Author Archives: Bob Evans

Frankenstein’s ‘Red Shirt’ Problem

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Guillermo del Toro’s production of Frankenstein is glorious to behold, visually and thematically rich, stuffed with great actors giving generally great performances, it is everything you should expect from del Toro when he’s off the leash, given a budget that fits his vision.

Netflix

It also has a shortcoming in the adaptation department. Now, I have written several times that I harbor no sympathy for the creature in the original text. From its own lips it strikes me as a vain and murderous narcissist who easily self-justifies its acts of wanton violence. Going into this film I knew that the novel’s creature was not going to make an appearance. Del Toro’s long-time sympathy for all monsters made such an interpretation simply beyond the pale. But the more I consider the film the more I am struck by just how much he had to forcibly change to have the sympathetic character that he wanted to present.

In the original text the creation kills, directly or indirectly, several characters: Elizabeth, after her wedding to Victor; Henry Clerval, Victor’s close friend; William, Victor’s brother, a mere child in the text. The thing framed the nanny Justine for William’s murder, and she is lynched for the monster’s crime.

In del Toro’s Frankenstein, the creation kills no one who has a name. William’s death comes as collateral damage in combat with Victor, and even then, in this version, he’s an adult and complicit in the creation, his innocence greatly reduced. Elizabeth dies at Victor’s hand because there can be no subtlety in the theme that he is the real monster.

In its attack on the ice-locked ship, we hear that after the first encounter it killed ‘six men,’ and it may have killed more later, but these men are given no names, they are not characters to be mourned. When the captain tells his crew that the creature is free to leave, there is no word of protest that the murderer of their shipmates is escaping any and all justice. It is as if those men simply never existed because in terms of this film they never did. They were ‘red shirts’ there to die in service of showing that there was danger and to make for an exciting scene.

Taken on its own, this production is fantastic but it is best viewed with total amnesia to the source material.

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When Mixing Genres Use Care: Arctic Circle Season 4

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My sweetie-wife and I have now completed all the available seasons of the Finnish police procedural series Arctic Circle (Ivalo in Finland). The protagonist Nina in Season Three became the chief of the Ivalo police force and became entangled with a tech billionaire, his self-driving car company, and murders surrounding the launch of his newest product. That was a decent season and did not come off as a direct critique of any particular real-world billionaire with a self-driving car company.

Sadly, Season 4 proved more disappointing.

A comet is passing close to Earth, and a collection of international astronomers and scientists is gathering in Ivalo to study the object, but an American terrorist has also slipped past the watchful eyes of the FBI and escaped to the Lapland community. When the staff of a nursing home murders nearly all the residents, Nina discovers that a cult of Christian fanatics are in her town and they have a grand scheme based upon their twisted understanding of their splinter church’s teachings.

Now, just that would be a perfectly fine season-long arc. Nina has both professional and personal challenges—her formerly drug-abusing sister now a deeply committed Christian convert—and juggling being a professional and a new mother. But the series went off the rails when it introduced elements of the supernatural and made the religious beliefs reflect reality.

Characters get mysterious voices in their heads that actually are vital clues to solving the crimes. The comet, which we have been told visited the Earth about 2,000 years earlier and was the actual “Star of Bethlehem,” hangs in the sky and actually leads the police to the perps.

No, no, no.

Now, I have no issues with Christianity being real in the right sort of story. You can’t have The Exorcist without it. (As the sequels kind of prove.) The worldbuilding has to match the genre and style of story that is being told. True Detective successfully blends elements but also generally refrains from providing explicit answers.

Arctic Circle spent three seasons presenting grounded drama without any hints or suggestions of preternatural aspects to its worldbuilding. Trying to add them this late in an established setting is doomed to failure. You just can’t hand-wave Christ and Holy Signs into the story with literal, if subtle, divine intervention as a deus ex machina in the final episode. When you do that, you break the reality of the worldbuilding.

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The HBO Series About SpaceX has RUD’d on the Pad.

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For those who haven’t been following—and that includes me—HBO had been in development on a dramatized limited series depicting Elon Musk and the founding and eventual success of his rocket company, SpaceX. Earlier this week, news broke that the series won’t happen and the rights to the biography from which some of the source material was drawn have reverted to the author. The series has suffered an RUD. (The ironic term SpaceX developed for when a rocket explodes instead of flying: Rapid Unplanned Disassembly.)

