Author Archives: Bob Evans

Movie Review: Knights of Badassdom & a short essay

Last night my sweetie-wife and I went out for an evening film. Knights of Badassdom is not a movie you will find in general release, however if you search the TUGG website you may find showings in your area. Otherwise you will need to wait for video to see the film.2013-07-25-knights_of_badassdom

The premises is farcical and simple: LARPers, that’s Live Action Role Players for those of you not in the geek, on a weekend game in the woods accidentally summon up a real demon amidst the scores of players and their foam weapons.  It falls upon these fantasy warriors and wizards to defeat the evil.

My feelings about the movies are decidedly mixed. There no doubt that the comedy worked and worked often. I laughed out loud repeatedly and I truly felt that the filmmakers were not grinding an axe about LARPers and gamers in general, but rather were celebratory in the geekiness of their characters. That’s several good base hits in my book, however they also whiffed at bat where is comes to mixing horror and comedy.

This film did not find the right mix and too often I found myself having to go from laughter to seriousness and far too short of a time frame. I have often said in the past that mixing horror and comedy is generally a bad idea.

Knights of Badassdom get fairly explicit in its violence and the violence is with real consequence, this plays against the well written and well delivered comedic aspects of the piece. During the film there is a moment – I will not spoil it so no details – but when that moments happened I felt the film lose the audience. This audience had been right there in the palm of the director’s hand. There were laughing, having fun, and thoroughly engrossed in the film. The Moment happens and you could sense the stunned emotion radiating from the seats.  In my opinion the audience was never back in the zone are well after that moment, though they did return to having fun, and the filmmakers did try to make amends for the moment with the ending of their movie.

This film is very hard for me to recommend or not recommend because I think people are going to have very idiosyncratic responses to it. Certainly see it on video, provided moderate gore does not bother you.

Many times today my mind returned to why this movie did not work for me and why sometimes I have no issues with comedy and horror mixed up, after all I love The Cabin in the Woods and other times It just drives my away. I think I understand now. You can mix horror and comedy, but you have to pay particular attention to the kind of horror and comedy.

For example in the afore mentioned The Cabin in the Woods. There is certainly comedy, but it is not farcical. It is the type of comedy that crows out of naturalistic characters reacting as real people could react to an actual situation. Contrast that with Dead Alive (or as it is known down under Brain Dead) by Peter Jackson. That film has very broad characters, the kind that are found on farce, and the violence and gore is very broad as well. It’s not realistic at all to expect that a lawnmower will let you literally mow through a crowd of zombies, but in that film it works because it matches the style of the comedy. The Lost Boys does not work for me because it has farcical characters, The Frog brothers, the Grandfather, placed with naturalistic settings. When I watch farce I don’t get wound up about the dramatic troubles in the plot, there are there just to drive the plot. In Airplane! No one is on the edge of there seat about the landing, you just don’t take it as a serious danger. It is mixing the farcical with the seriously dramatic that grates on me the wrong way, and Knights of Badassdom did just that. The characters are farcical, and wonderful in that aspect, but the threat is too real, too certain and that breaks my disbelief.

Of course, your mileage may vary.

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Some Thoughts on Political Tribalism

A Broadway, or perhaps off-Broadway I’m uncertain on that point, show was proclaim in verse that the internet is made for porn. That’s only partially true, it’s also made for flame wars. Among the most heated and viciously fought of these wars are the political ones, and it is there that you see the purest distillation of political tribalism.
It seems to me that tribalism must be in some ways very liberating. Freed from doubt, freed from choice, you always know exactly what is the right answer, who is the right candidate, and what is the right position. You trust your sources of information and all others are suspect, subject to your tribes vetting before their data can be evaluated.
Now, I am not talking about have convictions. I am not talking about having a philosophy. I am talking about having a team and the team’s position is always correct, even when it changes, it can only change from correct to correct. You have seen the tribes on the Internet. They are the people who never ever surprise you with their political posts. It doesn’t matter if they are sharing a meme, commenting on an article, posting a link, without even looking you know what the position is going to be, you know who is going to be attacked, who is going to be praised, and what is going to be reviled. That must be easy.
I have cast a few votes over my life. I have wrestled with the choices laid out before me. I can look left and I can look right and in both directions I can see things to admire, objectives worth striving for, and freedoms worth defending. What I do not see are enemies, and at it’s heart that is what tribalism always is about, the enemy.
It doesn’t matter if it comes from the left, or if it comes from the right, the tribe is about defining the enemy and drawing a circle that proclaims those on the outside are not like us, they are the enemy and they are not to be trusted.
Doubt is not allowed and doubt to me is essential. Anytime I feel absolutely certain about anything a nebulous as politics, I know I haven’t given the subject serious thought. Politic is culture and culture is big and messy, it is not given to absolutes answers, those are illusions obscuring our understanding.

