All posts by ERTorre

E. R. Torre is a writer/artist whose first major work, the mystery graphic novel The Dark Fringe, was optioned for motion picture production by Platinum Studios (Men In Black, Cowboys vs. Aliens). At DC Comics, his work appeared in role-playing game books and the 9-11 Tribute book. This later piece was eventually displayed, along with others from the 9-11 tribute books, at The Library of Congress. More recently he released Shadows at Dawn (a collection of short stories), Haze (a murder mystery novel with supernatural elements), and Cold Hemispheres (a mystery novel set in the world of The Dark Fringe). He is currently hard at work on his latest science fiction/suspense series, Corrosive Knights, which features the novels Mechanic, The Last Flight of the Argus, and Chameleon.
Movies

Fast & Furious 6 (2013) a (mildly) belated review

Until very recently, I was never a big fan of the Fast & Furious movies.  The first movie was essentially a car-centric remake of Point Break with the late Paul Walker in the Keanu Reeves role and Vin Diesel playing the Patrick Swayze part.

I think I saw one other Fast & Furious film from that point on, 2 Fast 2 Furious (didn’t think all that much of it) and pretty much skipped the others until catching Fast & Furious 5, the film that obviously preceded this one.

F&F 5 proved highly entertaining even if not pushing the limits of the believable.  The interactions between the characters and the element of “the heist” proved an interesting mix and I found the film very entertaining.  When Fast & Furious 6 came out last summer, I was eager to see it but, as with many films I hope to see, would have to wait for the video release.  In the meantime, the film did gangbusters at the box office and appeared to further solidify the series as a great action/adventure saga.

Would I find this sixth film as entertaining as the fifth?

Sadly, no.

Right off the bat, I know I’m swimming against the tide here (Rotten Tomatoes has the film scoring a genuinely impressive 70% positive among critics and an even more impressive -if not outright stunning– 84% positive among audiences), but F&F 6 left me cold.

I think a big part of the reason is because I enjoyed the fifth film as much as I did and was hoping the people working on this one would give us another pretty well written bit of entertainment.  In this case, though, the story is super sloppy with only one admittedly really creative element: The F&F group goes up against their dopplegangers, another group of racing hellions who are stealing high tech military equipment.

Unfortunately, that element is mentioned and ultimately never really dealt with to any great degree.  Like the heroes, the villain(s) of the piece are woefully underwritten, including one that is meant as a “surprise” yet whose revelation of such (I don’t want to get into spoilers) truly comes out of left field and makes not a lick of sense after what’s come before.  Anyway, the villains “look” like the F&F group and do F&F type crimes but that’s about as far as the similarities go.  Their target is a component of something that should have been called the “MacGuffin“, the last piece of a greater computer whole that does something really, really bad.  Truly, I can’t even recall what the heck the bad thing was.

The gang is brought back together by Federal Agent Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson looking really scary pumped up…seriously, I’m worried about him.  Being that muscular can’t be good for you, can it?) to take on this gang of mysterious and super-efficient thieves with one wrinkle already alluded to in the previous movie: The bad guys somehow have the character of Lefty (Michelle Rodriguez) in their group.  This is significant as Lefty, Dominic Toretto’s (Vin Diesel) girlfriend, was thought dead.

The mission, thus, has two goals: Stop the bad guys before they get the last component to their MacGuffin and get Lefty back to the fold.

What follows, naturally, is plenty of gravity defying stunts and action.  But the action sequences this time around veer into the truly absurd.  At one point Hobbs jumps out of a very fast moving car onto another that is at least two stories below him.  Hobbs does this successfully without so much as suffering one broken bone.

Later in the film, Toretto one-ups Hobbs by slamming his car against a bridge railing, flying at least a zillion feet through the air, catching someone else flying through the air in the other direction and smashing against a car which apparently amounts to falling into a bundle of extra-fluffy pillows.  The person Toretto saves asks him afterwards something to the effect of “How did you know that car would be there to break our fall”?

