Monthly Archives: August 2019

Where Are the Conservative Solutions?

With my political reading and podcasts I try to read and listen to writers, publications, and thinker from both the liberal and the conservative perspectives. I’ll admit that I have yet to find a conservative podcast that seems to be about ideas and not about endless ad hominem  attacks on the viewpoints that they find disagreeable, but the search continues.

One thing I have noticed as I visit various conservative publications is what seems to be a scarcity of proposed solutions to challenges facing us today.  There is a lot of ink and bandwidth dedicated to attack solution proposed from liberals, endless streams of outrage over proposed or actual changes to our social order, and an infinite supply of arguments defending the current administration that are simply at odds with everything these publication have professed to stand for in previous years. It boils do to a lot of ‘We can’t do that!’ while offering nothing as a counter proposal.

This is not how has always been.

I think that what is happened and has been happening for about a decade or so is that we have reached the end of the life cycle for the current wave of conservative thought. I think that political thought comes in the large massive periods and when a version becomes dominant it will remain essentially unchanged for many years.

From the Great Depression through the first Bush administration the liberal political thought was very much just variations on FDR and his legacy. Until Bill Clinton’s campaign the music played at National Democratic conventions was Happy Times are Here Again   a Depression era song. Clinton, sensing that the Conservative era ushered in my Reagan had not yet passed, charted a ‘third way’ for his politics, seeking to appease conservatives as he tried to implement his programs. It was often said during his two terms that it was better to be his enemy than his ally because he would sell out his ally to gain from his enemy. Obama in my opinion represents the final breaking from the FDR legacy and is the threshold as we cross into a yet undefined period of liberal thought. It is why the three leading Democratic candidates for President lead such different coalitions.

On the conservative side the victories of Ronald Reagan broke forth a new dawn, pushing aside the conservative thought of Eisenhower, Rockefeller, and that ilk for a new way of thinking. However that victory happened in 1980, 39 years ago, and the last of Reagan ideology has been falling away. We are at the end of Reagan’s period of dominance and conservatism, particularly now that the Cold War is over, must find a new philosophy and new thought and it hasn’t done that yet. Trump represents one possible future for conservatism. It is a bitter, hate-filled future of endless nasty attacks and a very tribal warfare but it is a possible and it holds no solutions only political warfare that never ends. A decided defeat of Trump in 2020 will be a good step in closing off that future, but it will take more than one humiliation to kill that monster.

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Film Review: All the Colors of the Dark (1972)

Hailing from 1972 and currently streaming on the specialized horror service Shudder, All the Colors of the Dark  is a giallo,  a genre of Italian cinema that specialized in sensation lurid tales often centered on aspects of sex, sexual perversion, and violence. Part of the global exploitive cinema of the 1970s and 1980s, giallos  are colorful, have amazing photography, and bold art direction, the best of them are usually associated with the noted directors Mario Bava and Dario Argento. Though an Italian film All the Colors of the Dark  was filmed and set in England.

Jane (Edwige Fenech), while recovering from a car crash that injured her and killed her unborn baby, is tormented by terrifying visions of a knife-wielding attacker. The vision manifest most often when Jane and her boyfriend Richard (George Hilton) attempt to be sexually involved. Richard insists she needs vitamins, while her sister Barbara, who works for a psychiatrist presses for psychiatry. Jane’s neighbor, Mary, introduces Jane to a satanic coven and the events explode into debauchery, assault, and murder with Jane’s visions becoming apparently real as she loses connection with reality.

With plenty of blood and nudity All the Colors of the Dark is not a film for the young, sensitive, or easily offended. The final act of the movie ties things together with an explanation, but this, as with most giallos  in my opinion, is more a perfunctory move providing only the barest of rationales that allow the dream-like and nightmarish imagery to play out.  This sort of movie you do not watch for logical consistency or carefully interlocking plotting but rather for the surreal nature of the visuals and the emotional punch of the scenes. I find the style reminiscent of David Lynch albeit with a much more conventional approach.

 

 

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Reading HBO’s Chernobyl

Unless you have been under a rock hiding from the insanity of today’s world, and honestly who could blame you, you have probably heard of HBO’s fantastic mini-series Chernobyl  chronicling the infamous Soviet nuclear disaster. Show runner and writer Craig Mazin, best know for films such as The Hangover 2,  delivered an amazing, frightening, and moving depiction of the terrifying and heroic events surrounding the 1986 event.

