Monthly Archives: November 2023

General Catchup:

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Posting here of late has been quite sporadic for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, the current novel in progress has consumed most of the creative CPU cycles in my brain. Perhaps the fact that I am ‘pantsing’ the book, that is writing it without a pre-created outline means I need more synapses on station or perhaps because it is my first novel length horror project, or some other reason, it’s been front and center of my brain for weeks. Either way there has been creative output toward the blog and more in the direct of these Family Value Fascist werewolves.

Secondly, we have entered the busy season at my day-job. The non-profit healthcare HMO I work for get very busy from October thru January as this is the yearly ‘open enrollment’ period of member’s with Medicare to enroll, disenroll, or make changed to the Medicare HMO coverage. Overtime becomes plentiful and work takes up loads of hours.

Still, this weekend, after shifting my working on Friday to 7am until 4pm, my sweetie-wife and I sped up to L.A. and enjoyed the weekend with the Los Angeles Area SF Convention, LosCon. This year I did not participate as a panelist, but enjoyed going to panels on writing, movies, and technology. In the evenings there were room parties, lengthy discussion and I ended each night in the lobby with a soda, my laptop, and the final chapter of my horror novel. Which I completed on Saturday night.

The last couple of panels of the convention were of only middling interest to us and so we left about 2:30 pm to get home to San Diego. Once home we settled on simply microwave meals and watched the new Doctor Who special.

All in all it was a good weekend and today I start the corrections and revision to ‘The Wolves of Wallace Point.’

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Movie Review: Next Goal Wins

Searchlight Pictures

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Even someone as disconnected from the world of professional sports like myself knows that soccer is a low scoring game. It’s quite a shock to discover that it is a historical fact that the American Samoa team were crushed, annihilated, and humiliated by Australian National team losing to them by the astounding seemingly impossible score of 31-0. Next Goal Wins is the comedic, true-life inspired, sport feature film from Taika Waititi.

If you have seen comedy sports team movies before, such as The Mighty Ducks or The Bad News Bears, then you will instantly recognize the structure of this movie. The irascible tantrum throwing coach, in this case Thomas Rongen (Michael Fassbender) is tasked against his will to bring a team of outcasts, misfits, and oddballs into some sort sporting shape before an emotionally important game. Along the way the team learns something of value from the coach and the coach learns that there is more to life than sports and that he shouldn’t judge on early impressions.

Nothing in Next Goal Wins breaks this fundamental story construction, but two things do make this movie distinct. First, the film take time to respect and enjoy the culture of American Samoa. The people of this island nation are the real heart of soul of the production. Secondly the film is very much fixed in the off-beat humor of its director and co-writer Taika Waititi. Waititi’s humor is grounded in humanism. It is rarely cruel or mean and often celebrates humanity’s oddness that produces such infinite variety. Much like his current HBO series Our Flag Means Death, this film elevates the weird and different illustrating that joy is a much better way to live than anger.

This film is not a deep exploration of human soul, but it is concerned with that soul and that to be happy is important and sometimes it is choice. This is one well worth seeing.

Next Goal Wins is currently playing in theatrical release.

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Movie Review: The Marvels

Marvel Studios

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Marvel Cinematic Universe films come sin several flavors and tones, from the intensely personal and dramatic such as Captain America: Civil War, the thematically serious such as Black Panther and its critique of both colonialism and ethno-isolation, to the comedic and lighthearted such as Ant-Man. 2023’s The Marvels, while resenting world-ending threats for humanity, falls cleaning and intentionally into the light and comedic category.

As a side effect of a magical device entangles the power of Ms. Marvel, Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) and Captain Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) the three women are forced into an oddball partnership to stop the murderous revenge rampage of Kree warrior Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton) bitter from the fall out of Captain Marvel’s ending the Kree wars and domination depicted in the film Captain Marvel. Supporting characters include Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) and Kamala’s immediate family introduced in the limited series Ms. Marvel.

The ‘mismatched partners’ is a classic genre of cinema and while that sort of story is often a two-hander, screenwriters Nia DaCosta, who also directs, Egan McDonnell, and Elissa Karaski juggled the competing needs of the ‘forced partner’ comedic tones with the serious world dying stakes that are often a requirement of superhero movies, and the family conflicts quite well. The Marvels is principally a comedy, one that finds its humor in familial relations, both blooded family and the found variety. Any doubts about the intentional comedic tone are dispelled by the tongue in cheek use of the song Memory from the musical Cats. The difficult problems of exposition dealing with characters entering the theatrical world who were created in the streaming series format is handled with quick amusing lines. (You got your powers walking through a witch’s hex? Yup.)

The cast is uniformly good and talented, handling the FX work and the comedic character beats with equal skill. The cinematography by Sean Bobbit is perfectly adequate capturing the sequences with enough flair to have some emotional impact but not quite reaches truly impressive levels.

While The Marvels will not reach the heights of becoming one of my favorite 5 MCU movies it is certainly well cemented in the upper half of this franchise and with a running time under two hours it makes for a pleasant and fun distraction.

The Marvels is currently playing in theaters and well worth the trip to see it on the impressive big screen.

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November is National Novel Writing Month

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National Novel Writing Month, NaNoWriMo, has started and loads of people have enlisted in their attempts to write 50,000 words on their project by November 30th.

