Tomorrow night is my feedback dinner for the Beta Readers of ‘Cawdor.” Sadly, not all the beta readers could make the dinner. Work schedules and other commitments rarely allow me to have 100% turn out, still we should have 5 or so people there and that will be enough for me to have a sense of where common fault and virtues may lie in the piece.
We shall see.
When Chris MacNeil’ s daughter Regan begin behaving strangely, Chris does what any mother would do and takes Regan to the doctors. Despite advanced technology and level of medical examination that borders on medieval torture the doctors can find no cause for Regan’s increasing bizzare and violent acts.
When Chris’s director dies mysteriously after visiting Regan Chirs is pushed out of the light of reason and enlightenment and is forced to confront the growing possibility that Reagon is possessed.
With only the help of Father Karras a priest whose own faith has shattered, Chris must find the one person who can save Regan’s soul, The Exorcist.
Frank Moses’s life is dull and predictable. The closest thing he has to real human contact is his monthly calls to Sarah who works distributing retirement checks. Frank perpetually destroys his check and reports them as missing so he can continue to call Sarah.
After a team of Souther African assassins try to kill Frank, he is quickly on the run trying to stay one step ahead of the assassins and not ruin whatever chances he might have at a real relationship with the quirky Sarah.
As a retired CIA agent, franks knows a thing or two about killing people and quickly re contact members of his former team. The smooth talked and smooth-voiced analysis/intel man Joe, the mentally deranged but talented combatant Marvin, and finally but not least the Femme Fatale assassin Victoria.
With time running out and ruthless and uber-competent company after them can the retired agents get to the bottom of the conspiracy against them?
One on level RED is a predictable and fairly unoriginal piece of action mayhem. If you can’t figure out how this plot is going to end then you are asleep. However this film is fun and well worth watching because it is not trying to be serious. This is a comedy and by using a plot that is well know, they devoted more time to the characters and the off-center world that they live in. This is a movie that demands you turn off your higher functions and just have fun.
It is based on a comic book, which I have never read, and the action is very unrealistic. That said, I laugher out loud many times and this film was genuinely fun to watch. The time flew by and I would watch this again in a moment.
If you go, do not test this film against how the world really works. Things like g-forces do not exist here. What does exist here is sharp dialogue and some wonderful performances.
Something I seemed to revisit in my writing is the subject of loyalty. Many, though not all, of my stories have conflict of loyalty as the a primary source of character tension.
I know that I have always been bored by stories where the issue is merely: how do I win? For a story to be compelling there must be something personal at stake and there must be a personal decision the character must make that can never be unmade. What struck me this week is how often for my own characters it is a question of loyalty.
When I started writing Cawdor I had originally thought I would explore the avarice of ambition as the overriding theme, but when I crawled down into the trenches and fought and grappled with the plot, it became something different. Most of the characters are faced with tests of loyalty.
What I liked best in the way it turned out is that there was no simple answer to the puzzle of loyalty. It is not always good to be loyal and it is not always wrong to betray. That’s because as in so many things there is a hierarchy to loyalty and the test is understanding that incline of competing demands for loyalty.
For example, Von Stauffenberg had taken an oath to be loyal unto death to Adolf Hitler. For a man of his social class this is not something one tosses away lightly, but he did betray that oath with treason and an attempted assassination. We do not look upon his betrayal as a bad thing, we honor it and make movies about it. Here disloyalty is prized, because the greater cause of virtue demands it.
That of course is an easy case. We vilify Benedict Arnold because of his betrayal and the reason for his betrayal is more complicated. It might be because he felt slighted and insulted, which would hardly be sufficient to justify his treason. On the other hand it may be he was motivated by pure and consuming love and that is harder for us to emotionally reject as a cause.
In Cawdor I have characters that I think act rightly by betraying their oaths and their people and I have character who I think acts right by not doing so. I have never been fully aware just how much loyalty means to my writing. Even in my horror shorts loyalty often expresses itself.
I wonder why?
