Author Archives: Bob Evans

Gravity Always Asserts Itself

As a kid I watched countless hours of Warner Brother cartoons and among my favorite were the Roadrunner and the Coyote. Invariably at some point in his futile attempts to catch the Roadrunner the Coyote would find himself suddenly without ground beneath his feet. For the first few moments, everything was fine, but once became aware of the fact, gravity took command and his fall began.

For more than six year the Republican Party has railed against the ACA and encouraged their political base to view it as an evil that must be destroyed. That destruction has been their premier promise in every election cycle and now, with control of both congress and the White House, it is within their grasp. However, like the Coyote they have discovered that the ground beneath their feet is not what they believed it to be.

Immediate repeal means throwing twenty million or more people off of their insurance. Even if you are not inclined to think of the news media as hostile to conservatives there is no universe where that plays well on the evening news and with number that large nearly every person will know someone who lost their coverage. It will be a painful, personal, and powerful storm of anger.

Not repealing means enraging the base, encouraging the dreaded ‘primary opponent’ that all officials in safe districts fear, and sparking intra-party warfare between the more pragmatic and Freedom Caucus wings.

Repeal and delay, vote for repeal but word it so that the effect occurs two, four, or more years down the road throws a hand grenade into the individual insurance market. What company will want to participate when the market will cease to exist in just a short time? Insurers flee, people loose their coverage, mandate are not enforced and a death spiral for the industry is a real possibility. That means people with deep pockets and political connections will be very angry.

Complicating this terrain is the fact that the President-elect is well known for his lack of consistency. Is he committed to repeal for ‘conservative’ reasons? This is a man who has praised single-payer nationalized healthcare, hardly a conservative policy. And just recently his spokespeople have affirmed that under the President-Elect’s plans no one will their coverage, no one.

They have dashed off the precipice, there is no ground under them save the disastrous and countless distance below, and no one will be inclined to give them any aid.

If they do manage to repeal, without dealing with the very thorny and difficult issues infusing this problem, (Which is likely because in six years they have advanced zero legislative packages to institute a ‘conservative’ solution.) they will have done more to hasten single-payer in this country than any ten liberal politicians.

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Novel to Film

There is a witticism that the book is always better then the movie but in my opinion this generally represents elitism on the part of the speaker. The truth of the matter is that novels and films are two very different art forms and direct comparisons are generally unfair to both. It is like comparing sculptures to paintings and fault paintings for their lack of three dimensions and sculptures for the lack of brush strokes.

Now having said that direct comparisons are unfair I want to expand my position by asserting that you can still judge if a film fairly adapts the source material. This is different from proclaiming one superior to the other. You can read ‘The Maltese Falcon‘ or you can watch the 1941 adaptation of the same name. Neither is better than the other, both are classics and the 1941 film is faithful to the characters, themes, and mood of the novel the elements required for a successful adaptation.

There are films that I enjoy more than their prose predecessors. Jaws strips the story down to the core elements and by doing so heightens them, the loss of an affair or a mafia sub-plot strengthens the thriller aspects of man vs shark. The Hunt for Red October loses a tone of Americans always bests their enemy, to present amore balanced story of men in conflict and the terrible costs of that struggle.

I am current reading the novel The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro and it was adapted into a movie of the same name in 1993 starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson.

It concerns an English Butler, Mr. Stevens, his relationships to his employers Lord Darlington, his father, and the housekeep Miss. Kenton. Stevens is so utterly repressed and committed to his sense of duty that his is unable to expression his feelings for others, even as his world tumbles apart.

This is a drawing room drama, with tension expressed in quite conversations and constrained by station and class. It is not a movie for those enamored of Bayhem. (Can you tell I really do not like the movies of Michael Bay?)

This novel, which won the Booker Prize, is an example of fantastic writing. Presented in the first person point of view the author pulls off the amazing feat of letting the reader see what the first person narrator is incapable of, his own motivations.

The film adaptation is so faithful, in character, tone, and theme, that as I read the novel it is Anthony Hopkin’s voice I hear in my head and it hasn’t clashed with the movie once. The producers, Director, and screenplay authors performed a masterful feat of capturing the heart and soul of this novel.

The film is not better, the novel is not better, but both are fantastic.

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Brain can’t brain

I can’t seem to conceive a new essay today so am off to edit some fiction and I will leave for your enjoyment a music video from one of my favorite singers, Caro Emerald. (If you cant sing acoustic you’re not a real singer.)

