The Hook Showed How Bad Things Were For Midlist Authors At the Turn of the Century

On Monday's entry I mentioned I read a book called The Hook by Donald Westlake.  It was first published in 2000 according to Goodreads.  There were a couple of interesting tidbits in there for writers.

First is the role computers play in destroying midlist authors.  Author Wayne Prentice published a few books but while they were well-received, the sales kept dwindling and so did the advances.  Then the publisher dropped him and no one else would touch him.

As Wayne explains it to famous author Bryce Proctorr, the biggest problem was the computers.  They would see his previous book sold 30,000 copies with 5,000 returns, so the next time the computers for the wholesalers would order only 23,000 books.  And so on and so on with diminishing returns until the publisher decided he wasn't going to make them money and dropped him.

The secondary problem:  marketing.  Marketing teams for publishers only have time and enthusiasm for winners.  If your books are seeming to sell less and less, they'll stop marketing you as much.  Where for the first book they had him on tour and on TV and stuff, by the third or fourth book he was on his own.  I can tell you from my limited experience that when your publisher doesn't help you market the book, it's a real tough sell.

Wayne comes up with a solution of sorts:  he starts using pseudonyms.  Usually you tell the publisher, but Wayne only told his agent.  So to the publisher, wholesalers, and bookstores--and their computers--it's a whole new author publishing his first book.  Thus the cycle begins again!

Except the problem is it's hard to do marketing if you're not who you claim to be.  You can't really go on tour or on TV and so on.  So the results probably won't be as good and thus with diminishing returns after a year or so he has to create another name and do it all again.

That's something I probably should do with my books.  I mean I've been Eric Filler for 8 years now; it's probably time to try a different name.  But then I have to set up new author pages and a new newsletter and do I just drop Eric Filler and start the new name?  Or do I kind of wean people off Filler books by doing them less frequently?  But at least for a while I'd have to do books under two names...you see the problems there.

Anyway, while this book was fiction, Westlake published books under various names from the late 50s until after his death in 2008, so I tend to think these parts were not really fiction, but something he knew about from first- or second-hand experience.

And I'm sure that in the 22 years since this book was published, things have only gotten worse for midlist authors.  Amazon's growing dominance, ebooks, self-publishing, and so on have probably only made it harder for midlisters to keep from getting canceled.

Something else to consider is the book you're reading that seems like it's written by some first-time author could actually be an experienced midlister in disguise.  How often does that happen?  I don't really know.  Is there even a way to find out other than doing an elaborate poll of authors who may or may not tell the truth?

Anyone want to chime in?

What Would You Doooo...For Writing Success?

 Remember those Klondike ice cream bar commercials in the 80s and 90s (and maybe they still do them today) where some guy on the street would go around asking people what they'd do for a Klondike and then ask them to do something stupid like act like a monkey or whatever?  I think they've even done parodies of them on Family Guy and Robot Chicken and so on.

Last month I watched a movie called Writer's Block and read a book by Donald Westlake called The Hook and both involved a less successful writer being coerced by a famous writer to doing something skeevy to downright criminal.   So I thought I'd do a little Klondike-type game with the scenarios in these books.  Then Phantom Readers can think about what they'd do.

Question 1:  A famous writer wants to invite you to his remote ranch in southern Texas to work on a book.  You won't be allowed to take your car or phone and you can't leave the ranch once you're there.  You could be there for weeks or even months.  But you, a struggling unknown writer, get to work at the feet of a master craftsman.  Do you say yes and go to the famous author's ranch or do you say nah, I'm good?  

Question 2:  An old friend who's now a famous author says he's blocked on his latest book.  Since you happen to have an unpublished manuscript handy, would you give it to him so he can rework it and claim it as his own in exchange for 50% of the advance of $1.1M?

Question 3:  At the ranch in Question 1, the famous author wants you to outline and write a book that he'll publish under his name.  The payout is far less generous than Question 2 as well.  Do you write it or tell him to stuff himself and demand to go home?

Question 4:  The old friend from Question 2 says he's blocked because his divorce has dragged on a while.  And his soon-to-be-ex will get half of any profits from his next book--ie the one you'd give to him.  But if something happens to his wife, the divorce will be over and he'll get all the money from the book to share with you.  Do you help him out with the wife problem or tell him to go hire a real hitman? 

Question 5:  While writing at the ranch from Questions 1 & 3, you find out that this famous author has not written any of his own books in a long time and you're just another in a string of less notable writers he's brought in to do his dirty work.  And after he's done with them, he has them killed and their skin turned into covers for his books.  What would you doooo...?

Question 6:  Let's say you killed the wife in Question 4 without being caught and are now $550,000 richer.  But a couple of months later, the famous author you helped is starting to crack, risking that you could be outed as a murderer.  What would you doooo...?

If anyone answers, try to be honest and don't try anything too outrageous or stupid. 

Obvious legal disclaimer:  You should not murder fellow authors or their spouses and should definitely not turn their skin into book covers.

Everyone Is Doing Writing Reality Wrong

 A little over a month ago, Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware posted this article about writing reality TV shows as another attempt is made.  Reading about the new show and the attempts in the past (apparently the last one was in 2013 so it's been a while) they were all doing it wrong.  