Imagine that…in this alternate F&F universe a metal and glass car can actually break your fall!

And don’t even get me started about the Runway-That-Never-Ends.

Some time ago a Hollywood figure (sadly, I don’t remember who) said that when making an action film which features considerable stunt work, one should go about 30% over what can be done in “real life”.  In other words, your stunts should amaze the audience yet make them think they could/might happen in real life.  With F&F 6, the “unbelievable” factor was pushed to 500% (Or, in Spinal Tap lingo, waaaay past 11) and that proved tough for me to swallow.

In the end, I found F&F 6 a disappointment because a) the script simply wasn’t as engaging as the fifth movie’s and b) the overblown stunts proved too difficult to swallow.

There was, of course, one other element that may well have affected the overall experience, and that was the presence of Paul Walker.

As everyone who is a fan of the films knows by now, Mr. Walker died in a tragic car accident recently (He was on break from filming this movie’s sequel, Fast & Furious 7).  I suspect seeing F&F 6 in theaters and before Mr. Walker’s death is probably a very different experience from seeing it after, which is of course how I saw it.

Those “unbelievable” stunts that bothered me so may well have been even more unbelievable when in the back of my mind I knew what happened to Mr. Walker.  Perhaps if I had seen the film before his tragic accident, my negative reaction might have been lessened.

We’ll never know.

But as it stands, F&F 6 proved a disappointment and, despite glowing reviews from others, I cannot recommend this film.  A pass.

General

22 Years Gone By…

…in the blink of an eye.

A husband and his wife decided to start taking a picture of themselves and then infant child starting in 1991 with the same photographer, lighting, and background.  They took a photograph of themselves from that year all the way through the present, amounting to 22 years worth of photography and (gulp) aging.

Fascinating stuff.  Check it out if you’re curious:

http://mom.me/toddler/10736-one-family-one-pose-22-years/item/1991/

General

Dude, where’s my pardon?

Fascinating article by Eric Stern for Salon.com relating to a question I had when Colorado eased up on their marijuana laws: What happens to all those who are in jail and/or are being prosecuted by incidents involving marijuana yet happened before this new eased regulations were instituted?

http://www.salon.com/2014/01/17/dude-wheres-my-pardon-colorados-marijuana-law-raises-serious-legal-conundrums/

In many ways I’m a real “square”.  Throughout my life I’ve hardly ever had alcohol (I have never been drunk and I don’t drink because I don’t like the taste of most alcoholic beverages), I don’t smoke (tried it for at most two days in high school before giving up), and have never taken any illegal drugs (though like many I certainly had the opportunities to do so, again in high school as well as college).  That last bit obviously includes the use of marijuana, which I haven’t so much as had single puff of.  In fact, during the years when I was exposed to its use via friends, I was very much against it though I don’t recall ever pontificating against its use (I could be wrong but throughout my life I was never much of a “strident” type).

Over the years I’ve come to the opinion that drug laws in this country are both too harsh and ineffective.  It is also my opinion our society is repeating the mistakes of Prohibition.  Drug laws, like the Prohibition laws of the 1920’s, have spawned a vast criminal underclass devoted to selling these illegal items, some of which are clearly more damaging than others.  The bottom line remains the same as it was during the Prohibition years: If people want to use an illegal substance, they WILL find a way.  Many may get caught while many others won’t, but the use will continue.

So now that marijuana, an illegal drug many consider no stronger and less damaging than alcohol, is essentially “allowed” in Colorado (there are fine lines in the new law, which are addressed in the article) while “medicinal marijuana” is looked upon more and more favorably in other states, a very legitimate question is raised: What happens with the people of Colorado who are in prison specifically for the use and/or distribution of marijuana?

Should they be immediately freed?  Should their records be wiped clean?  And what if this legalization seeps into other states?  What happened to all the others in prison for similar offenses?