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Game Review: Star Trek The Deck Building Game; The Original Series

Before I get into the meat of this first post in over a month, let me give you a brief look into my life lately.

The reason I have not been posting is threefold.

1)   Day Job: I’ve been working 6 days a week for three months now and it has taken a real toll on my energies when I arrive home. 5 days a week at 11 hours at the day job and then a half-day on Saturdays. This is good money-wide and while I am still a temp there things look good for transitioning to a regular full time position.

2)   Writing: Despite the enormous number of hours poured into the paying job, I have also been very productive on my non-paying writing job. The re-write of my SF adventure novel hit 70,000 words and I figure I have another 30 to 35 thousand to go.

3)   Kerbal Space Program: This I blame on my nephew, or is it nephew-in-law? Is there such a thing? Anyway  he mentioned this program in a facebook post, I downloaded the Demo and good god this is crack for science/engineering types. I used to play a lot of first person shooters on my Xbox 360. That was perfect. I could fire up the machine and play for just 15-30 minutes and get in several games. Kerbal? Hours sucked away designing spacecraft and then trying to figure out why they blow up.

So on to the mini-review. Continue reading →

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I Don’t Miss Cable Television

Every four years I order the basic Cable TV suite from my local provider to that my presidential election party can have a full array of talking heads, but other than that I don’t have cable T.V., or conventional television for that matter.

All of my video watching need are met either by my library of discs, or by the streaming services I subscribe engage. (Amazon Prime, Netflix, and Hulu-plus) With these services I have found I miss cable television almost not at all. It’s wonderful being able to browse a selection, find something that fits my mood at the moment, and just start watching.

This week I watched in bits and pieces, because OT is sucking up a lot of my time,  a film I have not seen since I was 13 or 14, The Hindenburg.

For those of you too young to remember the 70’s was the era of the disaster movie and I have always enjoyed that odd genre. It’s one reason I adore Mars Attacks, it a perfect blend of the 50’s SF invasion film and the 70’s disaster movie. In 1975 Universal Studios gave us the disaster movie based on an actual disaster, The Hindenburg, about the German zeppelin that exploded over Lakehurst New Jersey, does anything good every happen in New Jersey? The fictional account is about a German air force officer tasked with ferreting out the bomber and his bomb who plans to destroy the Nazi symbol of technological triumph. George C. Scott stars as the conflicted officer, torn between duty and his disgust for the new regime. The ship is of course filled with interesting characters, diamond smugglers, spies, shady businessmen, entertainers, and aristocrats. What the film is a little short on is suspense.

It is a given that he fails in stopping the bomb, because well as we all know the airship did explode. I think it would have rather original if he had succeeded, but the cause of the disaster was something other than the bomb. Think of it as a statement on the futility of our fight against death. We can beat one thing, but in the end we always lose.

Anyway, it was fun watching the film again and the special effects amazingly stood up rather well over time. If you have Netflix you might want to give it a go.

 

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Unreality and Hallucination in MacBeth

Over the last week I have been watching one of my favorite films, Throne Of Blood, in bits and bites as my scheduled scarcely allows me to watch an entire film on any one night.

