The GOP is a parade of corruption, anti-American ideology, and moral collapse.
There is no credible reason for voting for this political party save, grift, power, and bigotry. Everything else is rationalization, justification, and lies.
There are arguments to be made about the size, scope, and reach of government but that is not the question of the day.
The question of the day is do you stand with democracy or against it?
There is no third way.
I had been scheduled to participate in the programming for this year’s WesterCon, a science fiction convention that moves about the American West from city to city each year.
Yesterday, I got an email from the con committee that the convention has been canceled. It was of course written in a passive voice, so it was impossible to determine what had happened behind the scenes to destroy this year’s event, but WesterCon number 75 is not going to happen.
In addition to the fun of panel pontification this was going to be my chance to see an old friend, Gail Carriger, who had been named the convention’s Guest of Honor, and perhaps even share a panel or two with her.
At least the news came down before I had ordered copies of my novel, Vulcan’s Forge to hand sell at the convention.
Still, this is a bummer.
A gentle reminder that I have my own SF novel available from any bookseller. Vulcan’s Forge is about the final human colony, one that attempt to live by the social standard of 1950s America 
and the sole surviving outpost following Earth’s destruction. Jason Kessler doesn’t fit into the repressive 50s social constraints, and he desire for a more libertine lifestyle leads him into conspiracies and crime.
August 10th, 2017, Swedish journalist Kim Wall boarded a privately built submarine built by a Danish man for an interview and cruise in the harbor. She never returned and the next day the submarine had sunk, and its designer rescued from the water. What unfolded next became an international case and the subject of the limited series The Investigation.
Focusing nearly entirely on the Danish Police investigating Wall’s disappearance The Investigation takes the unusual approach of never having the subjects of that investigation,
either Wall or the suspect Peter Madsen appear in the series. Aside from Wall’s parents the focus is fixed squarely on Jens Jansen the lead detective and his team as they attempt to discover the truth behind Madsen’s continually changing story.
The Investigation does an excellent job of portraying the meticulous work of investigating a crime and slowly building a case element by elements when critical pieces are missing from the puzzle. While Jensen and his home life are the elements that are intended to give the limited series a ‘character arc’ I found them far less compelling than the actual work of solving the case, the multi-national team assemble to do it, and the extraordinary lengths required.
Like The Wire this series is not about cops and robbers in gun battles but rather on the actual work, day to day, and the frustrations of good police work.
The Investigation is streaming on HBOMax.
Hailing from Spain in 1955 Death of a Cyclist follows a couple having an affair, Maria Jose de Castro (Lucia Bose) who, by marrying Miguel Castro, (Otello Toso) has become wealthy and privileged, and her paramour Juan Fernandez Soler (Alberto Closas) an adjunct professor of mathematics. While returning from an evening’s assignation, with Maria at the wheel, the couple run over a cyclist and in their panic at being discovered flee, leaving the man to die at the side of the road. Paranoid at being discovered, each descends into trouble and crisis as their carefully managed affair and lives are consumed in the tangle of their crime.
An excellent character study and noir Death of a Cyclist presents the elements of noir that I find most compelling, ordinary characters caught in a web of extraordinary circumstances propelled forward by a flaw of character that prevent them doing to right thing as their compulsions push them to an inevitable conclusion.
The film is not without its own flaws, however. It does not bear to think at all upon the ages of the actor. The lovely and talented Lucia Bose was a mere 24 when this film was released in 1955 and would have been but 5 at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil war, hardly a fitting subject for a soldier’s affections. Aside from the disparity in ages Death of a Cyclist is an excellent foreign noir. Shot with expressive intent by Alfredo Fraile the film, while eschewing the typical using of shadowed bars across the characters manages to capture a stark and isolating sensation mirroring the characters’ psychological states as they are consumed by their guilt and paranoia. Written and directed by J.A. Bardem Death of a Cyclist is often referred to as a social realist film but it equally fits the bill as a film noir expressing the universality of human cynicism.
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Imagine a woman in a monogamous relationship. She has recently discovered texts on her partner’s phone to a young, attractive woman, but the partner dismisses these are innocent conversations with a friend. He’s allowed to have friends, right? The she uncovers gifts to the woman in question, but they too are innocent he protests, it was her birthday and people give gifts to people on their birthday. Her friends bring photos of her partner enjoying upscale dinners and theater and the man continues to insist all of this, none of which he had shared with his partner means anything at all. After all, she has never seen him screwing this other woman, so there’s no proof that he’s been misbehaving.
