Author Archives: Bob Evans

The Godfather Coda: Completing the Saga

 

I own a Blu-ray of The Godfather and I have watched The Godfather: Part II several times but it wasn’t until last week that I finally sat down and over several installments, the same process I am employing for Zack Snyder’s Justice League, that I watched The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone.

1972’s The Godfather is a classic of cinema, a triumph of filmmaking in the face of overwhelming adversity with lasting cultural impact as the film’s 50th anniversary approaches. The sequel deepened our understanding of the Corleone family, its history, and the ruthlessness required to sit atop a vast criminal empire as it corrupts the culture around it and the people inside it.

The Godfather Coda in comparison is a film that feels small. Cleverly staged mass assassinations of crime family bosses are far from new within this franchise and fail invoke much in the way of emotion or stakes. The plot involving Michael Corleone’s quest to absolve his murderous sins by going legitimate through corrupt deals with equally corrupt Roman Catholic officials seems perfunctory and with any real character weight. Familial conflicts, Michael’s son wanting a career in the arts, his illegitimate nephew affair with Michael’s daughter, and his strained relationship with his separated wife Kay, possess the requisite story beats but are executed in an unimaginative manner that any Lifetime movie would exceed. While lengthy in running time the film sprints to its conclusion cramming the death of a pope, the election of a new one and that pope’s assassination all into the story’s final act. Characters act in a manner more suited to movies that any reflection of reality perhaps best example by the assassins sent to kill Michael’s nephew who take the nephew’s current sexual partner hostage for no reason other than to present a ‘more dramatic’ scene when ruthless killers would have simply murdered her silently and then proceeded with their plan. This is mast worse by the fact that the character served no story purpose after that scene only heightening the contradiction of the scene.

Sofia Coppola has earned rave praise for her skills as a filmmaker in her own right. I have seen Lost in Translation it is unquestionable that she has learned much from her father and is a very talented director. As an actress she leaves much to be desired. She had no chemistry with her romantic lead and presented no interior life from her character Mary Corleone. Her character sits at the story’s emotional center exerting a gravity that bends the fates of everyone around her and this casting seriously damaged the film.

For me The Godfather Saga ends with Part II.

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I Must Be Dreaming

 

It’s a cliche and before it became a cliche a character muttering during a fantastic event ‘I must be dreaming’ still never worked for me.

The tired bit has a long and stories track record which even includes Goldfinger as Bond mutters the phrase when he awakes and Pussy Galore tells him her name. Here’s why this particular trope has never convinced me that the character’s reaction is authentic.

Never once in any dream that I can remember have I ever considered for a moment that I was dreaming. No matter how fantastic or mundane or improbable the events, locals, or characters that appear in my dreams at the moment they occur they accepted as established reality. Recently I dreamt that I was attending some event and the governor of California was there, not Newsom just some generic guy, dressed in the terrible plaid jacket with stripped slacks. I was about to comment that his style was worse that the mayor of Amity in Jaws but then noticed that Murray Hamilton, who0 played the mayor, was not only sitting right beside me but wearing an identical outfit.

I do not associate with either high ranking politicians or actors and Hamilton dies in 1986 but none of this caused even the slightest hesitation in my acceptance of this reality. It is dream-logic and as you experience it is it solid and unquestioned.

The ‘I must be dreaming’ utterance is a weak shortcut to try and pull out of the character some emotional experience to their current situation. Writers would be better off if at the moment that are tempted to type those words if they stopped and searched for a more intimate and personal way to express the character’s wonderment.

 

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We Are Westview NJ

 

In Disney +’s first Marvel Cinematic Universe television series WandaVision Wanda Maximoff after a life of trauma and her world shattered by grief explodes with a power she never conceived of having transforming the dying town of Westview New Jersey in her escapist fantasy of reality where life became an endless procession of sitcom episodes. Actual reality intrudes forcing Wanda out of her delusional and her artificial reality.

The series sits as a perfect metaphor for the Republican party’s current madness and sadly we are the imprisoned citizens of Westview forced into another’s delusion of reality, trapped by their fears and inability to face facts that are too painful to admit.

