Author Archives: Bob Evans

Things to Look Forward To

After two days of dental surgery, chiropractic, and pulmonary medical appointments, Amazon drivers taking a reserved parking space, and my front passenger tire going flat due to a tiny screw, I can finally start to relax and look forward to a few weeks of hopefully nice events and activities.

First off is this weekend’s opening for Fantastic Four: First Steps. I am quite happy with the trailers and the interesting approach to produce the film in a retro-futurism style that echoes the comic book’s 60’s origins. So far, there haven’t been any decent Fantastic Four movies, but this one is the first to be produced under the Marvels Studios’ guidance following that studio’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox.

Next on the things that are making me happy is the next 7-8 weeks of televised science-fiction with the third seasons of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and Foundation. Full disclosure, while I have read a lot of classic SF, I never managed to get into Asimov’s Foundation series. His fiction often struck me as dry and with characters created to solve puzzles rather than experience emotional lives. So, I know that this show is deviating wildly from the source material, but it doesn’t bother me. Strange New Worlds is of course as I have previously written about is breaking ‘canon’ with Treklore, but it is doing so while giving us more realized and fleshed out characters so that’s a trade I am perfectly willing to make.

And finally, next month is the World Science Fiction Convention in Seattle, Washington. It has been a number of years since I have been able to make a WorldCon and this I hope will be the restorative vacation/holiday I need just before the really busy period at the day-job commences.

In Defense of The Last Jedi

Yesterday, while recovering from minor oral surgery, I watched a YouTube video from the channel ‘Feral Historian’ where he discussed the history of myths and their cultural command throughout human civilization, concluding with the observation that while Disney owns the intellectual property of Star Wars the myth of that franchise belongs to the wider American and even global culture. It is a very fine distinction that can ‘separate ownership’ from ‘belongs to’ but in my opinion his essay seemed to boil down to essentially, ‘Not my Luke Skywalker.’

It is a fairly common refrain that the character of Luke Skywalker as presented is strikingly at odds with how the character is in the original trilogy. That his fall and sulky isolation degrades his heroic stature and is an insult to the fanbase.

I don’t agree. In fact, I think there are signs and traits exhibited in the original trilogy that support the actions taken by Skywalker in The Last Jedi.

Disney/Lucasfilm

Luke started his journey to becoming a Jedi Knight driven by anger and a thirst for vengeance after discovering the charred corpses of his Aunt and Uncle. His first steps into that wider mystical existence were steps that often lead to the Dark Side. This is a small factor, Luke clearly tries to devote himself to the Rebellion and the fight for freedom, but it is an important emotional fact to keep in mind.

In The Empire Strikes Back it becomes clearer that the Dark Side of the Force holds an allure and draw to Luke just as it did for his father. (In either the original backstory presentation as told by Obi-Wan or in the retconned version of the prequels.) When confronted with a cave that is ‘strong with the Dark Side’ Luke is told by Yoda that he must confront it, and he should do so without his lightsaber.

He ignores the sage advice of his tutor, strapping on his weapon, and venturing into the lair of the Dark Side. There he is confronted by a vision of Darth Vader. There was the unmistakable sound of a lightsaber igniting, and Luke raised his weapon to fight. Only after Luke has lit his weapon does the image of Vader ignite his.

Luke, even after being told that hate and anger are paths to the Dark Side, starts the violence of the encounter. Defeating the image of Vader, it was revealed to be Luke under the mask, his real fight is and always had been with himself.

Luke, again ignores the counsel of his teachers, abandons his training to fly into a trap set by Vader and the Emperor in the Cloud City of Bespin. There he is maneuvered into a confrontation with the real Vader and having not learned the lesson of the cave, Luke starts aggressively, lighting his weapon first. Luke escaped but was bitter that he was not told what he thinks he should have known and not reprimanding himself for repeatedly ignoring the people wiser than himself in these matters.

