Dan Brown, Sandra Bullock and Sweeney Todd: movies and a play

The Da Vinci Code sequel ANGELS AND DEMONS (2009) has David Langdon (Tom Hanks of course) recruited by the Vatican “despite your history of prying into church affairs,” when it appears the Illuminati have planted an anti-matter bomb to wipe out the Vatican during the conclave to pick a new pope (I’m inclined to suggest a double bill of this and Conclave for sheer incongruity). A set up like that should have led to pure, wild entertainment but Dan Brown is too busy teaching us esoteric details about the Vatican, Rome and the Illuminati to go with the flow (some of Michael Crichton’s talkier books have the same problem).

Plus, of course, the details are wrong. The real Illuminati were a branch of the Freemasons founded in 1776 in Bavaria, repressed by the state a few years later; here they’re a much older organization, a brotherhood of scientists driven underground by the Vatican’s persecution. Given the real Illuminati have been massively transformed in pop culture and political paranoia to something far more ominous, ignoring the reality (for that matter it doesn’t have much in common with the paranoid fantasy Illuminati) shouldn’t be a sticking point — but I don’t like the movie so I’m less forgiving than I might be. With Stellan Skarsgaard as a cop and Ewan McGregor as a priest. “Is it possible the Illuminati could have infiltrated the Swiss guard?”

Memory says I did like THE NET (1995) the first time I saw it, due my huge crush on Sandra Bullock; rewatching now, she can’t save such a slow, predictable thriller. Bullock plays Angela, a cybersecurity whiz who lives a high-tech, solitary lifestyle. Doesn’t hang out with her neighbors. Keeps her mother, who’s sliding into dementia, in a home (I’ve seen people deal with family members who have Alzheimer’s and I do not find Angela’s decision unreasonable). Her last serious relationship was with her married therapist, Dr. Alan Chapman (Dennis Miller). When she wants pizza — well, why go to a restaurant when you can order it online!

From Angela’s perspective it’s a good life … that comes crashing down when she unwittingly acquires the McGuffin, a software program that a sinister conspiracy definitely doesn’t want a security expert looking at. On vacation she meets Jack (Jeremy Bentham) who’s really into her … because he’s working for the conspiracy! This will come as a shock to no-one, except Angela. Bentham does a good job as a hit-man who might genuinely like Angela (or he might be lying) though not so much he won’t kill her. When he fails, the conspiracy goes to Plan B, rewriting Angela’s digital records so she’s now in police records as a petty crook and scam artist. An imposter takes Angela’s own identity, sells off her house, drains her bank accounts — and as she lives online, nobody knows it isn’t her.

It’s a shame I had to watch this without TYG, as she’d have some thoughts on the 1990s tech, like the crude avatars of Angela’s online friends in chat rooms. As a thriller, this is formulaic though I do find it interesting as a high-tech version of a concept — having your identity erased — that goes back much further (Twilight Zone: Person or Persons Unknown is one example). “She’s not running — she’s going in there to use a computer!

Finally got around to watching my brother in a production of SWEENEY TODD, the story of a barber transported (shipped overseas as a convict) for crimes he didn’t commit so that a lecherous judge could plays sexual predator to the barber’s wife. Now he’s back, out for revenge, but until he can get it, he winds up working in partnership with a local baker: he kills his customers, she bakes them into pies. My brother plays a rival barber who makes the mistake of blackmailing Mr. Todd.

The cannibalism dominates my memory of the show so I was surprised it doesn’t start until the show is half over. It shows Sondheim’s skill as a playwright that the drama of the first half kept me engaged, instead of waiting for the blood and gore to kick in. I’m inclined to suggest a double bill with Little Shop of Horrors as another story of a struggling business that gets involved in anthropophagy. “There’s a hole in the world like a great black pit/And it’s filled with people who are filled with shit.”

All rights to images remain with current holders.

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Second September verse, more or less same as the first

Which is to say that much like last week there were constant calls on my time but I still got good work done. Not as much as last week —Thursday there was too much stuff going on, including the housecleaners coming in (having to watch over four pets in a small room to keep them out of the way does not lead to productive results). Even so.