The shows were all based on competitions like American Idol, usually with some Big Brother thrown in as the writer contestants would all be locked up together.  None of the shows really made sense, which is why none of them succeeded.  The thing is, writing a book takes a long time--a really, really, really long time if you're GRR Martin.  It's not something you can just up and do in a couple of days like covering a song or even writing a song.  I mean a song is 3-5 minutes usually while a novel takes hours to read. 

It's just really stupid to keep trying to make writing fit into that mold.  Almost instantly I knew the way to do a writing-based reality show is more like Shark Tank or Dragon's Den.  In those shows people go on and try to get four businesspeople to invest in some product or idea.  This can obviously work for writing:  have four agents/editors as your sharks or dragons, writers come on to pitch an idea, the agents/editors either reject the idea or bid against each other to buy it.  And then you just have more of the same with different ideas.

Periodically you might also want to do updates on some of the contestants to see how their book is coming along towards publication.  Maybe talk to editors and illustrators and whoever.  Get some famous author like James Patterson or Stephen King to "mentor" a writer.  If you can get it on network TV then have the author go on whatever their morning news show is to promote the book and maybe have like one of those book club things with it.

It seems so obvious that you have to wonder why no one's done it.  Other than maybe it sucks?  It would get a little repetitive, especially if the ideas are all the same.  I'm not sure it could get one of the big 4 networks, but maybe something smaller like TLC or Discovery.

Another possible alternative is to do it cooking show style.  You could have writers try to write a story based on some prompt and then have judges judge them.  You'd really need to find some known writer who could scream at people and throw shit like Gordon Ramsey.  Even then I'm not really sure because writing isn't as physical and visual as cooking; I mean it's basically sitting at a desk or table and writing on a computer or paper.  Of course you can use montages for that, but it still doesn't seem that interesting.

Or you could do something like that show where Gordon Ramsey goes to restaurants to "help" them fix their problems by screaming at them and throwing stuff.  There are others like Bar Rescue where some guy goes to bars to fix them up.  By the same token you could have some known writer go to unknown writers and "fix" their manuscripts.  But again it would be hard to get a lot of compelling visuals of the writing, though you could get drama in the known writer berating the unknown writer and the unknown arguing back and stuff before they give in and everyone hugs and cries.

Would you watch shows like those?  I probably wouldn't because I don't watch "reality" shows.

What Happened to the Greatness of Compromise?

 Thanks to the Supremely Partisan Hacks overturning Roe v Wade, a lot of Republicans are revealing their true colors.  When a 10-year-old girl in Indiana was raped and got an abortion, some Republicans said she should have carried the child to term.  In other words, a child should give birth to a child, no matter how traumatizing and physically dangerous it might be.

In the same way after every gun massacre, Republicans say their "thoughts and prayers" and then do everything possible to make sure no meaningful reforms are enacted.  And people (and bots) on Twitter scream "SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED!" in reference to their precious 2nd Amendment that they've only partially read because they always overlook that part about a "well-maintained militia" which really in no interpretation should mean some asshole carrying an AR-15 to the grocery store.

The problem is that on these issues Republicans are so dug in, they won't give a single inch of ground.  It's this slippery slope logic of if we give in and make exceptions for the most extreme cases, like pregnant 10-year-olds or women who face serious complications or women who have fetuses already dead inside of them, then eventually we'll have to make more compromises until we lose everything.  The same is true about guns:  if we ban AR-15s or high-volume clips or armor-piercing bullets then you'll eventually give in more and more until there are actually sensible laws on the books.

And unfortunately voters support this shit because if a Republican gives an inch on gun laws or abortion or doesn't say the 2020 election was rigged and Trump won in a landslide, they'll be attacked and attacked and quite probably voted out for some lunatic who will spew those lies and hold the farthest right position.  Encouraging people who hold far-right positions and support lies then only encourages even more of that.

And then someone will say, "Both sides!" It's true that some "progressive" Democrats can hold too strongly to a far-left position.  But there are a lot fewer of them than far-right Republicans.  Then you get the "moderates" like Joe Manchin who are deathly afraid to support anything that might be anti-gun or pro-abortion because even though he claims to be a Democrat, he's really not; he's basically a pre-1994 Republican.

The truth is if we had this kind of thinking in 1776, there would not be a United States today.  The whole country was founded on compromises.  The Constitution Republicans claim to love was filled with compromises like the three-fifths compromise that counted slaves as less than full people--and also allowed states to keep slavery.  By today's standards it was abhorrent and so some on the far left say we should cancel the Founding Fathers.  But you'd probably still be a subject of the British crown otherwise--which in some ways might not be so bad.

We need to move back to where we can compromise, but I don't think we will.  Social media makes it easier than ever to just parse everything into sound bytes and now with things like deepfake and "fake news," it's easier than ever to just make up a bunch of shit and spread it around to people who don't know better.  Eventually I think we're just going to implode.  It's still hard for me to imagine an actual civil war, because what happens in Michigan where you have a large number of Democrats in cities and Republicans in the rural areas?  It's a lot more difficult than the 1860s where you could pretty much draw the line at slave states vs non-slave states.

Thanks to the Supremely Partisan Hacks, what we have instead is a return to the Bad Old Days of the Articles of Confederation, where it was every state for itself.  That system completely failed and gave rise to the Constitution with the Bill of Rights, like that precious, poorly-worded Second Amendment.  What we found is that we can't be "United" States if everyone is just doing their own thing.  Unfortunately, corrupt judges and an unwillingness to make sensible compromises is dragging us back in time.  You know what they say:  those who don't pay attention to history are bound to repeat it.