Mazin also co hosts with fellow screen scribe John August the podcast Scriptnotes  where the pair, along with occasional guests, discuss screenwriting from both a creative and a business practical viewpoint.  As part of their mission to help screenwriters Mazin has published all five scripts for Chernobyl  and I have spent the last two days lost in a wonderful reading experience.

I have read a number of scripts for both television and feature films and I have to say that Mazin has really opened my eyes to ways this particular art form can be expressed. His approach is a close subjective style with elements that I have not seen often in screenplays. The narrative elements of the script contain descriptions that are purely internal to the character. It’s a guide to the reader, the director, and the actor how a scene needs to be played. I have to say that these scripts are a good reading experience one that is as enjoyable as any well-crafted short story or novel. Not only has it made me appreciate the craft more, but also it has enhanced my respect for the series as a whole and ignited a desire to re-watch the entire run.

The scripts are available for free downloading at John August’s website.

 

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Foreign Movie Review: Salyut-7

Inspired by the Soviet Mission to save their crippled space station the film Salyut 7is a fictionalized drama in low Earth orbit.

Vladimir Fyodorov is a Soviet Cosmonaut grounded after reporting having seen ‘angels’ in orbit during a life-threatening emergency. His wife and daughter are relieved that Vladimir will no longer be risking his life in dangerous space missions. Everything is upturned when the space station Salyut 7 that was un-crewed and flying on automatic suddenly loses all power and is rendered dead in orbit. Fearful that either the Americans may steal the station by way of a shuttle mission or that the station in an uncontrolled re-entry posses a hazard the Soviet’s decide to launch a mission to repair the station. After all other cosmonauts fail to dock with tumbling station in simulation it is decided to reactive Vladimir and along with an engineer is sent to Salyut 7. Once there they face numerous challenges both technical and personal as they struggle to rescue the station, Soviet prestige, and their very lives in a desperate bid to save the station.

With only a few technical errors, Salyut 7 is a gorgeous film utilizing the very best special effects to recreate the sensation of flying 200 miles above the Earth at 17,000 miles per hour.  In the interests of narrative and drama, the story deviates significantly from the historical record and should be best viewed as a work of fiction rather than a view of actual events. The acting is very good, the drama is tight and the characters believable and relatable. Currently available on Amazon Prime in Russian with English subtitles Salyut 7 is worth the time for anyone who enjoys a heavy dose of technical realism in their space films/

 

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Fantastic Films Ahead

As we wind down into the end of August and the end of summer, I can look forward to two different fantastic film events.

First up, starting on August 30thand running for three days is the Horrible Imaginings Film Festival. Started ten years ago by my friend Miguel Rodriguez the festival is dedicated to horror films of all stripes. Miguel and his team cast a wide net using a liberal definition of horror that includes everything from neo-noir crime thrillers to surrealist experimentations exploring deadly vampire clay. Started in San Diego with a tiny venue, the festival now is hosted in Orange County California at the wonderful art house theater The Frida Cinema, and while the locale has added about an hour and a half of travel time, it is still well worth the effort. Sadly, because August 31stis the first day of a long holiday weekend and I do not yet have 15 plus years of seniority at my day-job I will be missing the first evening’s festivities including what looks to be a fun film Satanic Panic. Seriously, at my job people rarely leave once they get in the door, and that is understandable, but to get any time off around the holidays is neigh impossible for anyone with less than 15 years of seniority. I do miss the days when the festival was located in San Diego and I could simply drive down to the Museum of Photographic Arts to catch the first evening, but the Frida is a great venue and I would rather the festival thrive than wither simply because it would be easier for me.

The second film event is on September 28thand is The Secret Morgue 2. Created by our local film fanatics Film Geeks SD, of which Miguel is a founding member he’s responsible for in part or in whole for a whole lot of good film stuff in San Diego, this is a 13 hours marathon of horror film hosted by the Comic-Con Museum in Balboa Park. Last year at the first Secret Morgue the theme was 70s and 80s horror, the sort of title you would discover in video rental stores, if you remember what those were. The titles were secret and I rolled the dice and attended the screenings. What fun I had! Every film was one I had never seen, and while some were tedious than entertaining, I don’t regret attending. This year the theme is SF Horror and I suspect I will have seen some of these titles before but I could be wrong. Film Geeks SD has a deep cinematic knowledge and their choice can be quite surprising.

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Every Book Is Different

As I embark on the start of writing another novel it has struck me as curious that each of the books I have written ahs taken a different path in the pre-writing work.

