Author: photog

Coming to a Theater Near You

photog Current Events, Movie Reviews, Reviews , ,

I was watching a movie from the 1980s (Moonstruck) with Camera Girl tonight.  I’ve been busy with book marketing for the last month and it’s been a grind.  So, I sat down after dinner and we just enjoyed the show.  It’s a ridiculous romantic comedy with Cher and Nicholas Cage as the couple and a veteran cast of character actors with New York City as the backdrop.  It’s an absurd movie but it’s genuinely funny and it means no harm.

And I found myself enjoying the movie immensely.  Afterwards I tried to figure out why.  First off it was about 1980s America; a place where normal life proceeded and people were generally happy.  And secondly, the movie was well made.  It wasn’t deathless prose.  It wasn’t profound.  It was silly.  But it was good-hearted and the script, the acting and the production were professional and enjoyable to watch.

But why should that be such a big deal?  And then it hit me.  Nothing that has come out of Hollywood in the last five or ten years has been any good.  Everything is poorly made and poorly written and poorly acted.  Nothing makes you laugh or cry or even think.  It’s all dreck.  And that’s crazy!

And it occurred to me that this won’t go on forever.  Someone is going to step forward and make something good.  And I think what they’ll do is break the rules.

Someone is going to refuse to only hire DEI writers and DEI actors and DEI directors and instead they’ll hire the old white guys who used to make stuff in Hollywood and used to make us laugh and cry and think.  It’s a cinch those guys haven’t all died in the last ten years and I’m sure they could use the work.  I’m sure they haven’t forgotten how to ply their trades.  All it will take is someone with enough money to put together a production crew (outside of Los Angeles) and has the nerve to make a movie about the America we used to make movies about.  And it doesn’t have to be a period piece about the 1950s when everyone was white.  There can even be some immigrants in the cast.  After all the problem isn’t having non-white people in a movie.  It’s about the writer and director hating white men so hard that they have to make believe they don’t exist.

It’s a funny thing.  The eastern and southern European immigrants who came to this country at the beginning of the twentieth century didn’t look like the English and northern European people who were already established here and from whom the movie characters were selected.  Blond haired, blue-eyed stars weren’t them.  But they could be stand-ins for the dreams that those immigrants had about being prosperous and happy in their adopted country.  They had enough imagination to realize that the American dream was transferrable to people who chased the American dream.  Work hard, follow the rules and dream big.  It was aspirational to watch Jimmy Stewart or John Wayne as a cowboy saving the day and winning the girl.  Hating on Anglo-Americans made no sense.

Well, that’s what needs to happen again.  Aspirational movies with Americans acting like Americans and not apologizing for being smart and successful is what we should be seeing on the screen.  And there shouldn’t be any DEI box checkers making sure there are the correct number of interracial couples or black lesbian brain surgeons in the story line.  Of course, 2026 is the year that Christopher Nolan is casting a black woman as Helen of Troy in his Odyssey.  Well at least it wasn’t a trans-woman.  But I guess I’ll have to wait a little longer.  I can wait because I know it’s coming to a theater near me soon.

Struggling Back from the Abyss

photog Current Events, Trump ,

Anyone over the age of fifty knows that things are devolving in the western world.  European societies (including places like the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) are degenerating from the competent, affluent and intelligent places they were even twenty years ago into mediocre (at best) struggling third world backwaters.  The reasons are manifold but essentially the powers that be have intentionally worked to undermine the institutions and practices (merit-based career advancement, standards based educational advancement and preferential employment of American workers) that made an advanced civilization possible.

It seems that the damage is pretty severe.  In many areas of the country young people educated under the lax standards are functionally illiterate and without skills that would make them useful employees.  But at the present there are attempts to bring manufacturing back to the United States and efforts to deport illegal aliens and curtail legal immigration.  But it leaves us with the question as to whether this degeneration of society will be reversed and how?

The way I see this is that improvements will be a local phenomenon and will be tied into state policies to arrest and reverse these problems.  And in order for improvement to grow it will require a two-pronged effort.  State government will have to enforce educational reform that verifies progress through standardized testing and state and federal agencies must work to ensure that qualified Americans can find good jobs in their state.  Places like Florida, Texas and Tennessee are taking the first steps to attract jobs to their states.  Low tax rates are encouraging businesses to leave places like the West Coast and the northeast and provide job opportunities for Americans.  Florida has made a start at reining in the woke madness that has descended on public schools and colleges and restore them to their proper mission of providing learning for Americans who want to work in a modern nation.  And right now, the Trump administration is deporting illegals from red states without the battles that occur in places like Minnesota and California.  Put these conditions together and what I expect to see is normalcy begin to return to red states first.

I read somewhere recently that Mississippi has shown marked improvement in the test scores of public-school children and I wonder if the conservative nature of that state’s population in comparison with other parts of the country might be part of the reason.  But in general, I expect that what will eventually happen is states that encourage merit-based rewards and have an America first policy to job creation and cooperate with immigration control will eventually become noticeably better places to live than the woke areas that have already become hellholes like New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Portland.

Of course, if the Democrats get back into power in Washington, they will do all they can to degrade these other locations by reopening the borders and preventing red states from targeting illegals.  But I still think we may already be witnessing a bifurcation in the kind of society that will be seen in America.

08MAR2026 – This’N’That

photog Life in Dunwich, My Fiction, photog's Corner , ,

Today I spent a chunk of time with a roof rake pulling snow off the lower roofs.  These roofs have heavy plastic cleats glued to the metal to keep the snow from sliding into the gutters but there was so much snow that the weight cracked the glue and so these enormously heavy blocks of ice and snow were falling down onto the upper and lower driveways and blocking the routes we use to reach the road.  So, I forced the issue and pulled down all (most) of the snow with the rake and then spent a few hours moving the snow away with a shovel and wheelbarrow.  I was planning to use the snowblower to move the snow but all those plastic cleats would be bad for the rotating parts and it would have taken me so long to separate them out using a garden rake that I said, “to hell with it” and just used the wheelbarrow and shovel.  Well, they say work develops character and Camera Girl says I’m a character so it must be working.

I’ve had some interesting conversations on X with another author and he seemed genuinely interested in how my characters would advance in a sequel so I told him I should send him the e-book and then he could see the challenges I’m going to face deciding how I’ll clean up the mess I’ve created in the first book.  Also, I’m hoping to get a review out of him.  Of course, he’s not a genre fiction author so it may not be his cup of tea so I may not get a highly positive review but honest feedback is valuable so I’m interested.

Tomorrow, third grandson is coming over to spend time with us and absorb mass quantities of spaghetti and meatballs followed by mint chocolate chip ice cream.  He’s starting high school next year so I’ll have to try and up my game.  I wonder what form of entertainment he’ll favor.  I know this year his whole family has been on a hockey kick.  While hockey is far from my favorite form of entertainment, I feel I must try to adapt myself to the grandkids as best I can.  After all they’re the future and I’m practically extinct.

I got in touch with my marketer and said I wanted to discuss strategies to maximize numbers of readers by minimizing cost to the reader (up to and including giveaways).  She said I should make a point to collect e-mail addresses to allow for follow up advertising for sequels.  I will study her message and formulate some specific questions to facilitate getting answers at the meeting.  I’ve found marketing a book is an onerous task that’s far from fun.  At this point I want a strategy that sustains itself with minimal demands on my time.  But I may not get the answers I’m hoping for.

Alright, that’s enough for now.  I’m trying to stay away from the news of wars and scandals and elections and other tawdry concerns.  The world is certainly a messy place.