The Bulls**t Police…

Fascinating article by Michael Moynihan for Newsweek Magazine concerning the “Skeptic” movement:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2013/08/16/james-randi-the-amazing-meeting-and-the-bullshit-police.html

Don’t know how long ago it was I first saw/heard/became aware of James Randi, the movement’s founder…perhaps it was on one of his Johnny Carson/Tonight Show appearances…but I’ve always felt a kinship, of sorts, with him.  I suppose what drove him into this area (he was a well known magician/illusionist before) was a distaste for people claiming to have some kind of extra-sensory power and using this flim-flam to get money.

In some cases, lots and lots of money.

Where the article gets really interesting, in my opinion, is when it deals with some of the groups trying to appropriate the term “skeptic” to essentially promote anti-scientific ideas and, the big one, the whole issue of religion in the skeptical community.  The author notes that skeptics can sometimes come off as arrogant and this passage, found close to the end of the article, sums up that danger:

Many believe that the movement’s insularity and self-confidence is damaging its ability to broaden its impact. In his 2010 speech at TAM, Slate’s Phil Plait offered his allies a harsh bit of advice: if you want to gain converts, he said, “don’t be a dick.” “The tone of what we are doing is decaying,” he admonished, and “vitriol and venom are on the rise.”

As I said, a fascinating article.

Olympus Has Fallen (2013) a (mildly) belated review

With many, if not most action films, you often are forced to overlook dumb/improbable things that occur in order to enjoy the feature.

For example, nearly every James Bond film has that scene where our hero is captured by the villain.  Instead of pulling out a gun and putting a bullet through Bond’s head, ending all unpleasantness right then and there, our villain inevitably decides now is the perfect time to tell Bond all about his plans before (usually) leaving him alone in some overly complex death trap he will inevitably figure a way out of.  Thus, when Bond is free once again, he knows where to go and what to do to triumph.

Moving away from Bond specifically and into action films in general, its hard not to notice that when bullets fly, they seem to have a really hard time finding the hero…but a much easier time finding the bodies of the villain and his henchmen.

I could go on and on with other, perhaps lesser examples, but suffice it to say I offer the above to segue into this:  Olympus Has Fallen is an awfully dumb action film.  Perhaps one of the dumber ones I’ve seen in a long time.

And yet…I can’t deny finding it entertaining as well.

Olympus Has Fallen is the first -and lower budgeted- of the two “White-House-gets-nuked-by-terrorists” films released this year (White House Down being the other, bigger budgeted one).  The movie opens with a sequence that, frankly, didn’t even need to be in the film at all:  We see the President (Aaron Eckhart) leaving Camp David with his wife (Ashley Judd, in what amounts to a very small cameo) during a snowstorm and their limo winds up crashing through a bridge guard gate.  The President’s personal bodyguard/secret service man, Mike Banning (Gerard Butler), is forced to pull the President out of the limo just before it falls off the bridge but is unable to save his still trapped wife.

Eighteen months later, we find that Banning is now working for the Treasury (the President doesn’t want him around as his personal bodyguard because, even though everyone, including the President know his actions were correct, the mere act of Banning being around the President reminds him of this loss).  Banning wants to get back into his old job but knows it is difficult to get past the emotions.  Therefore, he does his paperwork and hopes to one day move back into the job he was meant for.

Enter: tensions between North and South Korea.

We find that a delegation of South Koreans, including their Premier, are coming to the White House for high level negotiations.  In the middle of negotiations, a large, U.S. military aircraft starts strafing Washington D.C. with high caliber bullets, slaughtering many people and causing incredible mayhem.  The President and the South Korean delegation head to the “bunker” under the White House where it is revealed the security detail of the South Korean leader are, in fact, a group of terrorists.  They take out the security details around the President and now have him and his immediate staff under their control.

Outside, a small army of North Korean (?) terrorists have emerged from hiding and are locking down the area immediately around the White House.  Banning runs from his job at the Treasury Department and makes it into White House grounds before the area is sealed.  By the time he reaches the doors of the White House and enters the bullet ravaged structure, he alone is left to fight the terrorists off…and free the President of the United States.

Before we go any further, let’s get to the dumb stuff.  I suppose I could enumerate all the dumb things that happen in the film but, in the interests of brevity, let me point out three of the juicier ones (Some mild SPOILERS follow):

1) Perhaps the biggest dumb thing this movie wants us to accept is the idea that an unauthorized military aircraft essentially can make it alll the way to the Washington monument while strafing the grounds with countless bullets before finally being taken out.  In pre-9-11 times I could envision something like this taking the U.S. defense forces by surprise.  Post 9-11…it is an awfully hard thing to swallow.