Why the Needless Lies?

 On Facebook I often get ads for Humble Bundles.  The ads usually say something like, "Pay What You Want, Get $229 in Games!" The amount and what you get (games, books, comics, whatever) changes.  What doesn't change is this is a bald-faced lie.  You literally cannot "Pay what you want" to get that amount of stuff.  

Instead, there are tiers ranging from $1 on up to whatever, usually like $35-$65.  The tiers are spread out like $1, $10, $20, etc.  So what if I want to pay $0.01?  I get nothing.  What if I can only pay $2.53?  I only get the $1 tier.  I've replied to a few of their ads and never get any response from Humble Bundle.  And the brilliant responses from other people are like, "Learn to read!" or "You can pay what you want. You just dont get everything.  They never told anything else"  Or those really smart people who just laughing icon react without saying anything.

And to respond to them, obviously I did read it and it does literally say, "Pay What You Want, Get $229 in Games."  See the image above.  How can you interpret that to say, "Pay What You Want, You Won't Get Everything?"  In reality it should say, "Pay What You Want, Get UP TO $229 in games."  That would actually be accurate.

It's not that I'm saying Humble Bundle is bad, but it's a stupid, needless lie.  It's like when I talked about the Movie House app on Roku.  They advertise that you can get "free premium movies."  But in reality if you watch enough "standard" movies (ie, mostly indie pictures no one has heard of) you get a $5 gift card for Amazon or Vudu, which usually is not enough to watch the movies they advertise as "premium" for free.

In both cases, the lies seem really pointless because the truth is still pretty good.  Humble Bundle you pay some money and you get games or comics for a lot less than they retailed for.  Plus you support charity.  The Movie House, I get $5 gift cards with little effort that I use on the shit I routinely buy on Amazon.  So they're still good deals; it just bugs me that they lie.

There are so many other lies like these.  I probably mentioned somewhere before how yogurt companies use these whimsical names like "cherry cobbler," "Boston cream pie," "red velvet cake," or "Key Lime pie" when in reality they don't have anything to make them taste like cobbler, pie, or cake.  They're just cherry, custardy, red(?), and lime flavor.  Similarly I buy these keto-friendly jams by "SkinnyGirl" which also makes cocktails, so they give the flavors drink names like "apricot mimosa," "strawberry rose" (rose-eh, not rose), and "grape merlot."  In reality there's no alcohol in them so they're just apricot, strawberry, and grape.  But they're usually the same size and cheaper than other keto-friendly jams so what the hell.

Another one is Sling billing itself as "a la carte TV."  In reality like Humble Bundle or, you know, cable, you have to buy set packages.  Real "a la carte TV" would mean I can just buy the channels I want, which would not be many, hence why cable and Sling offer packages.  I mean, most of us would never actively subscribe to those stupid religious or shopping channels if they weren't included.  Fox "News," MSNBC, ESPN, etc would have a lot fewer subscribers if people weren't forced to get them in packages.  And in return those networks pay a kickback to Big Telecom.

Anyway, the point is we're surrounded by lies and so many of them are completely unnecessary.  What happened to "truth in advertising?"  Did it ever really exist? 

I suppose a lot of people shrug this off as, "What's the big deal?"  Well if we can't stop ourselves from lying about the little things, how are we going to stop lies about the big things?  You know, like saying the 2020 election was "rigged" or all the bullshit about vaccines and whatnot with the pandemic.  In my mind, we can't excuse lying about little things and complain about big lies.  We have to say all lying is wrong and try to be more honest about things.

And that ain't no lie.

Zounds! Thou Shouldst Forsake Ye Olde Timey Language!

 On one of the Facebook book promotion groups I joined but hardly ever do anything in, I saw someone post a meme type thing relating to their book.  And it had a quote that I don't know if it was from a character in the book or someone reviewing it, but it really struck me as odd.  I'd post the exact thing but of course after I commented on it, it disappeared.

Anyway, it was something like, "The [whoever] family panders to the elite but they hold the bourgeois in their heart."  

Reading that I was like, "Wait, aren't the elite and bourgeois the same thing?  You can't pander to them and hold them in your heart at the same time."  I said as much and predictably the person who posted it got all huffy and pouty, saying, "That's their opinion.  In my book it's fine."  (I don't know if she meant it's MY opinion or if she meant "their" as in someone else wrote it?) And then probably she or a moderator deleted the post so I couldn't find it.  

In lieu of recent posts, I didn't try to be too much of a dick about it.  I mean, I didn't say, "You're so stupid!  Don't you know they're practically the same!  You idiot!"  But still they acted like a thin-skinned baby.

I had to do my own research then to satisfy my curiosity.  It's one of those cases where it turns out we're both right.  It's just how you use the word "bourgeois" has changed in the last 250 years.

The 18th Century French definition meant the middle class, not the elite.  So by that original definition, the quote the author (or reader) used is correct.  

But largely thanks to Karl Marx, the definition of bourgeois began to change in the mid-19th Century.  "Bourgeois" began to mean more well-off than middle-class people.  In the recent movie Death on the Nile, a rich woman who considers herself a socialist says, "This place is too bourgeois for me."  Meaning that it's decadent, not middle-class.

A couple of TV shows I've watched have used the word "boujie," which is slang for upscale.  The word is a shortened version of bourgeois according to the urban dictionary.

