Category: Reviews

Reviews of books, movies, tv shows and other items

The Library is Full of Them

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As I mentioned in an earlier post Disney (and by extension Hollywood) realizes that they’ve alienated the male half of the human race.  And as I gleefully mentioned this is all their own fault and it’s hilarious that it’s a surprise for them.  And after torching two of the most valuable male-oriented intellectual properties (Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe), instead of trying to fix the problems and repair the damage to these brands they’ve decided to bury their losses and start from scratch with brand new franchises.

Well, you’ve got to admire their optimism.  Maybe they haven’t heard the old saying about the definition of insanity being doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.  But it’s their money (or their stockholders anyway).

But in a sense, they’ve got it half right.  Half of their problem is that sequel after sequel has drained all the life out of their franchises.  So new stories and characters is a good direction to go in.  People like to be entertained and meeting new characters is part of that entertainment.  And even though there are only a few overarching plots to an adventure story it helps to change the names of the heroes, villains, magic rings, super-weapons and princesses from story to story.

So far, so good.  But now comes the tricky part.  Listen up Disney:

DON’T MAKE THE HERO A GIRL-BOSS.  THE GIRL IN THE STORY IS THE LOVE INTEREST OF THE HERO.  SHE IS THE REWARD FOR THE HERO SAVING THE DAY.  SHE MAY TAKE UP A BOW OR A DAGGER IN A PINCH BUT SHE’S NOT THERE TO SAVE THE HERO AND SHE’S NOT SUPPOSED TO BE IN CHARGE.

I hope I was clear there.  Use the traditional hero saga as the backbone of the story and find a writer and a director who can work with such a story in a creative and entertaining fashion and you will make billions of dollars.  Just as a for instance Joss Whedon directed the first Avengers movie.  It made $1.52 billion worldwide at the box office.  That’s a lot of money.  And part of the reason for that enormous sum is because Whedon knows how to make likable characters in a movie.  He blends humor, action and drama in the correct proportions and at the right moments.  In other words, he’s not a hack like all of the DEI directors that have bungled the last several years of your franchise flops.

Now, granted he is demanding and sometimes slightly abusive toward the “talent.”  But they’re getting paid millions of dollars to dress up in spandex and fool around in front of a green screen.  The least they could do is take a little hectoring from a prima donna director to earn those millions.  So anyway, my advice for Hollywood is to find the few creative talents out there; directors like Whedon and Christopher Nolan.  And purchase the film rights to books that millions of people love.  And don’t mess with the stories and characters.  Put them faithfully on the big screen and then instead of trying to recreate success with endless sequels move onto another story!  Did you know there is more than one book in the library?  There are several.

I know it’s a radical departure. But it’s just so crazy it just might work!

A Light Bulb Turns On at Disney

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According to Variety magazine:

Disney’s Boy Trouble: Studio Seeks Original IP to Win Back Gen-Z Men Amid Marvel, Lucasfilm Struggles

Disney has realized that young men are tired of their girl-boss inhabited movies.  And now it’s a problem because Disney needs their money.

And I quote:

“Numerous studies show that Gen Z men in particular are a lonely, gaming-obsessed group who were hampered in their formative years by COVID-19 lockdowns — not the easiest segment to grasp.”

So even when their desperate to attract an audience they can’t help but mock and belittle men and boys.

Rather than rant on my own I’ll borrow the Critical Drinker’s rant.  He is much more amusing than I am.

 

 

A Window into Death

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This morning when I woke up the house was noticeably cooler than it’s been in a month.  It was sixty degrees or thereabouts.  So, Fall is making its entrance felt.  Lots of leaves under the maple tree and the grass is drying out.  The raspberry canes are still producing tons of berries but the lower leaves are all turning yellow.  Well, the kids go back to school on Monday and so this is the end of summer by decree and by degree.  So be it.

Well, it was a terrific summer weatherwise and we did most of the things we wanted to.  And we had a big party at the end.  So now it’s time to anticipate the good stuff that comes with Fall.  Well?  I guess the only thing about Fall that’s good is the long evenings allow us to watch old movies and plan for the holidays.  Certainly, there’s more to do than that.  Fall is when you’re supposed to do the repairs and weatherproofing that prevents winter from doing a lot of damage.  And I do plan to do that stuff.  But let’s be honest here.  I hate that stuff.  I’ve been talking about getting some tarps to cover over the woodwork on the balconies and the outside staircase for about ten years and I haven’t gotten any closer to doing it yet.  I’m just an immensely lazy man whose strong suit is dithering, waffling, vacillating and procrastination.  Of course I blame Camera Girl.  If she were half as good at nagging as she is at cooking, I’d be a model husband.  But it’s the cross I bear.

