On Remakes and Reboots

Next month Netflix unveils their SF television series Lost in Space a reboot of the 60’s show of the same title. Again the premise of the show is essentially The Swiss Family Robinson but in space.

In the original series the Robinson family is departing for Alpha Centauri to start humanity’s first interstellar colony. The logistic of the premise is laughable. A single family founding a colony, the genetics are a nightmare. For reasons a hostile foreign power, never identified as to which power or why, attempts the sabotage the mission. The saboteur is trapped aboard the vessel at launch and ends up trapped with the Robinsons when their ship veers wildly off course and they are lost in the unmapped vastness of the cosmos.

Very quickly an ensemble show transformed into a children’s program focused on Will Robinson, the precocious young boy of the series, the ship’s robot, and Dr. Smith, the saboteur but now a character of comic relief and defanged of all serious threat. The show ran three years and produced classic SF ideas such as a rebellion of vegetables. The show was bad.

So if I did not care for the original, does that mean I will be skipped this reboot? No. Here is my core rule for remakes and reboots; they should only remake material that was bad.

If you attempt to remake a good show or movie, particularly if we are talking a classic, you are almost certainly going to do worse. It’s hard enough to make good narrative material, it’s harder to improve on material that has already achieved quality and that should be avoided. However, bad source material, well, you might find a way to make something good out of that.

Given that Netflix’s original series may indeed salvage something worthwhile from the concept. After all, the original, The Swiss Family Robinson, itself was a remake of Robinson Crusoe but with a good god-fearing Christian family as the principal characters. (In the book the family was not named Robinson, but Irwin Allen was never known for subtlety.)

I shall keep my expectations low, but I will give at least the pilot a go.

Share

Politics and Entertainment

I am seeing again people advise aspiring artists of every stripe that you should refrain from all political topics lest you offend a potential fan and lose that sale.

Okay, I can see the logic of that. After all we all want our art to sell wide and far, not only does that help provide an income but also it means that the art itself is reaching a wide audience, but is that the single most important thing?

First off I think it is impossible to make art, particularly when you talk about anything with a narrative, that does not also profess, intentionally or not, a worldview and all worldviews are inherently political. Perhaps you never make a public statement about marriage equality or other matters interact with homosexuality, but having gay characters appear or not appear makes a statement, what you do with those characters makes a statement, how heroes and villains react to those characters makes a statement, and the totality of those statement is a political statement. This is true of issues like how the military is presented, how government officials are presented, and numerous other factors in world-building. Narratives are political, that cannot avoid it.

When someone complains about a narrative being ‘too political’ it is nearly always a complaint about a political philosophy that the protester disagrees with. I cannot recall a single instance of someone protesting as ‘too political’ a stance that they supported.

Another important factor is that when someone decides to perform some art they have not surrendered their rights, privileges, or duties as a citizen. In democracies we all have a responsibility to the political body, to participate, and that includes making arguments for what we think is right and against what we think is wrong. To do less is the surrender the duties of citizenship for a gain of coin.

Now with all that said you can be smart about your positions or you can be an ass. I tend to dismiss those who think that the height of debate is ‘trolling’ the opposition. Those who use mockery and insults in the place of reasoned arguments get no where with me save being put on the ignore list. There are political writers with whom I almost never agree and yet who I do read often. I am not reading them to score some sort of imaginary counting coup by dismissing their arguments, but rather to read their actual arguments. Sometimes people who disagree with can have very valid points and its better to understand where you might be going wrong than to continue on in smug ignorance.

So I will continue to make political observations, but I will always strive to base them on reasoned arguments and not on snark and mockery.

Share

Critiquing the Unseen

So The Shape of Water at this year’s Oscars took not only Best Picture but Best Director as well. I saw the film, enjoyed it, but frankly I think Get Out was a stronger film and should have taken statue over The Shape of Water. (But what do I know I still think that L.A. Confidential was robbed when Titanic won that year.)

What has spurred this particular post is watch some of the reaction to The Shape of Water’s win and the similar reaction that has caused me to remember.