2) I keep having visions of Banning just outside the entrance of the White House, crouching behind a cement pillar in relative safety while wave after wave of soon to be dead (and most certainly brain dead) Secret Service members run out of the structure only to get mowed down by heavy machine gun fire.  Perhaps we needed better editing in this sequence, but all those supposed “professionals” came out looking like lemmings!

3) The traitor.  The moment I saw this recognizable actor in what appeared to be a “minor” role, I KNEW he was going to revealed as a baddie.  After this revelation, he delivers some ferociously nasty lines to the captured President of the United States and looks, for all intents and purposes, VERY willing to kill him.  But when he is sent (alone, of course) after Banning and the two eventually clash and Banning has him at his mercy, it takes a grand total of two seconds for the traitor to completely flip.  He agrees to help Banning out against the terrorists as his last act.  Seriously?!?

Ok, so there are a few of the really silly ones.  But the bottom line is this:  As silly as the film was, it moved.  There was very little fat -other than the opening sequence- to take up your time.  The good guys are good (if a little bit slow) and the bad guys, including Rick Yune as Kang, the head terrorist, are deliciously bad.

The movie never really lets up once it gets going, delivering a higher body count combination of 24 and Die Hard while entertaining you just enough to (almost) forget the silliness.  No, we’re not talking Oscar caliber material here…but if you’re in the mood for some pretty good action and aren’t the type to get too hung up on dumb plot points, you could do a whole lot worse than check out Olympus Has Fallen.

Marvel vs. DC

Its the age old argument many a child -and adult!- fan has engaged in at one time or another:  Which is the better comic book company, Marvel or DC?

Read on, read on…

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/rivalries/2013/08/marvel_vs_dc_comics_one_is_just_like_iron_man_the_other_like_batman.html

Big admission:  I’ve always been a DC fan.  When I was growing up in the early 1970’s, my first major comic book experiences almost all related to DC books.  At the time, I was absolutely wowed by the sinister, shadowy artwork of Berni Wrightson and great storytelling of Len Wein in the first ten issues of Swamp Thing.  I was also impressed with the Archie Goodwin/Walt Simonson Manhunter stories.  Not long afterwards I was equally blown away by the various Neal Adams drawn works, primary of which were his Batman and Green Lantern/Green Arrow series, at that time appearing in various reprint forms.

Don’t get me wrong, I was aware of the Marvel books and many of the creators involved in them.  I loved the works of Jack Kirby (who doesn’t…at least now?) and was floored by his Fantastic Four work…but, again, his DC work, which was more current at that time, simply had my attention.  I loved, loved, loved Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth and found The New Gods, and in particular the at times savage Orion, absolutely fascinating.

Lest I sound like a total DC fanatic, let me conclude with this:  The initial 38 issues of Spider-Man, the original issues created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, easily remain my all time favorite Marvel works.  This is no slight on the many contributions to Marvel Comics of Jack Kirby.  As I mentioned before, I loved his Fantastic Four run.  It is a very, very close second to the Spider-Man issues for best Marvel work ever.  In my humble opinion, of course.

Ok…think I got all that geekiness out of my system now.  Back to work! 😉

Solomon Kane (2009) a (mildly) belated review

Pulp author Robert E. Howard’s best known creation is, most likely, Conan the Barbarian.  Despite this, it is his another of his major recurring characters, Solomon Kane, that remains my personal favorite.  Surely it has something to do with the fact that the character is a religious 1600’s era Puritanical “Dirty Harry” that most intrigues me.  He hunts evil…and deals with it mercilessly.

A few years back, when word came that a Solomon Kane film was in the works with James Purefoy in the lead role, I was eager to see it.  The film was made and there was word of a coming release and then…nothing.

The movie, a European production, was eventually released to theaters in Europe but, as far as I can tell, didn’t make it to United States theaters.  If it did, it was very a very limited release.  More time passed.  Eventually, I found the movie was released to the video market, again in Europe, but it remained left out of the U.S. markets.

Until, that is, last month.

Now, four years later, I finally had a chance to get my hands on Solomon Kane and give it a shot.  Would it live up to my expectations?  More importantly, would it live up to Robert E. Howard’s original stories?

In a word…kinda.

Solomon Kane is a low budget movie and, like many low budget features, suffers at times from a lack of spectacle.  While this can hurt movies that strive for “big” stories, it doesn’t hurt the film all that much…at least until the end (I’ll get to that in a second).  Where the film may bother Solomon Kane fans is in the story it tells.  Solomon Kane is, essentially, an “origin” story for the character and this winds up being the worst -and most unnecessary- part of the film.  Worst because the character’s story arc from bad to good feels way too compressed and -given what we see- unlikely.  Unnecessary because the movie’s makers could have eliminated almost all that back story and still given us almost everything presented…only without that clutter.