So, a couple of nights ago TCM had “Psycho” on and Camera Girl was watching it.  Well, I was busy but I noted her choice in passing.  And while I was working in the dining room, I could hear snatches of music and dialog.  And I could tell it was getting toward Marion Crane’s (Janet Leigh’s) fateful arrival at the Bates Motel.  So, I dropped what I was doing and sat through Marion’s supper with Norman and all the way through her murder and subsequent deposition in the “swamp.”  By the way, how much of Southern California actually has any swampland?

Now I’ve seen Psycho dozens of times.  And the murder scene has always struck me as well done.  It’s well staged and well shot.  And having seen it so many times allowed me to watch it this time analytically.  And I thought that the critical snatch of film is when Marion is luxuriating in the shower and the camera shifts to the room through the shower curtain and you see the door open and a silhouette appear in the doorway.

That is the moment when death has entered the frame.  The actual killing with the blood and piercing, screaming “music” is almost an anticlimax.

And then I watched Marion Crane die from loss of blood.  And it was remarkably well acted and achingly sad.  Here was a young woman whose impatience to be with the man she loved had driven her to steal an enormous amount of money.  But just as she’s figured out what she needs to do to escape from the trap she’s gotten herself into, fate steps in and feeds her into a buzz saw of insanity.

The rest of the movie is a murder mystery and a psychological horror show.  But the end of the murder scene is a tiny window into an intensely poignant moment; the death of a human being and specifically the death of a beautiful young woman.  Janet Leigh’s face conveys the reality that Marion Crane’s brain is shutting down from lack of blood and her world has shrunk down to just trying to grasp the shower curtain with her hand.  And then she dies and her body lies crumpled on the floor and her unfocussed eye stares into space.  That’s the best acting in the movie.

So, despite the spectacle from then on, the interesting part of the movie is the first forty minutes that record Marion Crane’s date with destiny.  And I’ll include her conversation with Norman.  He does communicate his pathetic version of what he thinks the world is about.  And in some sense, he provides a sounding board to allow her to think about what to do about her own private trap.

Well, anyway, it’s Fall and old movies are the thing to do.

Guest Contributor – Tregonsee – 18AUG2025 – A Miracle?

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What we have is a miracle. To be honest after 2020’s lopsided “defeat” I figured the Democrats had a lock on things at least through 2028. The reality was that Biden was a REAL mess and the infighting within the White House made it look like there were three or four different factions fighting for control of the Presidential puppet. That and the choice of the clearly DEI VP candidate (Biden SAID he was going to choose a black female outright) who was not even competent in her previous tasks lead to a result that baffled the Democrat pundits come November 2024.

Trump and his team have been going gangbusters. Not that there haven’t been issues. Someone that understands engineer types needed to soothe Mr. Musk’s feathers in particular praising his team for what they did get done against incredible odds. Getting USAID under control has done much to starve the Democrat punditry and nomenaclatura. The Trump people also had less control of the Senate, the President Pro-tem is slow walking things. In addition, there seem to be lots of district and appellate court nominations going wanting and many deputy positions also unfilled. This is where the current troubles are. That said for 7-8 months into a 4 year term they’re not doing too badly given the headwinds they’re sailing against.

2026 is going to be a battle Royal. This is do or die for the Dems. If they can’t take back either the House or the Senate this just keeps rolling on for 2 more years and likely there would be strong restrictions on the remote voting the Democrats are so fond of. If the Democrats can get one arm they can tie things up and maybe even negotiate some minor wins as many Republicans try to play nice. This is like playing nice with a nest of Black Widow spiders but somehow some Republicans fail to perceive this.