The litany of GOP lies, and delusions is extensive; the January 6th attack and insurrection was the product of Antifa masquerading as Trump supporters, systemic voter fraud stole the election, mask mandates are tyranny, COVID-19 is an inconsequential flu, racism only exits against white people, thoughts and prayers prevent mass shootings, Christianity is oppressed and in danger of vanishing, and many many others. For some these are calculated lies used to seize and maintain power for far too many these are their reality, and it is a reality as valid as Wanda’s sitcom life.

Unlike the residents of the fictional Westview there is no outside force or agency coming to our rescue. We have the reclaim actual reality for ourselves. The GOP must be driven from the lever of power until they have expelled the delusions from their system. This did not begin with Trump and it did not end with his defeat. The long road to sanity’s recovery still is ahead of us.

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The Big Combo: Fante’s and Mingo’s Liminal Relationship

 

Saturday night a friend and I watched the 1955 noir film The Big Combo. The film stars Cornel Wilde as Police Lieutenant Diamond who is obsessed with charging and jailing a local organized crime boss, Mr. Brown, played by Richard Conte while having unrequited love for Brown’s mistress Susan Lowell. Combo in the title is a shortening of Combination one of many names assigned to organized along with Commission, and such, when for whatever reasons the title ‘mafia’ is avoided.

The film’s limited budget gives it a decidedly B picture feel and the dialog from time to time to too on-point with characters delivering clumsy exposition, but the twisty narrative delivers nicely with the final reveals of the plot playing out well.

This is a movie where the supporting cast have the most memorable characters and performances. John Hoyt, perhaps best remembered as the Enterprise’s original doctor in Star trek’s first Pilot The Cage, has but a single scene as a retired Swedish Sea Captain but fills his few moments on screen with life and vitality.

However, the support characters that fascinate me the most in The Big Combo are a pair of hitmen, Fante and Mingo, playing to perfection by Lee Van Cleef and Earl Holliman respectively. The pair are inseparable, traveling together, eating together, and sharing a tiny apartment. Fante is the judicious, calculating and older member of the duo while Mingo’s character is brash, juvenile and more likely to react without considering the consequences.

While the characters are never ‘coded’ as gay by any of the usual traits used by cinema of the period, no lisps, no perchance for extravagance, no perfumed cards or elaborately stylish outfits, the pair’s relationship can clearly and be easily interpreted as a close, bonded pair or lovers. This is even more evident when Fante’s leaves Mingo utterly shattered emotionally so much so that all traces of criminal loyalty vanish. Never is there an overt action that would support the interpretation of the characters as gay but neither are there any of the easily dropped clues such as ogling women or discussing girlfriends and dolls that would have countered such a conclusion. Fante and Mingo live in the liminal space between what is suspected and what is confirmed, shadowy, hidden, a perfect film noir relationship.

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A Bad Year

 

One year ago my planned book launch event at Mysterious Galaxy had already had its attendance limited to the growing pandemic and we were just one day before California and very quickly following the United States and the world shutting its doors and going into lockdown.

My novel Vulcan’s Forge was released from Flametree Press March 27th, 2020 and I can speak with some authority that having your debut book hit the shelves the week the world goes into lockdown is terrible for sales. IT sort like if a sprinter at the starting gun discovers after hitting the ground with his face that someone has ties his laces together. Yeah, you’re in the race but you are not going to win it.

Of course, things were going to get worse. The lockdown shuttered all of our social lives and in June of 2020 my friend of 40 years died of COVID 19. here in 2021, we have lost in the United States alone more than half a million people to this pandemic and in the scale of such disasters poor book sales are less than inconsequential.

Still, I recognize that things could have been worse for me. I never lost an hour of employment and my wife and I have not contracted the disease and are now vaccinated against it.

The year did not have to be this disastrous and it is now upon us to rebuild our lives, rebuild our communities, and honor those who were cruelly taken from us.

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Incomplete Observations on Vampyres (1974)

 

Among the curated horror movies currently available on SHUDDER is the mid-70s ‘erotic’ (read, naked women) horror flick Vampyres.

Hailing from the UK, Vampyres centers on a pair of lesbian vampires living in a dilapidated country manor, the same used for the exterior shots of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and many Hammer productions, where, with carnal seduction, they lure unsuspecting victims.