The Return of the Jedi in addition to the space and ground battles represents Luke’s final temptation by the Dark Side and he starts the story off in a bad place. Setting aside the elaborate and knowingly doomed attempts to make a deal with Jabba the Hutt, when Luke enters Jabba’s palace his very first action, though difficult to see due to the bulky costumes, is to force choke the Gammorrean guards and reserve the ‘Jedi Mind Trick’ for the majordomo. While there are no on-screen fatalities from the choking it is quite reminiscent of the scene from the original Star Wars when Vader is simply annoyed by an Imperial Officer.

Luke displayed a fair amount of control as the Emperor pushed, prodded, and tempted Luke to give in emotionally to the Dark Side as the Rebel forces are being destroyed in the battle of the Second Death Star but eventually Luke did break, seizing his weapon, and giving in to his anger. He briefly regained his calm but only until, again unable to control his emotional nature, it is revealed he has a twin sister and all of Luke’s composure vanishes.

He is very nearly turned to the Dark Side with only the image of his father’s mechanical, hand so much like Luke’s own, shattered the rage that had propelled him, allowing him to accept death rather than be seduced by the Dark Side. Luke did not get to that moment of serenity quickly or easily. He is an emotionally volatile man, given to storm changes in his mood, demons that have been present throughout the character’s arc.

Which brings us to The Last Jedi and its Rashomon-like backstory of Luke and that night with Ben Solo.

Luke, sensing a Dark Side power he had not encountered since Vader, nearly twenty years earlier, reacts as he has always done when suddenly confronted in this manner, ignites his lightsaber. It is a moment of fear and weakness, but a moment was all that was required to destroy the future. Luke did not strike, but before he could take any further action, Ben awoke, and the die was cast for both their fates. Luke, always a person short on patience and given to grand gestures, flees in the face of his failure.

Here it is important to remember that Luke is also older than he was when he confronted his own failings. When one is young it is much easier to ‘pick yourself up’ and start over. There is an air of limitless possibility and invulnerability to youth but as you age you become more cautious, you feel the failures more painfully, and you are so much more aware that time is closing off all those limitless possibilities of youth. The idea that Luke flees, hides his failure and his shame from everyone else, wallowing in self-hatred for what he has done, is wholly in character with the young man I met on the silver screen in 1977.

He may not be ‘your Luke Skywalker’ and any honest critique cannot be wrong, but he is not divergent.

Cowardice, CBS, & Colbert

As you may have already learned, last week the Columbia Broadcasting System, CBS, announced that it was ending The Late Show with Stephen Colbert effective May 2026. The Late Show began in 1993 with David Letterman hosting the series, who handed the program off to Colbert in 2015. CBS, a division of Paramount, in its announcement of the show’s termination took pains to make clear that the decision was “purely a financial decision.”

CBS’s explanation has been met with considerable skepticism, with many believing that the network, under direction from its parent corporation, made the move to placate President Donald Trump due to Colbert’s continual and savage criticism of the president. The truth is that without someone bringing forward documented evidence, we can’t know if that was the reason or if the shifting nature of late-night television and the aging of the audience out of the demographic desired by advertisers played the deciding factor in ending the long-running program.

What I think we can say is that Paramount burned all of its benefit of the doubt over this decision in a 16-million-dollar bonfire.

Trump, a petty and vindictive man, launched a lawsuit seeking damages against CBS for the manner in which it edited an interview with Kamala Harris in last year’s presidential contest. It was a lawsuit without any legal merit at all. There was simply no theory of the case by which one could come to any reasonable conclusion that the interview had harmed Trump in any fashion. He still won the election; it was not his words that had been edited. All he had in his claim was that he suffered “emotional distress.” The big man behind the “fuck your feelings” crowd had had his feelings hurt.

But Paramount, seeking federal approval of its sale to Skydance, understood the Mafia-like mentality of this man and settled for 16 million dollars. In effect, not a bribe but a shakedown: “That’s a nice sale you got there, Redstone. It’d be a shame if anything happened to it.”