Over at the American Conservative, columnist Rod Dreher titles his piece about the movie Triumph of the Freaks. Dreher is one of those conservative who sees the downfall of Western Civilization and a coming dark age due to the recognition of such ‘unnatural’ and or sinful aspects of humanity such as transgender, homosexuality, and other non-traditional sexual mores. In the column Dreher admits that he has not seen the film and based his entire reaction on what he has heard and reading the Wikipedia synopsis. I always find it astounding that people, usually paid content creators, are so willing to elaborate opinions and dissect pieces that they have not personally seen. For Shape it is clear that the romantic story between Elisa, a mute cleaning woman in a secret government facility, and that facility’s latest ‘acquisition’ and amphibian humanoid. (We can’t call him a gill-man without incurring the wrath of Universal.) For Dreher this relationship is pure and simple bestiality. That the Amphibian is a thinking, feeling creature, capable of language and emotion is meaningless, it is not human and therefore the relationship is unnatural and sinful. Apparently even in such a fictional setting only humans are ‘people.’ However if you have seen the movie — and you need to stop reading if you fear spoilers — then you know that his basic facts are wrong. Either the Wikipedia synopsis omits crucial plot twists, albeit one I foresaw quite early in the film but that’s a danger of plotting your own stories, you can see the magician palming the card, or he failed to understand how revelation destroyed his entire argument.

It reminds of another conservative columnist, Michelle Malkin, and her reaction to the film Death of a President.

Released in 2006 Death of a President deals with the fallout produced by a fictional assassination of George W. Bush. The film used actual news footage as part of the flashback to the assassination in an attempt to create a sense of reality. At the time of its release there was quite a stir in the conservative media about the subject matter with perhaps the most strident voice belonging to Michelle Malkin. She referred to the movie as ‘assassination chic’ and felt that the movie revealed the desires for Bush’s murder by people on ‘the left.’ (Side note; I am always suspicious whenever motivation is describe for a third party without any supporting evidence or citation.)

As with Dreher and The Shape of Water it seems clear to me that Ms. Malkin never actually watched the film she criticized. In the movie’s narrative the assassination has taken place years earlier and the country now labors under the heavy authoritarian hand of President Dick Cheney. There is mass round-up of ethnic minorities and other police-state tactics, hardly the sort of dream world envisioned by ‘the left.’ The film itself is rather pedantic, predicable, and ultimately boring. I know this because, unlike Malkin, I actually watched it on DVD. It hardly revels in the murder of a conservative president, but acknowledging that would destroy her entire thesis about ‘the left.’

I believe that it is vitally important that people actually watch the media that they critique. You cannot rely upon synopsis, second hand accounts, or skimming to arrive at a fair judgment. It is also equally important to set aside personal bias and pre-conceived notions, otherwise all you will end up with if a big fat case of conformational bias.

Share

Cold War Marathon

This past Saturday I have several friends over for a three-movie marathon with the central theme being The Cold War. For some of the people attending the films were their first views, while others had seen at least some of the trilogy. With pizza to snack on we had a very enjoyable time.

We started off with The Manchurian Candidate, the story of poor doomed Raymond Shaw and of vast, complex international communist conspiracies to subvert the American democracy. For anyone who only knows Angela Landsbury as a sweet old lady solving mysteries, or as a welcoming animated teapot, this film is a revelation and a shock.

Following the paranoia of The Manchurian Candidate we skipped across the pond for the British film, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. Spy follows the exploits of Alex Leamus, former station head of for the East German sector of British Intelligence. When Mundt, the head of East German intelligence, kills Leamus’ last agent, Leamus’ superior, code named Control, leaves Leamus in the field for one last operation in hopes if destroying Mundt. What follows is a cat and mouse game with secrets, betrayals, and the cynical premise that one cannot afford to be less ruthless than your enemy, no matter your ideals.

To counter the dreary themes of the previous two movies we ended with the black comedy Dr. Strangelove or How I stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb. In Strangelove, General Jack D. Ripper, suffering a paranoid breakdown, orders his B52 bomber wing to attack the Soviet Union with its nuclear payload. Suddenly the Russian and Americans find them selves scrambling to find some way to avoid atomic war and the destruction of all life in the Earth’s surface. With farcical overdrawn characters this movie highlights the inherent absurdity and dangers of the Cold War’s nuclear standoff.

Overall I think the marathon was a success and that people enjoyed this bleak black-and-white peek at the bit of history that is not too far behind us.

Share

And the Draft is Done

Well, technically I completed the first draft of my latest novel a week ago, but only now am I talking about it here.

This is the next novel in my military/sf adventure series. My agent is shopping the first book in the series and I went ahead and produced the second. The title and synopsis is of course under wraps but it deals with an American officer serving in the 3rd European Union’s interstellar forces. I refer to the setting of these stories as Nationalized Space as this is an imagined future where mankind spreads out into the cosmos without ever having unified. In addition it is a future where sometime in the early 21st century the United States took a wrong turn, never recovered, and ended up a minor power. After all, all empires fade.