One weeknight after I have finished my writing for the evening, I usually like to relax by watching videos before bed and I have watched at least the first act of Vampyres and witnessed perhaps the worst serious sex scene committed to celluloid. I literally laughed out loud when the couple began ‘making out’ because it looked so clumsy, so fumbling that I was immediately remined of the comedic version of the scene in Syfy’s series Resident Alien, and yet this was supposed to be titillating rather than laughable.

What is crystal clear is that the film has no characters. Oh, actors come in, deliver lines, and fumble at each other nude bodies, they do not portray any sort of actual person. “Ted” in the first act picks up one of the vampires, Fran, while she pretends to be hitchhiking. We are supposed to believe that she seduces him but without any convincing dialog it’s just two people who decide to go to her house and screw. Ted has no motivation beyond his supposed attraction to Fran. He wasn’t coming from anywhere, or going to any place on his drive, he exists only to have scenes with a vampire. Scene after scene is devoid of any motivation on the character’s part. People do things to achieve goal that serve their needs the exterior reflecting the interior here they just get wine glasses, drink, and screw without anything beyond the walls of the set existing.

I can see why I have never heard of this movie.

 

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A Most Disappointing Continuation

 

This contains spoilers for The Umbrella Academy season 2.

 

Last week I posted about how I dislike cliffhangers prompted by the season one cliffhanger from The Umbrella Academy, a series that I had very much enjoyed and found a non-ending frustrating.

I watched the season two opener and my reaction transformed from frustration to irritation. Season 1 centered on two major plot threads, an end of the world apocalypse in seven days and the secret behind Vanya’s lack of superpowers. They resolve when her powers induced the end of the world with the moon’s destruction but all of our central characters, including Vanya, escape into the past to continue their quest to save the world from the apocalypse they failed to prevent. Okay, the story’s not over and we continue this fight, right?

Wrong.

The characters are scattered from 1960 through 1963 Dallas, with 1963 being the time of an all-out Soviet invasion and nuclear war. Five, the character who brought scattered them through time, is informed that they had to stop this nuclear war and they have just ten days to do it and he’s plopped down in Dallas with that ten-day countdown. Oh, and Vanya’s forgotten who she is and what she can do.

So, the story has not resolved in any manner the central plot from season one but has recycled the plot into a ‘new’ apocalypse with another very limited window to prevent it and no actionable information and it has reset Vanya back to her starting position.

What the fuck kind of story telling is this?

I ant complete stories, not cheats and handwaving like a bad roleplay game adventure that suddenly changed gamemasters. Finish one story before starting another and when you do start another crib something other than the plot you failed to complete.

 

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We Need Election Reform to Save the GOP

 

Between H.R. 1, the fact that the current president had about 7 million votes more than his opponent and still only barely won the contest, and the deeply imbedded partisan in the system there has been a lot of talk about reforms needed to the USA’s election systems but there is another reason to enact reforms fast, to save the Republican Party.

Out system is a two-party system and the sort of ground up redesign to change that is simply not in the cards. Given that we locked into a two-party system it is essential that both parties be sane, viable, organizations fairly representing broad cross-sections of the American electorate. This is not the path we are on.

Our congressional districts having been gerrymandered into local one-party dominance enforces a drive for either party to the extremes. An incompetent, insane person like Marjorie Taylor Greene only has to win their primary to win a seat in government. As more gerrymandering draws more districts into this pattern the real election become the primary where fewer voters and more extreme voters decide the outcome. This was bad enough before 2016 but after Trump’s takeover of the Republican party and its commitment to a dwindling base of support and its adherence to lies and conspiracy theories, this is a design for disaster. As long as the primary process controls the outcome the situation will only get worse.

This is not an argument to kill off ‘conservatism’ however you might define that. This is the way to keep both parties, though the rot is far deeper on the right than on the left, responsive to the general electorate and not their fanatical bases. If we do not reform our election right now, we are headed for one of two futures, either the GOP, more insane and less connected to reality becomes the dominate political force by way of its current anti-democratic attacks on voting and the franchise or the Democratic Party becomes immune to challenge because the GOP has shrunk itself to a base unable to contest national elections completing its transformation into a regional rump party.

Both outcomes are bad for the Union. Our system requires two healthy sane parties and only by election reform can we return to that ideal.