Now, there are, of course, a lot of similarities, after all I am the author of each of these works and while I evolve and change those changes are not so radical as to turn me from a plotter to a pantser. However there are significant changes to my approach with each and every book. The quest for ‘The Way’ to write a novel never truly finds a whole and unifying answer.

Outline vary a great deal from fairly simple and straight forward affairs of just a few pages to the monster outline that reached 87 double spaced pages which detailed nearly every single scene in the work. I like using act structure to plan and plot my narrative but that too changes from book to book, with some using a three-act format such as you might see in a typical movie to more recently a five-act structure inspired by the plays of William Shakespeare. Often my act structure is nothing more than the key events that define the changing of an act, but I have also crafted spreadsheet tracking each character through the acts showing their relations to not only the changing of the acts but to each other as they approach these key story beats.

Often I will amass a list of characters as I compose an outline, with new characters created and added to my list as I discover them in the process and even that changes. For my most recent work, which isn’t yet to the outlining stage, I ended up creating a visual map of the characters, color-coded for if they were primarily associated with a protagonists or an antagonist and with lines connecting the character that had significant relationships to each other. This exposed a hole in the narrative that required a character that connected to several of my major characters and straddled the divided between protagonists and antagonist.

This all makes a weird kind of sense to me. Each novel is unique, with its own set of characters, themes, and events, and that fact that each requires a unique approach should not be that surprising.

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Sunday Night Movie: Circus of Fear (1966)

Last night my sweetie-wife and I watched an older British film of Amazon Prime, Circus of Fear. From 1966 and starring Christopher Lee and Leo Genn, who struck both of us as a low-rent James Mason, the movie is far less about horror than it is about crime.

After a daring daylight armored car robbery, are they all daring, which ends in the unintentional murder of a guard, Scotland Yard Inspector Elliott, (Genn), chases down leads until he’s confronted with a rogue’s gallery of suspects at a circus that is wintering over. With every character seeming harboring a deep and dangerous secret and a masked foreign lion tamer, (Lee) Elliott’s task of discovering the murderer and recovering the stolen 250,000 British pounds becomes much more difficult.

Comprised of studios shoots, tired stock footage of an actual circus, and emaciated elephants, Circus of Fear  can hardly be called a good movie. There were times, particularly with the repeated shots of a gloved hand throwing knives with lethal precision as character were eliminated from the story, that I was reminded of the Italian Giallo genre of lurid and sensation exploitative movies but sadly we were not watching one of those and whatever charm this movie had quickly faded.

The cast included Klaus Kinski as a mostly unnamed and looming threat over the proceedings but his part was rather small and did not provide enough screen time for ample amusement. Repeated uses of crash zooms and abrupt cuts failed to provoke any real sense of shock or dread and for the most part what you can say about this movie is that it was shot in focus and without absurd cuts covering poor editing choices. This is suitable for Riff Tracks ofrMST3K should they ever get around to it.

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It is Probably a Bad Movie Anyway

Some weeks ago I first saw the trailer for the thriller The Hunt and I was unmoved and uninterested. If you are familiar with the classic story The Most Dangerous Game, a piece of literary fiction that has been adapted into film several time or the Ozploitation movie Turkey Shoot  then you are aware of the basic set-up for The Hunt, a group of people are forced to the objects of a big game hunt and must fight and use their wits to survive. When I saw the trailer my thoughts went to Turkey Shoot  and frankly seeing that again prompted more interest.

Last weekend a conservative friend of mine brought up the film because of controversy that was apparently bubbling over at conservative websites. The movie grand satire was that gun-toting liberal elites were the hunters and that they had selected ‘deplorables’ Trump supporters and the like as their game. Under fire for this set-up, with Trump taking part in condemning the movie, and the horrific tragedy of three mass shooting events, one certainly politically motivated, within seven days, Universal pulled the movie indefinitely from their release schedule.

Ruben Baron at the website CBR reports having read the script by Damon Lindelof and Nick Cuse and compares it to an episode of South Park  where both the liberal hunters and conservative prey are presented in a bad light. In an attempt to be even handed apparently the script treats the liberal hunters as stereotypes and the people selected for the hunt are guilt of more than simple right-wing political positions but are also spousal abusers and such. (Though that itself ignore that domestic violence spans the political spectrum and reveals more about the screenwriters than perhaps they intended.) The central hero is a Red Stater who was selected by mistake when her name is confused for the hunt’s actual target.

