All the Secrets of the Universe and Some Really Important Stuff Too!
Ray Wylie Hubbard – Dust of the Chase
This is not a very upbeat song.
I first heard this song on the soundtrack for the movie “Hell or High Water” which I also highly recommend. Funny how sometimes a song fits a mood you’re in. I can’t even remember what it was but it did. That must have been a very “not good” day.
Kirk Douglas stars as Midge Kelly a tough angry young man trying to hustle his way to something better than the low pay jobs he can only find. He and his brother Connie arrive on a freight train from the east and believe they have an ownership stake in a small restaurant. But discover they’ve been conned. Taking jobs as waiters there, Midge becomes romantically involved with the owner’s daughter Emma but this leads to the couple being forced at gunpoint by her father into a marriage.
This prompts Midge to abandon Emma and he and Connie end up at a boxing gym where a trainer named Tommy Haley agrees to manage Midge. Midge proves to have considerable skill in the ring but more importantly he has a killer instinct that leads him to brutalize his opponents with maniacal force whenever he gets in the ring. Eventually Haley arranges for Midge to fight the number one contender for the middle weight crown, Johnny Dunne in New York. But the gambling interests have only allowed Midge the fight with the understanding that he’ll take a dive to allow Dunne to capture the middle-weight crown from an aging champ.
Midge double crosses Haley and the gamblers and knocks Dunne out in the first round. The mobsters beat Midge, Haley and Connie badly but now the reality is Midge is the leading contender for the crown. Dunne’s platinum blonde girlfriend Grace tells Midge that the only way he’ll ever get a shot at the crown is by appeasing the gamblers. And the only way that will happen is if he dumps Haley and signs up with Grace’s friend Jerome Harris. And Midge does it without blinking an eye. Seeing how Midge stabbed Haley in the back and what company he was now keeping, Connie decided to leave New York and go back to his mother’s apartment in Chicago.
Meanwhile Midge is flying high with a victory in the ring against the champ. He’s dating Grace but sleeping with Jerome Harris’s wife Palmer. Neither of these women know that he is still married to Emma. But now all of Midge’s double-crossing comes due. He has to defend his title against Johnny Dunne and he’s out of shape from living the high life. So, he hires Haley to train him but has to agree to split 30% with him. But Haley doesn’t really care whether Midge is up to the fight and after missing his mother’s death bed Connie and Emma despise him. On the day before the boxing match, she tells Midge she’s divorcing him and marrying Connie. He answers her statement by dragging her to bed to claim his conjugal rights as husband.
At the boxing arena Connie attacks Midge for what he did to Emma. But Midge beats him down and heads for the ring. The match is very even at the start. Midge manages to knock Dunne to the canvas in the first round but after that the match slowly but surely shifts in Dunne’s favor. By the twelfth round Midge has one eye closed and looks almost punch drunk. But when he sees Grace and his other “friends” in the audience smiling at his defeat he becomes enraged and with a manic flurry of punches he beats Dunne to the canvas and wins the fight. But he is basically dragged back to his dressing room by Haley and his trainers and after a brief ranting speech that seems to come from his angry tortured soul, he drops dead. The movie ends with reporters asking Connie about his brother and him replying sardonically that Midge was a perfect reflection of the spirit of his sport.
This movie has some good points. The early scenes of Midge and Connie travelling across country to make a new life for themselves and their loyalty to each other is affecting. However, the unfolding of Midge’s personality and his general hatred of humanity is a very unpleasant experience. As he goes from one betrayal to the next, I found him despicable. And because of this, by the end of the movie, I wasn’t enjoying the story at all. I was very relieved when he dropped dead and I could turn off the tv. I can’t recommend this movie to anyone.
This movie is an alien invasion/time travel movie. Wow, that’s complicated.
(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)
This movie is a highly confusing science fiction story. Chris Pratt plays Dan Forester a retired special forces soldier from Iraq who now works as a high school science teacher. He has a wife Emmy and a young daughter Muri. So far so good. One day while watching soccer’s world cup game on tv they witness the beginning of the future war. In the middle of the field a “wormhole” opens up and a bunch of humans dressed in military attire carrying weapons appear.