Honestly, where the heck the Democrats go in 2028 baffles me. in the last decade or so there have been 3 wings to the Democrats, The Clinton wing, The Obama Wing, and the AOC/Bernie/Squad wing. The Clinton “middle of the road” (it ain’t middle by at least three rows of tall trees) wing seems to be heading to dormancy/decline. Newsome is sort of their kind of candidate charismatic, and he’s positioning towards the “middle” although like the Clintons before him his real positions are far to the left of what he’s staking out. The Obama wing really has no one. Mrs. Obama may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer but she is smart enough to know she doesn’t want the job. Most of the Biden appointees are absolute messes (e.g. Pete Buttigieg, who couldn’t even manage to not run DOT into the ground). The Squad has some known names like Ocasio-Cortez, but none play well outside deep blue enclaves. I suspect if Mamdani wins the NYC Mayoral post, he’ll be so awful he’ll make Mayor Dinkins look like Mayors Koch or Giuliani. That will sour red and purple US districts to ANY of the Squad/Bernie type candidates. So I think we get at least 1 term of Vance. This crosses the 2030 barrier and may mean a more precise census.

No it’s not a golden era. To fix things we REALLY need huge advantages, 2/3 in both houses and 3/4 (38) of the state legislatures, so amendments could be moved through to pin down some things (e.g. Citizenship, Census taking, Supreme court judge numbers, etc.). But it is surely that worldline is far superior to what would have happened if Dems had remained in control. Down that path lay some variant of Mr. Schlicter’s Peoples Republic at best.

What If We’re Not Doomed

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How many times have pundits (including my humble self) declared that we are already irrevocably tobogganing down the slope toward the decline and fall of the American Empire?  Probably too many to count.  And it’s not as if there isn’t a lot of dysfunction everywhere you look.  I won’t go through the litany.  It’s almost endless but all we have to mention to provide an undeniable example of societal rot and insanity is the spectacle of the American Medical Association embracing “gender affirming” treatments for minors including hormone therapies, mastectomies, hysterectomies and castration.

But what if things are about to improve?  Suppose the Trump administration is followed by the Vance administration and during this reprieve from leftist lunacy the country gets its financial health back to a greater extent.  Let’s go with that scenario.  People have enough money to buy houses again and raise kids and plan for the future.  What would that look like?  Of course, I have no way of actually knowing but let’s play the game and throw out some ideas and see if it leads us somewhere.

First off, I think it’s important to say what it won’t look like.  It’s not going to look like America in the 1950s or even the 1980s or 1990s.  The adults and children today; the millennials and the zoomers are very different from my parents’ generation and mine.  They’ve been propagandized in school and through social media to despise the world from those olden times.  They’re ashamed of their parents and grandparents and want to conform to the norms they’ve been taught.

Some of this can be seen in the situation playing out in New York City’s mayoral race.  The last two mayors have been liberal Democrats and under their administrations all the improvements in quality of life and safety gained during Republican mayors have been lost and the city is on the verge of collapsing into chaos.  So, what do the people there want in the next mayor?  A communist!  Now this is just an example.  There are others.  A similar radical is running for mayor of Minneapolis.  So, there is no lack of evidence that the millennials believe insane things.  Now it is true that there is precedent for people who believe these things being gob-smacked by reality and changing their minds.  Maybe that’s what we’re going to see.  It happened to the baby boomers in the nineteen seventies and eighties.  Maybe it’ll happen again.

But regardless, things will be very different.  I believe there has been a breach between the older America and what will follow.  It will not be the monolithic culture.  It will be several, or possibly many separate cultures.  Identity groups have been spawned and they will not disappear.  Ethnic and locality identities will develop and they will complicate social cohesion.  Hollywood and other purveyors of cultural content won’t be able to put out one product that resonates with everyone.  We already see that.  The multicultural experiment with superhero movies and other content have fizzled because people recognize they’re being handed a narrative to cheer for someone else’s team.  How many teenage boys want a female superhero beating up on much larger men as the template for the movies they are being handed.  They just stay home and play video games that allow them to control the narrative.

So, America might recover and even thrive.  But it will take generations for it to coalesce into a common identity.  In the meantime, we and our descendants will have to look out for our own interests, forming alliances and voting blocks where advantage exists.  There may even be a shining city on a hill.  But on the next hill may be a hellhole.  And that’s just the way it’ll have to be.

Does Fiction Publishing Still Exist?

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Selling intellectual property has changed radically in the last thirty years.  We used to buy books at a book store.  We bought music at a record shop.  And we rented or bought movies at a video store.  And then we bought all these at a Walmart or an electronics store (well, maybe not the books).

Now we stream movies and pay by the minute or the month and listen to music more or less for free and books are just this thing that exists on Amazon as a free service or a minor expense.  And the marketing and advertising of these works is some inexplicable algorithm that somehow links up people to the things that would appeal to them.

