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

Hellboy (2019) a (Mildly) Belated Review

The latest iteration of Hellboy, featuring director Neil Marshall taking over for Guillermo Del Toro (who I suspect at this point does whatever film he wants to do) and David Harbour taking over for Ron Perlman in the lead role, had me interested in its first few minutes.

Understand, I’m a pretty big fan of the Mike Mignola Hellboy comics. Further, I felt once Harbour showed up as Hellboy he did a pretty good job with the character, though I would note rather quickly that he seemed to be following in Perlman’s footsteps.

Still, he was pretty good.

But then…

I’ll get to the movie in a moment but first, here’s the Red Band trailer for Hellboy…

Anyway, we start in the past, with witches being put down, including the head witch Nimue, the Blood Queen (Milla Jovovich). Then we’re up to the “present” and introduced to Hellboy, who is in Mexico seeking out a fellow agent in the B.P.R.D. (Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, the organization that goes after evil creatures and which Hellboy belongs to, at least in the early going of the comic books). He finds the agent in a “lucha” ring, ie a wrestling arena, and all hell breaks loose.

So far, so good.

…but then…

Two words: Information dump.

In many ways this new Hellboy feature reminded me of Ryan Reynold’s favorite movie role punching bag: the 2011 film Green Lantern.

How so?

Well, because both films were overfilled with references to so many different characters and stories and individual comic books that it became something of a mess.

Both Green Lantern and Hellboy were betrayed by scripts that couldn’t focus and hit us with so much …stuff… that after a while one begs for simplicity and clarity and focus, which are simply not to be found.

As I mentioned, we have the Blood Queen. We then go to the Mexican luchador sequence (and vampires), then we side step to the Wild Hunt, then Baba Yaga and her bizarre house, then… ugh.

I mean, I could understand many of the references because I’m familiar with the books they’re based on, but could you imagine a James Bond film gets released and it features Bond first going up against Dr. No, then Blofeld, then Pussy Galore shows up, then Bond finds the love of his life and marries her only to have her killed, then he goes up into space to thwart a megalomaniac trying to poison humanity and comes down to a Voodoo plantation to deal with drug runners and in the meantime avoids an assassin with a Golden Gun…

I mean, if you’re a James Bond fan you know what I’m referencing, but if all those elements were pushed together in one film, the ultimate results would have been an overload and that’s what’s happened here.

I suppose one also has to acknowledge the fact that there are many -myself not included, alas, and you can read more about that below- who love the two Guillermo Del Toro directed Hellboy films and had a tough time with him leaving that franchise.

Add to that some strange/wild behind the scenes stories regarding director Neil Marshall (you can read about that here and here), and even some pointed statements by David Harbour about the film’s reception and production (there are rumors he didn’t get along with director Neil Marshall and the film had some 16 producers through its making and further rumors are that they did not agree often. You can read about that here) and you have issues.

It just seemed like too many things were going against the work to begin with. Too much ambition in showing all these interesting comic book elements when they didn’t need to. Too many “cooks in the kitchen”, so to speak, and a script that needed paring down rather than being so overstuffed.

Yet the film looks pretty sharp, I must say, and the action is good. Still, the film winds up being like Green Lantern, an overstuffed work that ultimately just isn’t all that good.

POSTSCRIPT: Regarding the two Guillermo Del Toro Hellboy films: I can’t say I’m a huge fan of those two films either, though I would say of the three Hellboy features, they are better than the most recent.

While they both looked terrific and boasted incredible special effects, the first film felt a little underwhelming to me, fizzling toward its end. The second, I felt, was like this new Hellboy in that there was too much going on and it felt like there were climaxes after climaxes to the point where I was exhausted.

All this, of course, is IMHO!

General

First Appearance of Covid-19 in US… December of 2019?

Over at The Wall Street Journal, Betsy McKay offers this intriguing article:

Covid-19 Likely in U.S. in Mid-December 2019, CDC Scientists Report

The bottom line of the article is that examination of blood samples collected from December of 2019 show that the virus was already in the U.S. a few weeks before China identified the disease and about a month before the first “official” case was found in our country.