Robert E. Howard never bothered to give Solomon Kane much of an origin, though one of his best Kane stories -in this case a poem- involves Solomon Kane’s return to his home town.  It was this poem, I suspect, that was the primary inspiration for this movie.

Unfortunately, while the poem was wistful and grand, the movie is decidedly smaller.  We start with Solomon Kane as a berserk killer, a privateer lusting for gold and mayhem and willing to kill anyone that gets in his way.  On his latest adventure his pirate crew invades a castle in search of gold.  As they climb the castle, however, evidence of dark magics appear.  Eventually, Solomon Kane’s entire crew is butchered while the bloodthirsty man is confronted by one of the Devil’s own…a demon who wants to drag evil Solomon Kane to Hell.

Solomon barely escapes with his life and, years later, we find that the encounter with the Devil’s minion has made Kane renounce his evil ways.  He now lives in a monastery, alone and non-violent, and is trying his best to repent.  Alas, and as I said before, this is the part of the movie that just doesn’t work for me.  Why?  Because rather than the Robert E. Howard vengeful zealot, we have a man that, for lack of a better word, was scared shitless into becoming “good”.

Seriously?

Anyway, the monastery decides its time for Solomon to leave their grounds.  They can’t keep him anymore and he ventures off, only to run into foul deeds performed by a rumored sorcerer.

Once again, I was bothered by this whole introductory segment.  Not only is Solomon presented as a bloodthirsty murderer who was “scared straight”, but he’s also forced to leave the Monastery when they don’t want him anymore.  Had this not happened, would the fearful Solomon Kane remain hidden for the rest of his life?

An instant fix that might have worked better:  Eliminate the whole privateer thing and introduce audiences to Solomon as a mysterious figure in the monastery, a man who knows the devil has chased after him all his life and decides, on his own, that the time has come for him to leave the safety of the monastery and confront his nemesis.  The monks beg him to stay, but he refuses.  He will not live in fear anymore.  On his way out the door, he tells the head monk regarding his eventual, inevitable confrontation with the Devil: “We’ll see who’s left standing”.  After saying this, he walks out the monastery gates.  No more “scared” Solomon, no more silliness.

Anyway, back to the real movie…

So Solomon Kane is out and about and, because he has renounced all violence, suffers from this, especially when a family he falls in with are for the most part butchered by the sorcerer’s soldiers.  This wakens the grim Solomon and he vows to save a kidnapped maiden and rid the terrorized lands of the sorcerer and his army.  The climax, if you haven’t guessed it already, leads Solomon Kane back to familiar ground and the poem I referenced above.  Unfortunately, the final battle features some CGI effects that may work better in a DOOM type game rather than Solomon Kane.  Ah well.

Even with the faults I mentioned above regarding the character’s origin, Solomon Kane is a reasonably entertaining film, but one that could -and should- have been much better.  Even ignoring the unnecessary origin aspects for a second, the film, at least to me, never really catches fire.  Mind you, it moves along well enough and doesn’t bore…but neither does it draw you in with bated breath like a good action film should.  The bottom line is that while you may be entertained, you’re likely not to be terribly impressed.

On the plus side, and despite the silly origin aspects, the filmmakers clearly were familiar with the Solomon Kane stories and tried hard to make a film that honored them.  A bigger budget, a rethinking of the origin aspects, and a more exciting pace would have surely helped make for a better film.

Despite this, I would cautiously recommend Solomon Kane to fans of the stories.  Others may want to stay away.

Shades of Geraldo Rivera…

I’m a sucker for these kinds of stories:  A very old floor safe was discovered in a Cincinnati bar.  The owner wasn’t aware of the safe, which was lost/forgotten for decades…so he called in a safe cracker to open it and see what might be inside.

Watch the results for yourself:

http://on.aol.com/video/old-safe-found-at-otr-business-opened-517893674

I suppose many of you may not recall the Geraldo Rivera reference above.  Relates to this:

Bookstores in the age of e-readers

Interesting article by Harry McCracken for Time Magazine regarding Green Apple Books, a San Francisco bookstore, and how it is introducing -and dealing- with e-readers in their stores:

http://techland.time.com/2013/08/12/how-one-local-bookstore-is-dealing-with-the-e-book-revolution/

It is my sincerest hope that bookstores will continue to survive in some form or another into the future.  The logical side of me, however, feels that because of the various advantages tablets and e-readers have over brick and mortar stores, bookstores will either a) fade away entirely or b) morph into something more devoted to “nostalgia” or “collectible” material -and e-readers- than printed “new” works…which it seems Green Apple Books is indeed doing.