Now that the draft is done, currently at 99,000 words, I am going to take a few weeks off from working on the novel. First I am going to play on my new Xbox One S and lose a lot of matches of Player’s Unknown Battlegrounds. Second I am going to work on some short pieces, including trying my hand at a pulp styled adventure, but in short story form, and then after I have achieved some distance I will return to the novel for the revision processes.

I’m confident that the book has no major flaws that will require a complete rewrite, but I have been wrong on that before. I anticipate that the revision will be principally tightening, clarifying, and of course hunting and killing the dreaded spelling and grammar flaws.

Share

Product Review: TCL P605 55″ Television

Nearly two weeks ago I replaced my 10 year old 42″ LG LCD TV with a 55″ 4K TCL P605. The LG had served me well and good for most of those 10 years but an annoying backlight issues had degraded the screen image and it was time for something new.

The TCL is a 4K television providing a resolution nearly double of current HD standard and it comes with HDR, High Dynamic Range, for better contracts and black levels.

I paid the extra money to not only have the television, and its news stand, delivered, but also to have everything assembled and put into place. The savings in frustration more than made up for that extra cost.

The TV is working beautifully. The picture is sharp, clear, and with great color and detail reproduction. I have watched everything from native 4K content all the way down to 480i broadcast signals of classic programming. The classic programming is fuzzy and it is amazing that we watched that content at all. My Blu-rays look fantastic, Sunday Night I watched my copy of the 1973 The Wicker Man and it was the best I had seen outside of a cinema. Sitting about 9 feet from the screen the apparent size is great for an immersive experience, making late night movie watching a pleasure. The thin black frame of the Tv vanishes in a dark room, so there is the illusion of an image simple hanging in the void.

The P605 is also a smart TV, meaning it has a number of apps and this model uses the Roku system for streaming content, either through a direct connection or via a wireless network. I use a wireless connection and here again the TV works great.

It has been more than 8 years since my wife and I subscribed to a cable TV service, and now everything we watch is either streamed or on disc. The built-in Roku works well with our streaming services, Amazon Prime, Netflix, and Hulu. (Though I found the Hulu interface not as user friendly as the one on our Apple TV.) Streamed the 4K content plays perfectly and we’ve enjoyed a lot of cool programming on our new television.

I have also connected my new Xbox One to the TV and again it passes all expectations but of course no product is perfect.

The set lacks component inputs making it difficult to connect older devices such as my region-free DVD player. That’s going to have to go through my AV receiver. Also the screen has a bit of gloss to it so you’ll need to be aware of light sources and their positions to avoid glare. However, those are fairly minor issues.

In short I have no regrets buying a ‘budget’ television. This monitor gives me great image, and presentation with a very affordable price.

Share

Sunday Afternoon with Film Geeks SD

One of the more fun things in San Diego is the group Film Geeks San Diego. For the last few years they have organized yearlong themed cinema celebration at the Digital Gym, a 48-seat micro-theater of art and international films. Past themes included Universal Suspects, featuring classic Universal Horror movies; Get Hammered celebrated the horror of British Hammer studios, and last year’s retrospective of John Carpenter movies.

This year’s theme, after a very close vote, is Noir on the Boulevard with each month spotlighting a different classic of the Film Noir tradition, one of my favorite genres.

This past Sunday I stopped by to enjoy a noir I had never seen, I Wake up Screaming, starring Victor Mature, Betty Grable, and Carole Landis. In addition to the feature presentation, the showing included a short introduction by Victoria Mature, daughter of the film’s lead.

After a spot of luck finding a parking spot just one block away, I entered the theater and discovered that the showing had sold out two weeks earlier. This prompted conflicting emotions. On one hand I wanted to see the movie and this was a personal disappointment, but on the other hand what coolness that the showing were generating greater interest and selling out. Luckily not all pass-holders, who account for about half the audience, showed up and all of us on the stand-by list were able to buy tickets and get in. I lucked out and I learned my lesson; buy in advance.

Victoria Mature was charming, she treated us to video clips and stories presenting sort of in-person bonus material. She also sang for us and her voice was lovely and powerful, filling the auditorium with her rich tones.