Everyone in the industry understood precisely what had transpired when Paramount/CBS agreed to give 16 million dollars to Trump for his hurt little feelings. So, naturally, everyone views this decision with an ocean’s worth of salt. Trump crowing on social media over the cancellation only elevates the idea that this was a move to further placate the man. After all, if the 16 million is a shakedown, Paramount has no way to enforce it. Trump can take the money for his Presidential Library—yeah right—and still have his administration kill the deal in “the public interest.” Paramount has to keep him happy until it is done, and if that was the real motivation for the move, then it will not be the last.

Revisiting Across 110th Street

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This Sunday, as part of Film Geeks San Diego’s Neo-Noir festival for 2025, we watched the 1972 film Across 110th Street. Often considered a ‘blaxploitation’ feature, I think the film is more accurately part of the crime sub-genre than that one. While the movie has a large cast of Black actors and the setting is the gritty, grimy conditions of their lives in run-down Harlem of the early 70s, the novel was written by a white author, and the film was produced and directed by a white filmmaker, which I think takes it seriously away from the ‘own voices’ nature of most blaxploitation movies.

I watched this film on the Criterion Channel a few years ago, but it is a different experience watching it on the big screen, even if that screen is the 50-seat micro-theater of San Diego’s Digital Gym.

In the story, three Black men rob a ‘counting house’ where the Italian Mafia counts and acquires the funds from the Black Harlem gangsters that are their subjugated gang. The robbery goes awry with both Italian and Black gangsters being killed along with a pair of New York police patrolmen, sparking an intense hunt for the robbers by the police and the criminal gangs.

Thematically, Across 110th Street is very much about the old being supplanted by the new. Within the police, for purely political posturing, the investigation is given to a young and relatively inexperienced officer, Lieutenant Pope (Yaphet Kotto), solely because Pope is Black, infuriating Captain Matelli (Anthony Quinn), a racist cop but with decades of experience in Harlem. The Mafia Don sends a hotheaded and expendable nephew, Nick D’Salvio (Anthony Franciosa), to identify, find, and make an example of the three robbers. Nick’s interfacing with the local Black criminal organization, run by ‘Doc’ Johnson (Richard Ward), reveals serious friction between the gangs with the implication clear that the Italian Mafia’s days controlling Harlem are rapidly closing. In both cases—the criminals and the police—it is the younger, more vibrant actors that repeatedly succeed in uncovering information leading to the three doomed robbers while the tired and brutal methods of the older generation prove ineffective.

As was typical for films of the 70s, now released from the restrictive Motion Picture Production Code, Across 110th Streetis a violent, cynical affair populated with characters of whom none can truly be called heroes save for the still, in many ways naïve, Lt. Pope.

Directed by veteran television director Barry Shear and utilizing new lightweight cameras, Across 110th Street was filmed on location using location sound instead of the more conventional studio shoots and dubbing of location dialog, giving the film a realism that indicated the future of cinema. While the feature may not fit neatly into the genre of ‘blaxploitation,’ its treatment of its Harlem-based characters indicates a compassion and understanding that is often absent from films of the period. The characters, good and bad, have depth and characteristics beyond the needs of the plot. Even the racist and bigoted Captain Matelli has a compassion even for those for whom he normally harbors only resentment and hatred.

Across 110th Street has now been released in a newly restored 4K Blu-ray from Shout Factory. It was this release we watched, and the film looked fantastic.

Superman and Assimilation

James Gunn’s relaunching of a film franchise based upon DC comic book heroes has begun with his Superman and in these politically charged and patently insane partisan times it of course has launched a million takes.

Sonny Bunch, culture editor for The Bulwark, an online home and community for displaced former Republicans and centrist Democrats, recently revealed that his interpretation of this variant of the character was to see it as a conservative character, principally due to Clark Kent’s end-to-end assimilation as an immigrant of American culture and values.