First, the medical stuff. Plushie’s eye ulcer is gone; once again his robustness shines through and his problems cleared up. Trixie, by contrast, followed up last week’s gastro-intestinal bleed with a UTI. Fortunately the vet has handled both and she’s on the road to recovery. In hindsight I was right a couple of weeks back to think something was wrong — her body language and behavior were “off” — but it was such a vibes-based thing I wasn’t sure it was quantifiable enough for the vet. Looking at her now, when she’s back to her usual cheery self, I can see I should have acted sooner.

Oh, and I had my own medical issue. A couple of weeks back I made a Scandinavian flatbrod, which the book described as a cracker-like flatbread. Turns out while it’s hard like a cracker it isn’t brittle; I hurt my gums biting hard on it (this may have been my baking rather than something innate in the recipe). Got an appointment with the dentist this week; she recommended waiting three weeks to see if the pain subsides. If not, I need a crown. Fingers crossed the pain goes away.

Like I said, work got done despite that. More work on my Doc Savage history, Savage Adventures. Two days going over the second draft of Let No Man Put Asunder. It helped clarify some of what I vaguely sensed wasn’t working with this last draft; now I’ll try to override my pantsing instincts and plot the next draft out thoroughly. I’ll discuss what lies ahead in one of next week’s posts.

At The Local Reporter I wrote about problems with school bus service in Chapel Hill and Carrboro, and how the Republican-dominated legislature is restricting local development rules. Over at Atomic Junk Shop I blogged about Steve Ditko’s Objectivism

— and Bronze Age writers’ enthusiasm for bringing back C-list Silver Age villains.

I’m tired, sure. The timing of Trixie’s drug regimen means we usually wind up going to sleep later than usual and it’s taking its toll. But the work got done. I’m pleased.

Panels from Blue Beetle #5 drawn and written by Steve Ditko. All rights to image remain with current holders.

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The bow tie of mystery

I saw this in the street a couple of weeks back.

I have no more idea why it’s there than those shoes I saw a while ago.

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Undead sexist cliche: women are sheeple

This is an idea that I’ve seen in multiple different forms, most recently here.

This is kind of funny, given the Toddler in the White House devotes endless posts on Truth Social to proclaiming everyone who hurts his fee-fees or threatens his power is cringe. For example claiming James Talarico isn’t manly enough to eat meat (yes, this idiocy has become a theme on the right) so he eats it, then runs away to vomit. Right-wing masculinity is all about painting their opponents as low-status, which is to say too girly to be men. And of course, there’s Margaret Atwood’s observation that men’s greatest fear with women is that women will laugh at them.

The assumption women are driven not by rational argument but by things like “social status, popular consensus” is an Undead Sexist Cliche, a variation of the cliche that women are too emotional to think rationally (unlike say, the Toddler, who lashes out and applies tariffs for no other reason than someone in Switzerland wasn’t nice to him). I first ran into it 12 years ago, when libertarian Julie Borowski (a glance at her political postings online makes me think she’s one of those libertarians who are right-wingers in all but name — anti contraception, anti-abortion, anti-women having casual sex) declared women don’t want to be libertarians because they’re conditioned to worry about being “socially acceptable and fitting in with their peers” and so they can’t embrace the logic of an unpopular, minority worldview. As I note on the old post, she ignores that most men aren’t libertarians either, and that women, have in fact embraced many unpopular worldviews: women fought for the right to vote, for equality, for civil rights, for gay rights, when all of these were minority positions.

More recently we have Elon “fascist salute’ Musk embracing the position that anyone except high-testosterone alpha males is a sheeple. Implicit in this is that Musk himself is one of those alpha males rather than a pathetic attention-seeker who cheats at videogames. Hardly his worst sin, but telling — far from being a tough guy doing as he chooses, he’s as desperate for approval as anyone else.

As someone pointed out recently, many men seem to be the sheeple they claim women are. They’re happy to obsess over Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate and other right-wing misogynists. They’re happy to embrace popular mainstream sexist cliches like patriarchy is good and fighting rape is an attack on men. Or more sadly to repress any part of themselves their buddies might think too girly.

That’s not to say women are immune to shaming or incapable of following the herd. That’s a common impulse in everyone of any gender. Equally common, people can sheeple on one thing, independent on another — a political radical who reads best-sellers, a political conformist who reads the most avant-garde literature, someone who dresses in whatever’s fashionable but roots for an unpopular sports team, etc. And plenty of men have fought for unpopular causes or pushed the envelope of what was acceptable.