As you may or may not be aware of, Throne of Blood, is Macbeth set amongst feuding Samurai in medieval Japan. It is truly my first real experience with the play, and led to my experiencing the play in a number of other forms and productions. I even have a failed novel that was an attempt at placing Macbeth in an SF setting.

As I was watching Thursday night we got to the scene where Miki, the Banquo character, appears as a ghost after his has been murdered. It suddenly occurred to me, and I doubt that this is truly original after all people have had hundreds of years to consider various aspect of the play, that instead of the ghost being a hallucination from the guilt ridden and mad MacBeth, instead it was exactly as it appeared. Am angry ghost taking revenge upon the man responsible for its murder.

Macbeth is a play full of madness and hallucinations, but it is also a play full of magic and witchcraft, leading me to question just how much of the hallucinations are from insanity and how much may be from supernatural sources.

The play opens with the supernatural, the three witches meeting and agreeing to meet in the future with MacBeth. In addition to their prophesy about MacBeth, murder, and a Scott Game of Thrones, the witches also boast of the deeds that they have performed by way of the cruel magic. Clearly the audience is meant to accept that these are not deluded women pretending to be evil spell casters, but actual witches armed with potion and spell.

Before MacBeth has murdered Ducan, and so supposedly before there are strong stressors to drive him made, he sees a phantom dagger that prompts him onward towards his foul deed. What would he have such a hallucination? May it be possible that this an evil spell from the witches whom we already have learned revel in causing death and discord?

Of course we’re back at the ghost, and Shakespeare  was fond of using the undead spirits to advance a plot. So instead of looking upon Banquo’s shade as mere illusion of MacBeath’s mind, hit might very well be real.

If we accept these ideas, where does that leave our interpretation of the play? With evil spells at work, just how much of the tragedy is the result of MacBeth’s and Lady MacBeth’s  lust for power and position and how much can be laid at the supernatural powers playing the couple?

 

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The Importance of Emotional Balance to My Writing

For me, this has been a real roller coaster of a year. The sudden los of gainful employment in April sent shockwaves throughout every aspect of my life. When I found myself with loads more unaccounted for time I really thought I was going to get loads more writing completed.

The plan had been that the mornings would be dedicated to job searching (as task made much easier by the internet) and the afternoons would be spent writing. Boy, that plan never worked.

The stress of not having a regular job really took away my ability to concentrate. While I did get some writing done, including I think one of my strongest stories even if the coordinating judge at the Writers of The Future Contest disagrees,  by and large I got very little written. Certainly my novel suffered.

Two months ago I landed a job as a temp at the healthcare giant, Kaiser Permanente. I almost passed up on the job as the offered pay was barely more than the unemployment compensation I was receiving, but I did take the job.  (One reason was that I prefer to work to no and another my belief that having a job makes it easier to land another.)

While I am still a temp, things are looking optimistic that I will transition to a regular full-time employee at Kaiser. This is very good. We’re talking good pay, good benefits, and a union to help protect me for the inconsistencies of poor management.

Currently at Kaiser we are doing a lot of overtime. This is the busiest time of the year for my division. For the last three weeks I have been working 10 hours a day for 5 days a week, and then putting in a half day on Saturday. It would be expected that so much overtime would be an additional drag on my writing, but that would a conclusion at odds with my observations.

I purchased a backpack – I need to walk a mile and a half everyday to get from work – and began taking my MacBook Colossus with me to work. Even dead tired and working like a dog, I am writing every day on my lunches and my breaks. I’m not yet back to thousand words a day, but I will be hitting that goal and exceeding it soon.

It’s not the tiredness; it’s not the hours, it is the emotional stability of having my problems in my rearview mirror that seems to be the singe most important factor.

I must say, it feels good to be back.

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Movie review: Gravity

Sunday morning a friend and I caught a 3D showing of the new film Gravity. I normally steer clear of 3D showings as I feel to often the effect is used as a gimmick and a way to needlessly boost the ticket prices. However with a few directors, men of vision, I will often GRAVITYgive them a short if they can sell me that the 3D is a part of their vision and not just a revenue device. Alfonso is one such director.

