Author Archives: Bob Evans

Sunday Night Movie: Big Trouble in Little China

After spending the afternoon watching The Godfather on the big screen yesterday afternoon I decided that for my Sunday Night Movie feature I wanted something lighter, something more fun.

Big Trouble in Little China is an 80’s martial arts/comedy directed by John Carpenter, written by the director W.D. Richter, and starring Kurt Russell. It concerns Jack Burton (Russell) as he gets involved in supernatural affairs hiding in the heart of San Francisco’s Chinatown. What starts out as kidnapping by a street gang transforms into a battle of good and evil against a two thousand year old wizard.

This movie did poorly when it was released, panned by critic and ignored by fans, but over the years and through the sorcery of home video it has gained a devoted following of fan.

Despite Russell leading credit and having a majority of the lines, his character of jack Burton I think can best be understood as the sidekick to Dennis Dun’s Wang Chi and that this film is really a story told from the point of view of a sidekick who thinks he is the hero.

Big Trouble in Little China has many elements that are never explained and several that are used for convenient comedic effect but it is a fun romp with sharp funny characters.

 

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Trust Once Broken is Nearly Impossible to Re-forge

Life is not like the Lord of The Rings and trust once it is shattered is not easily reformed into a new shiny compact like the recreated blade Narsil transformed from its shard into Anduril.

Ask any couple where one has betrayed the other with an affair. Ask anyone who has placed their trust in another person who let them down and then asked to be trusted again. When someone’s given word is broken it is very difficult and usually a lengthy process to regain a measure of trust so it is with nations.

Trump’s lasting impact on the United States is probably going to be in the area of how our allies treat us and our commitments. From his refusal to recommit to Article 5 of the NATO treaty. which is the very heart of the treaty, to the sudden withdrawal from the Paris Accords, our allies are going to understand that America’s word is much less dependable and our actions much more volatile then they have assumed.

Roman maintained Pax Romana through it’s military dominance of the4 ancient world with Rome’s mighty Legions. England maintained Pax Britiana with her Navy and economic colonialism, but Pax American has been something different.

For the most part, and imperfectly, we have maintained a world peace and flowering economic growth around the globe through our leadership and our diplomacy. As I have mentioned in other posts the United States spends far more than other nations on its military because we are the one assuring the world’s peace. We are also the linchpin of the world’s economy, with out dollars acting as the planet’s reserve currency. That power and that responsibility comes entirely from the world’s trust, trust in American agreements and treaties.

While amongst ourselves the right and the left have bitter differences, over seas we have historically presented one face and fully backed our agreements, something the world counted upon. Trump has shattered that. Our allies now publicly state that they can no longer fully count on America, that they must be ready to go it alone. This does not make us stronger it weakens us. This does not secure our economy it imperils it. Other nations are watching us and want our position. There is no love for a fallen empire and no loyalty to an ally to shatters trust.

We are in terrible danger.

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On Horror and Un-credited Horror Directors

Horror is a mood, and when we speak of horror in the arts we speaks of an artist’s intent to create that mood. With words, and sounds, and images the artists seeks to undermine the viewer/readers comfort, replacing it with a sense of dread, danger, and unreality.

That unreality is not to the same as a sense of something being unreal, but rather the knowledge that reality is not what you thought it was. The idea that the world does not work along the laws and principals that you thought it did is one of the core elements of horror. When you walk onto a stair, expecting the first step but instead it is missing and your foot falls an extra four inches for that moment when you fall you are in a brief state of horror. You knew that the step was there, in darkness you plunged forward fully confident of its existence, but the instant your foot plummets past the step your world is suddenly rendered wrong.

The moment passes quickly and the horror vanishes with the firm feel of the very next step. The explanation destroys the horror. If excellent horror fiction that return to ‘normal’ reality never arrives and the new unfamiliar reality goes on forever,

I think that David Lynch is one of our greatest horror directors. Not everything he makes is horror, certainly Dune is not, but a lot more is horror than is conventionally recognized.

Lynch’s world are often very much like our own, but quickly he leads the audience into a nightmare where nothing is what it seems, where images and sounds unsettle, where identity crumbles, and sane rational explanations never arrive. In Twin Peaks, now returning for its 3rd season after a break of 25 years, there is unquestioningly super natural elements, but even with demons and doppelgangers Lynch finds horror to unsettle and unnerve us. But in other works, Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway, Earserhead, these same very powerful sensation are invoked and rational explanations are withheld. Though the critics, devoid of thee usual easy identifiers or aliens, monsters, and bloody deaths, rarely labeled these films as horror, to me that is exactly what they are.