Way, way back in late March of 2020, when the lockdowns were first starting and everyone was shutting down, I wrote about how I thought maybe I, and several people around me, might have contracted the Coronavirus in early/mid January and into early February. (You can read my entry about that here)

Mind you, there was no thought at that time the Covid-19 was in the U.S., yet as I noted in my post above, our family business was very busy at the time and we were in contact with people from quite literally all over the world. There was also a little thing called the Super Bowl which happened on February 2nd in Miami, and which caused our area to fill up with many people… also from all parts of the world.

So back then, my father and several people we knew around us got quite sick and the illness lasted a long time, some two weeks or more, before they kicked it out of their systems. In later January and into early February I too caught something and I wasn’t sure what. I had my flu shots in October of 2019 and it seemed unlikely I caught the flu.

However, I caught something. I felt incredibly weak/exhausted at the end of workdays and, especially, work weeks. I literally felt I needed to collapse in bed and rest.

Luckily, my wife didn’t catch it and, eventually, whatever I had left my system.

Afterwards, I couldn’t help but think maybe those around me and I caught the Coronavirus in the very early -and for many unknown- days of its spread. Given the Wall Street Journal article, it certainly is possible.

It’s scary to think we may have had a potentially fatal disease at a time when no one thought it was spreading in the U.S. and, had any of us gotten really sick, in those very early days of the virus treatment would have been far from well thought out.

If indeed it was COVID-19 we had, we were lucky and made it through. Happily, everyone who caught whatever it was is back to normal.

Still, the idea the people around me and I could have been exposed to Coronavirus before it became known is a chilling thought indeed.

Movies

The Hunt (2019), a (Mildly) Belated Review

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Back in 2019 the movie The Hunt was scheduled to be released but, after mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, Universal Studios decided to pause the release of the film (you can read about that here).

Before that happened, I wrote about the film and its original trailer, which I felt gave away pretty much the total story of the film (you can read the original article here, but beware that some of the embedded material, including that original trailer, were taken down).

If you go to that original article, I go into what this movie obviously is: Another riff on what I think may be the most adapted story of all time, Richard Connell’s 1924 short story The Most Dangerous Game.

The story involved a shipwreck victim who washes up on an island only to realize the man who lives there has a peculiar habit: He likes to hunt human prey.

The story was first adapted into a movie with the same name in 1932 and since then I can’t count the times either movies or TV shows or books offer a similar story with that common theme: The idea that someone has decided to hunt humans.

Anyway, after a fashion The Hunt was finally released in March of 2020. This is one of the main trailers used for the film when it was finally released:

Earlier this morning I managed to finish the film off and… man, there is so much to like about it.

I loved Betty Gilpin as Crystal and Hilary Swank, in what amounts to a cameo, was wonderful as the hissable villain. The direction is crisp, the action presented bloody in a grindhouse way. And the concept, while once again owing to Richard Connell’s original story, manages for the most part to present an exciting variation of the well used hunter-hunting-humans concept.

Unfortunately…

The makers of the film, specifically screenwriters Damon Lindelof and Nick Cuse, decided to add another element to the story. They decided to satire current right/left wing politics, presenting the “hunters” as stereotypical liberals and the hunted as stereotypical conservatives. I’m sure “on paper” it sounded like a clever idea, but for me that concept played out really quickly and soon became alternately off-putting and obvious while never quite being as humorous as I suspect they thought it was.

So we have scenes where the hunters talk about global warming or speak about racism while figuring out the proper way to call an African American and do this while gleefully murdering their “conservative” prey who we find slaughter endangered animals or have conspiracy podcasts… and it’s just not all that amusing.

John Carpenter in a few of his films takes on societal satire but manages to do so in a far more effective ways (check out Escape From New York or They Live). Here, I wished the film focused more on its main plot and, especially, Crystal and her fight for survival and not hit us over the head with so many too-obvious “jokes” about liberal or conservative silliness.

If the film had decided to accept and accentuate its Grindhouse elements more while toning down and/or eschewing the obvious -and after a while increasingly silly- political commentaries and not gotten so into the weeds about why the hunt existed (it is explained and, frankly, it was yet another dumb political element, IMHO), the film would have been much more successful.

As it is, if you are in the mood for some bloody fun and can ignore the annoyance of the “satire” that plays out much quicker than the writers thought, then you may find enough to enjoy in this film.

