions throughout the cast with no character, not even the self-serving and villainous business man, lacking in human depth and need for connection with those they love and cherish.

Re-watching the film I am thunder-struck by the performances. Not simply the leads, who are all fantastic, but every small part if played with the life and vitality of a serious performance. Simple expression and single lines of delivery suggest complex interior lives for characters that are never even granted to the honor of being named. Not to be overlooked are the amazing mime performances of the actors portraying the zombies. Twisting and contorting their bodies the actor exude a sense of inhumanness that turns what had become a tired and standard screen monster into something that again can truly terrify.

By the heart wrenching ending of the film I was thoroughly engrossed in the characters fully invested emotionally, Train to Busan  is a fantastic film.

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A Party Without Solutions

I try to consume political media from a wide variety of sources, including news and opinion journalists. To me it is a firm truism that no person, party, or faction has a complete truth and as such I am always looking for new points of view, new ideas and solutions to the problems and challenges facing out nation and our world.

Finding liberal or progressive writers, commenters, and podcasters with proposed solutions is scarcely any trouble at all but the converse is not true for conservative thought. When I read or listen to conservative writers and podcasters it very quickly becomes evident that there is a real dearth proposed solutions. This is not to say that there aren’t things that the GOP and conservatives want to enact or achieve but it seems to me that everything on that list, be it ‘constitutional carry,’ tax reductions, or a lax regulatory structure, is something that they desire regardless of any current condition.

Instead when I read or tune into conservative media it is often about their state of  ‘siege.’ It’s endless vitriol, attacks, and frankly whining about the unfairness of the culture, exaggerated and imaginary dangers of ‘SJWs’ eradicating Christian culture, or pitiful attempts to re-play the cold war and depict every progressive proposal as the rebirth of Stalinism.

As a country, a society, and as a species we face serious challenges, stagnating wages, crumbling infrastructures, racial strife, rising authoritarianism, spreading mass murder, and climate change and yet one half the American political system offers nothing but platitudes.

This is terrible time and I fear it could become much worse before it gets better.

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Movie Review: Crawl

There are horror film, monster movies, and creature features with significant overlap between these three sub-genres and this week’s releaseCrawl pretty much falls into the Creature Feature definition.

Set in a fictional Florida town of Coral Lake during a category 5 hurricane, Crawl  is about Haley Keller (Kaya Scodelario) and her father Dave (Barry Pepper) trapped in the crawlspace of their home while being menaced by aggressive alligators. If you have seen the trailers for the film then you have pretty much seen the entire premise and set-up. Clocking in at a slim 86 minutes Crawl  doesn’t waste much time, very quickly delivering it’s central character Haley into the jaws of danger and then escalated the obstacles throughout the movie. Focused on the dangers of drowning and deadly alligators the movie is light on character development, though it has some just enough to hang the barest story upon, and any deeper theme beyond survival is wholly absent from the script. With the exception of a few secondary and utterly disposable characters this movies rest entirely upon Haley and Dave as they struggle to survive.

In a high-concept movie there is usually one ‘gimmie’ that is asked of the audience, one element that if accepted though it flies in the face of reality allows the rest of the story to unfold organically and with suspension of disbelief. In the classic film Jaws  one has to ignore actual shark behavior but beyond that the film proceeds logically. With this film the one gimmie should be the alligator behavior but sadly the writers and directors instead ask the audience to accept impossibility upon impossibility particularly as the movies crashes through its third act action. Detailed and graphic tissue damage that the characters, both Haley and Dave, sustain from attacks are minimized beyond belief for the sake of keeping the characters mobile, active, and capable of impressive physical feats for even uninjured persons. The first time the filmmakers ignored the realistic effect of a compound leg fracture, I simply groaned and accepted it, the second I silently growled in frustration, and by the climax I needed to stifle actual laughter.  In addition to the grossly under-valued physical damage the characters nearly ignore, the third act also suffers from contrived coincidences with valuable and critical equipment literally floating to the characters in their moment of dire need. As an additional note, a category 5 hurricane has sustained winds exceeding 157 miles per hour and there will not be rescue helicopters flights in such conditions.

Overall I found Crawlunworthy of the timer I spent watching it and I took solace in knowing that as part of my weekly three movies from the theater chain’s subscription service it cost me no extra money. For others, with less sensitive suspension of belief, this movie may turn out to be a fun roller coaster ride, an exciting summer popcorn movie, but for me it was not.

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