Culturally, we’re in interesting times and the above article offers some food for thought.

TV

Helix (2014) a (mildly) belated TV pilot review

Whenever I look over movies, TV shows, books, or music, I try to give the people who created the work the benefit of the doubt.

This is a relatively new thing for me as I used to have very stringent standards for what I perceived as “good” works vs. those that were “bad”.  Perhaps its a sign of mellowing with age.  Perhaps its the realization that all works were created by people like me who certainly had no intention of making something “bad”.

In the books I write, the only deadline I have is my own.  I will not release any of my works until I’m satisfied they are about as good as I can get them.  And even then I know the works aren’t perfect.  A typo or two might have escaped me.  A passage might have worked better had I written it this way versus that way.

While I have the luxury of time and budget (as a novel writer, there is no budget!), others aren’t so lucky.  A project can be greenlighted and the people before and behind the scenes may have a very limited time and an equally limited budget to create their work as best as they can.  Long, loooong hours may be invested to make sure the project gets to the screen at a given time and sometimes compromises are made.  A work that looks like it “can’t miss” therefore comes out looking sloppy and not at all well thought out.

Which brings us to the SyFi network’s Helix.

Just before the show aired its pilot and first episode back to back last Friday, there were posts on the blogs that I frequent talking about how good the show was and how it would be a “must watch” in the future.  The show involved a group of Center for Disease Control (CDC) officers sent to a remote arctic base where a mysterious virus has been released.  The CDC officers are trying to find and contain the virus while dealing with the fact that the people behind the base are keeping secrets…and one of their own members may be in cahoots with the base’s brass.

Now, this description sounded OK to me.  Not great, I would admit right off the bat, but not all that bad.

But then I watched the two episodes.

Ouch.

While the show features decent actors and a decent “look”, the story presented veered from the dull to the absolutely preposterous.  The head of the CDC, Dr. Alan Farragut (Billy Campbell) is sent into this situation along with his estranged wife (Kyra Zagorsky) and have to deal with a survivor of this mysterious virus, his brother (Neil Napier) who happened to have slept with his wife!

Are these the people you want to send into a potentially Earth threatening hot zone?  Do we need this potential drama between professionals who should be focused on their jobs?!

But it gets worse.  There is a military officer liason and another CDC Doctor who break from the others and explore the facility essentially on their own.  They do not report back to their superior for what appeared to be two days or so despite quickly finding evidence that the head of the research facility was withholding information/lying to them about the research center.  I mean, come on, shouldn’t you tell the others that the head of the base might in fact be a bad guy?  Are you going to let your teammates stumble around a couple of days not knowing the man they’re dealing with may be about to make them victims?  Then again, the head of the research center was only missing a thin twirly mustache and the name “Dr. Evil” to fully cement his persona.  If the others didn’t realize he was holding back, perhaps it was their own damn fault.

No, I did not like the show at all.

One wonders how some of the talent involved in The X-Files, Lost, and the excellent Battlestar: Galactica reworking could also have had a hand in this show.

The answer is we’ll never really know…unless we were there.  Perhaps the writers were rushed.  Perhaps the directors and actors and crew didn’t have the time necessary to fully flesh out the characters and scripts before filming began.  It’s far better to think that than to think these two first episodes are exactly what their makers were hoping to create.

Needless to say, a pass.

Movies

Elysium (2013) a (mildly) belated review

Following the surprise success of the 2009 Neill Blomkamp directed, Sharlto Copley starring District 9, fans were eager for a follow up.

When it was announced this film would be Elysium and it would star Hollywood A-listers Matt Damon and Jodie Foster along with the returning Mr. Copley and feature a sci-fi premise, anticipation was sky-high.

Was it too high?

To some, the answer would prove to be a resounding “Yes”.  Many fans of Mr. Blomkamp’s District 9 found his follow up lacking, bemoaning problems with the story and, in the case of Jodie Foster, her choice of line delivery.  There was even one critic who listed Elysium among his “worst of the year” films.