 

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Revisiting John Carpenter’s They Live

Released in 1988, towards the end of Reagan’s second term, They Live is a film that I often jest represents the moment in time when John Carpenter lost his talent. There has not been a Carpenter film that followed where I did not feel robbed of my money and time for having viewed it, while before They Live there are several movies that I enjoy repeated showings.

HBO is currently showing They Live and through the gift of streaming I rewatched the movie to see if I had been too harsh in my earlier appraisal or if time would confirm my conclusions.

The film still does not work. The front half of the movie works, mostly, and the second half is a jumble of confused and clichéd scenes. The concepts and ideas behind this movie are strong, powerful, premises which are applicable today as they were in the late 1980s. The film has a viewpoint critiquing rampant capitalism, consumerism, and economic inequality. Granted the handling of this message is heavy-handed, no one can accuse Carpenter of subtlety, and setting aside if you agree or disagree it is good to see a film that takes a stand and a viewpoint. It is better to have something to say than to simply fill the screen with riotous color and explosions such as any Michael Bay franchise flick. There are better and slyer critiques on these themes, you need look no further than the original RoboCop for that, but the failure of They Live is not the stand it takes but the technique by which it takes them.

Most glaring is that the film  establishes itself with a slow pace that reveals bit by bit menacing dread but then suddenly it changes into an action film that requires absurd coincidences and idiotic enemies to reach even a marginal resolution.

How does Gilbert find the boys in their hotel? How does Holly find the resistance? Why didn’t the police secure the parameter before assault the resistance? Why is the door leading to the most important device in the enemy’s possession unlocked?

None of this makes any sense.

The problems only go deeper when you try to unravel the world building. Listening to the audio commentary by Carpenter on his film Prince of Darkness illuminated for me that Carpenter doesn’t do backstory or world building and this is a great flaw for his scripts. If the aliens are here to ravish our world of wealth, then why are so many of them in common shops and stores, working as tellers in banks or regular patrol officers?

It makes even less sense the more you try to work out exactly how this functions. This movie is a series of ideas, many of them powerful, but slapped together in a manner that undercuts all of them.

I would love to see a real remake of this. Not a quick cash grab that has been done to other Carpenter properties, yes I am looking you The Fog. This could be a franchise starter. The issues, a secret alien subversion of our world, our economics, our lives, is too big for one movie. This could be a great dystopia series for adults instead of teenagers.

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Goodbye 2016

Today is New Year’s Day and we can officially place 2016 into the pages of history. For some 2016 was a terrible year and I can share their horror of what unfolded on the public stages, but personally 2016 was for myself a year of gradual change.

I made no new fiction sales during the year. My agent continues to shop my military SF novel so on first inspection it would appear that the year has not been very kind for my writing, but I do not feel that is very representative of my experiences.

Yes, the lack of sales is disheartening, but I have also gotten some very nice comments from top editors. While the particular stories were not to their tastes they praised the prose and asked my agent to send more.

In 2016 I also completed two novels, both were experiments outside of my writing comfort zone. One, an SF noir I think worked very well and now rests in the hands of my capable agent, the other my first attempt at an SF YA adventure failed, but the idea is not dead and who truly succeeds at a first attempt?

I believe that I have in gaming terms ‘leveled up’ this year and start 2017 as a stronger and more skilled writer.

My personal life continues to improve. I love my wife and our marriage is strong, my day-job is interesting, worthwhile, and compensates well. I work with good people who I enjoy interacting with everyday. 2016 also saw my first opportunity to attend San Diego’s local horror film festival Horrible Imagings. I loved it more than I had expected and look forward to the next festival later this year.

2016 was not without its troubles. I watched friends struggle with adversity and right there at its close I became aware of the need for a dramatic lifestyle change of my own. My G.P. has informed me that my cholesterol numbers are beginning to climb and I had a choice, radical alteration to my diet or medication. I detest the idea of taking ever more maintenance prescriptions and so the diet is a changing. Fruits and veggies are the order of the day, whole grains, and never again the beloved fried foods.

So the year had it’s bumps and its benefits, overall I am not unpleased with how the year has turned out.

2017 holds promise. I have entered the Writers of the Future Contest after an absence of several quarters, though the tale submitted it another experimental one and we shall see if it strikes a chord with the judges. My novel continues to be considered for traditional publication, and after a little short story work that won’t take more than 2 or 3 weeks I return to the comfort of military SF for another novel.