They explain that they are from the year 2051 and their world is fighting a war against aliens called the “whitespikes.” They are about 8-10 feet long, have four running legs two grasping legs and two tentacles that can grab but also shoot “spikes.” And they are always ravenously hungry for human flesh. The aliens appeared in arctic Russia and quickly spread across the world and now the human population has been decimated (total world population down to 500,000) and they are begging people from 2021 to come through a portal and help fight the aliens.
Earth agrees to send its armies into the future but barely twenty percent return alive. After that a draft is employed and all adults (men and women) are eligible. Eventually Dan is drafted and is sent. Enlistment involves surviving one week of combat after which the soldier is automatically returned to the present wherever he is.
Dan goes to the future and is immediately swept up in the “run for your life” action of fighting the whitespikes. Eventually he meets his commanding officer Colonel Muri Forester (played by Yvonne Strahovski), in other words, his daughter now grown up and become a biologist working on a toxin to kill the whitespikes before they finish off what is left of humanity. And with Dan’s help she captures a female whitespike and they synthesize a toxin that will kill all whitepikes injected with it.
But it’s too late. The last human outpost where Muri and Dan are located is overwhelmed by a horde of whitespikes and Dan time jumps with the toxin just as Muri falls to her death in the grips of a whitespike. Dan reaches home and is overwhelmed with grief and anger. Grown-up Muri had told him that back in the “present” when Dan had returned from his seven-day assignment he abandoned his wife and daughter and eventually was killed a few years later in an auto accident.
Determined to get the toxin mass produced and sent back to the future Dan reaches out to the government but finds out that the portal is gone. The whitespikes have finished off humanity in the future. There is no place to send the toxin.
But Emmy reasons that it makes more sense to find the whitespikes before they conquered the world and destroy them at the beginning. With a clue from volcanic ash present on a whitespike artifact they figure out that the whitespikes must have been frozen under the ice cap in northern Russia and thawed because of “global warming” in 2051 or shortly before. Because of global instability caused by the knowledge that the world would be coming to an end, the US refuses to help Dan go to Russia to find the whitespikes. So, Dan goes to his Vietnam War vet estranged father (played by J. K. Simmons) who happens to have access to a large cargo plane and they mount a small expedition.
They find the alien ship by its magnetic field and use thermite to reach it through the ice. Then they find out that the whitespikes are not the astronauts but rather a bioweapon cargo on a ship that crashed into earth long ago. They use the toxin to kill about half the whitespikes on the ship but another five or six escape. Two of the humans use a C4 explosive to kill the whitespikes in a suicide maneuver. But one female escapes and after an extended chase and fight scene Dan and his father kill the monster. The movie ends with Dan reuniting with Emmy and introducing young Muir to her grandfather. Wow, what a mess!
Okay, what the hell do I say about this crazy mixed up movie? From a science fiction plot perspective, this thing is a turkey. There is no indication of how the 2051 humans in the middle of their existential alien crisis were able to create time travel. And the workings of this time travel also seem goofy. The 2051 people can only go back and forth thirty years. So, they can’t go back five years and search for the whitespikes before they became overwhelmingly numerous and unstoppable. Also, grown-up Muri tells Dan about what he was like after he came back from the future but then Dan followed a completely different course of action when he returned. How? Alright the plot is as full of holes as Swiss cheese. But is the movie any good? Well, yeah. Chris Pratt portrays a likeable character and so does Yvonne Strahovski. There is a good family chemistry there and the action sequences although quite a mess aren’t boring. And it isn’t woke. Chris Pratt is allowed to be a white man and the hero of the movie. That’s something to be amazed at in a movie made in 2021. It’s a silly sci-fi action movie. But I kind of liked it. You have to decide if it’s something you want to waste a couple of hours on.
I guess strictly speaking, science fiction starts with Jules Verne and evolved into H G Wells and then expanded into a plethora of subgenres that include every imaginable kind of story that involves “science” in some aspect of the story. And the types are endless and the mixing of the types with each other make the number of different subtypes equal to the cardinality of the continuum (a very big number they say). You have space travel, time travel, dimensional travel, multi-verse reality. There’s solar system colonization (with and without terraforming), interstellar exploration with and without colonization), there’s first contact with different alien species, there’s interplanetary war, interstellar war, there’s the human galactic empire, there are galactic civilizations made up of many species. There are stories about the origins of the human race that involve older races either creating it or influencing it (with or without monoliths and xenomorphs). We have futures that include artificial intelligence as our servant or as our master or locked in a mortal combat with us. There are stories about our future that involve evolution either natural or induced that change us in any number of ways; physically, mentally or supernaturally where we develop abilities that give us almost godlike powers. There are comic stories, love stories, war stories, literary stories that concentrate on the psychological effects of technology and stories that try to extrapolate what the future of technology and science will do to humans in the future. There are even stories about our extinction.
