Movie Review:Crimson Peak

1-crimson-peak-posterLet say that I have been a fan of Guillermo Del Toro ever since I saw his film Chronos in the theater during its initial release. That is not to say I am a fan of all of Del Toro’s films, the first Hellboy didn’t work for me and the same can be said for Pacific Rim. It a happy circumstance that I can say I truly loved Crimson Peak.

Crimson Peak is under-performing at the box office and if you have a desire to see this on the big screen you should probably move quickly. before I give a non-spoiler review of the film let me tell you what this movie is not.

Crimson Peak is not a horror film and it is not a ghost story. Certainly looking at the trailers, posters, and images you could easily come away thinking it is both those things, but that would be a mistake Crimson Peak best fits the genre Gothic Romance. (That is a genre I am not overly familiar with and I am told that Peak inverts the tropes of that genre. this I have to take on faith.)

The movie is a story about a headstrong, capable woman, confident in herself and her arts suddenly courted and swept up in passion for a tall handsome European noble. (Yes, I did just call and Englishman a European, he can live with it.) She soon is off to be married to the dashing dreamer with a dark soul and a dark sister. The mood of the film is carried off perfectly, the imagery is haunting and like a masterpiece painting, the cast are wonderful and play their characters believably.  Now, I found I did predict the twists and turns of the plot, but I also consider plotting to be one of my strengths as a writer and it is the rare script that can justifiably surprise me in its plotting.

The film is violent, but not gratuitous or exploitive in is depiction or use. This is not a film that insists upon an on-screen death every ten minutes. There are ghosts, but it is not a ghost story. To quote the movie ‘It is not a ghost story; it is a story with ghosts.’ It is not for those easily upset by imagery or violence and it continues with Del toro’s persistent theme that the truly monstrous is the truly human.

If you are a fan of his work such as Pan’s Labyrinth this is worth seeing.

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A Different Approach to School Shootings

So yesterday morning as my sweetie-wife and I were en route to my day I caught a very interesting piece on NPR’s Morning Edition. They were interviewing writer Malcolm Gladwell and he proposed a radical take on the growing phenomenon of mass school shootings. The interview was prompted by a piece Gladwell had written for the current issue of the New Yorker Magazine and can be found here. It’s worth the time to read.

What he says and the sociological theory of riots he applied to school shooters all make sense to me and maps fairly well with what I know about these events. To be clear, these are a very different from workplace shootings and also very different from politically motivated mass killings. Gladwell avoids the simplistic approach of mental illness and looks at a much more frightening mechanism. The mob effect and in my opinion the status seeking motivation.

Particularly upsetting it the idea that traditional mass media is no longer a relevant factor as a status conferring mechanism. The internet drives a lot more of this now. This matches with what I do know about these schools shooters. They often, if not always, obsessed on-line over previous events, often analyze the shooters methods and outcomes, and seek to — for lack of a more apt word — improve on the results.

I have confided privately to a friend that my personal belief is that this wave is going to continue to a generation, perhaps two while our culture deals with the shock waves induced by massive change. (It is not a coincidence that the shooters are nearly always young men. The only except I know is the Brenda Spencer case and that’s more than 40 years old.) My friend if a gun collector and I predicted that it was likely the US would see more and more restrictive gun laws passed and that these would likely have little to minimal effect on the wave. (The laws that are possible, assault weapon bans, background checks, magazine capacity limits, are unlikely to make any serious change to these sorts of killings and a total gun ban is simply unrealistic for this country.)

However, this article sparked an idea. The problem is identifying these gunmen and killers before they act. More and more they have no history of serious mental illness that could be used in a reliably predictive manner. A position I hear repeatedly from psychiatric professionals on this matter. there simply is now way to screen to the vast population of angry young men and sort out the shooters from the non-shooters.

But they may be sending up flags we can use. On-line. If they are obsessing on-line about previous events, sharing information in forums and chatrooms, and leaving a digital trail of their intentions then it should be possible too use that information to identify, isolate, and prevent them from acting on their murderous fixations.

In order words, treat them like the terrorists they are and utilize the full power of the intelligence agencies to deal with this problem.

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Bad Movie Review: Death Ship (1980)

death_shipI have no idea why this movie suddenly popped up into my thoughts. I do remember that I had seen it during its initial theatrical run. That would be a difficult event to not remember. I was 19, in the Navy, and just getting seriously into RPGs. On that weekend Friday night me and my friends started a marathon AD&D game. We did not sleep but gamed right through the night and on into Saturday. by later Saturday we decided on a break in the game and went to the movies — Death Ship. After the movie we went back and continued gaming. Ah, the energies of youth.