Now, the only way a musician can make any money is by live concerts that people pay to attend.  But no one would pay to attend a reading of a chapter of a book.  So maybe very soon books will cease to exist as a commodity.

And I guess that’s just the way it will be.  Now I’ve been trying to finish up a novel (and fixing the last ten percent of the book has been much harder than writing the first ninety percent).  And when I attempt to market it, I’ll try it on some traditional publishers and if that doesn’t work, I’ll probably self-publish it on Amazon.  I have noticed that lately some authors try to start a “go fund me” campaign to drum up the support for the book before it’s released.  But I’m not sure how that would work for a new author.

I guess pretty soon I’ll know as much about it as anyone else.  But isn’t it interesting that now that technology allows for avoiding all the obstacles that the “gatekeepers” of traditional publishing provided, that the real problem would be the “needle in a haystack” reality of many millions of self-published books thrown together in an endless slush pile with no way to stand out to a jaded reading public.

Well, they say that Americans have always made the best salesmen.  It wouldn’t surprise me to find out that self-promotion is the real talent behind entertainment.  Hollywood was successful because they could get millions of eyes on their product.  I’m sure the same applies to selling books, movies and music.  It’s just that it’s a field I never got involved in.  Engineering is product that has to be sold but I was always just the product.  I was never one of the sellers except when I would be sent out with the marketing team to convince the buyers that we knew what we were doing and could provide them with the services and hardware that they wanted.  Books on the other hand need fancy covers with somewhat-undressed women and weapons of war and starships to attract the buyer’s attention and get him to plunk down his electronic money.

I’ve seen some marketing going on by some of the people I follow on X and YouTube and it all feels very tiring but maybe that’s because at heart I’m a very lazy guy and hawking product is hard work (at least for me).

And maybe this is all a transitory situation and eventually some more efficient way to link readers with new books that match their tastes will appear among the AI gods.

Well, just some musings.

And Through Me Tell the Story

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Christopher Nolan is filming the Odyssey.  And, of all people, Matt Damn will be Odysseus.  And his son Telemachus will be played by Spiderman (Tom Holland) and Charlize Theron will be Circe.  Anne Hathaway is listed high in the credits so I fear she will be Penelope.  And most frightening of all, John Leguizamo is in the cast.  I guess I should be grateful that Pee Wee Herman is dead or maybe he would be cast as Achilles or Zeus.

Christopher Nolan is a talented director.  Could the movie turn out to be an entertaining and well-made film?  Sure.  But based on the cast I’m pretty sure it will have only the most tangential connection to Homer’s poem.  I’m guessing Damon will channel his character in the Bourne Identity and kill the suitors in a blur of shaky cam footage.  Maybe he can use his character development from “The Martian” to recreate Odysseus’s sense of abandonment on Ogygia with Calypso.  And come to think of it, Calypso can be played by RuPaul in drag.

No kidding, we’ve finally reached a point where special effects are good enough to show the scene in Polyphemus’s cave believably and what will render the story unfilmable will be the ethnicity of the characters.  In order to be eligible for Academy Awards, there will need to be a certain number of non-white and non-straight actors distributed among the most important roles.  I’m guessing that blonde Helen and specifically red-haired Menelaus will have to be portrayed by Australian aborigines and the Sirens will be transgender creatures.  Who knows, just to win Best Picture he’ll have to make several of Sylla’s heads look like prominent Republicans.

I’m probably painting this thing impossibly more negative than it needs to be.  But I think that Christopher Nolan is the closest thing to a good director left in Hollywood and the fact that he’s casting the movie with woke actors and following the DEI guidelines reinforces my worst premonitions for what this will end up being.  Well, why not?  Instead of Odysseus, the Sacker of Cities, we’ll get Matt Damon, Keeper of Safe Spaces.  I’m sure that instead of putting the hundred plus Suitors of Penelope to the sword, he’ll sue them in the court of public opinion and then realize that fighting for his wife’s honor is a toxic patriarchal practice that assumes that Penelope needs him to return when instead she could have shacked-up with Clytemnestra and ruled Ithaca as the first lesbian power couple of the Bronze Age.

And obviously, his son Telemachus would have discovered that he was born in the wrong body and want to be called Telemacha from then on.  And all of Odysseus’s slaves will have read Ibram X. Kendi and will rise up and decolonize Ithaca.