As many others, I was curious to see the film.  I liked District 9, though perhaps without the feverish love others had for it.  The commercials for Elysium certainly looked intriguing, with Matt Damon hardwired with an exoskeleton and looking like he could kick some serious ass…

Not bad, I thought.  Not bad at all.

As has become depressingly usual for me, I simply didn’t have the time to catch the film in theaters and had to wait for the home video release to give it a look.  I have.  Did the film deliver or was it the disappointment others felt it was?

The answer to both questions, curiously enough, is “yes”.  The film delivered some really good scenes but I have to agree with others that it was, in the end, a bit of a disappointment…though not quite worthy of being included on any “worst of the year” type lists.

The story goes like this: Worker drone Max (Matt Damon) lives on the squalid Earth while orbiting the planet is the Elysium satellite, the place the rich folks live.  Right away, we’re back in Mr. Blomkamp’s (who also is credited with the screenplay) District 9-like world of the haves and the have-nots.

Max bumps into a childhood friend of his, Frey (Alice Braga), before an accident at his plant irradiates him and leaves him with only five days to live.  Max realizes his only hope for survival lies in somehow getting off Earth and to Elysium, where they have medical beds capable of curing him of his illness.

But getting to Elysium is not an easy task.  A local smuggler agrees to get him on a ship to Elysium provided he steals the memories of a high level industrialist, who coincidentally is Max’s boss at his factory and coldly witnessed Max’s grim medical analysis following his radiation poisoning.  It turns out the industrialist, however, is in cahoots with Delacourt (Jodie Foster) the Secretary of Defense of Elysium, in trying to overthrow the power structure of the satellite.  In his head was a program designed to do just that.

Thus when Max uploads the industrialist’s data into his head, he is suddenly on the run from a fearsome assassin Kruger (Sharlto Copley) while trying to get to Elysium.  He must also deal with the fact that his childhood friend Frey has a young daughter who is dying of leukemia.  Will Max ultimately help Frey’s daughter or will he selfishly try to save himself?

I suspect you already know the answer to this.

Plain and simply, Elysium is a terrific looking movie that features a script that needed some more work.  The cast, for the most part, is certainly game (even Ms. Foster…I’ll get into her performance in a second) and as a director Mr. Blomkamp delivers some very exciting action sequences.  But unlike District 9’s more subtle treatment of the haves vs. the have nots dynamic, Elysium gives it to us with the subtlety of a sledge hammer.  The haves are uncaring in their heaven in the sky while the poor folks live in the dirt and dream of escaping their uncaring hell.

I have to agree with the critics that Jodie Foster delivered an almost bizarre performance/line reading.  It was a curious choice, to be sure.  However, like the other actors in the movie, Ms. Foster didn’t seem to be “slumming” (no pun intended) it.  Her choice of line delivery might not have worked, but she certainly appeared game.  Also, her role was no more than an extended cameo, amounting to not much more than five to ten minutes of total screen time.  Blaming her for the film’s problems is therefore at best misplaced.

Once again I return to the script and its flaws.  In Elysium we have a broad story involving our Earth and an incredibly large satellite for the rich…of which we know almost nothing other than the fact that it is as beautiful as the Earth is grim.  We have a massive satellite that has rivers, mountains, seas and beautiful buildings and a large population…yet somehow does not have any sort of defensive system?

Really?

Why exactly do they have a Secretary of Defense if the satellite has no apparent defensive capability…at least until the “illegals” actual land there?  Add to the fact the too-coincidental meeting between Max and Frey and the daughter that should be called “Plot Point/Hero’s Angst”, the Industrialist who happens to be working on “rebooting” Elysium just as his mind is stolen, Max’s convenient radiation poisoning (which makes him barely able to walk yet when he gets the exo-skeleton he no longer appears to be affected by it much at all) and you begin to feel the film is just a little too manipulative and/or not as well thought out as it should be.