So you can see how when I read it, my interpretation is different, because I was thinking in modern terms, not 18th Century terms.  That's the problem when you use fancy words instead of just saying what you mean.  Instead of "bourgeois" if the person in the quote had just said, "working-class" or "middle-class" or "common people" then it would have worked a lot better.

If you're going to use a fancy, old-timey word, make sure you know what the modern meaning of it is--unless of course your story takes place in 18th Century France.  Even then it might confuse your readers who are used to it being used in the modern context.  That's why so often in classic books like Shakespeare or Dickens there are footnotes to explain terms that might not make sense to modern readers.

Oh, and if someone calls you out on using old-fashioned words, maybe don't be a whiny bitch about it.  Maybe explain why you used it that way.

Michael Crichton Was a Rare Talent

In baseball the term "five-tool player" means someone who can hit for average, hit for power, run fast, field well, and throw accurately.  Such rare players are almost like superheroes.  A couple months ago, Michael Offutt wrote this appreciation post of Michael Crichton and as I commented, Crichton was one of those rare writers who wrote in different areas.  He also worked in different mediums:  books, TV, and movies as a writer, producer, and director.  He was a five-tool player.  

The way the writing world works is that if you have success in one genre then generally you keep doing that for a while.  A lot of writers will pretty much do that the rest of their careers.  And there's nothing really wrong with that.  If you can do something well, why not keep doing it?  Getting back to the baseball analogy, some players are good at hitting but lousy at fielding (especially older players who lack the mobility they once had) or really good at fielding but not very good at hitting.  Then there are "left-handed specialists," or left-handed relief pitchers who basically come in to pitch to one left-handed batter and then leave the game.  Some of those guys can hang around to their mid-40s because they don't get as much wear-and-tear as someone who pitches 200 innings a year.

Anyway, most writers are like minor leaguers who never really crack the major leagues, but of the ones who do, most tend to have some kind of specialty that they do.  Even a writer who has been around a long time and had a lot of success like John Irving stays pretty much in one area of "literary" writing.  Tom Clancy was so successful in one genre that he became a brand after his death.  Others like Stephen King or John Grisham have a lot of success in one area and then earn the right to expand into other areas.  And then you have James Patterson who pays people to "co-author" books in a variety of genres.

Most of what Crichton wrote were "thrillers" but there was a variety of subjects.  The science ones like Jurassic Park, Congo, and The Andromeda Strain are probably the best known ones.  There were also business ones like Rising Sun, Disclosure, and Airframe.  Then he also wrote Eaters of the Dead, a more realistic take on Beowulf and The Great Train Robbery, which was, you know, about a train robbery in Victorian England.  Towards the end he got into more technology-based thrillers like Cell or Next.  Maybe it's not as diverse as if he wrote romances and comedies and children's books along with the thrillers but it's still a pretty broad subject area.

Then you have movies like the original Westworld and its sequel Futureworld.  And TV shows like ER.  It was a lot of stuff and really not many get to do that because they don't have the success or talent.  Really all he needed to do was release an album of musical compositions to pretty much cover every medium.

Yours Truly has tried different subject matters.  I've done a lot of gender swap erotica, but I started writing sci-fi and then literary.  And some of the literary like Higher Power or The Best Light or Virgin Territory is really more romance oriented.  I even tried comedy with Chet Finley vs The Machines of Fate.  But obviously I haven't been all that successful except in one area.

Still, I think what we should take away from someone like Crichton is that we shouldn't be afraid to push our boundaries.  If you have success at something then you probably want to stick with it, but don't be afraid to do other things too when you can.  99% of us will never be a five-tool player, but that does not mean you shouldn't try.

There's your inspirational message...not that anyone will read it. 

And now here's my ranking of Crichton-based movies I have seen:

1. The 13th Warrior (aka Eaters of the Dead): Although now we'd probably whine about Antonio Banderas playing an Arab, it was a really good adaptation that in some ways even improved on Crichton's book, like how he learns the Norse language so he can talk to them, something that was awkward in the book.
2. Jurassic Park:  Even if a lot of the dinosaur stuff is wrong, it's still a really entertaining movie
3. Sphere:  This was a great movie with an all-star cast that somehow didn't get much attention.
4. Congo:  This should really get a reboot because it was a decent adaptation with not-so-special effects
5. Rising Sun:  I suppose now people would bitch about "cultural appropriation" with Sean Connery as the gaijin.  It is kind of a product of its time in the early 90s when it seemed the Japanese were going to buy everything in America.  (Then I guess the Chinese undercut them.)
6. Timeline:  I saw it once I think on streaming.  It was OK.  When I read the book I noted how cinematic it seemed, something that really couldn't be said for some of Crichton's other books.  I don't think the movie really improved on it much.
7. Westworld:  The 70s movie was a pretty 70s sci-fi movie with a decent story and a great performance by Yul Brynr as the "man in black."
8. Futureworld:  The unnecessary sequel!
9. The Lost World:  Speaking of unnecessary sequels...this movie didn't even hold that much to Crichton's rushed book

Before you say, "What about...?" I just said "movies I have seen."  Some I have not seen.  Got it, Phantom Readers?

What are your favorite Crichton books and movies?

Page to Screen: Philip K Dick's Electric Dreams

In 2018, Amazon made a series called Electric Dreams based on Philip K Dick's short stories.  It's one of those things I meant to get around to watching but I didn't until a couple of months ago.  By then I also had the book, so I figured I might as well read the book and then watch the episodes to compare and contrast.

