Category: Reviews

Reviews of books, movies, tv shows and other items

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 1 Episode 2 – One for the Angels

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A sidewalk pitchman (the guy with the foldable suitcase/table full of cheap junk) named Lou Bookman (Ed Wynn) is visited by Death.  Not wanting to die he negotiates a delay until he can “Make a Pitch for the Angels.”  Death agrees to this but once the agreement is made Bookman gloats that he’ll stop making pitches forever.  But the consequences involve the death in his place of a small child that Bookman knows.  The little girl is struck by a truck and will die at midnight when Bookman was scheduled to die.  Bookman awaits Death and delays him by distracting him with his most persuasive sales pitch and succeeds in saving the girl’s life.  And of course, that pitch was the “One for the Angels.”  And at that point Mr. Bookman is ready for his journey with Death who really isn’t a bad guy.

Wynn was a comic actor of the vaudeville era.  My only other memory of him was a small part in the original Mary Poppins movie from the 1960s.  The whole teleplay is highly sentimental and affected but it works.  It’s a gentle fantasy that tugs at the heartstrings and appeals to our sympathy for the little guy who also happens to be a nice guy.  For myself, being a rank sentimentalist, it appeals to my childhood view of how the world should be.  So, it feels comfortably familiar.  In other words, it’s nostalgic escapism and sometimes that’s exactly what I want.  You have to decide for yourself if this type of story is acceptable entertainment for you.

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 1 Episode 1 – Where is Everybody?

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I am embarking on a long voyage of discovery.  And like most long voyages it will be a combination of rare moments of pleasure immersed in long stretches of boredom.  That’s right, I intend to review the whole Twilight Zone series in its original order.  You will benefit from my suffering and will thereby know which episodes to skip, which to give a chance and which to view without fear of boredom.  Greater love hath no blogger than this,  that he lay down his sanity for his readers.

 

Season 1

Episode 1 – Where is Everybody?

Earl Holliman (the guy who played the cook on Forbidden Planet) is a man wandering around a town that seems to have had people in it immediately before but now is completely empty.  He finds fresh coffee, lit cigarettes and running machines but no people.  I guess it’s supposed to be mysterious and claustrophobic but mostly it’s just boring and annoying.  At the end we find out he’s an astronaut in an isolation chamber hallucinating.  This is preparation for a future moon mission.  Granted this was made in 1959 and Sputnik launched in 1957.  That means the Space Race was all the rage.  So maybe this seemed more interesting back then.  But honestly, it’s really dull.  This was the first episode of the whole series.  The fact that they would lead with this should have been a warning to viewers of what was to come.  Not a very auspicious beginning.

08JAN2019 – President Trump’s Border Wall Speech

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I watched the speech just now.  I liked my version of it better but I’ll give him a solid B.  He painted it as a humanitarian problem and also a crime problem.  That’s good.  He gave a litany of illegal alien crime stories.  There were murders, rapes, beheadings, dismemberments, you name it.  He laid the blame at the Democrats’ feet for not getting the wall funded.  And he compared the five-billion-dollar price tag to the five hundred-billion-dollar trade in illegal drugs that crosses the border every year.  He listed the horrendous abuse that happens to migrants being trafficked across the border.  He said that 33 percent of women migrants are raped and that many of the migrants are held as virtual slaves in the sex trade.  I understand that Pelosi and Schumer will have a chance to rebut the speech but life is short so I skipped listening to them.  I’m sure I’ll do better even if I just end up using the time to floss my teeth.

I wonder if there’s a chance that the Democrats will cave soon.  If not, I hope the President has a Plan B.  I like the idea of getting the military to build the wall.  They did a bit of that in Iraq I remember and I’m sure they could get it erected pretty quickly once they got rolling.  I’m trying to understand how long the government shutdown can go on before something critical goes wrong.  Is the IRS considered important or not?  Does this mean I don’t have to pay my taxes?  Or does it just mean my refund will be late.  Well, from my point of view I don’t care if the government stays shut for a couple of years.  As long as the military and law enforcement is funded the rest can just wait.

Well, that’s about all I can think of.  It was a short speech and I suppose time will tell if the Democrats will cave.  Skeletor Pelosi and Crying Chuck, the ball is in your court.