But patriarchy depends on thinking of men and women as two homogenous masses who all want the same thing, not individuals.

For more on topics like this, Undead Sexist Cliches is available in ebook and paperback.

Cover by Kemp Ward, all rights to image are mine.

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The deranged self-indulgent Toddler president

“Just as Trump so often comes across as a racist’s idea of a black man — lazy, stupid, hyper-sexualized — he also manifests as a misogynist’s idea of a woman, spending two hours a day on his hair, while fixating on picking out the perfect backsplash for the new designer kitchen while the world burns.” — Paul Campos, pointing out that the Toddler is completely obsessed with his ballroom project: “No matter the subject (child-rearing, public policy, baseball, death) or the audience (billionaire businessmen, Cabinet secretaries, children who have faced housing insecurity), he’s probably going to bring up the ballroom.” Click the link for example.

We’re in a war and we’re losing. The economy is starting to reel from the effects of the Toddler’s tariffs. There are wildfires all over the country. But the ballroom is what’s important to him. Well, that and posting non-stop memes online. Showing the “new” Iran resembling his head. Imagining himself wielding Green Lantern’s ring and reciting the oath (dude, your own party are the ones who worship evil’s might). Suggesting New Mexico be renamed New America. Claiming he led a rescue team of his employees to help out at the World Trade Center on 9/11. Which as one person put it online, is an obvious lie: if he’d been there on 9/11, he’d have publicized that non-stop ever after. And he didn’t. I suspect the Toddler knows he has to say something about 9/11; the only way he can focus on that is to make it about him.

Heather Cox Richardson: “Whwat is really doing is demonstrating that he is no longer even trying to govern and is instead retreating into a world where he simply does whatever he wants without regard for the country.” Nothing’s working the way he imagined — other than the huge amounts of bribes and other corruption he’s apparently steering into his pockets — and he’s not being showered with enough praise (which is why he needs Natalie Harpe as his emotional support human). So he’s retreating into fantasies about the big, beautiful ballroom and AI slop that presents any reality he wants.

None of this is startling. By the end of his first term it was well-known he didn’t give a crap about policy, could barely focus on discussions and had no regard for any restraints. All the talk about responsible Republicans as the “adults in the room” who’d manage him? Someone who needs that kind of management shouldn’t be in the Oval Office. Enough voters disagreed that here we are — but he doesn’t belong there and he’s never going to miraculously become presidential.

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Writing links for a Wednesday

I haven’t done a writing-links post in a while, so …

For anyone pushing creative stuff nobody seems to get, Rod Serling did too. When The Twilight Zone was approaching its first season, one interviewer asked Serling, “For the time being and for the foreseeable future, you’ve given up on writing anything important for television, right?”

So your beta-reader missed something you clearly explained in the manuscript? Maybe you’re not as clear as you thought.

When building a story around ancient legend, how much history should you throw in?

Acting link: The appeal of good guys playing bad guys.

“As nearly anyone who has graded a paper that was generated by ChatGPT can attest to, AI does not produce good writing. Not only does it hallucinate citations, but it fails to offer any originality or a clear point of view. It produces vague generalities without real insights. It offers a reminder that proper syntax and good writing are not the same, and as a professor I would certainly rather point out how an engaged student can refine their writing to improve their argument than grade another banal paper that is the product of intellectual laziness. What’s more, this excessive reliance on AI leads me to the inescapable question: Why are you in this field?”

I’ve read multiple complaints in recent years that a non-super supporting cast is becoming a rare thing in comics. Here’s some arguments for bringing them back.

“One thing that frustrates me quite a bit about modern opinion-writing is that hardly anyone tries to argue with a particular person or a specific argument. it’s all gesturing towards people saying something … i think writers would be well served by finding actual people of influence who hold the views they want to contest, and then contest them head on.” — Jamelle Bouie.

“Blackburn notes that there’s a lot of control relinquished to a chatbot as to what the definition of pornography or conservative values is. The definition is whatever the AI model has defined it as.” — a look at how rightwingers are using chatbots to find passages they think justify book banning.