As you'd expect, some are better than others.  What annoys me with some of these episodes is they deviate too far from the story Dick wrote.  I get that these stories were mostly written in the 1950s so to make them relevant to 2017 you had to change things.  But some of them don't just update things; they completely alter the story itself.  Now if you're going to call your series Philip K Dick's Electric Dreams and say it's based on stories by Philip K Dick, maybe you should actually adapt the story Philip K Dick wrote.  Right?

Something else that annoyed me is the book and the TV show are not in the same order, so as I read, I kind of had to jump around to find episodes that matched (which don't always have the same title) and a couple didn't seem to match at all.

Impossible Planet:

The story is about a tour ship in space that's boarded by an old woman and an ancient robot.  The woman wants to go to this mythical planet called Earth.  She offers the captain and first mate a bunch of money so the greedy captain finds a planet that sorta matches the criteria and takes her there.  The old woman demands to go down, where she's promptly killed.  The first mate is appalled and decides to quit the business while the captain studies a strange coin found on the surface--an American coin meaning it really was Earth--before tossing it away.

The episode has pretty much the same premise.  There's a tour ship captained by Benedict Wong (Wong of the MCU) and a young guy who has a girlfriend who wants him to get some fancy administrative job with the tour company but he keeps being rejected.  

The old lady comes on board with her robot and offers them a bunch of money to go to Earth.  Like before, the greedy captain finds a planet that's vaguely similar and then takes them there.  What's different is along the way the young guy and old lady start bonding and he has flashbacks to Earth and the old lady shows him a picture where he looks exactly like her grandpa.

They get to the planet and go down and while dying from a lack of oxygen, they imagine they're really in the old lady's grandparents' home of Carolina.  There's really no indication if they were really on Earth or not like in the story.

The romantic plot is a little weird but it doesn't distract too much from the story.  So overall it was not bad.

The Commuter

The story is about an officious little prick of a British railroad employee who has a man come up to his window to ask for a ticket to Macon Heights.  Except there is no Macon Heights!  The guy disappears but then keeps coming back.  The railroad guy finally gets on a train and finds the elusive Macon Heights, which was supposed to be a town but didn't get built.  Except the railroad guy sees it!  Then he starts questioning reality until he gets home to find his wife and house are the same--or at least same enough.

The episode layers on some extra stuff to the basic premise.  There's a railroad employee named Ed with a wife and a son who has psychotic freak outs.  Then one day a woman comes up asking for a ticket to Macon Heights.  She soon disappears but eventually he gets on a train and sees people jumping off in a field that leads to Macon Heights.

In the episode, Macon Heights is some kind of Field of Dreams-like paradise for people who have suffered some kind of problems like rape or molestation or stuff like that.  It's a quaint little town where everyone is happy and content--until Ed shows up and starts poking holes in it.  When he goes back home, his son has vanished; it's as if he never existed.  Then he has to go back to Macon Heights to make the woman give back his son even though the boy is going to keep having problems and probably end up in jail and dead.

The addition of the son plot not only helps add time but it helps to make the railroad employee sympathetic.  In the book he is as I said an officious little prick, a petty bureaucrat.  Giving him a son with mental problems and showing Ed helping women with baby carriages down the steps makes him appear more sympathetic to the audience.  It's kind of like that old thing where if you want a character to be more sympathetic, give him/her a dog or child.

Human Is

In the story, there's a scientist who is really a jerk to his wife and everyone else.  Then he goes to the planet Rexar IV to study something.  When he gets back, he's a new man!  He's fun and kind and considerate--and passionate with his wife.  The problem is that he's not really a human but a Rexarnian who has taken over the human's body!  But when called into court, his wife says he hasn't changed even though she knows he's an alien.  They go home together and live Happily Ever After.

The episode changes the guy (Silas) from a scientist to a colonel.  He's leading a mission to Rexar IV to steal some chemical Terra needs to clean up its atmosphere.  As before, Silas is a jerk who ranges from ignoring his wife Vera to being openly hostile to her.  To update for the 21st Century, instead of being a homemaker who seemed like kind of an airhead, Vera also works for the government as some kind of scientist or bureaucrat.

The mission to Rexar goes bad but Silas returns with another guy.  He's less obviously different than in the story where he uses kind of old-timey language like from a Jane Austen novel or something.  In this case it's not obvious right away because he's sick for a few days.  Eventually he gets up and around and gives himself away by not being a total jerk to his wife.  

There's some soft core sex and he even makes breakfast for her.  Then some footage from the battle on Rexar IV is found that seems to implicate him.  There's a slightly more drawn-out trial during which Silas confesses he isn't really Silas, but Vera successfully pleads for his life.  And they live Happily Ever After.

The love story element is a little better in the episode, where in the story it was a bit goofy because the wife was an airhead and the alien-possessed husband talked weirdly.

The Father Thing:

The story is about a boy who realizes his father is not his father.  He's been possessed by some kind of weird bug thing.  Then he finds out his father is growing replacements for him and his mom.  He ends up killing the bug.

The episode sticks pretty close to this only it makes the story a bit bigger.  A boy and his father (Greg Kinnear) come back from a camping trip but soon after, the dad starts acting weird.  As do other people in the boy's neighborhood--including the cops.

