The Hypocrisy of Ian Malcolm

Jeff Goldblum, playing mathematician Ian Malcolm in 1993’s Jurassic Park, delivered one of the films most central and memorable monologs as he lectures Hammond on the hubris and dangers of the dinosaur amusement park.

The problem with scientific power you’ve used is it didn’t require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done, and you took the next step. You didn’t earn the knowledge yourselves, so you don’t take the responsibility for it.

It is also for my money the height of hypocrisy. What Malcolm is describing the process by which science advances. No one reinvents all of the processes, theories, and techniques that came before them All scientists stand on the shoulders of those that came before and if they are lucky add a bit of new knowledge, new understanding for those that come after. Malcolm as a mathematician did not reinvent calculus but learned what others had invented and discovered before adding his own discoveries in the field of chaos.

The questions should have Hammond recreated dinosaurs? Should he have proceeded more cautiously before turning it into a park? Are valid important questions but do not give me this crap that the science didn’t require discipline and it was somehow unearned.

Back to the Spice Mines

Last year after I finished my science-fiction murder mystery and sent it out on submission I turned somewhat lazy.

Oh, I wrote detailed outlines for two novels, one a ‘no contact’ SF story where the aliens come to Earth and have nothing to do with humanity and the other a military SF space adventure but despite to large outlines and detailed plotting I did not turn to the pick and shovel work of prose on paper.

That changed this yesterday.

Finally shaking off these damn doldrums I began writing that outline military SF adventure. And it’s not a bad start, nearly 1000 words written on my lunch, flowing easily from brain to fingers to screen. And despite being a vomit draft not received horribly by my writing group.

One thousand words a day is not an unrealistic goal. In fact, it is one I can often exceed, even with the demands of a day-job. Should I maintain this pace the first draft will be complete in late May.

The time for laziness is past, the time of the writing has begun.

A Disappointing Noir: The Lineup (1958)

Included with the Blu-ray set Noir Archive: Volume 3 The Lineup from 1958 in my opinion scarcely qualifies a film noir and rather a poor police procedural. Despite being penned by noted screenwriter Sterling Silliphant and directed by veteran filmmaker Don Siegal the movie plays like a larger budget television series episode which is understandable as it adapted from a TV and radio show of the same name.

After a stolen luggage job goes wrong at the steamship docks leaving a cop and a cabbie dead police inspectors Guthrie and Quine start searching for the members of a narcotics ring that uses unsuspecting passengers to smuggler rather small amounts of heroin through customs. Simultaneously a hitman, his handler, and a local get away driver, are crisscrossing San Francisco retrieving the contraband murdering as they go.

While The Lineup has some nice location shooting and captures much of the flavor of the city by the bay the film is ultimately too sedate to be of much interest. The Inspectors are never emotionally involved in their case and the hitman and his handler are too unsympathetic to be engaging characters despite some minor quirks to make them at least superficially interesting. Over all my verdict is that there is no need to seek out this movie as there are far better low budget noirs to watch.

Final Review from 2021: The King’s Man

A prequel to 2014’s Kingsman: The secret Service this film takes place in the run up to and during World War I depicting the events that led to the formation of the private intelligence service.

The Duke of Oxford (Ralph Fiennes) after serving in and suffering the horror of Victoria’s Little Wars at the end of the 19th century has become a dedicated pacifist providing food and medical aid to the people suffering during wars. (Historical points to the film for showing Brittan’s invention of the Concentration Camp during the Boer War in South Africa. Points the film will later forfeit due to gross historical inaccuracy.) As the world if pushed towards the first global war by a shadowy secret conspiracy Oxford along with his man servant (Djimon Hounsou) his housekeeper (Gemma Arterton) and his adult son (Harris Dickerson) try to foil the plot. When war breaks out Oxford finds that his son doesn’t share his dedication to pacifism and is determined to perform his patriotic duty in the Great War. In order to defeat the conspirators’ plot to destroy England by using Imperial Germany as their pawn Oxford and his people involve themselves in events from Russia to Washington D.C.

