Category Archives: Movies

Moments of Transition

I think that some of the most vital moments in a story, and it doesn’t matter if that story is told through a visual medium such a feature film or a narrative medium such as novel, are those moment when the character crosses a transformational threshold and enters a new phase of their journey of change.

The best stories are stories about a character’s change where at the end of the tale the character makes choices that would have been beyond them at the start. But along the way to those ultimate transformations the characters cross smaller thresholds that build upon one another until the full transformation takes place and those smaller moments of change are often powerful moments in the story. Here are just a few examples from popular films, and I am going to use older movies because it does dip into spoiler territory.

Jaws

Chief Brody’s transformation from a man who fears water to a man able to venture comfortably forth on the sea is clear but a vital moment of change comes at the hand of Mrs. Kintner. The fishermen have brought in their tiger shark and everyone is celebrating the end of the threat. The moods crashes when Mrs. Kintner slaps Brody because her son is dead, he knew the beaches were unsafe and left them open anyway. It’s a powerful emotional scene and Brody after it cannot go back to who he was before her accusation. It is crossing this threshold that propels him to do a ‘half-assed autopsy on a fish’ and make his first foray onto the ocean and stiffens his spine in encounters with the Mayor. Mrs. Kintner literal slaps his character onto a new path.

Alien

Alien is a tricky beast. The film’s opening acts it hides the identity of the main character. Ellen Ripley, and she didn’t get a first name until the sequel Aliens, a first presents as a person who avoids direct conflict and dangers. She doesn’t volunteer as part of the expedition to investigate the signal, and she’s evasive with Parker and Brett over the bonus situation. Ripley’s first moment of transformation occurs when Dallas and Lambert return with the stricken and ridden Kane. She makes the hard call and denies them access to the ship, almost certainly dooming Kane to death. This is a threshold the character had avoided but faced with an unknown danger she steps across it and after Ash violates the quarantine she is more willing to confront other characters over their misdeeds and actions. The sequence at the airlock is not only vital to the plot, getting the alien aboard the ship, but vital to Ripley’s character development.

When you are craft the important moments of your story look to the one-way door of transformation it is vital to your character.

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Anticipation

This year there has been precious little to look forward to. It started well with the release of my book in March and my first in-person author event at the tremendous Mysterious Galaxy but the pandemic swept the globe, shuttering society, collapsing the economy, and leaving a terrible toll of death in its wake. In the face of cataclysmic events my little novel and its release seemed such a small thing. Still, I am grateful to everyone who has been ordering on-line and those who have left such positive reviews. Honest, I did not pay them for that.

Normally science-fiction conventions are events that help moderate my mood but naturally those have been canceled or moved to purely on-line gatherings.

Luckily the pandemic has not stolen from me entirely one of the year’s most enjoyable and anticipated events the Horrible Imaginings Horror Film Festival.

The festival was founded in 2009 by my pal Miguel Rodriguez and year after year has grown. Due to scheduling and other real-life issues I was never able to attend until 2015 but each year after that this has been one of my go to jams for good times, good people, and great discoveries.

Naturally this year there is no in-person festival but there will be an on-line celebration and exhibition. This is not as fun as a few hundred attendees jamming into the terrific Freda Cinema in Orange County for big screen presentations of short and feature length horror films from around the globe but there still will be new and exciting cinema to discover. I have already experienced the on-line presentation with Miguel’s quarterly mini-festival Campfire Tales and the process works well and while it is no substitute for a proper theater screen my 55” 4K television is passable for experiencing new and exciting film.

I have already purchased my all access pass for the festival and the next year’s worth of Campfire Tales so September should have a least a few moments of horrifying escapism to make life more bearable.

 

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Revisiting Sleep Hollow

Last night, with a big bowl a buttered popcorn, I put the DVD into the machine and settled in to enjoy 1999’s Sleep Hollow. Directed by Tim Burton, produced by Francis Ford Coppola, and starring Johnny Depp. Sleepy Hollow was less of an adaptation of the classic tale by Washington Irving and more of an excursion by Burton into the lovely lush landscape of a classic Hammer Horror movie.

Hammer Studios was a UK film company that produced many genres of movies but is perhaps best known for their impressive run of horror film starting with The Quatermass Xperiment a feature film adaptation of a live television play and running through the dismal and tired To the Devil a Daughter. Between those films Hammer discovered and promoted actors who would go on to be some of the biggest genre stars in the world, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Bring color to Frankenstein with their production The Curst of Frankenstein Hammer studios leaned into exploitive film styles with garish blood and explicit imagery of human organs that previous studios had obscured with edits.

