Monthly Archives: November 2015

November 30, 2015 · 7:38 am

Dada, Scrooge McDuck and other books (#SFWApro)

DESTRUCTION WAS MY BEATRICE: Dada and the Unmaking of the 20th Century by Jed Rasula would probably have worked better if I was stone-cold ignorant about Dada, but as I know the highlights and the details Rasula offers aren’t that interesting, I can’t say it worked for me. And even allowing for that, Matthew Gale’s Dada and Surrealism was more informative and better illustrated (seriously, this is astonishingly weak on the visuals).
That lack prompted me to crack open THE ART OF THE SURREALISTS by Edmund Swinglehurst in addition to the SURREALISTS book I read a while back and enjoy the work of various artists Rasula lists including Schwitters, Duchamps, Picabia and Ernst. Much more enjoyable.
7625043 THE LIFE AND TIMES OF SCROOGE MCDUCK Vol.2 by Don Rosa takes Scrooge from striking it rich in the Yukon to his return to his Scottish family, then off to his new estate in Duckburg and his eventful first meeting with Donald Duck and Huey, Dewey and Louie. This lives up to its billing as a delightfully fun adventure, though it gets downbeat near the end to fit in with the grumpy, depressed Scrooge of his original debut story. Rosa’s text pages explain how he based these stories on references in various comics by legendary Duck-scribe Carl Barks, the toughest one being a story where Scrooge ruthlessly loots an African village in contrast to his usual code of making money “square”—Rosa rationalized this as the turning point that led to the bitter, dour Scrooge McDuck we’re originally introduced to. Very good (cover by Don Rosa, all rights to image with current holder).
BALTIMORE: The Apostle and the Witch of Harju by Mike Mignola, Christopher Golden and Ben Stenbeck, has vampire/demon-hunting Lord Baltimore battling first a malevolent dead-raising witch (“Fear not the root of her magic—fear that which feeds the root.”), then a Catholic Inquisitor turned werewolf. Very much old-school horror in style, but it works well, like the sequence where the inquisition hunts the werewolf into a dark, spooky castle—hmm, how do you suppose that works out?
AvsX: It’s Coming: isn’t really a graphic-novel prequel to the Avengers vs. X-Men big event as much as a sampler of various TPBs that apparently tie in to the story. I can’t say I felt the urge to pick up any of the related books (though I will if they’re at the library, I imagine) so I don’t think it did its job—mostly it reminded me why the endless struggles of the various mutant factions began boring me back in the 1990s

1 Comment

Filed under Comics, Reading

November 29, 2015 · 4:58 pm

The hybrid Bond: Spectre (#SFWApro) with spoilers

SPECTRE (2015, all rights to image with current holder) takes the pseudo-gritty down-to-Earth Daniel Craig style of Bond and combines it with the classic Bond elements. In the opening, for example, Bond goes with a beautiful woman up to her Mexico City apartment, but it’s primarily to set him up for exercising his license to kill. That’s a classic Bond set-up, but unlike Connery or Moore, Craig walks away afterwards and forgets the liaison. Later he’s driving a gimmick-laden car, but it turns out the guns aren’t loaded. We get SPECTRE but instead of nuclear terrorism, it’s involved in sex trafficking (among other nastiness)

The Story: A video message from Judi Dench’s M some time ago set Bond on the trail of the mysterious Sciarri, which culminated in the Mexico City shoot-out. Typical for Craig’s Bond, the collateral damage is spectacular, much to the displeasure of M (Ralph Fiennes): ambitious intelligence overlord C (Andrew Scott) is plotting to absorb MI6 and shut down the 00’s—what can they do that a drone can’t?—while forging the world’s intelligence services into a level of privacy-violating, illegal joint surveillance run by him (hmm, is it possible C has a hidden agenda?). Despite being warned off the case, Bond doesn’t back after. After seducing Sciarri’s widow Monica Bellucci leads Bond to the meeting of Spectre’s heads, including the sneering Blofeld (Christopher Waltz). He then moves on to confront the dying Mr. White of Quantum of Solace, and in return for information, promises to protect the man’s daughter, Madeleine (Léa Seydoux), who becomes the main Bond girl.