I did not care much for Kingsman: The Secret Service but the actors and setting of this film enticed me out to the theater. Overall, I enjoyed the movie, finding the familial drama compelling enough and the adventure entertaining enough to serve as a nice ‘popcorn’ distraction. If you have any real historical knowledge of the Great War and how it resolved, you will need to set it all aside during the film’s third act when everything turns on bringing America into the war to provide the force required to defeat Imperial Germany. Germany was starving by 1918 and was already staring defeat in the eyes. Plus, the filmmakers were forced to sweep aside the Lusitania as a cause for American intervention or else somehow make out heroes responsible for her sinking. Still, if you can ignore history this movie is fun and has a few surprising turns in its plot.

4 Things That Annoy Me About Firearms in Media

In lieu of writing about the Republican insurrection one year ago today I am instead going to write about several repeating aspects of guns in popular media that always irritate me when they appear.

1) Throwing People: Over and over again guns are depicted as violating Newton’s Law of Motion. A target hit by a round is lifting into the air and flung backwards. Targets weighting hundreds of pounds. If such forced was being delivered to the target an equal force in the opposite direct would be applied to the shooter. In the case of handguns to their wrists. People are not thrown by bullets and very often don’t even collapse or fall down when hit.

2) Inhuman Accuracy: The greatest offenders here are the John Woo films and his imitators and Zombie movies where people firing with a piston in each hand, moving from speeding vehicles, and leaping through the air, sometimes all three at the same time, hits distant or difficult targets. Accuracy with a firearm is much easier to obtain than with a bow but such shooting is beyond the realm of possibility.

3) Lasers on Sniper Rifles: The point of mounting a laser on a gun is to assist in accuracy. The concept being that where the ‘dot’ appears is where the bullet will impact. This is true over relatively short distances, but it is not true over scores or hundreds of yards with a sniper rifle. A bullet the instant it leaves the barrel falls toward the ground with an acceleration of 32 feet per second/per second. If a round travels at 2700 feet per second, after 100 yards it has traveled 1/9 of a second and will be 3 feet 10 inches below when that little red dot. Mounting a laser on a rifle is purely there so the ‘hero’ can spot the tell-tale dot and avoid getting shot.

4) Steady Scope Images: Related to the laser but preceding it in history is the moment in TV and film where an assassin is holding a scoped rifle to their shoulder and we get a shot of what they see through the scope, a perfectly still telescopic image of the target. No wobble or shake because the camera is mounted on a tripod but take out your smartphone and zoom to a distant object and see how steady that image appears. Through a high-powered with a tripod or bracing the image will bounced and shake unless the assassin is an android.

My Sweetie-Wife’s Latest UK Discovery

My sweetie-wife is a real Anglophile and always finding interesting UK films and programs to introduce me to and the latest is the long running panel game/comedy show Would I Lie to You?(WILTY)

Two teams of three celebrities, with consistent team captains David Mitchell and Lee Mack, participants recount brief statements about themselves and the opposing team through often hilarious questioning must determine if the statement is true or a lie. Mid-Game a guest is brought out and each member of one team, alternating between the teams on a weekly basis, claims the guest has a special connection with them, such as being a member of the same Morris dancing troupe or having produced a song version of Hamlet’s ‘To be or Not to Be’ speech they recorded, or gave them a ride in a steam locomotive. The program is hosted by actor/impressionist/comedian Rob Brydon.

There are no prizes for winning further stressing that this is a show about comedy, and I must admit that there have been episodes where it was difficult to stop laughing. The participants are generally quick-witted, and landing a joke always takes precedence over discovering a truth.

The program has an official YouTube page where previous seasons episodes can be watched without angering the gods of copyright.

Another Trip Around the Great Ellipse

2022, as we reckon it, has started and here’s hoping that this year will see improvements over the one now departed to the ashbin of history.

Have no doubt that the times ahead will still be turbulent, troublesome, and tiring. Politically things will get harder, meaner, and more dangerous before they get better. The great test of American democracy and democracy in general will not be met by this year’s election or even the next presidential cycle but rather over the next decade. Still there is hope. Despair is those who know that there is no hope and only those with perfect foresight can know that.

On other fronts 2022 will still be an interesting year.

It is the year that the 1948 Paramount Decree which forbade Motion Picture Studios from owning theatrical exhibition assets is formally terminated and it would not surprise me in the least if Disney turned around bought AMC launching a frenzy as other studios raced to get back into the showing movies business.