Sleepy Hollow, though with a muted color plate save for vividly bright blood, is thoroughly a throwback to these Hammer Films, Burton has populated the cast with distinguished British actors and a small speaking part for Hammer’s star Christopher Lee as a New York City judge. While the film is supposedly set in New York state the manner, accents, and culture of the cast and characters scream a British environment. The set design in this movie doesn’t reflect Burton’s usual obsessions with German expressionism but reflects a more grounded realistic approach to the setting something I think may have come from the producer Francis Ford Coppola who just a few years earlier had experiment himself with classic horror directing his production of Dracula.

In this film inspired by the classic story Ichabod Crane isn’t a schoolteacher but a young police detective dedicated to science and reason as the sole methods for solving any crime’s mystery. He is dispatched to the isolated settlement of Sleepy Hollow to investigate a series of murders by beheading. Upon arrival the town’s leading citizens advised him that these are no ordinary killing but rather the supernatural vengeance of a hessian mercenary slain during the Revolutionary War. Dismissing the stories of ghosts and goblins Crane finds himself in a tangled mystery of greed, forbidden love, and undead mercenaries while discovering the truth of his own forgotten history.

Sleepy Hollow is an enjoyable film that doesn’t put on airs with a greater meaning buried in its subtext. It is an entertaining tale of love, greed, and vengeance that uses the Washington Irving story for a few moments of imagery but lives and succeeds on its own terms.

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Cinematic Social Commentary: Robocop vs They Live

 

In the essay I will not be taking a position on the merits of either films observations. I trust my readers are more than competent to make their own value judgements and evaluations politically but rather I am looking at how the films made their comments and which films, in my opinion, succeeded more adeptly at its intentions.

In 1987, the penultimate year of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop was released to theaters, the story Alex Murphy, husband, father, cop, who is murdered and then scientifically resurrected as Robocop makes important comments on the nature of humanity and identity but its sharpest social observations are on conservatism and Reaganism.

The next year John Carpenter’s They Live debuted and under the guise of an alien invasion movie spoke to the same social commentary about its views on conservatives and the effects of the Reagan presidency.

They Live posits aliens living amongst us that are subtly controlling and directly all facets of human life and social development. The title refers to the ‘waking sleep,’ created by a signal broadcasted by aliens, that keeps people from seeing the aliens around them and the subliminal messaging used to control the population. Global pollution is not a side effect of unregulated industrialization but rather a deliberate project of ‘terraforming’ the Earth to alien standards. Capitalism is an alien system imposed upon humanity for the purpose of extracting the planet’s wealth to the aliens and corrupting select human into acting as quislings for the invaders. Aliens live amongst us at every level of society but most importantly solely occupy the commanding heights of our cultural and political institutions.

The commentary here is not subtle. The direct one to one mapping of capitalist, the wealthy, and the powerful as a parasitic and controlling force with the alien invaders is a clear analog to class-based observations of our real-world economies, However, the worldbuilding is sloppy and not thought out in any logical manner. How the aliens extract wealth is hand waved away. The illogic of aliens travelling hundreds if not thousands of lightyears at great expense of energy to live as beat cops and bank tellers is ludicrous mudding Carpenter’s social commentary allowing neo-Nazis to reinterpret the text in an anti-Semitic screed. The fact that extremists on the right can see the commentary as supporting their racists position rather than attacking the economic system  they favor speaks volumes to the film’s failure to build any coherent statement.

Robocop is set in an undefined near future where crime is rampant and social services are nearly non-existent. The city of Detroit is crumbling under the lack of resources as the tax base evaporates and crime runs uncontrolled in the streets. Changes in the tax codes have benefited corporations concentrating wealth and privatization has turned social services such as prisons, hospitals, and schools over to corporate control and as the film open the fiction OCP corporation takes over management of Detroit’s police force. While corporate control of social services is presented in a plain and unflattering light the factions within OCP, standing in for all of corporate America, are given a richer and more nuanced portrayal. Dick Jones, a senior vice-president who is in bed with the city’s criminal boss, is a greedy immoral man only interested in the wealth and power he can extract from his positions. Bob Morton is a corporate climber and ambitious young man but seems to believe that the corporation can be a force for good and actually wants to deliver beneficial services. The ‘Old Man’ heading OCP is more of an enigma, it is unclear if he is even aware of the corruption within the company or if his ‘it’s time to give back’ speech is heartful or merely for appearances.

What is clear is that the film’s stand that corporate government is an ill is quite clear. Despite the story being about social disintegration and collapse there is no representation of actual government. Aside from a brief use as hostages, and there’s powerful symbolism in that, there is no mayor or civic leader presented in the film. The people and their representatives are whole absent a comment on their invisibility to corporate views.