Nonetheless, Elysium is far from a bust.  It is one of those films that are at best “decent” yet could -indeed should– have been far better than it was.  Perhaps that is why it proved to be so frustrating to people.  Had Elysium been made with a no-name cast and featured a no-name director not coming off a smash success, fans might have been a little more tolerant of the finished product.

Regardless and as it stands, Elysium is at best a mild-recommendation for me.  Others might want to skip it.

General

The End of Mass Production

The following article, from Newsweek, is about Airbnb, an upstart (small) Hotel company that is going after the “big boys”.  Although this may sound like something only those in the Hotel business may find interesting, the article touches upon something that has intrigued me for several years now: the evolution of businesses in the age of the internet.

Read the article and you’ll see what I mean:

http://www.newsweek.com/end-mass-production-225700

If you’re not interested in reading the whole thing and/or too lazy to click the link, let me offer you this quote which neatly summarizes what the article has to say about the current business world:

Information technology is eroding the power of large-scale mass production. We’re instead moving toward a world of massive numbers of small producers offering unique stuff – and of consumers who reject mass-produced stuff. The Internet, software, 3D printing, social networks, cloud computing and other technologies are making this economically feasible – in fact, desirable.

Let me repeat one small part of this great paragraph: Massive numbers of small producers offering unique stuff.

I see this today in Amazon whenever I check out my books, for am I not very much a part of this very game?  I’m one small independent writer out there offering my wares (books) to everyone out there.  At this point there is no major publishing company distributing my works.

Back when I first got into the publishing business in the 1990’s, being an “independent” publisher involved considerable investment and therefore potentially big loss.  Why?  Because the only way to publish works was to actually publish them at certain minimal quantity levels and on actual paper.  If you were publishing “Book X”, you could list it in the trades and pay good money for a full page add.  Eventually you’d get your order and you hoped it would be a sufficient quantity to pay for the publishing costs and still make you a little bit of money.

If the orders were too low, however, you could do one of two things: a) cut your losses (both in terms of money and time) and cancel the book or b) go ahead and publish it at a loss and hope that over time you can recoup your publishing costs and sell whatever material you were forced to over-produce.

This changed radically with the advent of the various tablets.  Now, you can “publish” works that can be read on your computer and tablet via Kindle or Nook or any other e-reader.  There are now “print to demand” companies that do just that, print your book in the numbers you need them printed without any minimal orders.

But even more importantly, the internet has given regular folks the ability to review the works of others.  Moving away from books for the moment, we as consumers can comfortably go to a McDonalds restaurant in all corners of the United Stated to get a meal and we know what we’re going to get.  Yet we may avoid the small, independent (and mythical) Billy’s Burger Joint right next door to a McDonalds for the opposite reason: We don’t know what we’re going to get.  The food may well be far fresher and tastier than that found at McDonalds yet as consumers we may shy away from this place because we simply don’t know if that will be the case.

In the book world, you may avoid a book authored by one E. R. Torre because you haven’t the foggiest idea of whether this fellow has any talent whatsoever (if you should even stumble upon him!) and time is money and you have neither available in healthy enough quantities to devote to this “newbie”.  Yet you buy novels by, say, Big Author X because s/he has a track record of sales and past successes which make you as a consumer more likely to try his/her latest novel out.

This in spite of the fact that you may not have enjoyed any of this author’s books in many years.

The wonderful thing is that the internet is in the process of changing all this.

Now, if you see Billy’s Burger Joint and are not in the mood for a Big Mac, you pull up your smart phone or any other internet device and see what others say about Billy’s Burger Joint.  If the reviews are good, you feel more comfortable in giving the place a try.

The same may well benefit someone like me..  I’ve been blessed with mostly good reviews for my books and I suspect that makes it easier for others who are not familiar with the works of E. R. Torre to give them a try.  While sales of my books certainly are not on the level of, say, a Stephen King I can’t help but feel each positive reviews has to encourage potential buyers.  And the reviews have the bonus effect of encouraging me to keep writing and releasing new works!