The only question is intent. Lynch is famous for never explaining the purpose or meaning of his films. Part of any art is the viewer/reader’s interpretation and for Lynch that means you don’t impose, in any way. your won view as artist, but rather you leave the viewer fully empowered to experience it on their own terms. This is challenging and Lynch has never and will never find easy commercial success but we would be poorer without his visions disturbing and unsettling us.

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No Blogging Today

I am suffering a fairly painful bout of arthritis and so no essays today.

I am also not going to my day job or writing.

Today is watching TV, taking painkillers, and icing the finger joints.

 

 

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Movie Review: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell no Tales

So, we have come to number five in the Pirates franchise. Roger Corman I understand once advised that film franchises rarely go beyond three because after that point you have run out of variations on a theme. Clearly there are exception to Corman Rule, Bond and Godzilla both come to mind. With the Pirates movies I would argue that the series ran out after film one.

Dead Men Tell no Tales adds very little of value to the wider story of Pirates of the Caribbean though perhaps the producers should have considered that we really didn’t need a wider mythos for that story. The protagonists of the story are Henry, son of Will Truner from the first movie, out on a quest to claim Poseidon Trident to free his father of the curse that makes him Davy Jones, and Carina Smyth, a young woman of scientific inclination out to prove a mythical map is real, said map leading to said Trident. We of course have the Return of Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow, crew after his luck has turned bad, and Geoffrey Rush’s Barbosa, no leading a fleet of pirates across the Atlantic. Added to the mix is David Wenham Royal Navy Officer Scarfield, who wants the Trident to make England the undisputed master of the seas, (Wait, at this time she already is, frankly it would have more interesting to posit that is why England rules all the waves around the globe.) and for a villain we have Javier Bardem as an undead Spanish naval officer who hates pirates and Sparrow in particular.

Sounds confusing and overly complicated? It is. This is a script fully slaved to the big set action pieces and special effects with almost nothing left for character. What is left for character is too fragment to hold interest as everyone has a storyline where they briefly feature, learn a valuable life lesson, and grow just a little bit.

The film is not original in story, character, or action and rarely engaging. Frankly, this one is a wait for video and then watch something else.

 

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Memorial Day

Today we remember our fallen soldiers but one aspect I want to mention is that not all fall in combat.

It seems decidedly strange thing think that we now have an entire generation that is rapidly approaching adulthood that have never known a time of peace. 2001 to present has ben continual war for the United States, some times hotter than others but always there. Before the present and enduring crisis there was the peace for the Cold War.

I served, briefly for I was a terribly sailor, and I saw no combat, took part in no exchange of gunfire and never sailed under the direct threat of attack, but still I knew servicemen who died while on duty.

I sailed on one WestPac, a cruise of the Western Pacific, and two men were killed while another was maimed for life during that voyage. One was a marine who fell from a helicopter during on exercise and the other was a crew chief lost when a helicopter crashed and went over the side, vanishing beneath the Pacific’s uncaring surface.

The military in all its branches is a dangerous profession, filled with men and women who for a variety of reason have chosen to place their lives on the line for our greater good.

War, peace, training, or combat all who serve do so at great personal risk and not all survive. It is our duty, our responsibility to make sure those lives were never lost in vain.

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‘Come see the Violence Inherent in the System!’

This week on the eve of a special election the electorate was treated with the spectacle of a congressional candidate, Gianforte, assaulting a person, a reporter, for their presumed liberal politics. Repeatedly punching the man while shouting that he was ‘… sick and tired of your guys!’ Sadly the candidate still won his election but let’s look at this again.

There were unqualified condemnations of the assault from people presumably on the left side of the political spectrum. This sort of violence is utterly unacceptable and there needs to be serious consequences for the criminality. From the right I heard qualified condemnation and regret. Yes, this is bad and it shouldn’t have happened, but liberal have long poised the discourse and this is the result of that. (I’m going to set aside any validity to that position, that’s not the point today.)

I have unqualified condemnation for all political violence. Violence should be held in reserve until it is required to defend life and safety. You bring the very concept that violence is acceptable, in any form, to political discourse and you have taken the steps to a terrible future.

We have another incident 4 months ago.

Richard Spencer, arguably America’s leading Fascist, the man who led a room of people in the NAZI salute while shouting ‘Hail Trump!’ was assaulted on camera while being interviewed.

I heard many voices from the left offering with outright praise for this violence to very qualified condemnation, while voice on the right proclaimed the utterly unacceptability of violence based on the target’s political views.