It turns out Blofeld is Bond’s foster brother, sort of—his father took James in after the death of Bond’s parents, and Blofeld resented it. A lot. So he killed his father, faked his own death and built up Spectre as a counterpoint to Bond’s MI6 world. His ultimate goal is to destroy Bond—Blofeld takes personal responsibility for setting up the deaths of both Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale and Dench’s M in Skyfall. Now he’s going to put Bond in an agonizing deathtrap, then once C gets his way Spectre will have full access to world-wide intelligence (as with previous Bond films, there’s not really an imminent threat Bond has to stop, just the villain getting too much power/money).

The good: It’s just a damn good Bond thriller, with a lot of nods to the past. And the ending, if this is Craig’s final film, works well for that.

The bad: The Craig films have consistently provided villains who are either bland, annoying or both, and this is no exception. Waltz’s giggling fiend simply isn’t strong enough to be the big bad, particularly when he’s retroactively the big bad of four movies, and the existence of Spectre is primarily to work out his sibling-rivalry issues.

As I mentioned back in 2012, The Spy Who Loved Me shifted the emphasis of the film from the villain to the female lead. In the Craig movies, it’s switched back. After Vesper Lind, there’s no Bond girl of consequence in Quantum or Skyfall (I don’t count Moneypenny as a Bond girl in the classic sense) and for all she gets her man, Madeleine doesn’t particularly stand out here, even if she does know how to shoot a gun. It’s Benicio del Toro in Skyfall and Waltz here who are the opposite number to Bond, just as in the early Connery films … only they can’t hold up their end. For me that’s a huge weakness.

The neutral: There’s a lot of talk in this film about Bond’s role as a double-O, a man with a license to kill, and it made me realize once again (I discussed this in the Casino Royale post) how hard a killer Bond is. Sean Connery killed, but the film treated his “license” as just part of the job, not his primary directive. Roger Moore’s Bond emphasized his duty to Queen and Country in contrast to mercenaries such as Scaramanga or Octopussy. Pierce Brosnan seemed to fit in the same mold while Dalton’s Bond was just a rogue action hero. Craig’s Bond seems to just do his job because it’s his job—I’m not sure he’d dispute Scaramanga’s claim they’re flip sides of the same coin.

Despite the flaws, overall this is an excellent addition to the canon.

3 Comments

Filed under Movies

November 28, 2015 · 12:01 pm

Not much time travel in my movie watching (#SFWApro)

SUNSHINE STATE (2002) is a John Sayles’ slice-of-life (all rights to image with current holder) set in a small Florida island town under siege by developers, with the main dramatic arcs being former runaway Angela Bassett working out her family issues and Edie Falco as a motel manager tempted both by developer dollars and by architect Timothy Hutton. Shot on location (Amelia Island mostly) and really struck a chord with me as a former Floridian—apparently development issues and Florida tourist architecture are universal. Ralph Waite and Jane Alexander play Falco’s parents, Marc Blucas is Falco’s golfer boyfriend, Mary Steenburgen is the mayor and Alan King, Miguel Ferrer and Eliot Asinof (the author of Eight Men Out which Sayles adapted for the screen) appear as developers. “People think it just happens, like Thanksgiving and Christmas—they don’t realize how hard it is to invent a tradition.”

THE BABADOOK (2014) is a bogeyman tormenting an Aussie single mother and her son, or possibly the son’s imagination, or possibly mommy’s … This starts well, but when the middle period became mommy having repeated hallucinations (or—are they?) it lost me, maybe because it could so easily have been a straight Mad Act film (and I pegged the pet dog as Doomed the first time it appeared). “I’ll make you a wager/I’ll make you a bet/The more you deny me/the stronger I get.”

MOCKINGJAY PART ONE (2014) is, of course, the first half of the final book, wherein Katniss reluctantly becomes the face of the revolution, only to find herself just as stressed against equally strong odds as when she was in the arena. Good, though I think they could have managed turning the tale into one movie without any difficulty. “Everyone in that hospital is guilty of treason.”