The creators of the classic Elfquest say they’d sooner have no animated version than an unfaithful adaptation — which is why they’ve now accepted there will never be an Elfquest movie. Here’s a more detailed look at some of the bad proposals.

Why Han Solo works when Han Solo-type PCs do not.

Are clothes art? Who decides?

“Publishing.com LLC and its two principals will pay $1.5 million and be required to substantiate earnings claims in the future to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that the company and its operators misled consumers about how much money they were likely to earn using their products.”

White supremacy, and criticism of the Christopher Nolan Odyssey. Here’s another look at the politics of the film.

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Random political quotes for a Tuesday post

“It’s always odd when “you should expose yourself to more diverse ideas” always means a certain kind of conservatism instead of like, Indigenous art, new fusion foods, math paradoxes, or the Dvorak keyboard layout” — Karen Ho on Bluesky.

I may return to some of these in the future. But there’s so much to write about so I thought I’d just put them here.

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It’s Tuesday, have some covers!

First up, one by Barye Phillips. Yes, that’s Gardner Fox the Golden and Silver Age comics writer/

Second, Charles Binger with a very Richard Powers-looking cover.

Third, art uncredited.

Fourth, also uncredited.

All rights to images remain with current holders.

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“If my own country won’t protect me, who will?” — rape and institutional betrayal

Elsie Dominguez, a member of the Merchant Marine, says she was raped by a naval captain in 2021. When she told her superiors she was “discouraged from reporting, dissuaded from seeking medical testing, denied access to confidential reporting, and had her job threatened.” Finally she filed a legal complaint. As detailed at the link, the Department of Labor decided being doped and assaulted was an injury she’d sustained in the course of her duties, therefore a worker’s comp matter … and they denied her claim.

A 13-year-old middle schooler reported a classmate had raped her. The school and the cops decided it didn’t look like she was struggling, decided it was consensual and took no action.

18-year-old Jesse Butler comes from a prominent Stillwater, Oklahoma family. Jesse Butler pleaded no contest to charges including “first-degree rape, domestic assault and battery by strangulation, attempted rape in the first degree and rape by instrumentation” from when he was seventeen. He was charged as an adult, then dropped down to juvenile; instead of a 78-year potential sentence he got a sentence of community service and counseling.

These are not new issues. The military has a long history, like many organizations, of ignoring rape; it used to be acceptable to grant clemency to officers convicted of sexual assault. Lots of judges, prosecutors and cops think they can tell it’s consensual even when it isn’t: if she’s not literally trying to fight him off, hey, she probably wanted it. I get into this a lot in Undead Sexist Cliches. However they’re still an outrage and we should keep on being outraged. Shrugging and declaring that’s just the way of the world solves nothing. We won’t know if we can end rape until we try. We won’t know if we can reform institutions to deal with rape better until we try.

The media fail us too. When E. Jean Carroll first mentioned the Toddler raped her, the media largely shrugged. “Worse still, when outlets did cover Carroll’s claims, most seemed to lead not with her harrowing account, but with Trump’s denial of it.” Likewise the New York Times spent far more newsprint covering Hilary Clinton’s alleged email scandal than on the Toddler bragging about grabbing women by the you-know-what. And look what happened next. We see similar distorted coverage on other topics today.

After a while this becomes easy to normalize: Toddler supporters don’t care he’s a rapist, so what’s the point in writing about it? Because while rape is normal — in the sense of happening a lot, and rapists getting away with it — it’s still monstrous and we should never resign ourselves to thinking otherwise. This is hard because as I’ve said before, contemplating the reality of sexual abuse and assault is like living in a Lovecraftian horror — accepting the true nature of reality feels insane.

As Scott Lemieux says, the argument rape accusations won’t affect his base is bad too. “Hearing yet more new accusations of sexual assault might not change the mind of any swing voters or demobilize any educated suburban Republican voters, and then again it might. More to the point, since when is “will it materially change the outcome of elections?” the standard for determining whether something is newsworthy? By that standard — particularly if we’re talking about individual stories — almost nothing is. What are we even doing here then? If you’re a political reporter and believe something is only news if it will turn hardcore Trump supporters against Trump, the logical conclusion is find something to do for a living.”