Here’s hoping that 2022 is also when we start getting good results from the newest batch of mRNA vaccines, the ones being tested right now against HIV/AIDS and some cancers.

There are dark times ahead but there is also strong reasons to believe that better times are also coming to meet us. Stay strong, get vaccinated, fight for democracy, and be kind.

My 2021 In Cinema Experience

Below are the twenty films I watched in theaters during 2021. ( Missed counted in yesterday’s post) From January thru April I stayed home due to the pandemic but once I had both shots of my vaccinations and felt more comfortable about brief outing in public I returned to my beloved theaters.

The order if this list is a combination of my subjective opinion on quality, how much I enjoyed watching the features, and how often I thought about them long after leaving the theater. I can honestly say I do not regret seeing any of the film, no matter their placement, in an actual theater.

1 Dune

2 Nightmare Alley

3 Last Night in Soho

4 Spider-Man: No Way Home

5 The Night House

6 No Time to Die

7 Lamb

8 Black Widow

9 The Last Duel

10 The Green Knight

11 Free Guy

12 Cruella

13 Nobody

14 The King’s Man

15 Eternals

16 The Tragedy of Macbeth

17 Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

18 The Suicide Squad

19 Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins

20 Venom: Let There be Carnage

My 2021 In Review

Not going to chat about news, political, or world events this is my 2021 and how it went.

First off and best I did not lose anymore dear friends to this thrice curse plague. Nearlyeveryone I know has been vaccinated and that is quite important to me.

Thanks to the fantastic scientific advancements of the last few decades and my day-job within the health care industry I received my vaccinations and boosters quickly and while I have not yet fully relaxed public gatherings, I have returned to seeing film in the cinema.

Since mid-May, when I treated myself on my birthday, I have seen 20 feature films in theaters and with one more today that will bring my 2021 total to 21. (updated the count as I had forgotten the 1 film I had not watched at an AMC Theater)

I completed my first murder mystery novel. It is of course science-fiction set aboard a generations starship which after 200 years of utopian coexistence faces its first murder. That novel is out on submission and here’s hoping 2022 brings a bit of good fortune on that front.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe shows began streaming on Disney+ and while I have not loved all of them nor have I hated any of them. WandaVision remains the one I enjoyed the most and the one I respect for taking the biggest of swings at doing something different while The Falcon and The Winter Soldier stuck me as the most standard approach of the attempts.

June witnessed another milestone in in aging as I had cataracts removed from both eyes. I am now seeing far better than I have in decades and the experience was quite interesting. Overall, my health was stable and fair during 2021 with all my chronic conditions well managed.

2021 was not the year of liberation that I or many of us had hoped for and its tragic and stupid that this nation saw more deaths from the pandemic after the introduction of the vaccines than before it but personally I and my friends thrived.

A Lackluster Opening: The Book of Boba Fett

A common piece of advice given to writers starting out in their craft is to avoid prologs. Far too often am inexperienced writer will use a prolog, particularly with fantasy and science-fiction stories to dump onto the poor unsuspecting reader pages and pages of backstory and world building rather then give the reader character and conflict. That is not to say that a prolog is never to be used, there are brilliant prologs out there including the one that opens The Fellowship of the Ring.

The Book of Boba Fett, like The Mandalorian before it, refers to episodes as ‘Chapters’ within a larger story but episode one, Stranger in a Strange Land (And deduct marks for using the title of one of SF’s most famous books even if both are biblical references), stank of a poor prolog.

The episode depicts two plot threads, one set nine years earlier following Fett’s survival after Return of the Jedi and the troubles he faced in the harsh Tatooine desert, while the other shows his current situation as the new crime lord of Mos Espa. The flashback storyline has little dramatic tension since it is a flashback and we are well aware of the character’s survival and thriving, and the current storyline has very little story content. Elements are established for future use, that is to say world-building, and a bit of combat is thrown in the to give the illusion of stakes, but ultimately the only thing this chapter does is set-up coming payoffs.

I have hopes for a decent series and story but Chapter one failed to pull me in, make me care, or do anything more than lay out the world to come.

Robert Mitchell Evans

Literary Saboteur