Now, time travel—TRIPPING THE RIFT: The Movie (2008) would double well with the Futurama movie as they’re both based on TV SF animated series, and both involve a Terminator parody, here a killer clown with a German accent trying to whack one of the regular cast. While I enjoyed the first Rift cartoon which was pretty short, this raunch doesn’t expand well to full length, so I have even less impulse to watch the series than I did with the other film.“I was about to suggest we hand you over to the psycho so the rest of us can live.”

MALICE IN WONDERLAND (2009) is a British film in which wealthy twentysomething runaway “Alice Dodgson” gets hit by a car and ends up wandering through a world of low-lifes and psychos who look oddly familiar. I figured this was a long shot but it’s one of those with a last-minute time-travel twist, so it qualifies for the appendix. I can’t really review this, though, as the dogs were clamoring for attention to much for me to really absord any other details. “We think we’re going in a straight line, but what goes around comes around.”

1 Comment

Filed under Movies, Now and Then We Time Travel

November 28, 2015 · 11:49 am

Time-travel holiday specials, and more (#SFWApro)

HERE COMES PETER COTTONTAIL (1971) was one of the Rankin-Bass holiday specials that populated the TV of my youth. Here, the feckless but good-hearted Peter (Casey Kasem) loses the right to become Easter Bunny to the villainous Irontail (Vincent Price), who institutes changes including painting Easter eggs the color of mud and replacing chocolate bunnies with chocolate tarantulas (personally I’d love a chocolate tarantula but hey). Can eccentric inventor Sassafras’ (Danny Kaye) time machine turn things around for Peter? Adequate whimsy, though I wonder if generations younger than me even know what Easter bonnets are—and Irontail is very much a disability cliché (hates children because a kid ran over his tail and forced him to wear a prosthetic). Still, that’s a heck of a voice cast; all rights to image with current holder. “People believe what their hearts tell their eyes/So when you can’t get it together, improvise!”

RUDOLPH’S SHINY NEW YEAR (1975) opens right after the ending of Rudolph the Red-Nose Reindeer (Rankin Bass’s best-known special) as Father Time (Red Skelton) recruits Rudolph to find the missing Baby New Year by New Year’s Eve (like young Rudolph, an outcast because of his features—in this case big ears).or else Dec. 31 will begin time-looping—forever! The quest takes Rudolph to the islands where past years such as 1776 and 1 million BC now live, preserved in time, so in an odd way I think it qualifies for my book. A lesser effort, as witness they use the Rudolph song to fill out space near the end. “Make every moment count/Rejoice with every dawn/The moving finger writes/And having writ—moves on!”

CAPTAIN Z-RO (1956) was a forgettable series in which the title super-scientist (Roy Steffens) and his sidekick Jet would tune in the past with their time-viewer (in other episodes they focused on space flight), then intervene whenever history is going off the rails, for example stopping a plot to kill William of Normandy before he ever conquers England. A textbook example of why 1950s TV SF is mostly forgotten. “Bring up the therma-gate and stand by to activate the cycle reactor!”

The second season of LIFE ON MARS follows in the same vein as the first, but culminates with a rather radical solution to Sam being torn between two eras (I’m not surprised the US version went a different route). Great fun with Lanister and Simms as the lead but I think they stack the deck in the last episode by completely forgetting about Sam’s girlfriend in the present.

CONTINUUM‘s final season (2015) also fudges a lot by pretending (even more than Season Three) that Kiera has always been trying to avert the dystopian future she comes from, rather than being a believer in the authoritarian, corporate-dominated system she once served. This does a good job wrapping things up in six issues as we learn the newest wave of time-travelers comes from a future where the conniving Kellogg is now the big boss, but things have collapsed to the point people are heading back “to win this war before it begins.” Despite the fudge, a satisfactory finish; the biggest loss seems to be the Traveler’s mission, which gets kind of deus ex machina. “I have a little experience with paradox—I lost my grandmother to one in 2012.”