Lemieux also quotes an LGM commenter making the same point: “regardless of his supporters we have to keep talking about these rapes over and over and over because otherwise we accept the implicit framing that it’s somehow okay or that there’s some kind of non-legal statute of limitations on holding someone accountable for rape. In other words we normalize it. We normalize rape. Rape.

That’s not okay. I understand that we live in a rape culture and that rape and sexual assault are to some degree already distressingly normal and normalized, but this is different. This is not hidden or glossed over or anything. It’s an open accusation, both credible and substantiated by what she said at the time, and consistent with over a dozen other accounts. We need to keep talking about it. A lot. Because if we don’t we give the message that you can get a free pass on rape* if you just…do it enough times that people get tired of hearing about it, or stonewall and lie about it no matter how obviously.”

Push back. Fight. Stare Cthulhu in the eye and say no, you are not acceptable. It will be a long time before we can end rape but reminding everyone, even the apologists, how evil it is, is a beginning.

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Not alternate enough: Summoned by Michael Anderle

In a discussion of Doctor Who: Wish World at his Blue Towel Productions blog, Ben McClure says that when writing about an alternate reality version of a popular show, you can “make the new world incredibly interesting, often by raising all sorts of questions about how the world works or even how the world came into being at all … the other way to make an alternate-reality story interesting, and by far the preferred one, is to make the alternate-version of the character meaningful.”

I’ll be blogging about this in another context but it captures part of why I was disappointed in SUMMONED: The Free Judge Reborn, Book 1 by Michael Anderle. The book takes place in the 2080s, the history is very alternate but none of that seems to matter.

(This has nothing to do with the book, I’m just using random photographs to provide some visuals).

Kara Greims is a crusading attorney, constantly frustrated that money and connections allow so many of the people who wronged her clients to walk away without paying a price. When gets news her brother has been murdered in Los Angeles, she heads west and discovers he was a Free Judge, part of a secret, supernatural justice system devoted to providing justice when the secular, mortal system fails. As the skull of Jacob Grimm, her brother’s mentor, explains to Kara, the True Court prefers it if the True Judges bring justice via quasi-legal means — intimidate someone into confessing to law enforcement says — but if that doesn’t work, executing malefactors is acceptable. Kara’s first target (I’m assuming the family will turn out to be descendants of Jacob or his brother): the corrupt corporation that killed her brother.

This leads to the novel approach for an urban fantasy of having Kara work within the system: she digs up documents via public information requests, puts together a case that the company has been violating the law, gets it to the right regulators. It is not, however, novel outside urban fantasy; as she herself points out, it’s not that far from a Leverage episode. Or similar, earlier TV creations: Mission: Impossible‘s organized crime episodes, the TV movie Institute for Revenge and others.

Lack of novelty is not a problem. Bringing justice to those the law cannot touch is a popular premise and like the legend of Robin Hood, there’s always a need for someone to do it. What doesn’t work is that the bad guys fall too easily. Kara puts in a lot of effort to make her case — it’s not a cakewalk — but her legal moves invariably work. Where is the Hamilton Burger to her Perry Mason? Why are the bad guys’ lawyers not throwing up counter-moves? For all the work Kara performs, it’s too easy. Likewise, her repeated beating of the thugs they send after her makes me wonder why they don’t change tactics — a bomb in her car or something like that.

The final problem is the worldbuilding. In Kara’s timeline, Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s motorcade took a different route in 1914 and he was never assassinated. No WW I, no treaty of Versailles imposing crushing burdens on Germany. No fascism. No WW II. Also no stock market crash, no Depression. On the downside, with no Cold War there was less pressure on the federal government to support civil rights, segregation continued unabated until the 1980s. At this point there was a horrifying fire in the Japanese neighborhoods of Los Angeles; assuming it was fueled by race, imperial Japan invaded and won. Kara’s story takes place a century later.

That’s a good premise for a timeline, though not always convincing (why would the stock market crash and the Depression not happen?). I don’t see any signs of it in the story, though. Other than zeppelins being the primary form of air transport, there’s nothing that feels different from 2026 in the real world. No sign of Japanese control. No sign the law is different. Hell, Leverage is a TV show in both worlds so apparently their history ain’t that different. To go back to that quote from Blue Towel Productions, it isn’t an interesting alternate world because there’s so little alternative about it.

I wanted to like Summoned much more than I did.

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