The boy and a couple of friends find where the aliens are creating more replacements, but end up killing the bug.  That doesn't necessarily mean all the bugs are gone though.

The episode is in some ways better in that it adds some depth to the characters that wasn't really in Dick's story.  The addition of a friend and his brother to help take the bug down also gives it more of a Stranger Things vibe.

This is really the way to adapt these stories by updating them and adding some extra depth but not changing the meaning of the stories.  The next ones discussed are far less successful at this.

(Fun Fact:  A teacher in the episode is named Mr. Dick.)

Kill All Others (Or The Hanging Man)

In the story The Hanging Man, a guy sees something hanging from a lamppost and realizes it's a dead body.  No one seems all that concerned, which starts freaking him out.  Then he starts seeing these bugs flying around and into people and realizes it's an invasion that he missed because he was in his basement that day.

The guy tries to get his wife and kids only to realize they're already infected.  He winds up going to the next town over, where he goes to the cops.  While they seem to believe him, guess what?  They're infected too.  Soon the guy is hanging from a lamppost in the town.  The bodies are a way to find who has not been infected yet, because the infected won't really care.

Basically the story is an Invasion of the Body Snatchers kind of thing where aliens are taking over people.  A lot of it was probably built on the Cold War paranoia of sleeper agents or other commie spies hiding in our midst.

The episode KAO (or Kill All Others) is not bad but it uses an approach far more like 1984 than Invasion of the Body Snatchers.  In the not-so-distant future, a guy named Philbert sees "the Candidate" for president of Mexmerican (a conglomerate of Mexico-the US-and Canada) say "Kill all others" during an interview.  No one else really gives a crap about it.

When Philbert sees a sign saying "Kill All Others," he stops a train to try to get a picture and winds up in trouble with the authorities.  Then when he sees some people chasing a woman and intervenes, he gets into trouble with the authorities again.  Finally he tries to ask "the Candidate" about it but the disguise he wears is easily seen through and his real identity is exposed.  He goes on the run and winds up being killed and hung by a KAO sign.

As I said, this is a lot more like 1984 than Dick's story by including all of the political stuff.  I'm not saying it's bad or I didn't like it; it's just like I said at the beginning, if you're going to call it Philip K Dick's Electric Dreams then maybe you should actual adapt the story he wrote and not a story George Orwell wrote.

BTW, the system for Mexmerican where there's only 1 political party and the idea of "democracy" is that you get to vote down from 52 candidates to 1, sounds like what Republicans want with all these anti-voting laws.  So again it's not the episode isn't good or relevant so much as it's not really the same story.

Autofac

The story was kind of fun in that it's a different take on the evil AI genre like The Terminator or The Matrix.  In this case the AI isn't evil so much as just oblivious.  Basically the "Autofac" was designed to pump out consumer goods based on what it thought people in each particular region needed.  But then there's a big war and the problem for the survivors is that the Autofac is continuing to pump out shit, using up all the scarce resources for crap they don't need.

One particular village tries to get the Autofac to shut down.  They manage to speak with an android-like representative, but when that fails they hatch a scheme where they pile up a bunch of tungsten in a spot and two different Autofacs end up fighting over it.  The war between the Autofacs gets bigger and bigger until it pretty much destroys itself--except for one factory that is producing "pellets" that will create more Autofacs.  D'Oh!

The episode is markedly different.  It's worth noting that Ronald D Moore is one of the executive producers because the episode is basically like the last two seasons of his Battlestar Galactica show, particularly where a bunch of the "humans" turned out to be Cylons and the Cylons were based off of real people.

Juno Temple is a young hacker who keeps dreaming about seeing the missiles flying and destroying the world.  Which doesn't make sense if the war ended 20 years ago.  I mean, she'd have to be 40-50 then.  The Autofac is producing crap the survivors don't need like in the story.  But to get the representative there they knock down a drone and hack into it instead of pretending the milk it delivers is bad like in the story--which is probably because hacking didn't exist in the 1950s.

An android representative shows up and they knock her out to try to hack into her to access the Autofac and plant some bombs.  Juno Temple and two dudes go there and then we find out that they're all Cylons androids made by the Autofac to replace humans.  And the Juno Temple one knew this because of those dreams of seeing herself at the end of the human world and so planted a sort of virus to wipe out the Autofac.  And she found an old Wired magazine with an article on the real human her.  Thus her village is saved.  Yay?

It wasn't really terrible, but it got too far away from the premise.  It took what was mostly a fun story about consumerism run amok and turned it into another boring AI-taking-over-the-world story.  Really this story was like The Trouble With Tribbles, where you had the goofy little fuzzballs reproducing and reproducing and eating everything, only this was robots producing milk, sandals, or whatever else.  If you hadn't read the story, you'd probably like the episode.

The Hood Maker

The story is about a future society where telepaths or "teeps" are being used by Big Brother to read people's thoughts.  Someone is distributing silver bands that go on the head and let people block the teeps.  The government is desperate to find out who is responsible and eventually they capture the guy.  But when the teep reads his mind, he finds out the teeps are not even mutants, just freaks who originated from a nuclear blast or something and can't reproduce and will die out in a generation.  This literally blows his mind and the hood maker goes on his merry way.