This news has disappointed many of SpaceX’s devoted fans, but I’m not sure such a series, at this time, would likely have been all that great. Don’t get me wrong—I think what SpaceX has achieved and demonstrated, the flight and recovery of orbital-capable boosters, is probably the most important development in aerospace since the jet engine. It’s the dramatized series itself that I doubt. I have a few reasons why I suspect it would have been difficult to pull off a truly great show.

1) We do not have enough historical distance.

Elon Musk, SpaceX, and the challenging rockets being developed are happening right now. They are not history; they are very current events. To tell such a story well, I think it’s important that enough time passes for the passions, partisanships, and preconceptions of those deeply involved to either fade or mellow.

2) Musk is still a very politically active agent.

Musk may or may not be the richest man in the world—stock fluctuations apparently change that title quite quickly—and he is reportedly thin-skinned. It would be quite difficult to make an honest dramatization of him and his nature at this time. No man is a saint, nor is any man entirely a devil; the best stories deal with people who are visibly a mix of the two. Whether Musk himself turned an unfriendly spotlight on the show if made to “look bad,” or whether those still angry over his DOGE activities thrashed the program for presenting him in too positive a light while entangled in today’s political passions, it’s doubtful any studio would have let the story unfold without heavy interference.

3) Whose Story Is It?

A story is about character and the changes and transformations characters evolve through over the course of their crisis. The most likely character for that treatment in a SpaceX story would have been Elon Musk himself, but that lands us even more solidly in the troubles of point 2. If your plot is compelling enough, you can dial back on character growth, but that requires a very clear, dramatic plot. Apollo 13’s Jim Lovell doesn’t really change over the course of the crisis, but the plot is blindingly clear: get home alive—simple and overwhelmingly dramatic. “Can we get a rocket to fly and land?” is not as dramatic, no matter the technical and engineering challenges. Without a central dramatic challenge, you need a strong character arc, so I ask again: whose story is it?

In the end, I think the “died in development” outcome for this proposed show is probably, at this time, the right outcome.

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Final Revisions and Themes Are in Sight

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My gay, 80s, cinephile ghostly horror novel is now rounding the corner and racing down the stretch as I work on the final revisions hurtling towards the climax.

This has been a very interesting voyage on the writing ship. My first novel written without a guiding outline, my first period novel — albeit a period I lived in and in locations I knew quite well — and a novel that is sounding more and more literary as I grapple with the themes that organically emerged from the crisis and the characters.

The poor thing has had an identity crisis as I struggled to find a suitable title for my creation, but unlike Victor Frakenstein, I did eventually give it a name, Outrageous Fortune. Now, Shakespeare was not in my head when I started writing the text. Very little was in my head aside from certain aspects and things I wanted to play with as a writer, ghosts and a cursed motion picture film on dangerous nitrate stock, but when one of the characters announced that she was unwilling to suffer ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ I knew I had stumbled across the title.

Thematically, my gay horror novel has delved into an existential question about morality in a cold and indifferent universe. If reality has no intrinsic morality — show me the particle that carries the ‘good’ or ‘justice’ between elements of matter — then the only morality that exists is the morality we conjure by our actions and our thoughts. But if we perceive a moral quality to our actions then that becomes something we cannot un-perceive and it is the knowledge of the meaning we have prescribed upon an indifferent universe that binds us.

Outrageous Fortune is quite unique among the novels I have written, the most thematically complex and with the most explicit sex scene of my writing history, only time will tell if I can find a market for it.

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Movie Review: Wake Up Dead Man

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Wake Up Dead Man, the third Knives Out mystery, opened to a limited theatrical release on Thanksgiving, the day my sweetie-wife and I saw it, and will be available on Netflix, the service that produced the project, on December 12th.

Netflix

Daniel Craig once again stars as Benoit Blanc, a private detective noted for solving perplexing and intricate cases of murder. Blanc has been drawn to a small New York town where the local Catholic priest, Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin), was murdered, with suspicion falling on the parish’s junior priest, Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor), whose troubled past—which includes a short, fiery temper and killing a man during a boxing match.

As is standard for murder mysteries of this sort, there is a large cast of characters all with seeming motive to murder Wicks, despite at one time being devoted to him. Being a Knives Out mystery, the case is stacked with notable names all thoroughly enjoying themselves.

I enjoyed the movie, felt it clipped along at a decent pace, but my sweetie-wife felt there were moments in the middle where it slowed too far and that it could have been cut. The story does present a number of reversals where you believe a solution has been presented and then that answer is demolished. Perhaps one of those false resolutions could have been removed without damaging the film, but if so, this is a very minor fault in the production.