As social commentary Robocop succeeds for better than They Live

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Quick Hits for July 23rd

No long form essay today just a few quick thoughts to kick off the morning.

 

Ladyhawke this film from 1985 doesn’t get the love that it deserves. A romantic fantasy directed by Richard Donner and starring Mathew Broderick, Rutger Hauer, and Michelle Pfeiffer this movie has it all, action, comedy, romance, and one of the best magical curses ever devised and yet it doesn’t get a tenth of the fan love and devotion as The Princess Bride. Both movies deserve to be in the Fan Cannon.

 

The year 2020 sucks. Not a new or shocking revelation but one I think constantly. I never expected that the year I debuted as a published novelist would be so terrible.

 

It’s hard getting people to leave reviews on Amazon. Please if you’ve read Vulcan’s Forge leave a review even if it is one star and you hated the book. Though of course I pleased that so far people seem to really like it and got what I was shooting for. Reviews raise visibility on the shopping sites and all of this year’s debut authors need the help.

 

Though it doesn’t look like I will return in in-person role play gaming before next year I have been hard at work on my Space Opera Campaign. I’ve been spending weekends working on Excel spreadsheet to do the tedious calculations that slow down the flow of play and last night I had an epiphany for solving a calculation that has been bugging me.

 

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Streaming Review: The Old Guard

This month Netflix added to its catalog the adventure The Old Guard. Starring and produced by Charlize Theron The Old Guard is an adaptation of a comic book about a band of warriors who are nearly immortal.

Theron plays ‘Andy,’ the leader of the mercenaries and the eldest having been at this since antiquity. Kiki Layne plays Niles Freeman a U.S. Marine and she is the newest addition to the squad providing an audience surrogate and a handy target for backstory and exposition. Attempts to stay in the shadows of the modern world fails for the Andy and her team leading to confrontation with a greedy pharma corporation and the discovery that truly are fates worse than death.

The Old Guard is a solid action movie without any glaring flaws or shortcomings. Theron plays both action and emotional beats with skill and as a producer she has shown a talent for bring in productions that have a deeper construction than a surface gloss. All of the performances in the film are competent and the script moves at a pleasing clip. There are turns and reveals in the story and it may be because I am a writer myself but none of these were truly surprising but neither are they damaging to the movie’s dramatic narrative. The combat is brutal and the effects of violence, even on those who heal magically, is never ignored. A moment at the film’s resolution echoed another film about immortality Chronos but aside from that I thoroughly enjoyed by hair of two hours it took to watch this film.

Overall if you have a Netflix account and enjoy films of the fantastic this is worth your time.

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Movie Review: Little Monsters (2019)

Little Monsters a 2019 Zombie-Comedy is a bit of a ‘bait and switch.’ The trailer and promotional material pushes the storyline of Miss Caroline (Lupita Nyong’o) as a kindergarten teacher who must keep her charges safe during a zombie outbreak while simultaneously keeping the small children from understanding the truth of their dire situation by making it all an elaborate game. Those plot elements do make up a substantial portion of the film’s second and thirds acts but Miss Caroline is not the story’s protagonist.

The story’s main character is David, a pot-addicted, obscenity spewing, failed street busking musician, man-child. So, the core plot of Little Monstersis a very tired one, the immature man forced into adulthood. David intersects with Miss Caroline and her class because his nephew Felix is one of her students and after becoming enamored with Miss Caroline David accompanies her and the class on the field trip where the zombie outbreak take place.

A third central character is Teddy McGiggles played by comedian Josh Gad, a popular American children’s television host on tour through Australia where the film is set. in another expedition to trope-ville Teddy is a boozing, foul, kid-hating character with little to differentiate him from similar characters that have come before.

What saved Little Monsters and made the viewing enjoyable was the immense talent of Lupita Nyong’o. This woman as an actor is simply credible in everything she plays and can draw in a viewer while making a character that on the page feels rather worn fresh and complex. Had the movie been centered on her character rather than the fairly typical David the movie would have been greatly enhanced and it is no surprise that the marketing focused on the movie’s greatest asset.

In this movie much of the comedy works though there is a fair amount of ‘cringe’ comedy focused on a character’s lack 0f self-realization that brings public embarrassment, so on that front your mileage may vary. The story’s approach to the nephew Felix is charming and the both the young actor and the character are endearing enough to pull the viewer into serious concern when he is threatened.

Overall this is worth at least one viewing though you must remember that it is not until the second act that the film’s real star and emotional heart arrives.

Little Monsters is currently streaming on Hulu as a Hulu Original.