The episode takes an approach more like Alien Nation or Almost Human.  There's a normal (we think) cop in some city.  I guess it's after a war that destroyed all the computers so everything is back to the mid-20th Century at best.  A teep girl named Honor is brought in to work with the cop.  Then someone wearing a strange hood almost kills them with a Molotov cocktail.  They start investigating the hoods and the cop and Honor start falling in love and even fuck.

Where this really deviates from the story is that the real "hood maker" is not the guy making the hoods, but the cop.  Somehow the cop has the ability to block teeps from reading his mind.  And so he is regular humanity's hope to counter the threat of the teeps.  Except he probably dies when the hood factory is on fire and Honor won't let him escape.  Meanwhile teeps are rising up all over the city.

I think this is another that's not a bad episode, but it kind of strays too far off-message.  The government using teeps to read minds and violate people's privacy kind of gets lost in the shuffle of everything else going on.  It seems like something pretty important.

Like Autofac, if you don't read the story it's based on, you'd probably like this better.

(Fun Fact:  in the introduction to the story in the book, the writer of the episode admits to changing the hoods from silver bands to actual hoods because that's how he imagined it as a kid.  So that was a conscious choice not something done wrong.)

Safe & Sound (Or Foster, You're Dead)

The story Foster, You're Dead is about two things:  Cold War paranoia and rampant consumerism, subjects that pop up in some of Dick's other stories like Autofac.  In the story, Mike Foster is a little boy who is terrified because his family doesn't have a bomb shelter.  In this world of "1971," everything is geared towards preparing for nuclear Armageddon, including schools that teach mostly survival skills.  Mike finally guilts his dad into buying a spiffy new shelter he can't really afford only for it to become obsolete a few months later.  (In a way Dick foresaw the modern tech industry where as soon as you fork over a bunch of money for something it becomes obsolete in favor of the newest, latest thing.)

Mike is happy for a little while, going down to the shelter every day just to hang out and feel safe.  But after a lousy Christmas retail season because everyone is buying "adapters" for their shelters instead of the furniture his dad sells, Mike's dad has to get rid of the shelter.  Mike is really bummed.  It ends with the ironic joke that he sees a sign reading, "Peace on Earth."

The episode Safe & Sound really only adapts half the premise.  Foster Lee is a 16-year-old redheaded girl who is moving from a "Bubble" in the west to some big city in the east.  At her new school, all the kids have these smart bracelet things called a Dex--like Dexterity, I guess--and if you don't have one you're basically an outcast who has to go through separate security lines, have to do schoolwork manually with a pencil and paper, and can't go into the school safe room during an attack.  Plus just the normal peer pressure of not being cool.  After Foster's mom refuses to buy one, she gets a classmate to help her obtain one.

Soon after when she's trying to use it she contacts customer support and a really helpful, friendly guy called Ethan starts contacting her.  Foster starts getting worried because her father heard voices and went crazy and even after her mom makes her get rid of the Dex, Ethan keeps talking to her through beams of sunlight or ants--supposedly. 

He convinces her there's a terrorist plot afoot and she has to carry a bomb into the school to stop it.  She does so but is stopped before it can go off.  Afterwards she becomes a hero as the government pins everything on her mom, who was crusading for more representation for the Bubbles and whatever.  The end then explains how Ethan manipulated her.  Hooray.

This does an OK job with the half of the story about paranoia.  In this case paranoia about terrorism instead of nuclear war, which is a more 2010s appropriate subject.  Where it fails is the other half of the story about rampant consumerism.  Which maybe being made for Amazon, a central hub for rampant consumerism, was something they didn't want to touch on too strongly.  But really that second point of the story was how the government had basically monetized fear, by convincing people to buy shelters and constantly upgrade them.  Like I said earlier, there was a parallel to modern tech only in this case it wasn't just to be hip and with it so much as without the latest, greatest thing you'll die!  That's what had Mike Foster so freaked out in the story but there's really none of that in the episode.

What I also noticed in this, Autofac, and Human Is especially is the creators of the series really don't do much with the dark humor in some of Dick's stories.  Some of these stories have a wry, tongue-in-cheek humor that reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut, though I think maybe these came out first.  But the TV series doesn't really do that; it plays everything straight and it's kind of a shame because I think some of these episodes would be better if they were a bit more fun instead of grim.

Real Life (Or Exhibit Piece)

This was the first episode but the description is so far different than the story in the book that I didn't recognize it, so I watched other episodes first and eventually came back to it.

The story is about a guy who works in a museum.  He runs a display of 20th Century America.  Then he finds himself inside the display with a wife, kids, and office job like Leave It to Beaver or something.  He goes back-and-forth a couple of times before deciding he'd rather stay in the fake world.  Ironically, the original Twilight Zone did a very similar episode where an actor thinks the family guy role he's playing is his real life.

The episode written by Ronald D Moore really bears little similarity except for the overall concept. It starts with Anna Paquin as a cop in future Chicago who is traumatized after some kind of massacre.  Her wife gives her a device that lets her go on "vacation" where she's in the past as Terrence Howard, whose wife recently died and he's been trying to find the real killers.  He developed the technology used to make the device Anna Paquin is using.

It becomes sort of a double Total Recall as Anna Paquin and Terrence Howard go back-and-forth a few times. Is he dreaming her or is she dreaming him?  In the end it doesn't matter as their brains are both fried.  Yay?