Movies

Alita: Battle Angel (2019), A (Mildly) Belated Review

Alita: Battle Angel, released last year and produced by James Cameron and directed by Robert Rodriguez, was one of those films I was curious about seeing but never quite had a chance to catch during its theatrical run.

Not that I was a fan of the original -and much loved!- Yukito Kishiro Manga comics it was based on, but rather because the trailers looked pretty interesting. Interestingly, I have the Manga books but until after seeing the film, I hadn’t read them (another of those things I’ve bought but were sitting around waiting for me to find time for them).

Anyway, here’s one of the movie’s trailers:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=jym-bOKG8NU

I managed to DVR the film when it played on a cable channel and eventually watched it in pieces over the course of three or four days. The film is fairly long, clocking in at 2 hours and 2 minutes and I wonder if maybe I’d sat through the whole thing at one time I might have had a somewhat lesser opinion of it.

I say this because an awful lot occurs in the course of the film and, while it is magnificent to look at, sometimes the plot seems to move in fits and starts and meander. If I had sat through the whole thing at one time, I might have been annoyed by this but, having seen it in pieces, I was more forgiving.

After watching the film I started reading the Manga comics. The original Alita Manga comic book series is collected in a 9 volume series and, it turns out, this movie covers events roughly through the first 3 volumes of those books. Had they followed this pattern, perhaps Cameron and Rodriguez imagined making three Alita films, the two remaining ones intended to cover the final 6 volumes of story originally presented in comic book form.

The movie version of Alita is quite faithful to the comics, though the events are presented in a more overlapping order. Certain things are changed as well, but at least in my opinion the movie was quite faithful to the original comic.

Thing is, “as is” the story is incomplete and ends on something of a “to be continued” note. Sure, we are given a fairly complete tale here, but there is no final resolution and I don’t know if we’ll ever get it. While the film did well cumulatively worldwide, I don’t know if it made enough to justify a sequel. Further, at this moment and while looking over the IMDb listings for both James Cameron and Robert Rodriguez, neither has an Alita sequel listed among their upcoming projects.

So, unfortunately, Alita: Battle Angel may wind up being a stand alone film that doesn’t feature any ultimate resolution. That alone may want some people to stay away from it, and its too bad.

Alita: Battle Angel features Rosa Salazar as the android known as Alita. She is found in a heap of trash discarded from a mysterious floating city by Dr. Ido (Christopher Waltz). He creates a body for her and she explores the city they live in, falls in love, and comes to realize she may be the last of a line of powerful warrior androids.

It’s interesting enough, though I feel like many of the story beats have been used and reused so much that it doesn’t feel quite as fresh as I’m sure it did when the original Manga comics were released.

Still, the film is enjoyable if a little overlong. I also feel like it could have been tightened up a little more. Jennifer Connelly, for example, has a role in the film which, truthfully, could have been cut completely (I have yet to read the full 9 volumes of the Manga, but at least through the first three there is no character equivalent to her to be found in there).

There are other actors who appear here and there for what amounts to one scene and of course they were likely intended to be used in sequel films.

So… yay or nay?

I recommend the film. It’s a visual delight for sure, though the story could have been tightened up a little and there is the possibility we’ll not see the sequels that will complete the story.

Still, if you’re in the mood for a good adaptation of a beloved Manga comic, this one is worthy of your time.

Movies

Kiss Me Deadly (1955) a (Darkly) Belated Review

The other day I reviewed the film Sweetheart (2019) (you can read it here). I liked the film, but concluded:

(Sweatheart’s) a very good film, but not quite a great one.

There are many, many films that can be summed up like that. Films you enjoy, even recommend, that you nonetheless feel don’t quite go that extra mile, don’t have the extra “juice”, to make them an extraordinary feature.

That’s not the case with the film I’m reviewing here. The Robert Aldrich directed Kiss Me Deadly is an extraordinary feature, one that I would easily recommend to any fans of film noir or detectives or mystery.

Loosely based on the Mickey Spillane Mike Hammer novel of the same name, this movie, in my humble opinion, is a total home run, a searing, sleazy detective movie that presents an incredible story and an even more incredible conclusion, which I will get to in a moment.