With everything that has been concealed and hidden she would utterly right in suspecting him. He has shredded his reputation with her without a private eye snapping photos of him in her bed. The reputation, the belief that he was worth of trust exists only in her mind and once that questioned it is very difficult to ever hold again.
This is precisely the situation with Justice Thomas. No one can prove that he exchanged a single vote for all the elaborate gifts and lifestyle he has enjoyed at the benefit of his conservative billionaire friend. But that proof is immaterial to shattering of trust.
The courts survive entirely on reputation. They have no armies, no police, no real enforcement capability. If you doubt that look up the Trail of Tears. They work because everyone accepts that they are fair and if that is questioned everything crumbles.
The court must clean house or our very nation will teeter even closer to a point of no return. No nation is guaranteed a tomorrow.
I awoke with a headache today and so I have little in the way of coherent thoughts to post, so once again some unconnected ramblings.
Current Politics:
Everything in my mind comes down to one theme: The only good Republican is an unelected Republican.
May The 4th:
Happy Star Wars day, and another on the 25th which is the anniversary of the release. It was months after the release before I saw the film in 1977.
The WGA Strike:
After following screenwriting podcasts for a few years, I am solidly with the WGA on this. It sucks for the consumers but if we want high quality product in the future, we need to endure the pain today.
For a week or so a very vague idea has been knocking around my cranium. Mostly themes and conceptual elements with very little in the plot of character save for what arises naturally from theme and conceit.
Normally, this is the part where I just let the ideas free form in the back of my thoughts, make occasional notes here and there, until a character a resolution present an ending to me that is strong enough to build an outline on.
However, by Monday one scene, not particularly dramatic, had floated to the front of my thoughts and with a writer’s group meeting on that night I decided the go ahead and compose this disconnected scene.
By the end of lunch, I had 1400 words about a character visiting an isolated bar in the mountains of Idaho, returning to the tiny town from which he had escape decades earlier. It was an experiment in tone and setting with perhaps just 300 words devoted to any real conflict when a Nazi biker attempted to drink at this local watering hole. Surprisingly it was well received by my writer’s group with some member expressing interest in where the tale was going.
As I said earlier, this point in my process is normally one of thinking and outlining. Plotting the critical elements, reveals, and reversals that will drive the story, not actual writing of scenes and characters.
But that is what I am doing. Yesterday at lunch I continued the scene and will do so again today. Flying by the seat of my pants I am going to drive for what would be the end of act one for the story that doesn’t have an ending, yet.
In all likelihood this will crash and burn shortly after takeoff, but for now it’s intriguing me enough that I simply cannot walk away.
A gentle reminder that I have my own SF novel available from any bookseller. Vulcan’s Forge is about the final human colony, one that attempt to live by the social standard of 1950s America and the sole surviving outpost following Earth’s destruction. Jason Kessler doesn’t fit into the repressive 50s social constraints, and he desire for a more libertine lifestyle leads him into conspiracies and crime.
The words Sisu is Finnish and denotes a grim determination in the face of overwhelming odds. It combines stoicism, perseverance, and making the most of limited resources to struggle to the very end without surrender. Developed as a concept during Finland’s 1939 bitter war with the Soviet Union it has become an element, a proud one, of the Finns national character.
Sisu is also a 2023 Finnish action movie now playing in theaters.
Set in the Lapland region of Finland during the closing months of the world war II, Sisufollows Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila) a former Finnish special forces commando and now gold prospector. Having discovered a ludicrously rich vein of gold Korpi is beset by retreating Nazi soldiers evacuating to Norway following Finland’s separate peace with the USSR. Naturally the Nazis attempt to steal the gold and murder Korpi and his little dog sparking an hour and a half of bloody, gory, revenge, (Don’t fret the dog is fine.) as Korpi slaughters Nazis and frees women that they have taken as sex slaves.
Despite the gore, the dismembered limbs, the clouds of blood from exploding Nazis I describe Sisu as cartoonish violence. This is not a feature you attend with an eye towards realism. Reality visited screenwriter and director Jalmari Helander, glanced at the script in progress, and took its leave. At no point in the movie did I have the slightest doubt to Korpi’s eventual triumph. It simply isn’t that kind of flick. This is a movie where you leave your higher logical functions at home and revel in the inventive slaughtering of fascists. If you have a delicate stomach or suspension of disbelief, then this movie is not for you.