I posted at the time that while Spencer is utterly reprehensible this violence was in no manner justified. I feel the exact same way about Gianforte’s assault on a reporter. My position is perfectly aligned with my principles in both cases.

Be wary of being so wedded to your team, of being so poised by your animosity, that you surrender your values. Without solid values there is nothing but naked raw ambition and power.

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Unimportant Political Posting

For Saturday here is an utterly unimportant political post about something that ticks me off.

Both Kerry and Obama were mocked by conservative media for ‘elite’ food tastes, Kerry while campaigning for asking about different cheeses on a philly cheese/steak and Obama for asking about deli/spicy mustard for a sandwich. (Not to mention the arugula comment.) these choices were presented as evidence that the respective pols were out of the mainstream culture and elitists.

Recently I have seen liberal media mocking Trump for his food selections, that he loves fast food such as McDonald’s, like catsup on his steaks, insulting him for having ‘common’ tastes.

Fuck off to all of you.

Trump is a terrible terrible president and may well be an inflection point indicating the beginning of the end for American dominance of the globe, but that’s not the point here. The point is that people are allowed to like what they like. They are allowed to take pleasures in the little things in life that help make life bearable.

I will not take part in elitist snobbery from the left or from the right. (And yes, mocking people for not following your tastes is elitist ) frankly food snobs in general piss me off. I see the memes passing around about how you should cook this or how you should consume that and the people who don’t should be asked to leave.

Yeah it’s joking but the heart of the joke is that others are expected to live their lives to an standard that is not their own.

You don’t like the way I order my steaks? You don’t like my choice of sauces.

Screw you. Your opinion on such things does not matter.

The same goes for music, television, books, films, and the like.

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Thoughts on Roger Moore

I am a few days late in posting my remembrances in part because I so rarely engage in public displays related to celebrity deaths but also in part because this feels more like a Friday topic.

As a baby boomer Roger Moore was a facet of my entertainment environment, television and film he remained for decades a familiar and stable cast member. Like many people he was my first Bond. I was staying the summer with my sister Carol and she took me to the movies to see Live and Let Die. Coming from a small town in Florida and before that an even smaller town in the rural mountain of North Carolina this was my first exposure to a true multiplex theater and I just adored the idea of so many movies in one location.

I became a Bond fan but there was always a little dissatisfaction with the franchise. The tone, silly and fun didn’t connect for me on what I thought a spy movie should be. However I did return again and again to watch Moore’s wittily save the day. Exploring past film I discovered Connery and Lazenby and I really like Lazenby but I have always walked out of step. My favorite Bond is the current one, Craig.

Outside of Bond there were a number of project that Moore had become famous for but one that did not add significantly to his fan, and that is a flawed film, was one that became a personal favorite, ffolkes.

Early 80’s this is the story of a Scot mercenary ffolkes (Moore) who tackles the problem of terrorists who have taken hostage three oil platforms in the North Atlantic. The film is cheesy enough to have been produced in Wisconsin but for me is fun enough that I continually lose myself in it.

I think I shall need to give it another viewing soon.

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Setting vs Genre

At a fellow writer’s Facebook wall we’re discussion the elements required for a story to be noir. Because we are SF writers the conversation naturally revolves about the intersection of noir and science-fiction. This has gotten me thinking and those and a few other terms and I’ve come to the conclusion, probably not original, that there is a difference between Setting and Genre

In this concept Science-Fiction is a setting, it has particular rules that govern its use and violation of those rules can lead to some and even most people excluding a piece from the setting definition, but it seems to me that genre is more about what is the intended or likely emotion reaction of the reader and as such is independent of the setting.

Lois McMaster Bujold’s Shards of Honor was, according the author, written as an SF/Romance. The setting is science-fiction, the far future, humanity spread out among the stars broken into new nationalities. The genre is romance, the story of two people divided by their warring cultures and yet who fall in love.

Alien is Science-Fiction/Horror the setting is clearly sf, a spaceship deep into space. The genre is horror as the characters, trapped aboard their isolated spaceship, contend with a monstrous being.

Back to the Future is science-Fiction comedy the science-fiction elements, a lone scientist, time travel, are clear while the story is a farce about the clash of perception versus reality when it comes to one’s own parents.

All three of these works are Science-Fiction but looking at them simply through the lens of their setting tells us very little and nothing at all about if these are stories we want to experience. It is only when we examine to the mood intent of the piece, romantic, horrific, or hilarious that we can gather these disparate works into recognizable useful categories.

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