The story: A lone woman runs desperately alongside a deserted highway at night, out of breath and clearly frightened. She sees a car’s lights in the distance and steps into the middle of the road, causing the car’s driver, Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker, in what is perhaps his all time best role), to hit the brakes and nearly crash while avoiding her.

Mike Hammer is pissed off. He drives a gaudy car, wears elegant clothing, but is a sleazy P.I. whose specialty is divorce cases. He uses his secretary, Velda to seduce those he is working against -and get incriminating information on them- and actor Maxine Cooper is another standout as the movie’s conscience, despite the sleazy things she does for her boss.

Before we get to her, Hammer reluctantly aids the stranded and terrified woman (played by Cloris Leachman in her screen debut) only to then have the two attacked and the woman tortured and murdered.

Hammer, not one for sentiment, realizes whatever the murder victim was involved in was big, and he intends to cash in on whatever it was.

Through the course of the movie, Hammer confronts many unsavory characters and has to deal with the law in the form of Lt. Pat Murphy (Wesley Addy, another standout).

When Lt. Murphy tells Hammer he’s in “over his head”, it may be a cliche line, but boy oh boy is it accurate.

I don’t want to get into too much more, but suffice it to say that Kiss Me Deadly is a must see, a film that in my opinion deserves its place among the very best film noir classics.

Oh, and if you recall the “glowing suitcase” from the Quentin Tarantino film Pulp Fiction and wondered what inspired that scene, look no further than Kiss Me Deadly.

Highly recommended.

Here’s my humble take on the film, which I originally presented here…

Now then…

SPOILERS!!!!

PLEASE DON’T CONTINUE IF YOU PLAN TO SEE THE FILM!

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

So, as I said above, I wanted to talk a little about the end of the film, which I feel may be one of the most incredible movie endings ever made.

Here’s the thing, though: Which ending are we talking about?

Years ago, when the best quality home video you could buy was in the form of laserdiscs, I picked up a copy of Kiss Me Deadly on laserdisc.

I don’t believe I had seen the film before picking up the laserdisc, only that I knew the film was a cult classic (it wasn’t quite as well known as it is today, and this was before -I think!- Pulp Fiction’s reference to it which I mentioned above).

Anyway, the film was essentially intact except for the movie’s very ending.

Again, I’m going to get into SPOILERS here, so please think hard about continuing if you don’t want to be SPOILED about the film’s ending!

Kiss Me Deadly’s climax involves Mike Hammer returning to the bad guy’s ocean front home. There, he confronts Gabrielle (Gaby Rodgers, another standout performance as the “pixie femme fatale from hell”).

Hammer has finally realized he is indeed “over his head” in this, and all he wants is to save his secretary Velda, who has been kidnapped by the badguys.

Gabrielle shoots Hammer and then, her curiosity overwhelming, opens up the mysterious case everyone has been after. It contains radioactive material, and by opening it she is set afire.

Hammer, though shot, manages to get up and stumbles in the corridor outside the room where Gabrielle burns. He finds Velda and they head to the stairs at the end of the corridor leading out of the house…

…only to cut to the beach house which blows up, taking with it both Hammer and Velda.

An abrupt, but I felt incredible and daring way to end this whole sleazy affair, with Hammer and his beloved Velda victims of Hammer’s hubris.

Only…

…that’s not the ending that Robert Aldrich made. Check out this trailer, which was also included in that laserdisc I purchased:

Note that at the 2:00 mark of the trailer we are presented with the exploding house and another curious thing: Mike Hammer and Velda huddled together in the beach surf watching the house explode!

Strangely, at one point the ending of Kiss Me Deadly -but nothing else- was shortened and for many years people saw the film with the abbreviated ending of Hammer and Velda still in the house when it explodes.

Robert Aldrich, before he passed away in 1983, was asked about the movie’s ending and noted he had filmed Hammer and Velda stumbling out of the house, making their way through the sand and into the water, and watching the house go up in smoke from there and that this version was the version that he created and which was the “proper” version.

In fact, as interest in the film grew, a copy of the film was found in Mr. Aldrich’s vaults and it had that extended ending and today that is the ending you will find on video releases and I for one feel it works as well as the more abrupt version.

