Author Archives: Bob Evans

Worldcon Day 2

There will not be very many ujpdates from the worldcon as the networks are jammed. Brad calls it Geek Gridlock. Too many wireless devices on the sam,e network.
That said the con is rocking and we’re being kept very busy.

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Leaving for Worldcon

So in about 25 minutes we will be hitting the road for the ten hour drive to Reno and the 2011 World Science Fiction Convention. I am excited and looking forward to the convention but this one will also have an undercurrent of sadness for me.

My friend Pat, who lived in Reno and introduced me to fanfic and Blake’s 7 passed away last year after a battle with cancer. Going to a worldocn in her town without her will be a sad affair. I will soldier on and enjoy myself, it is what she would have wanted, but ..well there it is.

 

 

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Been Busy

So Saturday I worked 5 hours of OT at my day job. Nice money but tiring. Sunday I saw Cowboys & Aliens, decent flick but not good enough to add to my library when it is released on blu-ray. I love Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig in the movie, frankly the whole cast was hitting their strong performance. The weakness is the aliens, the more you think about them the less sense they make.

I was pretty tired by the end of Sunday so there was no Sunday night movie.

I printed up copies of Love and Loyalty for the beta read and I will handing them out tomorrow. Here’s hoping that this novel will be the one that sells.

 

 

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Getting introduced to Pink Floyd’s music

I’m nowhere near Pink Floyd’s biggest fan. I own several albums,  (The Wall, Dark Side of The Moon, and Wish You Were Here) and enjoy them very much, but as you can see there is a lot I do not have. What this story is about is how I first listened to Pink Floyd.

It was the mid 1980s and I was an usher at a movie theater, UA Glasshouse 6 – no defunct and long out of business. I was involved with a lovely redhead and she and I were going through rough times. My shift had ended at the theater, but I really did not want to go home. I suffer from depression, and already in a black mood I knew it would get worse because she was not going to be there.

A life lobe love of movies had given me the avenue of escape through film. A good movie was my preferred method of getting away from my troubles and out of my head. It was late at the theater and the midnight movies would be starting soon. Free movies as an usher was the best benefit for working at the theater. I scanned the titles and found nothing I knew and flt strongly about, still I knew I did not want to go home.

hmmm, The Wall, My pal ray had told me that The Wall was a very good film and he and I tended to have similar tastes, so The Wall it was.

I was not prepared for a film that was entirely music and visual, but I settled in and let the film wash over me. Quickly disturbing parallels between ‘Pink’ the subject of The Wall and myself revealed themselves. We both lost our father’s when we were young, a devastating event, we were both artistically inclined, we both kept most people at a distance, had lovely redheaded girlfriends, but relationship troubles, and both given to wild mood swings. (ahh yes, One Of My Turns is a song I very much identify with.)

This movie was NOT cheering me up. I felt like I was drowning in a sea of depression and that to quote another song, “he was killing me softly.”

I made it through the screening with my wrists intact, and my head throughly spinning. The music stuck with me. The songs reverberated in my skull and while my depression lifted, as it always will do given enough time, the impact of that film and those songs did not.

Being horribly depressed is not my recommended introduction to Pink Floyd and The Wall, but it did work for me.

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Sunday Night Movie:X2: X-Men United

So Sunday turned out to be a really Marvel Day for your humble host. (Don;t snicker, I am too humble.  I’m WAY more humble than you are.) Anyway I started my day getting up and 8:00 am and no I am not a church-goin kind of fellow, unless you count movies as church, which they might in my case. Anyway I, and my sweetie-wife, rose early so we could catch a 9:15 showing of Captain America: The First Avenger, the last piece needed before next year’s The Avengers. (my quick opinion on Captain America? It rocked. This is a very hard character to write and I imagine a harder one to play but the writers nailed it, and Chris Evans did a fine job. Frankly I consider this film an apology from director Joe Johnston for The Wolfman.) Continue reading →

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Sunday Night Movie: Think Fast, Mr. Moto

Technically this is a Saturday Afternoon movie as the film I tried to watch Sunday Night could not hold my interest and I crawled off the bed rather early. (A weekend filled with Universal Studios, Harry Potter 7.2, fantastically lucky Scrabble games makes for a very short Sunday Evening.)

When I was younger I watched a lot of the old Charlie Chan films. Sometime ago I learned about another Asian detective from Hollywood’s less than enlightened period, Mr. Moto. Think Fast, Mr. Moto is the first in a series of movies starring Peter Lorre as a Japanese Businessman and dilettante detective. Made in 1937, before Lorre absolutely stunning job in The Maltese Falcon, Lorre, a Hungarian raised in Austria is of course cast as a Japanese detective because at this time Hollywood would never stoop to have an actual Japanese actor in a lead.

If possible this film is more insulting in its portrayal of Japanese peoples than the Chan films were of Chinese peoples. It seems that the script writers had a default rule, when in doubt has Moto say, ‘Ah so‘ for absolutely any and no reason at all. Lorre’s small stature made stature, fake buck teeth, and round glasses all added to the stereotypical image Americans had of the Japanese in these pre-war years. (While far from an expert in any manner shape or form on Japanese culture I saw nothing that indicated any research or study of the island nation by the writers. as shame.)

This mystery worked out in a standard B-mobvie plot kind of way. Moto is brilliant and two steps ahead of the crooks at nearly every turn. Perhaps one of the more interesting aspects to this story is that Moto plays at being a villain to gain information and trust, a subtly of performance that Lorre does admirably. (That would be no surprise to anyone who had seen in the Fritz Lang’s M.)

However, as much as I like Lorre, this series offers too little to entice me to watch the other seven film.

 

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