But almost all of these stories have been terribly far from reality. Even the “hard” science fiction writers who have tried to base their stories on science fact have for the sake of making an interesting story, diverged very far from what the future will really look like. For instance, interplanetary space travel. What has been imagined about exploration of the solar system for the last hundred years or so has been mostly wrong in several aspects of the science. The only exception has been manned travel to the Moon. Looking at Heinlein’s Moon landing in the movie “Destination: Moon” it really wasn’t that terribly different from the reality of the Apollo missions. Now granted he used a single vehicle and not the orbiter plus lander arrangement, but the overall effect was pretty close. Three or four Americans rocketed to the Moon and came back just as quickly as they could to avoid the difficulties of carrying enough rocket fuel for the return trip and air to breath for a few days. But every other space flight in science fiction history has ignored things like micro-gravity health hazards and cosmic and solar radiation damage to the human body.
And as for interstellar flight they’ve hand waved themselves past the realities of just how insanely far away even the closest stars are in terms of travel time. I won’t even begin to talk about anything like time travel. There just isn’t any scientific evidence that it can even possibly exist. As for Skynet deciding to kill off humanity using a cadre of cyborgs that look like Arnold Schwarzenegger, well I won’t say it can’t happen but I think maybe liberties have been taken with the likelihood.
So, what should science fiction be about? Let’s talk about that in Part 2.
What is it with YouTube lists of science fiction movies. Every other choice is some incredibly unwatchable movie!
Already you can tell I didn’t like this movie. And that is an understatement. I despised it.
(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)
The movie starts out with us meeting the protagonist Louise Banks (played by Amy Adams). We see her with her daughter Hannah starting with her as a newborn and progressing with her as an adolescent dying of what appears to be cancer.
Switch scenes and Amy is teaching a class in Portuguese language at a university but just then the world finds out that twelve alien spacecraft have landed in different areas of the Earth and Amy is needed by the US government to figure out the aliens’ language and find out what they want. Her contact is Colonel Weber (played by Forest Whitaker). Louise is teamed with a scientist, Ian Donnelly (played by Jeremy Renner) to solve the mystery of why the aliens are on Earth.
There’s a lot of hand-waving (literally) but eventually Louise takes off her quarantine suit so they can see her pretty hair and slowly but surely, she translates the language of the aliens; heptapods which are represented as some kind of hyperintelligent cephalopods that spell out words with their ink (seriously!).
Through misunderstanding the difference between the words for tool and weapon, all of the major military powers come to believe that the aliens are attempting to start a war by providing some kind of advanced weapons to all of them separately. Rogue American soldiers even try to blow up the heptapods and Louise is almost killed.
But just as the world is about to attack the heptapods and cause an interstellar incident Louise reenters the ship and has a magical epiphany and can understand everything the heptapods are saying. She finds out the tool they are giving humanity is their language which if studied allows the user to see the future and experience time as “non-linear.”
Louise then is able to see into the future and know something that will convince the Chinese leader not to attack the heptapods and save the day. Then we find out that Louise’s daughter Hannah didn’t die in the past but is going to be born to Louise and Ian in the future. And apparently Louise is accepting of this future tragedy including the fact that Ian will leave her when he finds out she conceived Hannah regardless of knowing she will be doomed to an early death. The End.
How do I hate this movie? Let me count the ways. This movie epitomizes the “girl boss” stereotype. Louise is the omnicompetent protagonist who can do seemingly anything needed without any rational explanation for her abilities. Everyone else is always stumped but she always finds a way. And it’s always ridiculous. The military are always arrogant, murderously enraged and completely incompetent. And the action of the movie is non-existent. The highlight of the film is Louise writing the word “LOUISE” on a white board and holding it up for the heptapods to see. I’m not kidding. And then in the last five minutes of the movie Louise figures out all of that stuff and we live happily ever after (except for her daughter dying of cancer). This movie sucks.