May your future hold much promise and joyful challenges.

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What Made the NAZIs so lethal?

Six million Jewish people, five million others, and even more war dead what made it possible for that evil empire to kill so many people? Of course I an not talking about the technical problems. Mass industrialization make many things formerly impossible, from moon landings to genocide, possible, but that doesn’t provide the will, the commitment to carry out such monstrous deeds. It is that commitment that is truly frightening.

Think for a moment on the 80’s genre movie They Live. (Spoilers ahead.) Nada played by the late Roddy Piper discovers, thanks to special sunglasses, that a secret cabal of alien living amongst us has been directing human affairs. They control the media, the economy, and the government. Some are in positions of great power and others occupy more menial posts such as police officers. When his eyes are opened to the truth, he goes on a killing spree, killing the aliens wherever he finds them. Soon he is pulled into a secret resistance group of people who know the true, who see behind the lies and the propaganda, and are dedicated to fighting this clandestine subversive threat.

Because the film is clearly set in Nada’s Point Of View and he is in no manner presented as insane or otherwise as an unreliable narrator, we the audience accept the premise of the a small group of beings secretly controlling world events as factual (within the confines of the story) and judge Nada’s killing spree not as murder but as justified. Accepting the worldview justifies the horrific murders.

For the Hitler and the NAZIs the anti-Semitism was not a tool, it was not propaganda, it was not a way to motivate followers and seize power, it was a worldview. It was a sick, insane conspiratorial view rooted in hatred that created their goals not their methods. I am reminded of a documentary The Goebbels Experiment which consisted of archival footage and Kenneth Branagh reading from the propaganda minister’s private journals. When the Enabling Act passed, making Hitler absolute dictator of Germany Goebbels didn’t note privately that they finally had the power to crush their enemies, that they had taken what was they thought of as rightfully theirs, no he wrote that at last they were ‘free.’ He believed, utterly and insanely, that they had been living in a world as controlled as Nada’s in They Live.

There is a bit if advice often floated to writers – the villain is the hero of his own story, and that is true. It is a lesson we must also apply with vigilance to the real world.

When people of position and power put forth conspiratorial explanations for how the world works, we must not let ourselves be lulled into complacency with notions of ‘just talk’, ‘playing to the room’ or that’s for ‘internal consumption.’ We need to always take such statements as dangerous examples of their worldviews and be prepared to fight them.

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Digital Necromancy

This post is going to have mild spoilers for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story so proceed with that in mind.

The most recent Star Wars film is set within the fictional continuity just before the events of the original Star Wars which was released into the wild in 1977. As there are characters that appear in the original and in the most recent production that raised issues of how to deal with the fact that 40 years separated principal photography on the two projects. Actors who were still with us at the time of production have naturally aged beyond the look of the original characters and Peter Cushing who played Grand Moff Tarkin as not been with us in the veil of tears for decades.

Recasting a part is a Hollywood tradition, most notably with the very successful Bond and Doctor Who Franchises. (14 actors have played the Doctor and 7 have played Bond (not counting the comedic Casino Royale where everyone played Bond.) Recasting turned out to be only part of the solution used by the producers of Rogue One.

For the newest film Guy Henry, best known to genre fans as a minister of Magic in the last two Harry Potter movies, was cast to play Tarkin. Henry has similar bone and body structure to the late Cushing and even performs an admirable vocal impersonation. Completing the digital doppelganger CGI was used to created Tarkin’s image over Henry’s facial performance. In essence a CGI mask of Peter Cushing was slipped over Guy Henry’s face. For some people this effect looked convincing but for other, including me, the effect suffered from the ‘uncanny valley’ and while it looked good it never looked quite like a real person.

To me the technical issues are secondary, they processes will improve and even in other movies have looked quite good, to wit the de-aged Robert Downey Jr in Captain America: Civil War. The real problem is passing Henry off as Cushing.

To my eye Henry’s performance didn’t feel like an authentic Cushing performance. Cushing was an understated actor, doing more with less and Henry, while not eating the scenery, gave a more extravagant interpretation of Tarkin.

As a performance this is neither good nor bad. Acting is more than hitting your marks and saying the words, acting is choices and different actors make different choices. Had they simply applied make-up to make Henry look more like Tarkin, but not doubling Cushing, it be easier to judge Henry’s performance as just that, Guy Henry’s Tarkin.