I Wake Up Screaming will not become one of my favorite noirs but it I am very glad I had a chance to see it with a live audience. The final resolution of the murder/mystery tracked about 50% with what I expected, and that was a good thing. Mysteries suffer from two common failure modes; so predictable as to be boring or so out of left field as to be utterly preposterous. (Really Agatha? How did everyone fit into such a tiny space?) This one threaded the needle presenting a solution that followed from the characters and yet was not telegraphed miles and miles away.

Next month they will be showing This Gun for Hire another I have not seen save for tiny clips appearing in LA Confidential.

Share

Black Panther and Wakanda’s Reality

Marvel Studios’ latest superhero movie Black Panther is proving to be a box office beast, pulling in audiences and on a trajectory to become the number 2 or 3 performing movie. (With dethroning Marvel’s: The Avengers not outside the realm of possibility.)

In addition to having a great script, sharp characters, exciting actions, and powerful performances, Black Panther had grabbed people by the heart with its vision of Wakanda, a fictional nation in the heart of Africa untouched by colonialism. For people of the African Diaspora the notion of a nation like Wakanda has proven to be powerful and liberating, but there have been people, such as Ben Shapiro, who have dismissed the emotional connection with a patronizing “Wakanda is not real.”

Of course Wakanda is not real.

Do you know what else isn’t real?

Camelot is not real.

Hercules is not real.

Paris, Helen, Achilles and Odysseus are not real.

The power of myth is not that it is real, that is history’s job, but rather myth informs us of who we are and more importantly who we want to be. Through myth people speak about the values that matter and the aspirations worth struggles and sacrifice.

Wakanda is a modern myth for people bereft of their own. For far far too many people of the African Diaspora genealogy is an impossibly, the Atlantic slave trade obliterated their history and their connection to myth. Make no mistake the attraction to Wakanda is not about the comic-book technology, the fictional metals, but rather about a culture that had flourished as its own culture, that celebrates its own people, that inspires without hand me downs from alien lands.
Something as simple has hair is fraught with the influences of colonialism and the horrors of the past. I can’t imagine enforcing a rule that expels students for natural hair and yet today such practices are too common, so a place where hair that has not been straightened and made to appear European is powerful symbol. The Wakanda myth runs far deeper than hair and appearance but it is not my myth and much of symbolism can only be an intellectual exercise for me, and one of empathy as I try to understand my fellow human beings and the world as they experience it.

I will close out this short essay with one more reference to someone who is not real.

Captain America is not real. Captain America does not represent the slaughter of native, he does not represent slavery, or Jim Crow, or any number of other ills that our country has participated in, but rather he is what we hope we can be, what our ideals demand of us. If people like Ben Shapiro cannot see that Wakanda and Captain America are really the same thing for different peoples it displays their terrible inability to see the world in any way other than their own.

Share

The GOP Must Go

After the release of the response to Republican Chairman’s Nunes memo I think that it is past time for the GOP to lose their majorities in the House and the Senate.

Set aside that they have added 1-2 trillion dollars to the Federal debt.

Set aside that they feel Wells Fargo has been punished too harshly for its financial crimes against its own customers.

Set aside that hey have stripped away healthcare for people and slashed funding for mental health as the nation endures a protracted crisis of mass murder.

Set aside the border walls, the protectionism, the abandoning of international commitments, the blatant nepotism and corruption.

Those are important issues and with some issues on which people can reasonable disagree.

However, it is clear that Russia, our geopolitical advisories, have penetrated our political processes, attempted to manipulated our voters, and influence the outcome of our elections. By our intelligence community this is an accepted fact and yet the GOP wants to do nothing about it.

Chairman Nunes’ memo did nothing to the illuminate the dangers we face but instead attempt to muddy the waters and throw suspicion not at our attackers, the Russians, but the party in opposition to his.

By wide margins the legislature has passed sanctions to be enforced against the Russia for their cyber warfare and espionage operations within the United States and the Executive had implemented none of them. Yes the GOP helped pass those sanctions but as the President ignores them they remains silent.

The Russian launched a sophisticated, expensive, and target attack on our self-governance. It is the opinion of our intelligence agencies that this did not stop with the 2016 presidential election but rather the Russian operation continues with the goal of influencing this year’s elections. We must assume that they will continue this aggressive assault on our most basic freedom.

What possible domestic policy is more valuable and more important than defending our nation from foreign attack?

It is tragic that the GOP lashed themselves the Trump ship. They had opportunities to sink that vessel but cowered before his supporters and now in bailing out his troubled administration they do the Russians a favor.

They must go.

Share