Perhaps the end of “mass production” is the future of not just the food, lodging, and writing industries but of all fields.

We will certainly see!

Movies

This is…amusing (NSFW!)

Seems The Wolf of Wall Street, the latest Martin Scorsese/Leonardo DiCaprio film has become know less for how good/bad it is/may be and more for the extreme amount of profanity uttered throughout.

How much profanity, exactly?

Glad you asked.  Take a look:

http://www.vulture.com/2014/01/wolf-of-wall-street-counting-all-the-curse-words.html

If you’re too lazy to click a link, here’s perhaps the most comprehensive chart found within the above article:

Number of times every curse word is said in The Wolf of Wall Street

Yikes!

You mean “fucksville” only got used four times?  And that’s like my favorite expression!

Seriously, though, check out the website.  They present plenty of other humorous charts noting the *ahem* flowery dialogue to be found in this film.

TV

Justified, Season 5

One of my favorite current TV shows is Justified.  Entering its fifth season this week and based on a short story by the late Elmore Leonard, the show stars Timothy Olyphant as Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens.  Justified often delivers a healthy dose violence -and death- along with an equally healthy dose of hilarity, a mix that when it works, it works incredibly well.  The writing on the show is often razor sharp and a great cast surrounds the taciturn Marshal, who at times walks through the scenery as if he’s a mellow Grim Reaper.

Having said that, this generally negative review by Willa Paskin of the fifth season’s first two episodes had me worried:

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/television/2014/01/justified-season-5-review-timothy-olyphant-s-pants-look-great.html

A while back I noted a link to a story involving TV shows that had gone on “too long”.  I ended the blog entry with examples of TV shows that I felt ended “right on time”, where you could see that the cast/crew/writers/directors/etc. were perhaps starting to lose interest and were beginning to release substandard episodes just before the shows were cancelled (you can read all that here).

One thing I realized belatedly when I wrote that entry was that many of the shows I felt went on “too long” -and those that ended “right on time”- seemed to fall apart around their fourth or fifth season.  There seems to be something make or break -more often break– about a show reaching that magical time.  As much as I adored The Simpsons, I grew bored of it around its fifth season and never bothered to watch it again.  Two of the shows I listed as having ended “right on time” were the original Star Trek series (cancelled after three seasons) and The Wild Wild West (cancelled after four seasons).  Thinking about it some more, Torchwood was another series that flopped toward the end, when it reached what was effectively its fifth (or would it be considered fourth?) season long story episodes.

That’s not to say that there are exceptions to this rule (Doctor Who) and, I would hastily note I’m speaking for myself here, but it is curious how I tend to reach my fill with series after a while.

So after reading the review I sat down and, with great trepidation, watched the fifth season premiere of Justified.

Was the negative review…justified?

I can only give a very ambivalent answer here: Yes and no.

The episode was certainly watchable, but the body count in that first hour (I have yet to see the second episode which the reviewer has) was beyond ridiculous.  There were somewhere in the neighborhood of ten people killed within that one hour of time (I actually lost track!) and I couldn’t help but think the writers simply wanted to shock us with all that violence.

However, for a kickstarter for a season, the story itself was surprisingly…small.  Not a whole lot happened here from a story standpoint, certainly not enough to clue you in on where this season will go.  Other seasons have grabbed you by the throat and not let go until the end.  This episode felt almost like filler/backstory despite the incredibly high body count.

In the end, I have to agree with Ms. Paskin’s review.  While still quite watchable, I hope this episode isn’t a sign of things to come but an anomaly, a “let’s catch the viewers up” type of deal meant for newbies more than those who have been around the previous four seasons.

I still have a great deal of interest in Justified and sincerely hope it once again reaches the levels it has in the past.  But this opening episode didn’t do all that much for me.