Either way, the extended version showing that Hammer and Velda didn’t immediately die in the explosion isn’t all that much more pleasant an ending because the explosion which takes out the beach home is a nuclear one. Sure, Hammer and Velda are still alive and watching the beach house go up in smoke but given the cause of this explosion they, and probably quite a bit of the west coast, are nonetheless doomed.

As I said before, incredible stuff.

Movies

Sweetheart (2019) a (Mildly) Belated Review

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Sweetheart, released last year to home video to extremely good reviews from critics (95% positive by critics at Rottentomatoes!) versus a much cooler reception by audiences (52%, Rottentomatoes again), came on my radar around the time it was originally released and I’ve been curious to see it since. Here’s the movie’s trailer:

The movie is quite simple: Jenn (Kiersey Clemons, quite good) awakens on a beautiful island shore. She wears a life vest and realizes nearby is Brad (Benedict Samuel), a fellow castaway. He’s in bad shape, though. At some point his body slammed into coral and he’s got a piece of the jagged material sticking out of his stomach.

Soon, Brad dies (this all happens within the first few minutes of the film, so rest easy, I’m not spoiling much), and Jenn is left alone on the island.

She explores and assesses her situation and, come night, realizes the island is the hunting grounds for a fierce monster.

Will Jenn survive?

After seeing Sweetheart, I was curious to read some reviews and one of the more astute ones note the film is like a cross between Predator and Castaway.

Not a bad comparison, but the film’s DNA lies more distant than that, all the way to creature feature movies like the original Thing From Another World and The Creature From The Black Lagoon.

The movie is pretty bare bones, but I say this in a good way. There is very little fat and the plot moves forward. When all is said and done -and without spoiling too much- we have a total of four “speaking” roles but it is Jenn who takes up the majority of the screen time and she does make for an engaging hero, even if she may not be quite as resourceful and gutsy as Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley from the Alien films.

However, once all was said and done I felt there were a couple of head-scratching moments in the film that bear scrutiny. I’ll get to them in a moment as they do relate to SPOILERS.

So… thumbs up or down?

I recommend the film but bear in mind along with the fact that this is a pretty straightforward film it also does not reinvent the wheel. It’s well done, at times very suspenseful and the main protagonist is engaging and worth rooting for but Sweetheart is not a terribly original or searing presentation.

It’s a very good film, but not quite a great one.

Now then…

SPOILERS!

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!!!

Still there?

Hope you know what you’re doing…

Anyway, there were two things presented in Sweetheart -three if we count the movie’s title, which is explained in the course of the film but… come on! They could have come up with something more interesting, no?!- that bugged me.

The first one occurs when Jenn is attacked by the creature. She sustains a gash in her leg but that wound, magically, seems to disappear immediately afterwards and through to the end of the film. An odd thing, a very odd thing, to have happen in a film that seems to be otherwise very well thought out.

It makes me wonder if maybe they re-arranged certain scenes and her injury originally happened later in the story -like toward the very end- but was moved to earlier to create some sense of tension.

The second thing involves even more SPOILERS so, again, if you don’t want to be SPOILED…

All right then…

Through the course of the film Jenn encounters others who were in the ship she was in. Not many, granted, but she arrives with one survivor who dies quickly. She later finds the half-eaten body of another and then toward the later half of the film she sees a lifeboat and swims to it. She finds two people, a man and a woman, who have also survived the wreck.

Once they make it to shore, we realize they know each other. The man, Lucas (Emory Cohen), is her boyfriend and calls her “Sweetheart” (hence the movie’s title). Their relationship, we infer, was on the rocks even before the ship expedition. Both Brad and the woman, Mia (Hanna Mangan Lawrence), are elated to have reached shore but, understandably, have a hard time believing Jenn when she tells them a monster stalks the island.

This eventually leads to a confrontation between the two against Jenn, but before that Jenn borrows Lucas’ knife and notices blood on it.

Later on, when Jenn gets into the lifeboat, she notices bloodstains in it.

There is a clear implication that Lucas and Mia killed someone with that knife and did so in the lifeboat. My best guess is they killed the half-eaten man Jenn found before Lucas and Mia showed up.

It’s an interesting element, that Jenn may not only have to worry about the creature but also Lucas and Mia maybe being killers, but that element is shown -both with the blood stained knife and the blood within the lifeboat!- but absolutely nothing more is made of it.