Just as with my review of the first installment of Dune, this will not be one of my usual reviews where I describe the plot. Once again, I’ll give my impressions of the movie as someone hitting the story for the first time, since, as I mentioned before I’ve never read the books and only have a vague sense of the story and the author’s message, if there is one.
First off, the cinematography is top notch. If the movie is blending actual desert landscapes with CGI it’s seamless and extremely realistic. Or maybe the whole thing is CGI in which case it’s even more remarkable. The acting is very good although casting Christopher Walken as the galactic emperor is jarring for me. It’s almost impossible for me to see him in a film and not expect some kind of joke. But he has very little screen time and the rest of the cast is very, very good.
The plot seems to be a combination of Lawrence of Arabia with a science fiction galactic political intrigue story. And that may sound sort of flippant but actually I think the storyline is handled very skillfully by the director. The pacing and the building to the climax is done with great skill and the final battle and its outcome are great.
What the filmmaker went for here was a combination of a personal story about Paul and his friends and family against the backdrop of a spectacle which is the revolt of the Fremen against the off-worlders who have dominated their world for centuries. The reason I mentioned Lawrence of Arabia is because Paul is an outsider who is accepted by the Fremen just as Lawrence was accepted by the Arabs in their struggle to liberate themselves from the Turks. And the Fremen are obviously modeled after the Arabs with “spice” as a stand-in for oil in the real world.
I don’t know if the movie is very faithful to every detail in the novels but in my opinion both this installment and the previous movie provide top-notch science fiction cinematic entertainment. The protagonist and his friends are extremely likable and their adversaries are almost literally cartoon villains that in some cases seem hardly human. And watching their defeat is almost as much fun as seeing Paul victorious. One thing though, Paul’s mother belongs to some kind of female religious magical cabal that has a lot to do with control over the nobility of the empire. I find myself repelled by all of them including Paul’s mother. I’d like to see all of them burned at the stake as witches.
So, my take on all this is simple. The plot is consistent enough to pass the suspension of disbelief hurdle and the action of the plot is lively enough and entertaining enough to keep you watching right through to the end. I can’t see how I don’t rate it as highly recommended. And the movie ends in the middle of a giant war so obviously we all have to save up our pennies to see the third and possibly further installments when they arrive. So, three cheers for Dune: Part 2.
Continuing my review of a list of “best Science fiction movies” from YouTube, the next installment is a movie from 2001 that I have heard spoken of as a “forgotten gem;” Donnie Darko. I will attempt to disavow my audience of that idea.
(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)
I would compare this movie to some mash-up of “The Breakfast Club” with a cheapo time travel/horror movie. The movie is stewed in teenage angst in an upscale California town where Donnie Darko (played by a young Jake Gyllenhaal) is undergoing psychotherapy to find out why he is hallucinating about a man in a dog mask who seems to be telling him to do dangerous and harmful things like smashing a water main to flood out his high school and burn down the house of a motivational speaker who is appearing at the school’s Health classes.
While staying out all night at the urging of Frank (the dog guy) Donnie escapes death when an airliner engine falls out of the sky and destroys his bedroom. It turns out that the FAA can’t locate a plane that lost an engine that day. Meanwhile his science teacher answers questions about time travel by using Stephen Hawking’s theories about wormholes to justify Donnie’s belief that his psychosis is really messages being sent to him from time travelers. And when he finds out that an old woman who lives up in the hills was a teacher at his school who wrote a book about time-travel he becomes convinced that he will be involved in a time travel event.
It all comes to a head around Halloween so the fact that some of the kids in the movie are wearing masks becomes less inexplicable but no less annoying. By the end of the movie several people have been killed violently which appears to include his mother and younger sister who are aboard a jet airliner that coincidently has lost an engine over his town before landing.
At that point, Donnie goes up to the mountains to await the time-traveling storm that’s about to strike. The end of the movie returns back a month before all the trouble started and this time Donnie is in the room when the engine strikes. So apparently, he’s sacrificed himself to prevent the deaths of his mother and sister and his girlfriend and the guy who ran her over and was then shot to death by Donnie. The end.