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Quick Hits July 17, 2020

Burn the GOP to the Ground

 

Pence would have been far from perfect but leaving corrupt incompetent Trump in has made the pandemic far worse and that is entirely at the feet of the spineless Republican politicians.

 

 The Towering Inferno Still Holds Up.

 

I’ve been watching this on HBO (I have the DVD, but HBO is in High Def.) and thoroughly enjoying a style of filmmaker that has fallen out of favor. Loads with stars and taking the time to tell stories. Though you gotta wonder about a team of firemen walking around with plastic explosives and detonators.

 

New Story Ideas beginning to bubble in my brain

 

This damned crisis, both global and personal, has been sapping my creativity but an idea for another Sf/noir is starting to take form in my head. It would be on a generation ship where sharp distinct classes have formed between crew and colonists and the murder that shatters the secrecy at the heart of the noir.

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Intertextuality and Vulcan’s Forge

Last night I watched a video essay on YouTube that argued the central flaw of most of Disney’s newer slates of film came down to a misuse of intertextuality. Intertextuality is when the text of one work impacted by the text of a previous work. It can be used as a powerful tool to explore themes and idea raised by the original work either in that work’s own text or as interpreted by the new text. An ideal example would be Tom Stoddard’s play Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead which follows as its central character Rosencrantz & Guildenstern two minor characters from Hamlet and uses that conceit to explore concept of narrative and fiction.

The essay argued that lazy utilization of intertextuality in the Disney live action remakes and the extended Star Wars trilogy resulted in a cheap ‘fan service’ rather than using the references to earlier works to comment either those previous pieces or to deepen the content of the new ones. The exception for Disney being the Marvel Cinematic Universe which stretching across more than 20 films and ten years is a grand experiment in intertextuality and uses those connections to paint deeper, richer, and more engaging emotional lives for its characters.

This leads me to think about my own debut novel Vulcan’s Forge. I shall avoid spoilers for the plot of that story but I will touch on how it itself is a work of intertextuality.

The protagonist of Vulcan’s Forge is Jason Kessler and on the colony of Nocturnia his job is to use mass media, principally film, to create, sustain, and reinforce the colony’s culture derived from mid-twentieth century Americana. To promote an idealized version of that culture, which honestly is more mythology than history, some films are elevated in their importance while others are banned as ‘corrupting.’ Jason, an ill fit for this suffocating version of American culture, is dismissive of some films and longs for the forbidden fruit.

Ideally, and only someone who has read the novel and also is unaware of the films it references can answer if I succeeded, the story can be read and enjoyed without understanding the film references but on an intertextual level the movies that Jason derides and the ones he adores informs the readers of the nature of Jason’s character.

Hopefully my use of intertextuality expands and deepens Vulcan’s Forge but even if I missed the mark making all of those film references was damn fun.

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More Movies: Voice from the Stone

Voice from the Stone is a 2017 atmospheric horror film with Games of Thronesstar Emilia Clarke leading the small cast. It centers on Verena (Clarke) a young nurse that lives with families to help psychologically troubled children. She has come to the Rivi family is post war Tuscany to help with Jakob who has not spoken for several months following the death of his mother Malvina. Welcomed to the family by Malvina’s mother Lilia and more coolly by her husband Klaus Verena
finds Jakob a difficult case and the young boy’s obsessive listening to the stonework of the ancient house intent to hear his mother’s voice from beyond grave layers a sense of insanity onto the boy’s silent condition. Finding herself increasingly attracted, in part due to Lilia’s prompting, to Klaus and with her attempts to help Jakob failing Verena becomes desperate to remain with the family in the isolated mansion.  Eventually twists are revealed and the story lands in a far too easily predicted conclusion.

Despite starring an actor from a global sensation Voice from the Stone received only a limited release in 2017 and was primarily a Video on Demand product. Currently streaming on the horror specialty service Shudder, Voice from the Stone fails to create a sense of building dread and inevitability essential for slow burn atmospheric horror and instead plays as a family drama that only in the final acts makes any move towards the unsettling and horrific. Adapted from an Italian novel I suspect that the source material is very much an interior story driven mostly by the Verena’s thoughts and suppressed emotional reactions and while that can be translated to film it is a particularly difficult task that has foiled more talented filmmakers. About a third of the way into this movie brief running time of 87 minutes I voiced the opinion that this could very well turn about to be quite similar to Henry James’ The Turning of the Screw another horror story that relies heavily on the psychological life of its central character but instead this story does come to a definitive conclusion and not a unsettling ambiguity.

Voice from the Stone failed to fully engage me as a viewer and failed to deliver any revelation that surprised or shocked and instead proceeded in a plodding manner to an ultimately unsatisfying conclusion. It is not a film I can recommend.

 

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