As with Jenn’s wound, I wonder if maybe either they filmed more regarding this and ultimately discarded it or they had it in the script, filmed it, but decided to not bother with any further explanations.

For a film that is so razor sharp, though, its weird to have this dangling and ultimately unresolved plot element.

Weird stuff.

Music

Re Imaginos (2020) a (Almost Right On Time!) Review

As I noted a while back (you can read it here) I was very interested in two “new” music releases on November 6th, David Bowie’s Metrobolist (I reviewed it here) and Albert Bouchard’s Re Imaginos.

I’ve already gone into the history of this later album, but I’ll nonetheless offer this brief recap: In the early 1980’s, the band Blue Oyster Cult, perhaps most famous nowadays for the song Don’t Fear the Reaper and its “cowbell”, were on the verge of breaking up.

Albert Bouchard, the band’s drummer (and the man responsible for the actual cowbell in Don’t Fear the Reaper!) at that time in the early-mid 1980’s took many songs throughout BOC’s history and created a demo for a concept album he called Imaginos.

Here’s that demo:

The album was shopped around to various companies but no one was interested in releasing it. A few years later, however, the album was reworked with the other members of the band -minus Albert Bouchard himself- as well as several session musicians and the album Imaginos, credited to BOC and not Albert Bouchard, was released in 1988…

imaginos LP - Amazon.com Music

Though I have no inside information on how the album came about, the fact that Albert Bouchard was not involved in a project he demoed suggested that maybe there was some bad feelings between the band and the drummer.

Many, many years passed and, this year, BOC released a new album and, lo and behold, in their first music video, who should pop up in it -and jokingly hitting a cowbell!- but Albert Bouchard?! (He first appears at the 1:07 mark)

Shortly afterwards, I heard that Albert Bouchard was releasing Re Imaginos, his version of the demo featured above…

Albert Bouchard - Re Imaginos CD – Merchbucket.com

My best guess is that whatever problems/anger they had between each other was resolved and, while Albert Bouchard hasn’t re-joined the band, his album was released.

So, what did I think about it?

I like the album but my main gripe remains: Albert Bouchard, to my ears, isn’t as good a singer as BOC’s Eric Bloom and Donald “Buck Dharma” Roeser. His voice isn’t bad, mind you, and in several songs the elderly/weary singing works very well, but in others it doesn’t do quite as well.

Just as an example, we now have three versions of what I consider the very best song BOC made, Astronomy. The original version was sung by Eric Bloom and is found on the 1974 BOC album Secret Treaties…

Then there’s this version of the song, from 1988’s Imaginos, and sung by Donald “Buck Dharma” Roeser…

Finally, this is Albert Bouchard’s version of the song from Re Imaginos (you can fast forward to the original demo version of the song above).

There are things I love in all three versions of the song but, if I’m being totally honest, I feel like the lesser version is Albert Bouchard’s from Re Imaginos. To be clear: I’m not saying its a terrible version of the song, but that the other versions for me are better.

That’s not to say, however, that all Bouchard’s versions of the songs are less than those which were released before!

This does bring me to the following: Nowadays, with so many music services available out there, you can cobble together a playlist of the various songs on Imaginos/Re Imaginos, making alternate “albums” which can feature classic BOC versions exclusively or a mix and match versions which features the original songs, songs from Imaginos, and songs from Re Imaginos.

If you’re interested in doing so!

As is, though, I recommend Re Imaginos to those who like the original demo and were curious to hear what Albert Bouchard originally intended with the Imaginos demo.

Interesting stuff!

POSTSCRIPT:

For the heck of it, here’s Metallica’s cover of Astronomy. It includes the lyrics!

General

Coronavirus Diaries 23

Another “lost” weekend, I suppose, of doing not all that much and hanging around the house.

We did go out to do some shopping, but that’s quick and done and over with well before noon. As always, we take great precautions, wearing masks and keeping our distance from others though, because of the early hour we go out, we generally don’t see too many others around us.

In the news, “President” Trump seems determined to ignore reality and the fact that he’s lost the election. I wonder -and that’s all I can do- if this might be related to other things, like a fear that once President-elect Biden’s people start looking in on what Trump has left them and/or done (but managed to hide from the public) during his four years might not just bite him, hard.