Helander directs Sisu with a firm solid hand aided by cinematographer Kjell Lagerroos’ stark yet beautiful capturing of Lapland’s desolate beauty.
Sisu is not for everyone but for those that it is for it should strike a very pleasant nerve.
Frank Enley (Van Heflin) seems to have it all, celebrated as a war hero for piloting bombers mission over Germany, a thriving successful business building housing for the exploding Baby Boom generation, the respect of his community, and adoration from his lovely young wife, Edith (Janet leigh). And yet a mysterious stranger (Robert Ryan) has come across the continent to murder him. Frank is about to learn that the past is never very distant and that some betrayals are utterly unforgivable.
I believe that I first learned of this film when it was mentioned on Karina Longworth’s Hollywood history podcast You Must Remember This. Intrigued and curious about a noir that focused on misdeeds during the second world war, particularly a noir produced when the wat was not yet five years in the past, I have searched for this movie for years. I once found it on a commercial supported streaming service, but the poor video quality and very constant interruptions made viewing it there impossible. This week I located a file, with apparently fan produced Spanish subtitling, on the Internet Archive and at last watched this nearly forgotten film noir.
There is very little fat on the slim 82-minute feature and the stakes and tension are established very quickly. Several times I wondered how this was going to make it to feature length when it seemed that Joe, our mysterious man intent on murder, was about the ambush the unaware Frank. With a decent budget director Fred Zinneman, who three years later, also made one of my all-time favorites High Noon, and cinematographer Robert Surtees, have crafted a mood, atmospheric film that moves from the bright sunny California mountains to the dark, grimy, and dangerous back alleys of Los Angeles with ease, carrying the audience of a visual descent into literal darkness as Frank’s shameful past stalks him, forcing him to confront and confess his ugly truth.
My favorite scene in the film is when finally forced to tell Edith precisely why Joe is determined to kill him, Frank not only reveals the truth about himself but a universal one about humanity. That our to captivity rationalize, to create ‘reasons’ for our misdeeds, is a self-deception and that all too often the only life we are looking to save is our own.
The gangster subplot in the third act, introduced by the incomparable Mary Astor, is a bit far-fetched, exposing the hand of screenwriter Robert Richards, but allowing that to slide in the interest of suspension of disbelief is not a difficult task.
Overall, I very much enjoyed Act of Violence, finding the film to be tense, with a surprising empathy for all the characters.
Act of Violence is not, at the moment, streaming anywhere.
Shock Treatment, made following the cult success of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, started its cinematic existence under two cursed stars, the folly of attempting to craft a film to be a cult hit, something that nearly aways fails, and the terrible timing of hitting production during a writers’ strike. A bomb at the box office and with the cult crowd, Shock Treatment is film discarded and nearly forgotten.
And yet these days it haunts my thoughts.
Budgets and strikes reduced the original vision until the film’s setting transformed symbolically in a single location, a television soundstage where all the action and the character’s lives are played out for the live audience. A bizarre collection of characters populates the story, a seemingly blind game show host, played by the recently late Barry Humphries, a brother/sister pair of actors (Richard O’Brien & Patricia Quin) portraying doctors on a hit medical show from which the viewers take real medical advice, and puppeteering all of it the media creation and fast-food spokesman, Farley Flavors (Cliff de Young in a dual role). Flavors manipulates opinion and emotions with his broadcasts finally presenting Janet (Jessica Harper) while drugged out of her senses as a model of mental health to sell the audience on committing themselves to his mental institution. Even Janet’s rejection fails to derail the plot, with Flavors discarding her as trash, the sudden reversal irrelevant to the masses under his spell.
I cannot but see the striking parallels between this 41-year-old film and today’s political environment. In 2019 I wrote another essay about this foresight and the 4 years that have passed has only strengthened the film prophetic nature. It is far too easy to see that the wildly cartoonish character of Farley Flavors is a dim shadow of the real-life threat that is Donald Trump. Impeachments and insurrections have no more damaged his ability to control his own cult than Janet’s rejects damaged Flavors. The film’s depiction of the nearly irresistible pull social conformity and the facade of community from the fake history of Americana of the 50s is eerily predictive of the entire MAGA movement, that could so easily and without any irony adopt the song ‘Thank God I’m a Man’ as their anthem.
I had never before considered Shock Treatment a horror film but it undoubtedly. lives in that space now.