ODYSSEY 5 (2002) only ran for one season and alas, didn’t get to wrap up. The premise is that four crew members and one reporter on the Odyssey space shuttle witness Earth destroyed while they’re in space. A mysterious being gives them the chance to go back five years (mentally, not physically) and undo whatever happened, so of course, they say yes … This first and only season was good as the team battles against the Sentients (disembodied minds living in cyberspace) and their physical agents, the Synthetics, but I’m not even sure if they’re actually the big villain in this (the ending reveals Martians are involved as well). I particularly liked that one of the cast, whose 22 on the initial mission, has real trouble fitting into his original pot-smoking, girl-boinking, garage band-playing teenage self—the idea that reliving your life isn’t necessarily a gift is one I wouldn’t mind seeing more of. “What would you do without the concept of sarcasm?”

And one that isn’t time travel—I finally finished DAREDEVIL‘s first season, a good, gritty street drama inevitably influenced by the Frank Miller run on Horn-head in the comics. Can Matt Murdock save Hell’s Kitchen from the mysterious crime kingpin? Can he keep his identity secret from best friend Foggy and secretary Karen? Can the Kingpin hold his own ranks in order? The biggest asset is Vincent D’Onofrio’s incredible performance as Wilson Fisk—even when his character elements are stock, D’Onofrio makes them work. “The horns are a bit much.”

3 Comments

Filed under Now and Then We Time Travel, TV

November 27, 2015 · 8:05 pm

Sort of back to normal (#SFWApro)

But it took a while and I had Thursday off, so this week was still mostly watching stuff. And then Wednesday when I was working on a tricky bit of the rewrite for Backstage With the Dead (I Think), Plush Dog decided he just had to have some fussing over, which proved way too distracting to get anything done.

However I came back to the story again today and decided my friend/beta reader Cindy was partially right about the ending and how to tie it in with the beginning. So I tinkered with it and I think it’s ready to go. One read-through in hard copy next month and if I don’t find major problems, it’s on the way.

In other writing-related news, my article for Brass came out, and Eldritch Embraces, which took my short story Signs and Hortense, has an Indiegogo campaign for the anthology. A portion of the proceeds goes to a dog-fostering organization, so it’s a worthy cause—though I can hardly deny my self-interest. Fund it, people!

And of course, we did do Thanksgiving. As every year, we went to the massive vegetarian (technically vegan) dinner at Cafe Parizade, which is now supposed to be the largest vegeterian Thanksgiving in the Southeast. I stuffed myself to excess (surprise!) with particular emphasis to the garlic mashed potatoes and the maple sweet potatoes (for some reason I went heavy carbs). Despite warnings from one of our companions, I did leave much room for desert, but I managed to squeeze in a few choice items (apple crumble, black bean brownie …).

I hope everyone had an awesome Thanksgiving and that you got to spend it with someone (or alone if you prefer it that way). And I’ll leave you with Gervasio Gallardo’s beautiful cover for Ballantine Books’ edition of The Last Unicorn (all rights with current holder)

f5a3b25cc049e8dd1c2fd6791af02ebe

Thanks (#SFWApro)

To TYG, for being in my life.

And to the pups, because no matter how frustrating it may be working while caring for them, I’ve never once regretted that we adopted them. That has to be a good sign.

Come to think of it I’ve never regretted moving up here to be with TYG, either.

There are lots of other people in my life to thank, but I’ll stop there.

Is Our Writers Learning? Welcome to Nightvale (#SFWApro)

content It’s been more than a year since I did an Is Our Writer’s Learning? post, but WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor (cover by Rob Wilson, all rights with current holder) is a perfect book to resume, precisely because it’s a curate’s egg (a British reference that means some parts are very good) so there’s plenty to learn.

The story: The novel is set in the same town as the creators’ smash-hit podcasts (which I haven’t listened to). Jackie Fierro, a pawnbroker who stopped aging at nineteen, is content doing business according to her time-honored rituals (“There will first be some handwashing, which is why there are bowls of purified water throughout the shop.”). Then she receives a slip of paper with “King City” written on it, and to her horror, cannot get it out of her hand. She can burn it, throw it away, cut it to shreds, but it comes back. Meanwhile, office drone Diane Crayton has her own problems: a coworker has vanished and apparently never existed; she’s seeing her ex-husband everywhere, literally; and her fifteen-year-old son Josh is well, a teenager. Inevitably, the two women’s respective problems turn out to be related, and King City is where they both need to get answers. If they can only find a way out of Night Vale ..