It is a shame that Netflix won the bidding war 5 years ago after Knives Out surpassed $300 million at the box office and thus required that the sequels be primarily streaming affairs with brief—too brief—runs in actual theaters. Wake Up Dead Man, unlike Glass Onion, is much more of a traditional murder mystery and doesn’t engage in a restart of the story halfway through the run time like Onion did. (Do not get me wrong, I loved Glass Onion, but I don’t feel it’s really all that much of a mystery as it is Johnson having fun playing with the tropes of a sequel.)

If you get the chance to see Wake Up Dead Man in the theater, take it; otherwise, it will make a fine evening’s viewing at home on Netflix starting December 12.

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After Action Report: Loscon 51

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After working at the day job with my schedule shifted from its routine 9-6 to an early morning 7-4 my sweetie-wife and I made the drive from San Diego to Los Angeles for Loscon 51, the 51st Los Angeles Area Science Fiction Convention.

Now, Loscon starts the morning of ‘Black Friday’ but as I will never have the seniority to win the bidding to have that Friday off from work I am resigned to the fact that I can never make programming any earlier than 8pm on the con’s opening night.

Saturday was a different story. Not only were we there for the full set of panels and presentations but I had the privilege and pleasure of participating as a panelist on a pair of them.

1:00 PM I took part in a discussion of apocalyptic fiction, its uses to transmit to coming generations warnings of the dire threats that they would face. We also addressed the tangle that if we, the previous generations had left the world in such bad shape why should anyone paid head to our warnings?

4:00 pm was a much more lighthearted discussion as we tackled the voyage of the McGuffin. We discussed many famous cinematic McGuffins, the difference for McGuffins that are active in the plot and required by the characters for its resolution and passive ones that don’t do anything in the story but are the treasure/item that is sought by the characters.

Saturday evening, after the sweetie-wife and I played out customary games of Dominion online, I visited the open room parties for a while, taking part in conversations, snacking on junk food and soda, and having a wonderful time. After the parties I found a quiet corner and worked on the revision for my novel.

Sunday, I participated in three panels, Developing a Creative Habit, AI & Science Fiction, and I closed out the convention with a discussion of Spiritually in Science Fiction and fantasy.

Directly after the final panel, It was time to climb into the auto and drive home to San Diego. All in all it was a glorious weekend.

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Streaming Review: Eye of the Devil

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I was listening to one of my many horror movie podcasts the other day when during a discussion of folk horror films one of the hosts mentioned such a film starring David Niven.

David Niven? Horror movie?

That’s a pairing of words I had not expected at all. This was one folk horror I had to see. Unfortunately for me in their discussion the podcast did give away the turn in the movie so it was less impactful than it might have been.

MGM

Adapted from the novel Day of the Arrow, Eye of the Devil stars David Niven as Philippe de Montfaucon the Marquis de Bellenac at an old and isolated French estate where the people hold strange rituals and customs. Philippe is called back to the estate as the grape harvest has failed for the third year in a row and he implores his wife, Catherine (Deborah Kerr) to stay behind in the city. Catherine, of course, does not stay behind but follows her husband, bringing along their two children, to the estate. Almost immediately upon arrival Catherine is terrorized by a pair of apparently psychotic siblings, Odile (Sharon Tate, here credited as ‘Introducing Sharon Tate) and Christian (David Hemmings). With her husband’s behavior growing odd and the country folk of the estate apparently intent on frightening her away, Catherine engages in an investigation to discover the truth behind those strange customs and secrets of the ancient estate.

I did not dislike this movie, but it is very hard for me to judge the film since the secret that Catherine, our true protagonist, is seeking to discover is the very thing revealed by the podcast. This is a movie whose engine turns on a single question, What is Going On, and if the answer is known ahead of time, or guessed accurately too soon, then there is little to no narrative weight or momentum keeping the viewer’s attention.

Niven and Kerr are fine in the film, turning in decent performances, but Kerr’s Catherine begins to have repeated scenes making the film feel dull and expanding the sense of its running time which is a mere 96 minutes. Sharon Tate is quite good here as the mysterious and dangerous sister. With very little dialogue Tate conveys menace with a look and her bearing.

I find it hard to recommend Eye of the Devil but it’s also hard to disentangle how much of my non-enjoyment stemmed from the ‘spoiler’ versus how much the film’s pacing simply plodded.

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Movie Review: Sisu: The Road to Revenge

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I am taking a break from working overtime at the day-job this week, and so I have a little more time to write for my blog.

2022 saw the release of the Finnish action flick Sisu, which followed the story of Finnish gold prospector and former special forces commando Aatami Korpi slaughtering a number of fleeing war criminal Nazis during the ending days of World War 2. The action was comically over the top, defying physics and reason but immensely satisfying. Apparently satisfying enough for a second movie, Sisu: The Road to Revenge.