This is the essential problem with trying to use digital arts to bring back dead actors; you can’t. At best you get an impressive impersonation, but you can never know what choices that actor would have made, who elements that they would have heightened and played down to create their performance. There was only one Peter Cushing an we have his film performances to enjoy, it is time to pass the baton to other equally capable but new performers.

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Failures with Frankenstein

From what I have seen a lot of film Frankenstein adaptations repeat the same flaw in bringing the material to the screen. It doesn’t matter if they are bring a fresh adaptation of the Shelley’s classic novel or a new take on her timeless story this same fault continually reappears -too much time spent detailing why Frankenstein is obsessed.

Look, Frankenstein is one of the best know pieces of fantastic fiction and people who go to a movie with Frankenstein in the title know what they are going to get; a scientist, possibly mad, an artificially created man, possibly monstrous or possibly sympathetic, and a tale of human hubris. Doctor Frankenstein obsessed with creating life is a given, it’s right there on the tin.

Despite that fact that everyone in the audience already knows this  often these films will still spend 30 minutes, 40 minutes, or even more stepping us through the doctor’s backstory, time that the audience will generally better spend getting a refill on their popcorn or necking.

As a counter example take a look at James Whale’s 1931 film, the Universal Classic that launched Karloff into stardom. The movie hits the ground running, our hero is already robbing fresh graves and cutting down the corpses of criminals, he’s  possessed by the vision and the knowledge to do it, we’re coming it just before the moment of creation. Bang! That’s starting a story. We aren’t wasting acts and pages on the doctor’s relationship with his mother or whoever else’s death it is that provoked his obsession. (Which often looks like an overreaction. I now tend to think of Rocket’s line from Guardians of the Galaxy ‘Everyone’s got dead people!’ We have all lost loved ones, that usually isn’t enough to spur mad genius.)

The better stories and adaptations leave the backstory in the back, referring only to the bits that we have to have and nearly always then in a conversation or a flashback. (Though the flashback is another device that gets overused, much like a prolog.)

When I showed my hubris and tackled a Frankenstein tale I started at the moment of epiphany when the character  realized it could be done. Granted, it is a little earlier than Whale’s work, but I had my reasons. (That has sold and when I have a publication date I’ll let everyone know.)

The point is backstory is important, but heaven’s sake it is not story, in film and in prose please skip it and cut the action.

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Sexual or Not?

photo credit: 20th Century Fox

Hypothesis A: In the film Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Chirrut and Baze are a long-term sexually pair-bonded couple.

 

The events observed in the film are consistent with this hypothesis.

No events in the film falsify this hypothesis.

This hypothesis is valid.

 

Hypothesis B: In the film Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Chirrut and Baze are a pair of bonded brothers in spirit without a sexual union.

 

The events observed in the film are consistent with this hypothesis.

No events in the film falsify this hypothesis.

This hypothesis is valid.

 

A person can hold either hypothesis A or B as both are valid and barring falsifying observations neither can be held as superior to the other. So if you watched the movie and thought of the two men as brothers in arms forged by adversity and experience into a tight bond, you are not wrong. Conversely, if you watched the movie and perceived the two men as sexually pair-bonded with a love that surpassed life itself you are also not wrong. Personally I am not bound to either concept and am perfectly willing to accept face value and wait for other evidence to deepen my understanding and their backstory.

I do want to bring one aspect to this fannish debate. Because you hold one view in no ways delegitimizes someone holding the contrary position. You are not wrong to hold your interpretation but you are wrong if you insist that others are in error for their contrary views. I would urge you to respect others because representation matters.

For those in the audience who are of non-mainstream sexualities and orientations the ability to see positive role models in mass media can be a life affirming message that empowers people to live fully realized lives.

For boys and men, particularly in America where phrasing such as ‘man up’ or ‘cowboy up’ are used as batons battering down male expressions of emotion, seeing such powerful friendship and tight relationships outside of a sexual union is a powerfully positive message opening up the possibility of more healthy emotional lives.

Representation for both groups matter and it certainly is not my place or privilege to deny it to anyone.

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Happy Holidays

Whatever holiday you may or may not celebreate/observe this time of year. I hope it is everything you want it to be. Mine is quite nice and I am happy with life.

So the themed reviews are done and here’s is the source of the theme. Each film reviewed was mentioned in the following song.

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