50 thousand words is not an obscene goal. It’s 1667 words per day, every day. It’s tough but certainly doable. I am not participating in this grand global goal not because I do not believe in it but because I am already eyeball-deep in my current project. I did once attempt to do a NaNoWriMo. It would have been a science-fiction novel about the survivors of a crashed passenger liner. It also would have been written without an outline. That novel crash and burned as completely as the doomed starship after less than 10 thousand words.

Still, NaNoWriMo is a good thing. For many writers the temptation do anything but write is quite strong. There is always something else that needs to the researched, there are tone boards to construct, characters to devise, locals to investigated online, so much that prepares you for the writing that is not writing. Making a public commitment to NaNoWriMo help some over that hump between planning and plotting and what is the hardest part of writing, butt to chair, fingers to keyboard. (Or pen to paper, or voice to tape. There is no one correct way to wright.)

So if you have committed yourself to this endeavor, may your words flow like wine, may your plot not clot, and remember even if you don’t hit the goal, writing itself is the victory.

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Crunch Time has Arrived

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By ‘crunch time’ I do not mean heaping bowls of nautically ranked golden squares containing unimaginable quantities of sugar but rather the time of year when at my day-job the work overflows, overtime is authorized, and I often work six days a week.

I work for a non-profit HMO in their Medicare membership division. Each year from October 15th thru December 7th people on Medicare can enroll, disenroll, or change their Medicare Advantage Plans so loads of applications and roll into our HMO during this time and that translates to loads of work. It’s good, I am paid well, represented well by my union, and being a non-profit I feel pretty good about the services my HMO afford these Medicare recipients. I sock my overtime money aside and use it for frivolous treats.

This year it is even more of a ‘crunch time’ as I am on the final stretch for completing the first draft of a horror novel. One written without an outline. As of the writing of this post I am sitting at about 73 thousand words. I expect the piece to land somewhere between 80 and 85 thousand. At one thousand words or so per day that means 7 to 12 writing days to wrap it up. Looking back there is less spade and reconstruction work that I had expected when starting the ‘no outline’ adventure. There is some rework to be done, some scenes to be rewritten but no major points of conflict or retroactive continuity to correct. I credit this feat to my decades of running tabletop Role Playing games, where there is never an outline that survived contact with the players and the need to make sure that nearly everything fits together coherently is fairly great.

In short I shall be busy during November, but not unhappy.

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Throwback Thursday

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This throwback Thursday reached into the primordial ooze of that distant date Oct 29, 2023, when my sweetie-wife and I went for our weekly trip to the San Diego Zoo.

This is a Bee Eater and in its beak is a bee, a Carpenter Bee I think but I can’t be sure as it wasn’t singing, We’ve Only Just Begun.

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Spooky Season Finale: Mulholland Dr.

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I had planned to cap off Spooky Season with a re-watch of David Lynch’s masterpiece Mulholland Dr., but sadly sleeping poorly on the night of the 30th, having extra errands add extra stressors to the day, getting zero words down on my werewolf novel, and a minor headache in the evening left me with the brain capacity of a reanimated slug.

Mulholland Dr. is an amazing piece of cinema that the first couple of time I viewed it left deep emotional impacts while remaining just out of intellectual understanding. I think I finally have an interpretation that works for all the aspects of the film, but it could be something entirely of my own invention. Lynch’s work, with the exception of his adaptation of Dune, defies convention and straight forward representation.

The key to understanding Mulholland Dr. is knowing that one of Lynch’s favorite and formative films is 1939’s The Wizard of Oz, and this film is his most direct reinterpretation of that classic movie’s themes. Lynch’s film is the story of a young woman, Diane, played by Naomi Watts, who dreams herself to a magical setting, Hollywood, which she describes a ‘this dream place.’ In the land of her dreams Diane is instantly recognized for her tremendous acting talent and falls in love with a mysterious amnesiac woman, Rita, that loves her back. There are subplots with a vain director tormented by infidelity and criminals forcing his casting choices, but the locus of Diane’s dreams are her career and the love between her and ‘Rita.’ None of this is real and more than halfway through the film we are shown, but it is never explained to us, Diane’s real life, where she is Betty, her career is shit, the woman she loved, ‘Rita’ has left her to marry a man, and everything ends in murder and madness.

In The Wizard of Oz, we experience Dorothy’s real world before being shunted of to her fantastic fantasy. In the end we return to reality and the deeply uncynical message that there is no place like home. Mulholland Dr. inverts all this, we first experience the Diane’s fantasy, unaware that all the characters in it are reinterpretations of people she has already met, so when we meet them in the real world it is reality that is strange, threatening, and confusing. Our disenchantment with reality is the same as Diane’s. This is not the glittering land of dreams that Hollywood has always presented itself to be, and we do not like that. In the end Diane’s madness at what she has done in reality breaks down her ability to separate dream from reality and what had once been a dream transforms into a nightmare as she pursued by figures of innocence from her dream to her death.

Mulholland Dr. is rarely counted among the films or horror but the deep unease and unsettling nature the film places for me it squarely in that genre. It is a film of dreams and nightmares and how though those two things feel very different that are inf act the same thing.

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