This is, of course, a ludicrous interpretation. Clark Kent AKA Kal-El, rocketed to Earth from the doomed planet Krypton as an infant. Assimilation implies, quite strongly, the discarding of some of a person’s former cultural practices and traditions while adopting the same from their new home’s culture. Kal-El carried with him none of that planet’s culture and was raised in the heartland of American as the only culture he knew. This was no more assimilation than it is for any person born and raised in Kansas.

But assimilation is a Trojan Horse argument, meant to ‘other’ the immigrant and as such make it easier to treat them as non-persons, which of course makes it easier to be cruel and uncaring.

America is an idea, and anyone can become an American, but that process does not at all require them to reject everything of their former culture and it never has. American culture is an amalgam of cultures from around the globe, our food, our holidays, our practices are not and never have been just one thing, one culture, one idea.

The poisonous idea at the heart of MAGA and its hatred of ‘DEI’ is the idea that there is one way and only one way to be American. It is the desire to use a great metal stamp to force everyone into a single mold, a single form and to fear and hate anything that resists that process.

Nothing is more ‘Big Brother’ than MAGA.

Standard Orbit Achieved

Tonight is the return of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds for its third of five seasons. It is a shame that when this series completes its run, the episode total will be only 50 fewer than the ‘failed’ original series with its three seasons. It is a shame because this is the first Star Trek series in a very long time that, to me, has the voice and feel of the original series.

Credit: Paramount Pictures

Yes, this series, produced nearly six decades after the original, has a very different tone and sensibility from its progenitor. It ‘violates’ established lore and canon numerous times, such as repeated contact with the Gorn prior to Kirk’s encounter following the destruction of Cestus III, or the sexual activity of Vulcan’s outside of pon farr, the time of madness; but as I have written about in other posts these divergences have led to more complex characters and more interesting plots, so I am not irritated by them.

Sunday evening my sweetie-wife and I rewatched the season two finale, which, of course, following the modern trend established by Dallas decades ago, ended with something I truly despise: a cliffhanger. That said, I and thrilled and excited to be returning to Pike’s Enterprise. To re-engage with what has surprised me, my favorite character, Christine Chapel, and the rest of the stellar crew as they sail the stars seeking out strange new worlds.

Conspiracies Are Forever

I hate the term ‘Conspiracy Theory’ as it gives far too much credence and plausibility to these insane and utterly batshit fantasies. In science a theory is something well established by test and falsification as being a model accurate to the data observed as to how the world functions. Conspiracists take falsehoods, unsupported preconceived notions, mixed heavily with idiosyncratic worldview to construct elaborate fantasies justifying the thing that they already want to believe. Once let loose and infecting minds conspiracies are undying, immune to facts, logic, and all evidence.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, antisemitic propaganda invented by the Czars of Imperial Russia has been debunked repeatedly but the popularization of the fantasy of a global plot by the Jews to control the world remains as potent and deadly today as it did 122 years ago when that despicable tract was loosed on the world.

Humanity achieved a technological marvel in 1969 when men walked on the surface of the moon and returned safely but within a few short years, fueled by cynicism propelled by both politics and entertainment Americans began believing in serious numbers that the entire endeavor had been faked. Again, fact and evidence are futile in killing the fantasy and people continue to believe it to this day.

Andrew Wakefield, a British physician, for monetary gain published a falsified study in 1998 linking vaccines to autism, again facts and science were unable to dislodge this destructive meme from the public consciousness and now adherents to his fraud control the levers of America’s medical system.

All this brings me to Trump and Epstein. That Jeffrey Epstein, a New York financier and socialite, rubbed elbows and traveled extensively with celebrities of entertainment, commerce, and government is an accepted fact. It is also a fact that the man was responsible for years of sexual assaults on young girls and women but suffered little criminal punishment for his convicted crimes. It is almost certain that his wealth and connections allowed him to avoid serious consequences for his actions. That others participated either in deed or knowledge of these heinous actions is a reasonable supposition but is not in evidence at this time. His death by suicide propelled more conjecture that others acted to ‘silence’ him but again this is not in evidence at this time.