I hated this movie so much I can’t state it enough. I despised everyone in it. That includes Donnie, his English teacher (played by Drew Barrymore), his mother (played by the actress who was the president’s wife in Independence Day), the motivational speaker who turned out to be a kiddie porn purveyor (played by Patrick Swayze), and basically everyone else in the movie. Everything about this movie was annoying or depressing. And calling it science fiction is absurd. There’s absolutely no justification given for any of the events or hallucinations that Donnie experienced. But honestly, he was such an unlikeable character that all I felt at the end of the movie was annoyance that I had sat through this ridiculous movie. I don’t recommend this movie to any fans of science fiction.
Here is a Canadian band that’s not exactly country but kinda close. Tell me what you think.
This isn’t really a normal review. I won’t walk through the plot. Instead, I’ll give my impressions of the movie. Now, full disclosure, I’ve never read the Dune books. That alone is pretty remarkable considering they came out in the heyday of my science fiction reading career. I never could actually tell why I didn’t. Just something about the story didn’t click for some reason.
The first impression I have of this film is the high quality of the cinematography. The landscapes both desert and temperate are beautifully filmed. And the special effects of the colossal machines, space craft and the sand worms are wonderfully done. Of course, on the theater screen they’re even more impressive.
Next let’s look at the actors. There is a fairly large cast so there is a range of talent and not every character is given equal attention but the actors for the principal characters do a very fine job of making their parts memorable and entertaining.
The plot is something like the situation in feudal Japan where the emperor is in competition with his warlords and internecine struggle is a constant threat. But we clearly have House Atreides and the Fremen to root for and everyone else to hiss at. The battle scenes are impressive and the sword fights are well done and very entertaining.
Now I guess I’m supposed to like the Fremen as they’re the “good guys.” But honestly, I found them pretty unlikeable. I much preferred Atreides people (whatever they’re called). And also, the sisterhood that Paul Atreides’ mother is a member; the Bene Gesserit, I disliked them also. If I was running that universe, I’d have them rounded up and burned as witches. They’re very annoying.
Now of course, this first movie isn’t the full story. The second film is out there waiting for me to watch. So, I’ll leave this encapsulation of my impressions here.
I highly recommend this movie. This is good storytelling. The plot and characters are memorable and engaging. Two thumbs up. Bring on part two!
I was going to review another science fiction movie tonight (Her (2013) but about fifteen minutes into the movie I couldn’t get over my dislike for the protagonist (Theodore played by Joaquin Phoenix) so I turned it off. Once again that “best of” list doesn’t really match up perfectly with my taste. So far, I’ve had three bombs; Repo Man, Dark Star and now Her. On the positive side I liked Dark City, Wrath of Khan and Dredd. And soon I’ll watch Dune which I’ve already seen and liked. So, this guy is batting slightly better than .500. To be fair there were other movies on the list that I also like but have already seen. But the point is I’ll have to make my own version of “The List.”
So, there’s about another ten days or so left in my marketing contract for my book and I have learned a lot about how Amazon Ads work and also what they can and can’t do. You’re basically buying visibility on Amazon. The ratio is about one person in a thousand who sees your ad will click on it. And about one person in ten (approximately) will buy the book. But you pay money for every click (something like a dollar a click) and so you actually lose money on the sales you make. It’s quite bizarre.
The next stage in the campaign includes giving away five books on Goodreads to people who signed up and dropping the price on the e-books for two days to $2.99. And then there will be ads on Bookbub and hopefully this will provide the recognition in the algorithm to boost the books visibility. And of course there will be some reviews that hopefully entice buyers. Well, the fate of a self-published author is a lonely one. But I wanted to write a book and now I know how that looks.
On the positive side I have gotten pretty favorable feedback from some of the readers whose opinions I highly value and that is actually the biggest pleasure of the whole process. Several people have demanded that I produce a sequel immediately. Which is kind of a problem. But I have several different stories that I’ve been toying with and one of them will take the lead and become book two. It is interesting to me how differently men and women approach the story. Some of the women wanted to know how Bogey does with the waitress from the end of the book. Well, everyone has their own way of reading a story I suppose.
Anyone who’s purchased the book and would like to put a review up on Amazon I’d encourage you to do it right away to help me with the push for sales during the upcoming sale. I’m told that verified purchaser reviews are actually one of the most important marketing factors.
Well, there’s my update. I’ve been disavowed of my dream of best seller status (sniff). But I hope that with the rest of the program to come it will spark enough interest to produce a burst of sales. Excelsior!