Well, I guess everything in the world is backwards at the moment and we’ll have to wait for a different motion picture environment before something like an authentic Odyssey is possible.  I guess the good news is that the book is still there to read.

The Odyssey

Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story

of that man skilled in all ways of contending,

the wanderer, harried for years on end,

after he plundered the stronghold

on the proud height of Troy.

He saw the townlands

and learned the minds of many distant men,

and weathered many bitter nights and days

in his deep heart at sea, while he fought only

to save his life, to bring his shipmates home.

But not by will nor valor could he save them,

for their own recklessness destroyed them all —

children and fools, they killed and feasted on

the cattle of Lord Hêlios, the Sun,

and he who moves all day through the heaven

took from their eyes the dawn of their return

(Translated by Robert Fitzgerald (1961))

 

ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ

πλάγχθη, ἐπεὶ Τροίης ἱερὸν πτολίεθρον ἔπερσεν:

πολλῶν δ᾽ ἀνθρώπων ἴδεν ἄστεα καὶ νόον ἔγνω,

πολλὰ δ᾽ ὅ γ᾽ ἐν πόντῳ πάθεν ἄλγεα ὃν κατὰ θυμόν,

ἀρνύμενος ἥν τε ψυχὴν καὶ νόστον ἑταίρων.

ἀλλ᾽ οὐδ᾽ ὣς ἑτάρους ἐρρύσατο, ἱέμενός περ:

αὐτῶν γὰρ σφετέρῃσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν ὄλοντο,

νήπιοι, οἳ κατὰ βοῦς Ὑπερίονος Ἠελίοιο

ἤσθιον: αὐτὰρ ὁ τοῖσιν ἀφείλετο νόστιμον ἦμαρ.

τῶν ἁμόθεν γε, θεά, θύγατερ Διός, εἰπὲ καὶ ἡμῖν.

(Homer circa 1,000 BC)

What Have We Got to Lose?

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This week Donald Trump has a meeting in Alaska with Vladimir Putin.  I find this intriguing.  And not because I believe they are on the cusp of agreeing to the end of the Ukraine war.  Far from it.  Ukraine and Russia are killing each other there at an industrial scale and there does not seem to be an end in sight.  So that doesn’t seem to be on the agenda.

And maybe that’s the point.  I think both men are getting together despite knowing that no peace deal is currently possible.  So why are they getting together?  I’m not really sure of the answer but maybe it’s because they both know they are in a sort of unique position.  I think that maybe both of them want to find a way out of this nightmare and maybe they figure if they meet up without those in their orbits who want to keep the war going forever, that maybe they can figure something out that would satisfy both sides.

I know that Trump doesn’t want any part of this war but the neo-cons are very powerful in the Congress and even to some extent in his administration.  As for Putin, he’s in a million dead Russians so he can’t just walk away.  And even if he could there are a lot of Russians in Ukraine and he’s carving out a homeland for them.

But all and still, there may be a way to move this thing forward so that the killing stops.  And maybe that’s why both of them are there.  Trump’s whole persona is “the art of the deal.”  He probably figures it couldn’t hurt to talk to the other head honcho.  It’s not as if he’s afraid the other guy will talk him into a bad deal.  So how could it hurt?

Of course, if the two of them walk away accomplishing absolutely nothing and can’t even come up with some story about how these are the “first steps toward peace” then it will look like a loss for Trump.  And Trump must know this.  So, he must think there is something to be gained that outweighs that risk.  And that’s what intrigues me.  Could both of them be there for entirely the right reasons?  Could these two supremely egotistical and cynical men be getting together because they want to change the trajectory of the world?  Because if you think about it, they’re the only two men on this planet who have the authority and clout to actually do it.  Between the two of them, they control about 90% of the nuclear weapons on the planet and between the two of them they control some enormous amount of the resources (both natural and financial) of the planet.  Now certainly, both of them are constrained by the political systems they exist in.  Believe it or not Putin is considered a moderate in his regime structure and Trump has to deal with the military-industrial complex that is still insanely powerful.

But they still are the chief executive officers of two very, very powerful entities.  And imagine if the reason they are going to meet is to try and untangle the conflagration that Biden and the neo-cons has allowed to engulf us.  Maybe they can find a path.  Or maybe it’s hopeless.  But I give them both credit for trying.  What have we got to lose?