Gravity is a film set in orbit high above the Earth. Two astronauts, Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) and Mat Kowalski I George Clooney) a part of a shuttle team making repairs to the Hubble Space telescope. A disaster occurs stranding Ryan and Kowalski alone and shuttles in orbit. This is a story of survival against extreme odds, and that has been a genre that has always fascinated.  The film follows closely and with a hard edge of forgivingness as the two struggled to find some way out of their dire situation.  It very much has a feel like the classic SF short story ‘The Cold Equations,’ but is sadly not as rigorous in the application of know physics.

That is NOT to say that this film just makes stuff up like most SF films do. No, compared to what we are generally fed from studios this is an amazing movie with a high degree of fidelity to science. It warms my heart that this film is doing great box office and it has the best use of silence in space since Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey.

What did the filmmaker’s get wrong? Mostly they imagine orbital space to be one area, not understanding or ignoring that orbital has inclinations and altitudes. The trip as seen in the film is simply not possible. However some of this I can live with. I ignore the words Hubble and simply imagine that the crew is working on a different space telescope, one that lies in the right orbit for the plot.

They also did understand surface tension in space. Tears do not float off a person eyeballs in weightlessness, but rather t stay there, making vision impossible until manually cleared. There is also a bit with momentum that when you think about just is plain wrong – I can’t go into details it would be spoiler material – but it’s a rather larger error in my book.

That said, I was blown away by this movie. The errors do not detract from my enjoyment any more than the multiple errors in Jaws. This is a movie after all and not real life.

This film also has the best zero-gee effects, besting Apollo 13 who used real zero-gee.

What the filmmakers have given us is a vision of space that is unmatched in cinema. Curaon use of 3D is masterful, the best 3D I have ever seen. Not only that his use of the camera of lenses or movement and framing combine to make an experience that is simply beyond words. I was breathless as I watched this movie. Even when I knew something was wrong I was still deeply engaged in the characters and their drama. I gasped out loud several times and that I rarely do. This film is phenomenal.

Do not wait for video.

Do not wait for cable.

Do not see it in 2D.

If you have to drive 60 miles, do it, this film is worth it.v

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Feeling alright

Despite the Republican insistence on going total ‘dirka dirka jihad‘ as an approach to governance, I am having a pretty decent week.

I’ve had some insights into a secondary character in my novel that I think brings out a more fully realized character and provides a nice bit of motivation for why she does what she does. She also surprised me by being married to another woman. I’ve heard author talk before about that their characters tell them whats what, but that’s not really how I operate. In this case I had started considering the spousal relations for Katarina and I know I did not want the usual power-couple you find in politics. Once i had the broad outlines of the kind of person for her spouse, I let my mind wander through scenes with different spouses and different bits of dialog.  Again and again I kept coming back to the same, off-world Scandinavian blonde. If that’s where my thoughts keep ending up, like some sort of orbit, then that where I need to be.

Also things look up on the job prospect. Right now I am a  temp but I’ve been told that my bosses are very pleased with my work and so I think when the probationary period ends it is likely that I will transition to a full time regular and unionized employee.

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Syria

So it looks like the U.S. has gotten an out on Syria, what with that country an Russia seeming to coming to an agreement that the vile nasty chemical weapons can be passed like a relay baton and this will make everyone happy. Well, no the people being bombed and shot to death but at least they won’t be gassed to death. As everyone know it’s not the destination but the journey that matters. As everyone knows 100,000 people killed in a series of fire bombing mission is honorable warfare, but 100,000 people killed in a single atomic mission is inhumane.

Despite the flippancy above I was strongly against U.S. involvement in the Syrian civil war. I have great sympathy for the people suffering on the heel of a monstrous dictator, however I failed to see a compelling national interest. I opposed the War in Iraq and I look back and see all my fears validated in that conflict.

I hope Assad falls. I hope that by some dues ex machina if he should fall a non-extremist government might arise, but man I am not holding my breath on that one.

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