On the one hand, this is a very sad sign of the times.  As much as I like carrying around a virtual library in my tablet (same as carrying my entire music collection in an iPod), finding new books and authors has always been best for me while walking through a bookstore’s new books section and looking over the wares.  This is something that Amazon, as good a company as it is in getting product into people’s hands, hasn’t quite been able to successfully accomplish.  At least to me.

So, on the other hand, there may be a glimmer of optimism to be had for the continued success (if not sterling success) of a Green Apple Books.  Perhaps one day a store like this one will open in my area…

Rare historical photographs…

Over at the fascinating slightlywarped.com you can find three incredible pages devoted to “rare” historical photographs…oddball pieces that surprise, delight, and amaze:

http://slightlywarped.com/crapfactory/curiosities/2013/march/rare_historical_photos.htm

In this, the first webpage, I found the following photograph the most fascinating:

Yes, that’s Fidel Castro standing before the Lincoln Memorial after laying a wreath!  Though I knew of his trips to the United States both before and after the Cuban Revolution, this image is so very…odd.

The second page can be found here:

http://slightlywarped.com/crapfactory/curiosities/2013/august/even_more_rare_historical_pictures.htm

Of this group, my favorite has to be:

According to the website, this is a photograph taken in 1893 of three Princeton students after a Freshman/Sophomore snowball fight!  Guess the snowball fight became somewhat…intense.

There is a second photograph in this grouping, however, that I simply have to show:

Believe it or not, that’s a photograph taken in 1894 of Mark Twain in Nikolai Tesla’s lab…with, I’m assuming, Mr. Tesla looking on!  Seems like something you’d see in a steampunk movie.

Finally, we have this, the last of the three pages:

http://slightlywarped.com/crapfactory/curiosities/2013/may/hidden_rare_historical_photos.htm

Of these, easily my favorite photograph, and one I had seen before, is this:

This photograph, taken in 1885, shows the Statue of Liberty nearly completed…while sitting in the middle of Paris.  Sometimes its easy to forget this extraordinary statue was a gift from the French and was constructed over there before being brought over to New York.

As I said before, fascinating, fascinating stuff.

What is real…?

So my sister tells me the other day about this fascinating documentary she saw on the Discovery Channel during the current very popular “Shark Week”.  It involved the search for a mysterious (and very scary) predator.  Presented as a factual documentary, Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives, was, as she told it to me, a fascinating story.

I repeat: A story.

However, given the way the show was presented and the channel it was presented on, many people out there, including my sister, thought they were watching something real.  A controversy followed and Discovery Channel was forced to issue a statement defending its programming:

http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2013/08/06/discovery-channel-defends-it-decision-to-air-dramatized-megalodon/

This hasn’t, however, entirely stopped the controversy.  Wil Wheaton, late of Star Trek: The Next Generation, offered some very strong comments regarding this special:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/08/06/wil_wheaton_discovery_channel_megalodon_documentary_betrayed_viewers.html

I agree with Mr. Wheaton’s statements and would go a step further:  Shows like this and the fact that they can fool people into believing a fiction are good examples of the dangers of mass media.  Often we are passive watchers of what the media offers us and, as is the case here, some of us can be “lied” to…and we believe the lie.

In the case of the Megalodon, I suppose watching this special and mistakenly believing it to be true is a fairly “benign” lie.

The danger, of course, is when the lie is no longer benign.

Jaws alternative titles

Fascinating article, found on Huffington Post, regarding the many (many!) alternate titles considered by author Peter Benchley for the novel that eventually became known as…Jaws:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/05/jaws-alternative-title_n_3703627.html

It got me thinking about my own novels and alternate titles I considered for them.

The Dark Fringe, my first major work, was originally entitled The Fringe (I came up with the title when I first started writing the story, way back in 1984-85 or thereabouts and a good twenty years before the TV show first appeared).  When it came time to print the story in 1996 or so, it was suggested by my publisher that I change the title to make it more “dramatic”.  So, I converted The Fringe into The Dark Fringe and to this day I believe J. J. Abrams and company at the very least were aware of my book (I say this for several reasons, the greatest of which is the season two episode Brown Betty.  While the plot of my book and the episode are quite different, the peculiars and visuals in Brown Betty sure look an awful lot like what I presented in my graphic novel). DarkFringe

My next big work was started shortly after I finished the early drafts of The Dark Fringe, circa 1985-86 and was entitled The Abyss.  In 1989, James Cameron’s The Abyss was release to theaters and my book’s title was deep sixed only to be resurrected years later as The Last Flight of the Argus.

As for my other books, they were originally titled as you see ’em today, so no stories there!