The lack of evidence has never stopped; in fact, it is a growth medium, for conspiratorial fantasies and those did indeed erupt around Epstein.

Trump and his supporters cultivated these fantasies, fertilized them with their own bullshit, and weaponized, quite effectively, them against their political opponents. The tale grew and grew until to the believers, who accepted with a religious fervor, just knew, even without any actual evidence, that every high democratic person must somehow be entwined in the terrible affair.

Now, with the people who pushed and fed the flames of this firestorm of accusations occupying the very positions that have access to all the ‘hidden evidence’ Trump and his circle want the fantasies to stop. His name is too often correlated with Epstein’s, and it would be best if everyone would just accept the official report and move on to other matters.

But conspiratorial fantasies are forever. They are immune to fact, evidence, and logic surviving no matter the arguments arrayed against them. Those who have held these things about Epstein as ‘truth’ are not going to be dissuaded from their religious convictions by a press release or two.

Will this break Trump’s collation? Will enough followers cease to follow that he loses his ability to the threaten Republicans into submission? I don’t know and neither do you. “Always in motion is the future.” I do know this, he can’t extinguish these flames. Neither those on the right, convinced that Democrats held satanic orgies with these children, or those on the left, certain that Trump raped little girls alongside Epstein, will ever be moved from the convictions that define their worldview.

Movie Review: Superman (2025)

Writer/Director James Gunn and cinematographer Henry Braham powerfully diverts from the grim, grounded, and gritty aesthetic of recent DC Comics superhero film gives the audience in Superman a colorful and gloriously goofy rendition of the iconic ‘Man of Steel.’ A trailer featuring the super canine ‘Krypto’ coming to a battered and beaten Superman sets the tone audiences should expect with this movie.

Eschewing re-harvesting the overly tilled fields of the character’s origin story or Marvel Studios’ course of building a cinematic universe element by element introduced in features focused on individual character Gunn drops the audience into a comic inspired universe already in progress and populated by ‘metahumans.’

DC Studios

What writers refer to as ‘the inciting incident’, Superman’s (David Corenswet) intercession into a war and losing in a battle against a new supervillain, happens before the film even starts the character crashing into the frame beaten and defeated. Gunn skips many of the familiar beats found in stories of these characters, hurling the audience into a film where Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) is already aware of his dual identity, allowing the story to focus on their relationship instead of secret identity shenanigans.

This new DC Cinematic Universe is one where the heroes of the ‘Silver Age’ are already present and active. Gunn, rightly, in my opinion, understands that the audience, after 17 years of the MCU, is ready to accept a world of comic book characters without the need to establish and detail each and every origin. As such the Guy Gardner Green Lantern (Nathan Fillion), Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced) and Mr. Terrific (Edi Gathegi) simply fly into their scenes without the scrip stopping to explain them.

Quickly the plot develops as manipulated public opinion turns against Superman and the hero finds himself questioning his purpose on Earth and the challenges doing the right thing in a complex morally grey world. Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) fueled by a fiery envy and hatred to destroy Superman is here presented in a composite of attributes that the character has exhibited in various media, he is scientifically and technologically brilliant, a billionaire businessman, politically influential, as well as having a predilection for land and its ownership.

There are a number of nods and references to 1978’s Superman The Movie, most notably even in the trailer is that the score by John Murphy and David Fleming is inspired and around the well-known theme written by the legendary John Williams. There are more subtle callbacks, in the background of one scene Perry White (Wendell Pierce) can be heard shouting ‘Don’t call me Chief!’ This Lex Luthor has a large number of people assisting his villainous plot including one referred named Otis a nice Easter egg but one that is expanded in the credits where his surname is revealed to be ‘Berg.’