I wonder if maybe there’s a great effort going on by those in the Trump cabinet to clean up whatever they can, any sort of potentially uncomfortable or incriminating memos or emails, and that may be in part why Trump doesn’t want Biden’s team in.

I could be waaaaay off here, I admit, and the fact that Trump loathes being called a “loser” may have just as much to do with this as anything else.

Regardless, as many have expected, Trump seems determined to mess as much things up as he cans on his way out the door.

Over the weekend a bunch of Trumpistas showed up to march on Washington, stating they would have their own version of the “one million man” march but coming up rather short. Some 11,000 people showed up, no doubt the hardest core of the hardest core, including members of the Proud Boys. If you have no idea what they are, look ’em up and try not to feel sad that such a group feels embolden to march in the open.

There was, though, good news as well: Pfizer announced their vaccine was a little above 90% effective against COVID-19 and, this morning, we had even better news, Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine is reportedly 94.5% effective (you can read all about it in this article by Elizabeth Cohen and presented on CNN).

The bottom line is that despite the grind of these past months, starting toward the end of March, things are looking up for the future.

There is, according to Dr. Fauci, a real possibility that the vaccines -whether through Pfizer or Moderna or some other companies- will start to be released by December, first to the first responders and elderly, and then next year to the common citizens.

It’s going to be quite a task. It will likely require the military to mobilize and offer the vaccines to poorer neighborhoods without access to the “big” drug stores while others with access to these stores will likely be swamped with people looking for the vaccine.

And, to make matters a little more complicated, it appears the vaccine requires two separate injections, so it will take a bit to get those who want to be vaccinated (yeah, I suppose the “anti-vaxers” will be protesting).

Boy, the problems the spread of misinformation causes nowadays.

Anyway, I’m optimistic nonetheless that at this time next year we may, just may, be looking in the rear-view mirror at the COVID-19 situation.

Dr. Fauci himself noted that by April we might just be back to normal.

Man, I hope so.

Music

Metrobolist aka The Man Who Sold The World (2020 Remix): A (Almost On Time) Review

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The Man Who Sold the World, now renamed -as it was originally meant to be- for Tony Visconti’s Remix Metrobolist, is what I consider the first “real” David Bowie album start to end.

David Bowie - Metrobolist (aka The Man Who Sold The World) - Amazon.com Music

I have nothing against David Bowie (his first album) or Space Oddity (his second album and which had some great songs, including his first big hit!), but this, his third album, seemed, to me where David Bowie first sets his course.

Back in 2015 the album was remastered and, I felt, that remastering was damn good. However, when I heard longtime David Bowie producer Tony Visconti was coming in to do a new mix of the album, I was curious. I generally liked his remix of Lodger and was really impressed with his remix of the song Space Oddity, so I was hoping for the best.

As it turned out, some songs have clear differences from the 2015 remaster. All The Madmen includes some nonsense lyrics toward the end which were cut out of the original. Running Gun Blues changes the sounds of the explosions. These changes are interesting but don’t necessarily improve upon the original releases/remaster.

Alas, a third song which featured noticeable changes was the one the album was eventually named after, The Man Who Sold The World. Here, Mr. Visconti adds reverb/echoes which, frankly, I didn’t like all that much and felt was unnecessary. My preference for that song, therefore, remains with the 2015 remastered version.

Other songs like The Width of a Circle, Savior Machine, She Shook Me Cold, and The Supermen feature very minor changes, at least those I could spot/hear.

Overall, the album remains damn good -and worthy of five stars, IMHO- though I don’t feel there’s enough difference in this Visconti remix to justify buying it again or putting it above the 2015 version.

I suppose in that respect I must conclude the exercise is a bit of a disappointment.

Truthfully, I probably would have been more outraged had Mr. Visconti changed all the songs significantly versus the three or so that have very noticeable changes. The clarity within the songs remains quite good but then again the 2015 remastering did a pretty good job of that as well.

So take my review for what it is: Its nice to have this alternate version of the album and I’m glad they put the original name and graphics on it. But the changes to the overall work simply aren’t that major. If you have the 2015 version, there’s not that much incentive for you to get this remix.

Movies

Black Moon Rising (1986) a (Very) Belated Review

There’s a few bits of film trivia that really intrigue me, and several of them involve writer/director John Carpenter.