08JAN2018 – American Greatness Post of the Day – Julie Kelly – Carlson’s Invisible Hand Riles Conservative Critics

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It seems everyone on our side of the fence was impressed with Tucker Carlson’s video monologue on what’s gone wrong in America.  But in Julie Kelly’s post she finds the reaction of NeverTrump folks like David French and Ben Shapiro to be decidedly negative.

Carlson’s Invisible Political Hand Riles Conservative Critics

Well, I’m not surprised.  Tucker must be doing something really right to have the friends he does and the enemies also.  Let’s hope he can help President Trump get his message out and start reversing some of the damage that Carlson has highlighted.

War Pig – The Future of War and Assassination

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Watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlO2gcs1YvM

The scary thing is that this is probably being developed somewhere as we speak. We can see where this will be possibly rather shortly. The US, Europe, China, Russia. This video is scary because within a short span of years, maybe this year, it WILL become reality. Then it will “fall into the wrong hands.” Imagine ISIS releasing 300 of those near Times Square on New Years Eve? Or the next Presidential Inauguration. Or the Super Bowl? If it is possible, it will be built. The appetite for these things will be so great you will not be able to suppress their manufacture or dispersal.

Technological advancement is coming so fast it will soon be out of our ability to control it entirely. Skynet. We can’t even secure the Internet, for crying out loud. Any nation with some money and the ability to grow their own or import technical expertise will be doing this sort of thing. Just as drug cartels bought and grew their own chemical engineering expertise, so will terrorist organizations (some of which are still well-funded). This is the future of terror, this is the future of asymmetrical war, this is the future of criminal cartels and groups to eliminate rivals and also politicians/ cops/ judges/ prosecutors with whom they have problems. The good guys could retaliate, but the faces of cops, judges, senators, prime ministers, etc are well known while most drug cartel members aren’t.

Major players in technology such as the US, China, Israel, Russia, India, Europe and South Korea probably already have the capability or will as soon as the art reaches that point. North Korea and Pakistan will not be far behind. Pakistan and the Chinese both will sell anything to anyone for enough money. Pakistan sold nuclear weapons technology and expertise to both Iraq, then later, Iran. Israel’s Mossad cannot kill them all. At least not until the Israelis, major technology players, make their own little death droids.

Any leader or any member of government can be killed almost assuredly. I could easily plan such an attack if the technology was available that would kill almost every member of congress, the President, VP, Supreme Court and anyone else in the chain of command of any of the three branches of government in one fell swoop. If I can, many more could plan it even better. We could end up with the Secretary of Agriculture in charge of the entire government and nation.

Defense? None that I know of if they are AI controlled and not in communication with a base station which could be jammed or hacked. Maybe all our politicians would have to wear Guy Fawkes masks 24/7? But the drones would simply kill anyone in such a mask. Besides, biometrics are already at the point where the face itself is not necessary to ID someone.

Results? Total anarchy.

The Twilight Zone Revisited

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My hypocrisy knows no bounds.

Last July I posted a review of the Twilight Zone in which I stated unequivocally that all but a handful of the episodes are unwatchable.  Once again, the SyFy Channel featured a marathon of the episodes around the holidays and once again, I found myself watching way too many of them.  I recorded about fifteen of them on the cable box and proceeded to replay them almost obsessively over the last few weeks.  I did find a couple more that I had forgotten were pretty good and kept re-watching the few that I do enjoy.  But what became intolerable was having to deal with the commercials from the SyFy Channel each time I watched.  Even fast forwarding through became so painful I finally deleted all the episodes in disgust.

The one episode that I had forgotten I liked was “Two.”  Charles Bronson and Elizabeth Montgomery are soldiers from opposing armies that wander into a deserted city five years after a war has depopulated the world.  Surprisingly, the sparse dialog and minimal action work remarkably well and create a genuinely affecting moment.

Anyway, I buckled under the pressure.  I went on Amazon and bought the whole series on blu-ray, all one hundred and sixty odd, mostly awful shows.  I guess this proves I’m a hopeless addict to bad television.

It showed up tonight and I put on “To Serve Man.”  Oh well, at least there are no SyFy Channel commercials.  That’s one nightmare I won’t have to face again.  That’s at least an improvement.