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A Harebrained Film: Night of the Lepus

 

A dozen years after the release of her cinematically legendary showers sequence and eight years before she would appear with her daughter Jamie Lee Curtis in John Carpenter’s

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atmospheric horror film The Fog, Janet Leigh, along with DeForest Kelley three years after Star Trek grounded, starred in a most unusual SF horror movie 1972’s Night of the Lepus.

Adapted from the satirical SF novel The Year of the Angry Rabbit by Russell Braddon, NOTL’s central conceit is the Arizona countryside suffering nocturnal assaults from mutated giant rabbits.

The film attempts and fails to build credibility for its premise by opening with a faux newscaster intoning seriously about rabbits upsetting the delicate ecological balance in Australia after their introduction to that continent. From there the story moves to Arizona where rancher Hillman is dealing with a rabbit infestation of his own. Rather than deploy harsh poisons to deal with the pests his friend Clark (DeForest Kelley) at the university puts him in contact with a husband/wife team of scientists Roy and Gerry Bennett (Gerry Bennett played by Janet Leigh.) The pair decide that using hormones to make ‘boy rabbits act more like girl rabbits’ is the solution to Hillman’s troubles and begin experimentation on rabbits captured from the ranch. The filmmakers use the Bennett’s young daughter both as clumsy exposition, ‘Mommy what is a control group?’ and the method by which a rabbit already mutated by the artificial is released into the wild to infect the ranch’s rouge population. And yes, the film tries to force the idea that hormonally changing one rabbit somehow infects other without the use of a bacteria or virus. Despite the EPA having been established two years earlier the scientific pair also have no hesitation in developing and deploying an unknown effect into the ecology without significant testing as their timeline from concept to eradication was mere weeks.

The greatest hurdle the filmmakers failed to clear isn’t the lack of character arcs or scientific illiteracy but rather no amount of slow-motion photography on miniature sets and even with fake blood smeared on their snouts, rabbits cannot look credibly frightening. Rabbits as a violent lethal threat belongs solely to the domain of British farce and not in the dying giant animal genre.

I found Night of the Lepus streaming for free on a Roku channel, but they interrupted the movie every ten minutes for a block of five commercials. even minus those interruptions except for comedic entertainment I could not recommend this strange unique movie.

 

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I Dislike Cliffhangers

I Dislike Cliffhangers

 

Recently, that is over the last few weeks, a friend and I started watching the Netflix Original Series, The Umbrella Academy,a series about a set of people all born on the same day, collected/adopted by a wealthy mysterious eccentric mand and turned into a crime fighting superpowered group before internal dissention ripped them apart. Now, as adults the enhanced individuals must reunite, overcome their personal and interpersonal issues, solve the enigmatic death of the adopted father and oh save the world from an apocalypse coming in just seven days.

*Some spoilers ahead*

Overall, I have really enjoyed the show. The production values at top shelf, the performances perfectly walk that line between realistic believable characters and comic book excess, and the plotting moves along at a snappy pace while still taking time to explore who each of these characters really is. All in all, well worth the time to watch.

But.

Season one ends on a cliffhanger and I truly despise that.

Modern television seems to have become infected with the season cliffhanger from the cultural event that was ‘Who Shot JR?’ on Dallas back in the 80s and the disease has spread wide and far particularly into genre shows and with the advent of long-form storytelling it metastasized.

I have no issues with dangling out plot threads to be picked up and following seasons. That’s pure addictive junk food and should be encouraged but promising a resolution to a central story and at the last moment yanking it back like Lucy with the football is simply cruel, capricious, and crappy. If I have invested ten hours of my time, or my life, watching your art then at the end I want you freakin’ art to be complete.

Again, this is not a rant against the concept of series or a plea to return to the artificiality of solely episodic story telling. Pratchett’s Discworld novels are one of my beloved reads and each book builds upon the previous in its storyline, but each book is also whole and complete. When I finish one, I have been told a tale that has a beginning middle and an end.

An End.

Aye, there’s the rub. I have a strong opinion that the ending of a story is where the purpose and reason for the story exists. It is why we experienced the story to have that moment of catharsis or epiphany or loss that gives the tale its meaning and its power a cliffhanger robs the audience/reader of that promise and that release.

 

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