The parts that were good: As I mentioned writing about the fifth Harry Potter, details count for a lot in fantasy and Night Vale is all about the details. It’s a place where clouds are created to hide the UFOs hovering overhead, there’s a faceless old woman living in Diane’s house, people visit the pawnbroker after a moment of existential angst “A stab of panic about how alone you are—it will be like most showers you’ve taken.”) and plastic flamingos can hurl you back in time. The library is a Hellmouth. During a visit to a video rental store, Jackie and Diane drop some tapes. They crack and there’s nothing inside but moist dirt and crawling insects. A city board randomly changes the meaning of words. The details are awesome.

The book also has great weird scenes, and some good lines (“People are just deaths that haven’t happened yet.”).

But then there’s the setting: Rowling, as noted at the link above, has great detail, but it fits in with her world. Night Vale isn’t a world, it’s a big accumulation of weird detail piled atop weird detail. I enjoy all the details, and in short podcast doses I think I’d love the details, but at novel length it’s obvious “there’s no there there.” Night Vale has no substance; it has no internal logic that makes me believe all the weird things can co-exist in one town (and I’ve been reading Marvel and DC since I was six, so I have no problems believing that gods, androids, African monarchs and mutants all coexisting on the same team). It’s like sketch comedy stretched out to feature film length.

And also the characters: I like that in Night Vale everyone calmly accepts the insane facts of life, but again, this doesn’t work so well stretched to 400 pages. Jackie and Diane are phlegmatic about a lot of what goes on; Jackie knows she’s stayed young for some reason while her friends have aged and grown away from her, but she’s just resigned to it. It’s hard for me to care if the characters don’t. And while Jackie freaking over the accursed paper is a nice touch (it reminds me of a Kafka story where a bachelor is constantly followed by two bouncing rubber balls), at 400 pages it feels, again, like a gimmick more than something substantial (Kafka’s story was short).

So I think I learned quite a bit from this. And don’t get me wrong, I liked it, but I don’t think Fink and Cranor transitioned from podcast to book as smoothly as they should have.

1 Comment

Filed under Is Our Writers Learning?, Reading, Writing

November 25, 2015 · 1:07 pm

Catching up on Hellboy (#SFWApro)

And I’ve already added these to the Hellboy Chronology page, in case you were asking.

HELLBOY AND THE BPRD: 1952 is an account of Hellboy’s first field mission, as written by Mike Mignola and John Arcudi and illustrated by Alex Maleev. The mission involves a string of mysterious deaths in Brazil, which leads Hellboy and his human companions to a secret laboratory, killer apes, leftover Nazis and a traitor in the BPRD’s own ranks. I hope we see more of this—I really do miss the old days of Hellboy working for the agency. And someday I want to see Varvara and Hellboy meeting.

ABE SAPIENS: A Darkness so Great by Mignola, Scott Allie and Max and Sebastian Fiumara has Abe and Grace arrive in a small Texas town miraculously untouched by the horrors swarming over the country. Wouldn’t you know, it’s because the local preacher has been praying to something that is not Jesus … Good, though it shows the problems of the Chronology that according to the first chapter here, all of Abe Sapiens: Sacred Places took place within a two-week span (I’d figured on a couple of months at least—and in terms of publication, it’s five months of Abe’s series). Like Hellboy in Hell, this presents the netherworld as being plunged into chaos by recent events, forcing demons to stake out new turf in our world, something I’m sure will pay off more as time passes.

BPRD HELL ON EARTH: Flesh and Stone (Mignola, Arcudi and James Harren—cover illustration by Laurence Campbell, all rights with current holder) has Johann and Howards (the BPRD agent who got plunged back to the stone age) lead a monster fighting mission into a small town. Meanwhile the Black Flame prepares to strike again and in the most interesting plot thread, Russia’s Nichaeyko and Varvara debate whether letting her lead the forces of Hell against the monsters would be a net win. The main plot feels like a routine installment in the overall arc rather than a standalone story, but the Nichaeyko stuff is good (I love Varvara).