Screen Gems

The sequel ignores Korpi’s (Jorma Tommila) lucky gold strike and takes place in 1946. Following the end of the war, Finland surrendered significant land to the Soviet Union. Korpi has returned to his home, now in Soviet territory, in hopes of bringing his simple cabin that he shared with his deceased wife and child back to Finland to rebuild it. Having killed numerous Soviet soldiers during the war, the Red High Command has decided that the living legend should live no more and pulls one of their war criminals out of Siberia, the military man responsible for the massacre of Korpi’s family, and assigned him the task of killing Korpi The Immortal.

What follows can best be described as a Finnish Fury Road but with far less adherence to any recognized laws of physics or biology. Korpi, with a large flatbed truck, attempting to return to Finland with his disassembled home, encounters numerous Soviet units intent on killing him.

How over the top is Sisu: The Road to Revenge? Well, the 1985 action movie Commando is a grounded and gritty portrayal in comparison.

If one can suspend all their understanding of the physical world and accept that this is a live action but bloody cartoon, then Sisu: The Road to Revenge is a very enjoyable feature, a perfect popcorn movie for a brainless bit of fun watching impossible action as vengeance is visited upon well deserving monsters.

If you cannot set aside physics, then the movie will only be a series of ‘oh, come on!’ exclamations as more and more impossible feats are performed by Korpi The Immortal.

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Proposition 50 a Necessary Evil

A friend messaged me the other day asking my opinion on California’s ballot initiative Proposition 50, which temporarily suspends the independent commission responsible for drawing the state’s Congressional districts in order to allow a directed gerrymander before next year’s off-cycle elections.

I favored and voted for the measure, though I did deem it something I wished I had the opportunity and freedom to oppose. I despise gerrymandering. It is the process where politicians choose their voters rather than the voters choosing their representative. Under normal circumstances, voting against Prop 50 would have been nearly automatic for me.

These are not normal circumstances.

Even before last week’s elections blew fear into the hearts of Republicans, they sensed the anger in the electorate and, given the history of off-cycle elections, knew that their position of power had become precarious. Rather than adjust their policies in hopes of persuading voters to trust them, Trump demanded that Texas redistrict to carve out five new seats deemed “safe” for the GOP, a bid to keep their grip on government.

It is unwise to go into a duel where your opponent has brought a pistol when you had agreed to swords and not change your choice of weapons. California’s abandonment of its commission was tossing aside the sword to pick up a pistol.

However necessary, it is still gerrymandering—manipulating the maps to dramatically influence the outcome of an election, a concept that is at its heart anti-democratic. I would prefer that the nation find a way to kill the process of gerrymandering in all states, but one cannot fight by “gentlemen’s rules” when the other side insists on being small-handed barbarians.

I would also consider it terribly important that the size of the House be expanded. Here is a graph showing that while US population has swelled, the House has been fixed for over a century, compounding our troubles.

us_congress_population_graph

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More Thoughts on Frankenstein

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Not so much about del Toro’s recent and lush production but more thoughts about the source text and the way people interpret it.

It is a common thought that the creature is a sad and pitiable character, his pain understandable, and perceives Victor Frankenstein as the true villain. The vain and self-centered scientist abandons his creation the moment he lays eyes on its unconventional appearance, leaving the poor creation in a monstrous body to suffer the indignities of a cruel and heartless society.

And as far as that analysis goes, it is correct, but it elides several aspects of the text and the horrific events that spring forth from it.

The creature, after finding shelter and hiding amongst a family, teaches itself to read and eventually becomes quite well-read and self-educated, skilled in understanding complex philosophical texts and arguments. This element is often deployed to portray the creature as sympathetic. To me, it is an element that renders him even more evil.

It is after the creature has obtained such mental heights as having read philosophy and advanced texts that it plans and executes the murder of a young child, framing an innocent girl as the murderer so that she is killed by a lynch mob. Neither the child William Frankenstein nor the young woman Justine mistreated the creature in any manner. Their lives were mere tools to be wielded in the creature’s quest for vengeance. They were not people with lives and emotions to be considered but things to be manipulated and abused for the creature’s self-important goals. These were not mad, spur-of-the-moment killings, but actions that were cold, calculating, and utterly indifferent to the pain they inflicted except that they troubled Victor.

Yes, Victor is horrible as well. Once freed from the grips of his obsession, he abandons all responsibility, but honestly, his sins are far less than the monster’s.

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