“Mr. Chambers, don’t get on that ship!  “To Serve Man,” it’s a cookbook!”  Ahhhh, ain’t it grand!

I’m the Bad Guy?  How Did That Happen?

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In a recent post I said that the current revolt on the Right could be described as the Falling Down Revolt.  This references the 1993 movie, “Falling Down,” that starred Michael Douglas as a divorced, recently laid off defense industry engineer, named William Foster, who, while stopped on the Los Angeles freeway on a sweltering hot day discovers he has reached the end of his rope.  He leaves his car in the middle of traffic and goes on a trek across the mean streets of Los Angeles to see his young daughter on her birthday.  Along the way he runs into all the dysfunctional aspects of modern America.  There is the Korean inconvenience store where the clerk won’t let you have change unless you pay larcenously high prices, the fast food store where a minute after the prescribed time breakfast becomes an impossibility and the food looks nothing like the nice pictures on the wall.  There are the Mexican street gangs holding up a stranger at knifepoint and then peppering a whole sidewalk full of neighbors with automatic weapons fire to revenge themselves on someone who didn’t allow himself to be robbed.  There are construction sites that spring up and leave the drivers stopped in place for hours, not to repair streets but just to maintain the size of the city construction budget.  There are the panhandlers and psychotic hate-mongers and all manner of unhappy people wherever he turns.

At the end of the film the police detective (played by Robert Duvall) following behind Foster’s trail of destruction figures out that Foster’s unconscious plan is to commit a murder suicide against his wife and daughter.  When Duvall tells him he’s under arrest Foster and the detective have this exchange:

  • “I’m the bad guy?” he asks, in a moment of rare clarity.
  • “Yeah,” says Robert Duvall’s police officer evenly, pointing a gun at his chest
  • “How did that happen?”

Now, up until the very end of the film Foster actually seems like a well-meaning guy who’s having a nervous breakdown in the middle of a city that is psychotic.  When he replies to the detective, he tells his side of it.  To paraphrase Foster, “I always did what they told me was the right thing and now I’ve been thrown away by my job and my family.  I’ve been lied to.”  The detective tells him that everyone has been lied to but that what Foster did isn’t justified.

“I always did what they told me was the right thing and now I’ve been thrown away by my job and my family.  I’ve been lied to.”  This is the crux of the analogy.  The regular joes were just doing all the right things we were told we should be doing.  We were being the good guys and bending over backwards to help the other guys out and what is our reward?  We’re told that we’re the bad guys.  That’s the whole thing in a nutshell.  I guess you could say it’s insult on top of injury.  And if they hadn’t added the insult at the end, when they thought it was already too late for us to do anything, they probably would’ve gotten away with it.  But these folks on the left just have to rub it in.  They not only want to destroy their enemies but they also need them to grovel too.

So that’s how we got here.  We can make a good showing for ourselves now that we know who and what we are up against.  We don’t actually have to help them dig the hole they want to bury us in.  We can stop paying them extortion money as they have no intention of showing gratitude because of it.  In fact, it only makes the Left more self-righteous about their entitlement.  Basically, it’ll be every man for himself, if I may be so bold to use the singular masculine pronoun.  So that’s why I think Falling Down is relevant.  We don’t want to pay for being the good guys if we’re still gonna be called the bad guys anyway.

The Portly Politico Explains the Hereditary Nature of Mitt Romney’s Treachery

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Any of you readers under the age of 50 wouldn’t be expected to remember that Mitt Romney’s father ran for president against Richard Nixon back in 1968.  Tyler over at the Portly Politico has a very enlightening essay about the elder Romney and the nature of the Romney spinelessness.

Their behavior brings to mind that classic Firefly meme, “Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!”

The Portly Politico Sums Up Carlson’s Essay

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Tyler does an excellent job condensing Tucker’s 15 minute video clip to a two minute read.

Watch the video if you have the time

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/01/03/tucker_carlson_we_are_ruled_by_mercenaries_who_feel_no_long-term_obligation_to_the_people_they_rule.html

but read read the summation if you can’t spare the time, it’s well written.

Tucker Carlson’s Diagnosis