1 Comment

Filed under Comics, Reading

November 24, 2015 · 9:18 pm

More Paris, more politics

Along with lying about how many whites are shot by blacks, Trump has also claimed that on 9/11 he saw thousands of Muslims celebrating in New Jersey, despite being in NYC at the time. Roy Edroso looks at the right’s continuing condemnation of the Syrian refugees, and its defense of Trump—just because Trump overestimated the number of Muslims hardly proves he’s a liar! After all, it’s just as much a lie to say Muslims are peaceful, so Clinton is as bad as Trump, QED!

•Ted Cruz says we can let Christian Syrians in because Christians don’t commit terrorism. That’s bullshit.

•We also have several white guys arrested for shooting at black protesters in Minneapolis.

•One water law for rich and poor alike, resulting in millionaires being able to keep five swimming pools during a drought while people who xeriscape and only flush toilets occasionally still get fined.

•Yesterday I linked to the story of an FBI informant who seduced an activist into a terrorist plot. That sort of thing happens in Britain, too.

•The Mayor of Roanoke, Va., said that shutting out Syrian refugees is a smart policy just like interning Japanese Americans. At the link, he insists his statement was very respectful and moderate and he had no idea that if he posted it online, lots of people outside Roanoke would hear about it.

•The New York subways object to running some positive Muslim ads, but they’re okay with decorating a car with Nazi imagery for Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle.

•A North Carolina historian rips into claims from Niall Ferguson about how Muslims living in Europe is the fall of Rome all over again.

•A blogger wonders why an obit would only mention the deceased’s male parent.

•Beware the security flaw on new Dell laptops.

•Justice Richard Posner points out that requiring abortion doctors have admitting privileges at hospitals in case something goes wrong ignores that abortion is safer than many procedures that don’t have this requirement. It’s almost like the law was trying to drive abortion doctors out of business …

How not to write coincidences (#SFWApro)

bravebold125 I like Bob Haney’s Silver Age work on Aquaman and the Teen Titans but his Brave and the Bold was often hit-or-miss. The stories of Batman teamed with various heroes are often so discontinuous (like having the Earth One Batman old enough to have operated in WW II) that there’s an old joke that they should be consigned to the parallel world of “Earth B.”

And then there’s #125 (cover by Jim Aparo, all rights with current holder), a striking example of how not to write a story that relies heavily on coincidence. The standard rule is that coincidence can get you into a problem, but not get you out of it, but this issue is just … messy. “Streets of Poison” opens with Batman busting a street gang pushing heroin produced by dictator/drug kingpin General Chan. The U.S. government is negotiating a payout to Chan in return for burning his crop, and by an implausible coincidence they’ve picked Bruce Wayne and Barry Allen as the negotiators. Even by comics standards, that’s a bit unlikely, but by itself, not horrible—and after all it does get them into trouble, which is what coincidence is supposed to do? Oh, we also see a woman bust out of prison, which plays a role down the road.

After the heroes arrive in Chan’s domain, they spot Amelia Earhart (with the serial numbers filed off) walking around, but can’t catch up to her. Then when they visit Chan himself, they discover Earhart is his prisoner/sex slave, and unable to leave … so how did she show up in town? It turns out that the escapee went to an underworld plastic surgeon and arbitrarily picked Earhart’s face as her new identity—oh, and she’s a former lover of one of Chan’s henchmen, so she showed up in the area looking for help from her boyfriend (unfortunately Chan has killed him for skimming off the top).

None of these are unworkable plot elements in themselves: doubles are a classic plot twist, and having someone’s plastic surgery turn out to be the Wrong Face isn’t bad. But having all these coincidences happen in just the one story—Earhart, and a lookalike, and the lookalike showing up in the right place, and Bruce and Barry being there … it just strains belief. If Haney had focused on one strand (Bruce sees the lookalike and assumes it’s Earhart, but the latter remains missing at the end) I’d have been willing to buy it. But not this set-up.

Oh, in case you’re wondering it turns out Earhart is the general’s lover and has been making drug drops for him using her plane. And Chan secretly plans to fake destroying his crop despite receiving American money, but Batman puts the fear of god in him so he burns off the opium poppies for real. But still stays in power and still gets a big bonus. Which as heroic victories go, ain’t exactly much.

1 Comment

Filed under Comics, Reading, Writing