I do remember I was not impressed with the film and tiny bits and pieces have stayed with me but really nearly off the movie was dumped by my data storage. Now, 35 years later I found myself thinking about the film and wondering what it really was like. Find a copy to watch proved to be a task, but one I completed sucessfully and earned out some e.p.

Death Ship is the story of a band of people who survive a cruise ship collision and find themselves adrift on debris in the Atlantic Ocean. Unfortunately for them the cause of their collision is the aforementioned Death Ship and when they spot it the next morning(?) (Not sure about that the lapse dissolves used after they are adrift makes any reasonable time estimation impossible.) They climb aboard its old and rusting hull. At once the ship proceeds to start killing them, throwing the Jewish comedian overboard.

A series of events pass when bad things happen to the survivors and one become possibly possessed by the ship, or perhaps simply enamored with it. the distinction is never made clear. There are psychotic breaks, or breaks in space/time, again the distinction is not clear, and eventually some of the survivors escape to rescue.

I made a post recently about the difference in my opinion between story and plot. This film is all plot, and very bad plot that is illogical and acausal, without any story. There are no characters of note, only the thinnest cardboard cutouts doing things to make the next scary event occur.

It is not surprising that I remembered so little of the movie as it contains nothing memorable.

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Hypothetical Trump Stopper

Trumps commanding rise in the Republican Primary is a black swan event. An unpredictable occurrence. When he first announced many people assumed, and I am included in that set, that he would flare and die as more serious candidates took the lead. The silly summer stretched on and Trump’s lead in the polls only grew.

No, I do not think he will be the nominee. TGhe party will rage and eventually kill his chances, but if they do that without gutting his support who knows what backlash his supporters may unleash? To safely remove Trump from the race he has to crater in the polls, but what might prompt that?

Not policy. He’s already all over the map with positions taken that would have killed any other candidate. His supporters simply don’t care.

Personality? Not likely, he is and remains who his public persona has always been, an arrogant, insulting, loud mouth, braggart and with each insult his numbers climb.

Attacks from the establishment? Hell, his supporters love him because he’s giving to the establishment. Every time the elders try to take him to task they strength him like Godzilla feeding at a nuclear reactor.

All the typical tool appear useless. I do think I have one way, but only Trump can do it.

Go watch a movie call ‘A Face in the Crowd.’ The character lonesome Rhodes suffers his downfall — spoilers — when an open mike lets his followers know exactly what he thinks of them.  Mitt Romney was hurt in the general election with his famous 47% comment, Trump supports would eat that up and ask for more, but if Trump were to be caught talking about the idiot and losers who listen to him and how he uses them, then he’d be toast.

But, I don’t know if he feels that way, or is in anyway likely to spout such sentiments.

Without that? I have no idea where you’ll find an oxygen destroyer that works on Trump.

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Story vs Plot

Lately I’ve been thinking about the intersection and differences between have a plot and have a story. What follows is necessarily just one person’s opinion and so take it or leave as you will.

Here are my basic definitions. A plot is a character with an objective and an intervening obstacle. A story is about a character in transformation, a character who is progressing through an arc and is changed irreversibly by the arc.

I’ll illustrate the differences between with two James Bond films, Moonraker and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. (Naturally there will be spoilers)

Moonraker is all plot and no story. Bond has a series objectives, Discover what happen to the stolen shuttle. Survived the attempts on his life by the villain Hugo Drax. Uncover the plot to destroy all human life, and finally prevent the nerve gassing of the planet. He succeeds at all of this, saves the world and has space nookie. The key thing that makes this all plot and no story is that James Bond in the first reel is exactly the same person as James Bond in the final reel. He has endured no tests of character, only of skill. You can replace him with any super-humanly competent secret agent and the events will transpire in essentially the same manner. James Bond himself makes no difference to the outcome only his skills.

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is a story with a plot. Bond has a series of obstacles to overcome, infiltrating the villain’s lair, discovering the threat to world agriculture, saving the world. In this aspect it is not very different than Moonraker, just with a less ludicrous set of events. However in this film Bonds meets Tracy and falls so hard for her that he marries her and resigns from the service. Blofeld, thwarted in his scheme, attempts to kill bond and kills only Tracy. Bond is shattered and broken in the movie’s final scene muttering over his wife’s corpse ‘We have all the time in the world.’

This is a story. Replace Bond with some other super-competent agent and while the world may be saved and the plot resolved, the character transformation will be missing. Tracy and James, quite unlike most other Bond girls, make this a story about choices and loss.

There in a nutshell is I how to cleave the difference between story and plot.