7 days to my Vegas adventure. I’m going to sin city and engaging on one sin, gluttony.
Been at my writings group meeting. Far fewere members made the last two so the die-off may be happening.
Arrived Monday, but I did not get to break the seal until last night. While this film is not everyone’s cup of tea it is one I like and getting it at a good price on Blu-ray with tons of bonus material made it a no brainer for me.
Google has announced that for months that they have been testing driverless cars on the streets and freeways of California. I for one am happy at the prospect of driverless cars. No, they will not be perfect, but I have ridden with and been hit by too many humans to know what sort of drivers most of them are!
There are legal hurdles to clear, but I suspect big business will push for this innovation when it become practical. Insurance companies will love them. It will give them a reason to jack up your rates if you insist on driving yourself.
Perfected this will save lives, time, and money.
The revision edits on my horror short story Proof Of Principle have been completed and the story has been re-submitted to a pro-market. I got a very encouraging rejection from this market suggesting that that the prose could be tightened and it would take 500-1000 words out of the story.
I spent two weeks reading it aloud and editing based on that and in the end removed 750 words. My sweetie-wife today did a proofreading pass, caught a couple of errors which I corrected before submission.
Now the waiting. This could be my first nation pro-market sale….
Two years after reporting about the massacre at he Delos owned amusement park Westworld, reporter Chuck Browning smells another story brewing. Delos has opened a new amusement park, insistent that this time the robot are fail-safe. When a man is murdered trying to get information to him, Chuck realized that not everything is as it seems at Delos.
Forced to work with a professional and personal rival, television reporter/personality Tracy Ballard, Chuck infiltrates the high-tech park Futureworld. Despite their bickering the television report and newspaper man discover this time that more is at stake than homicidal robots. Uncovering a vast conspiracy that threatens the world, Chuck and Tracy risk more than their lives.
I’ve decided that I would start off my Sunday Night Movie posts with a pitch for the films I watched. The principle reason for this is so that I would get more practice at pitch writing. It is an important aspect of novel selling and an aspect I particularly suck at.
So the Futureworld is the squeal to the 1973 hit, Westworld starring Yul Brynner and Richard Benjamin. In Westerworld at film directed by Michael Crichton from his novel of the same name. The Delos corporation has created an adult theme-park populated with lifelike robots. People can play in artificial environments, engaging in sword fights, sex, gun fights, sex, and debauchery. (Drinking in other words.) The robots malfunction and instead of losing the fights, begin killing the guests. Technology gone awry, as you can see it was never a new theme for Mr. Crichton. Westworld was a hit and made oodles of money, that commanded a sequel.
MGM released Futureworld on 1976, Michael Crichton was not involved in this production so the technology did not go awry. Instead we have a very seventies plot of conspiracies and cynicism. Political and economic leaders from around the world are coming as guests of Delos and of course some nefarious is happening to them. This film was not as well received by either the critics or the public and is generally a forgotten SF film of the seventies. I ended up watching it last night because I was in the mood for something that would not task my brain beyond the most rudimentary concepts.
That said this film in many ways worked better for me than Westworld did. Westworld suffered from severe plot-holes that were required to create the situation that Crichton demanded of his story. For example, when the technology fails in Westworld, the powered doors all locked. Sealing the technicians, who might have resolved the plot before the main characters were in too much danger, in their underground control chambers. There are apparently no overrides, manual or otherwise on these doors. Without power it is simply impossible to open them. Furthermore, the air stops and all the tech die of suffocation. Even as far back as the seventies this is not OSHA compliant. Westworld required this so that Richard Benjamin would have to face the gunslinger alone. Truthfully, this is not very good writing.
Futureworld, by not having the plot revolve around a breakdown of technology escapes this trap. It also got one thing right about the future, the death of Newspapers. Everything else about the future is strangle contemporary to the seventies. Blythe Danner is wasted as the airhead television personality.
In the end this made a perfectly acceptable SF film for a late-night just kick back and enjoy it viewing, but not one I’d want to own