The first one is probably the juiciest, though it has nothing to do with the film I’m about to review: While John Wayne’s final film The Shootist (1976) is considered a beautiful wrap up to his career, Mr. Wayne actually set his sights on a follow up film. That film, Blood River, was written by a very young John Carpenter and Mr. Wayne intended to bring along Ron Howard (who was in The Shootist) to co-star with him in it. Mr. Wayne would pass away from cancer before the film was made, though and, years later and in 1991, Blood River was released as a TV movie starring Wilford Brimley and Ricky Schroder in the roles which were intended for Wayne and Howard.

The second bit of trivia, which does relate to this movie: Tommy Lee Jones has starred in two films written by John Carpenter but has not appeared in any John Carpenter directed films.

The first film is the 1978 Irvin Kirschner directed The Eyes of Laura Mars -the film he directed before directing The Empire Strikes Back!- and the second is the one I’m reviewing here today: 1986’s Black Moon Rising.

Here’s the movie’s trailer

Featuring Linda Hamilton, Robert Vaughn, and Lee Ving (!), Black Moon Rising plays out very similarly, plot-wise, to of all things Escape From New York!

How? Welp, Tommy Lee Jones playing Quint, a thief who is hired by the government to break into a tech firm and steal a computer tape (this was the 1980’s) with their financial improprieties on it. He has a tight deadline to produce this tape to them, and has to deal with all kinds of difficulties -including a thief (Lee Ving) who the company hired to take Jones’ character out and retrieve the incriminating evidence.

Quint gets a hold of the tape but pursuit is hot and heavy after him. He manages to hide the tape in a super-high tech car called the Black Moon, but before he can retrieve it, the car, along with many others, is stolen by a high tech car thief ring. Among the thieves is Linda Hamilton’s Nina, who is only a couple of years removed from her classic role in The Terminator and looks almost exactly the same!

There’s romance, of course, along with a pair of hissable villains, but the reality is that the film makes very little sense and, if you think about those things, you may find yourself not liking what you see.

The tape the government needs for their court case, it struck me right away, would get tossed from any trial if the government couldn’t state how they got it, and I seriously doubt they’d admit to hiring a thief to steal it from them!

Later in the film, a character is murdered and no one calls the police or makes a report… the murder of this innocent person is pretty much used as incentive by his friends to work with Quint but otherwise, forgotten!

Robert Vaughn is good as the steely and evil head of the car theft ring, but given the fact that he owns what appears to be two skyscrapers, one wonders if a car theft ring could make that much money… even if they were the best out there.

These are but some of the things that one has to accept if one were to come away liking the film or, conversely, cannot swallow and therefore wind up walking out not liking the film.

For me, the problems were pretty clear yet the film has enough swagger provided by Tommy Lee Jones in what is a similar to (but not close to identical) Snake Plisskin-type of role, that of the loner thief who is hired to do something good. Quint isn’t the anarchist Plisskin was, but he does at times show a similar attitude, though Jones makes him a little less mythic. Linda Hamilton, similarly, is quite good as the car thief come love interest, though none of the characters in the end are given an incredibly large amount of depth.

Perhaps most intriguing of it all is that the car, the “Black Moon” doesn’t take up huge amounts of screen time, as one might have expected it to. It shows up and is the goal -because of what’s hidden inside it- but the film’s makers wisely don’t flood the movie with shots of the super-car doing super-car stuff, instead showing the way Quint slowly works his way to getting the car back.

Black Moon Rising isn’t some lost classic of the 1980’s. It’s an at times cheesy bit of popcorn filmmaking which, as I have stated over and over again regarding “older” films, may play too slow with modern audiences who are by now expecting a far quicker pace to their action films.

Yet there is enough within Black Moon Rising to offer enjoyment, especially if you are a John Carpenter fan. I don’t know how much of his original script ultimately made it to the screen, but the main plot, character, and antagonist sure do play out like other Carpenter works, and if you’re a fan of John Carpenter, you may want to check it out for that reason alone.

For the rest of you, its a decent film -provided the problems I outlines above don’t ruin it for you- that’s enjoyable enough especially if you long to see a young Tommy Lee Jones and Linda Hamilton.

Recommended.