I find it amusing that before Fox News, Trump, and PJ media jumped into the fray certain that this was nothing more than a liberal hit job on ‘real’ America that the most sympathetic characters were likely to be the conservatives being hunted. Narrative fiction, at least in the European tradition, is about character struggling to overcome adversity to achieve a goal and in that mold the characters an audience is most likely to root for are the ones fighting to survive. They have with the highest stakes in the conflict, are the ones suffering at a disadvantage, and the ones more likely to fail. I am reminded of a WWII training film about enemy interrogation where an allied aircrew is captured by the German and subject to various tricks, threats, and subtle techniques to divulge classified information. When I watched the film it was very difficult not to root for the Germans. They had the objective, they were facing the clock, and to win all the Americans had to do was shut up and say nothing. I suspect this script, in addition to being bad satire, would have placed the audience sympathies with the hunted.


 

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One Year Without an Agent

It was a little more than a year ago when my literary agency made it official and dropped me from their list.

I won’t lie, that hurt.

I won’t lie, I saw it coming. Emails went unanswered manuscripts went unread and in general I seemed to be more and more of an afterthought so the eventual move was hardly surprising. I am not naming names and I am not here to trash talk anyone or make a big public angry rant. The Author/Agent relations is a relation and now all of them work out, people have the be compatible just as with romantic entanglements there comes a time when it is better to walk away than to stay in one that is unhealthy and counter-productive. For those who are still with that agent and that agency I wish you all the best.

So, what has happened to me in the intervening twelve months?

I mentioned that ‘manuscripts went unread’ well that referred to a strange little novel I wrote where I combined Science-Fiction with Film Noir. I am certainly not the first person to that, there a plenty of novels exploring that blending of genres but what is different in mine are the exact sub-genres I braided together. Noir has two major branches, the ‘Hard Boiled’ school of police and private detectives and the ‘dark underbelly’ of society. That second branch is represented by works such as ‘Double Indemnity’ and ‘The Postman Always Rings Twice’ and it is the flavor I wanted to work with, merging it with colonial science-fiction about humanity as it struggles to survive on alien worlds.

I took that SF/Noir manuscript that had languished unread and found a publisher that produced books of both SF and crime narrative and submitted it. The book sold. First time, first publisher I submitted it to. I just completed the edits to the manuscript and my editor has submitted to the house’s production department. Vulcan’s Forge is expected to hit the shelves next March.

The manuscript that started the relationship with my former agent is showing promise as well. A major house that specializes in military SF, which is what that manuscript is, just alerted me that the work had been pulled of ‘closer examination.’ Of course they may still pass on the book but it’s more activity that it had been getting.

On the short story front I made it to ‘Finalist’ for the Writers of the Future Contest. That’s in the top eight slots out of thousands that had entered. I did not win, but it felt good that my odd little AI/Ghost story made it so far.

The point of all this?

If you’re queries are bouncing off agencies, do not despair. There are more paths in that just that one. Keep writing, keep plugging, and remember never ever self-reject

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Are they Alternative Histories?

The following post has spoilers for Inglorious Basterds and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood so proceed at your own discretion.

 

In the film Inglorious Basterds the heroes in a bloody and suicidal action murder the inner circle of the Nazi party including Hitler himself, presumably bring World War II to a premature close while in the current movie Once Upon a Time in Hollywood the cult followers of Charles Manson instead of murdering Sharon Tate and her houseguests attack her neighbors presumably launching Hollywood into a utterly novel sociological path.

Are these films with their fantastic premises and fairy tale ending popular examples of Alternative History fiction? Alternative History is that genre of speculative fiction which imagines how the world might have been different had history taken a different track than the one we know. For example what if the USA had lost its war of independence, or if WWI had not started? Harry Turtledove is today’s best practitioner of this art.

One the face of it this answer seems obvious, both of Tarantino’s film wildly diverge from actual history making those cinematic excursions truly an alternative to our own. However I think it require more than that. After Braveheart has loads of things wildly different from actual history and yet I have not heard anyone argue that it is an ‘alternative history.’

I believe an essential component of alternative history is an examination of what those differences mean to our understanding of the world. It is an examination of the consequencesof the change not just the change itself. In both films the story ends with the change, we never see what that means for the wider world. How does Hitler dying in 1944 change the Cold War, with Tate’s brutal murder how does film making change? We have no answer from the filmmaker, not even the hint of one. These are fairy tales, not alternative histories.

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