There is a major change in the canon of the character, one on which a great deal of the plot revolves about that is sure to upset some fans. To avoid spoilers, I cannot reveal it here but when it unfolds people familiar with the history and lore of Superman will see it. Personally, I was fine with it, but others may not be.

James Gunn’s Superman is about as far as one can get in tone and style from Nolan’s Batman Begins, but both are crafted by talented director/writers who knew exactly the kind of film that they wanted to see on the screen. It was a fun frolic but one with heart and soul and a powerful theme that we are not tools of our parents designs but of our own.

The Accidental Hero of Superman ’78– Otis

WB Studios

I was 17 years old and in my senior year of high school when Richard Donner’s Superman: The Movie hit the screens in the United States. Despite never being a deep fan of the comic books and possessing only a surface knowledge of the character, this was still a movie that I rode my bicycle a couple of miles to the local twin cinema to see. I can recall quite vividly pumping the pedals quite hard and fast with John Williams’ icon score replaying in my head as I went home from that screening. While not as campy as the Batman television series of 1966 and a far cry from the grounded, gritty DC superhero movies of the ‘Snyderverse’ to come in the next century, Superman: The Movie set a high bar for superhero films in general, and Christopher Reeve’s excellent portrayal as Clark Kent/Superman remains in the minds of many unmatched.

What is surprising is that after 47 years, the number of people who do not quite grasp that the plot of the film and its resolution rotates around the fumbling failure of one henchman.

Otis (Ned Beatty), while a seductively costumed and faux-injured Ms. Teschmacher (Valerie Perrine) distracts the Army’s security detail escorting a nuclear-armed ICBM, alters the missile’s targeting at the behest of his supervillain boss, Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman.) Later, Lex learns that Otis bungled his assignment inputting only three updated coordinates instead of the required four. When it comes to the second missile, this time being transported and guarded by the US Navy, it is Ms. Teschmacher whom Lex sends to corrupt the missile’s targeting, ensuring it hits his intended target: the San Andreas Fault line to create ‘New West Coast’ that he will own and control.

Lex Luthor’s plan is when both missiles are launched Superman, due the missiles divergent courses, will be able to intercept only one. But to ensure even that outcome does not come to pass, he chains lethal kryptonite to Superman and drops him in a pool to drown.

When Ms. Teschmacher learns that the other missile will detonate its nuclear warhead over her mother’s town of Hackensack, New Jersey, she betrays Lex Luthor and rescues Superman but only after he promises to save her mother first.

It seems an idiotic mistake for Lex Luthor to send his expendable nuclear warhead to the hometown of his expendable girlfriend but of course that was never Lex’s plan. That missile is the one whose targeting was charged by the bumbling Otis, who failed to input the coordinates correctly. Because it was not the warhead that would create the ‘New West Coast’ Lex never bothered to correct that mistake leading to the targeting of Hackensack and Ms. Teschmacher’s betrayal.

Without Otis’ ineptitude, Superman would have perished, and Lex Luthor’s plan would have succeeded. Otis is the accidental hero of Superman: The Movie.

Schoedinger’s 5th Amendment

There’s been a bit of a celebratory mood on the right side of the political spectrum with the report that President Biden’s doctor pleaded the 5th Amendment against self-incrimination during recent congressional testimony. This is taken as evidence that supports the conservative accusations of Biden’s mental decline.

However, when Trump pled the 5th Amendment more than 400 times during his testimony, that is only evidence of prosecutorial misconduct and not any evidence of actual guilt or wrongdoing.

Here’s the truth: When a person pleads the 5th Amendment, it is a null result revealing and supporting nothing. There are plenty of reasons why someone’s lawyer would advise them to take the safer course even when they are not concealing any crimes of their doing. For many people, being investigated by the government is a financially ruinous event, and it’s best to avoid opening any avenues for someone, particularly political enemies, to start such an investigation.

When someone draws an instant conclusion from a person taking the 5th Amendment, that reveals much more about the preconceptions they hold than it does about the person testifying.

Robert Mitchell Evans

Literary Saboteur