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Celebratory Trip

As many of you are aware, two months age I signed with the Virgina Kidd Literary agency.  (I am still somewhat boggled by that. They are a premier agency for SF/Fantasy writers.) Also in the month of June I twisted my knee and reinflamed its old injury. Now after weeks and weeks of work with my chiropractor, the knee is doing well. (The WorldCon was a test and I was able to walk 4.5 miles a day without pain.)

So now that the knee was recovered I could do what I wanted to do in celebration, go to Universal Studios Hollywood. My sweetie-wife doesn’t care for theme parks and the rides are certainly not her cup of tea, so this trip was a solo trip. That is sometimes a good thing. I am an introvert by nature and 10-12 hours on my own is good for my emotional state and usually give my brain time to ponder writing issues.

The sun beat down mercilessly on the park today, but I had  the foresight to apply sunscreen meaning I am not burned. There had been a few changes from my last trip in May. (I am an annual pass holder, so I go fairly often.) The Fast and Furious bit has been added to the tram tour/ride. It works pretty well. They use some sort of transparent screen to project footage in such a way that without glass there is a three-d effect. That’s only for the introduction, the main ride is pretty much like the King Kong 360 3D. You wear the glasses and are fully immersed in a fast action scene with events happening all the way around the tram. It’s a fairly well-executed illusion.

Raptor Encounters have been added as a character in the park. It’s very much based on the event sin Jurassic World where a trained works with the ‘tamed’ raptor. The suit/puppet for the raptor was impressive with articulated jaws and eye-lids. The Raptor performers I watched did an excellent job playing the beasts.

Photos and videos are up over at my facebook page. All in all I had a good day.

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Movie Review The Living Skeleton (1968)

Sorry about the scarcity of posts here lately. I’m engrossed in writing a new novel and that has taken up quite a bit of my new word output. So here’s a review of a film I streamed from Hulu.

1-LivingSkeleton_originalThe Living Skeleton is a 1968 Japanese horror film. I stumbled across it while browsing Criterion’s Catalog on Hulu. It promised an atmospheric, maritime-centric, ghost story. That sounded like a film worth at least a look-see. I am particularly fond of ghost stories and found several from Japanese cinema that worked quite well for me.

The story is about a freighter that is taken by pirates. (modern day freighter, not sailing ship.)  The crew are murdered and the ship considered lost at sea.  The film skips over a number of years to the sister or a woman murdered on the ship. She lives near the sea, working for a priest, and involved with a young man. The lost ship reappears on a foggy night and the young woman ventures aboard.

The story starts following the fate of the pirates as one by one they meet their deaths. All in all up to the point the film had been working for me. It is well acted, nicely photographed, and has plenty of atmosphere. My only quibble is editing. It lacked mystery because of the linear plot line. I would have favored an approach that started well after the pirate attack and brought the viewer up to speed with bits and bites of information.

*Spoiler Warning*

The film falls apart in the third act. After several well handled twists and very nicely staged ghost scenes the story reveals that there was no ghost. The ‘dead’sister survived the attack and managed to describe her attack so well that the surviving twin could track down the pirates and by her mere presence cause them to panic and die. The plot takes another terrible turn when it is revealed that not only did the ‘dead’ sister survive, but her groom did as well. Both have lived aboard the derelict ship, he as some sort of mad scientist inventing fantastic acids for bad guy disposal and third act ticking clocks.

The bad guys are killed, the sisters are killed, the mad scientist groom is killed, and the boyfriend is left alone and terribly confused.

This was a decent movie that had me buying in until they cheated and switched the genre. SF author Nancy Kress in her writing guides puts forth the idea that at the start of a story the artist and the audience enter into a contract, a promise, about what sort of thing they are going to experience, and that breaking this promise is a sure way to anger your participants. This film is an example of that failure.

 

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Post Worldcon entry

I am sorry that the daily entires dropped out. but I was just too dang busy. That’s a good thing when you are at a worldcon. The previous entries had been written at breakfast, and on those days I ate breakfast alone. The last few days of the convention we discovered a chain place that was suitable to both my and my sweetie-wife’s diets. So having breakfast with my sweetie-wife took priority over blog posting.

The Con was a blast. Each day I was there at the start of panels and they carried through into the late night. The fires nearby were bad. Sadly a few firefighters were killed battling the blaze. On Friday the winds shifted and the smoke overtook downtown Spokane. By evening the air quality had degraded to ‘hazardous to all’ and everyone was advised to no go outside unless required and to wear filter masks. Luckily this condition did not last long and Saturday the winds flipped again and it became much better.

I hung out with friends, learned new things in publishing and science, played a new game, and had the wonderful reinvigorating time I needed. I am already looking forward to next year in Kansas City MO. (2017 was won by Helsinki Finland, a convention I am unlikely to attend.)

 

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