I guess I can't say this one really got the premise of the story wrong.  It's just as I said the events are so changed that it's not recognizable until you actually watch it.  Maybe it's because that Twilight Zone episode already did this almost 60 years earlier.  But hey, it'd make a good premise for a gender swap story.  (Actually maybe I've already done something like that?)

Crazy Diamond (Or Sales Pitch)

This was the last one I watched because again it was so different and with a different title so I didn't know it was even one of the stories.  And it really isn't.  The author claimed to use "Dickean themes"...in the same way that the Super Mario Bros movie in the 90s kept the "themes" of the video game while being almost completely different from the game.

The story Dick wrote in 1954 is another about consumerism run amok.  It's a pretty silly story.  Ed has to go through tons of advertising on his commute from Earth to Ganymede and back.  One day he gets home to find his wife has invited in a robot called a "fasrad."  It promises to solve every problem in the house--except its presence.  Ed refuses to buy it but the fasrad goes with him on a doomed voyage into deep space.  Even when the ship blows up, Ed survives--as does the fasrad.  They're doomed to be together forever!  It's one of those Twilight Zone-type things like the famous episode with Burgess Meredith as the guy who has time enough to read and then his glasses break.  It's a comeuppance for a guy who didn't really deserve a comeuppance.

The episode uses pretty much none of that.  It's almost incomprehensible.  Ed (Steve Buscemi, cue the memes of him dressed as a young person) works for some company that makes "quantum consciousnesses" that are somehow bred from humans and pigs.  And there are pig people!  And for some reason the coasts keep crumbling and food expires in a day or two and there's metal about three inches under the soil so no one can grow anything.  Ed is restoring a boat so he and his wife can come sail away, come sail away, come sail away and go saaaaailing...because it's time for a cool change.

Anyway, he meets a "Jill" who has a quantum thingy that's going bad.  She uses her feminine wiles to get him to give her access to his business so she can steal some QCs to sell, but the deal goes bad and so she has to go back to Ed and his wife, pretending to sell insurance.  She starts getting chummy with the wife and in the end they push Ed off the boat but he doesn't die.  So...they don't get the insurance money or anything.  What was the point then?  I mean why bring up a double indemnity insurance policy if you're not actually going to kill the guy and not even be around to collect the money?

But then what was the point of any of it?  Seriously, it was awful.  Not just because it didn't follow the original story, but because it wasn't really a good story in its own right.  Like a couple of these other ones they just throw this near-future world at you with little explanation, but this one makes a lot less sense.  Pig people?  Why?  WTF?!

Like some of the movies I mentioned above, this was a fairly humorous story that was completely drained of humor.  And like some I mentioned, it was anti-consumerism but the episode also pretty much drained that out too.  Which, again, you have to wonder if they'd have done that if it was being made for Netflix and not Amazon.

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A Fun Fact is a lot of the writers, producers, and a few actors in this like Bryan Cranston also worked on other Amazon shows that premiered around this time like Sneaky Pete, Carnival Row, and a couple other ones I forget right now.

Another Fun Fact is I watched this movie on Rifftrax called Invaders From Mars which seemed like if Ed Wood had tried to adapt The Hanging Man or Father Thing into a movie.  It was about invaders from Mars (I guess) who sucked people under sand and possessed them.  A little kid realizes his father is different (like when his dad slaps him) and tries to get help, though unlike The Hanging Man he does eventually get help.  The sets and effects are so cheap and shoddy that it definitely never rises to the level of Dick's stories.

It's Better When We're Friends

Way back in March, I rewatched the first season of Syfy's Invisible Man series from 2000-2001.  The basic premise of the show is that a guy named Darien Fawkes gets busted during a robbery when the old man whose house he's robbing has a heart attack and he stays to give the guy CPR and save his life.  As it's his third strike he's sentenced to life in prison.  His brother is a genius scientist who works for a government agency and cuts a deal where if Darien puts a gland of "quicksilver" in his head, he can go free.  The gland causes him to turn invisible and then Darien and the cut-rate "Agency" he works for take on various bad guys or X-Files type cases and whatnot.  

The pilot and first couple episodes are a bit rocky for one real reason:  chemistry, or lack thereof.  Darien's partner is a high-strung government lifer named Hobbes and after the pilot there's a female British scientist known as "the Keeper" who oversees Darien's gland and overall health.  And the head of the Agency is known only as "the Official."  So we have two main characters who don't even get actual names and Darien and Hobbes really don't get along.  Which really does not lend itself to the kind of chemistry you need to be successful.

It starts picking up around the fifth episode when Darien spies on the Keeper to find out why she's working such a shitty job and uncovers a woman with rapid aging the Keeper accidentally gave her in an Army experiment.  With Darien's help the woman is saved and he and the Keeper have a better relationship and we even know her name:  Clare.  At the same time things with Darien and Hobbes are less acrimonious as they become more partners instead of Hobbes basically being a guard dog to make sure Darien doesn't go off the reservation.  An episode or two later we even find out "the Official" is named Charlie--or at least that's the current name he's using.

And so by that point things are settling in and the show has better chemistry.  Better chemistry makes it more fun to watch because the actors can play off each other better and banter a little more and stuff like that.

Of course this is not the only example.  It took a while for there to be much chemistry in Star Trek Discovery.  After the first two episodes that are essentially the pilot, Michael Burnham is a prisoner who like Darien Fawkes is freed by cutting a deal.  Except for Tilly, her roommate, she's not really popular on the ship until she starts proving herself.  Even then it takes a while (you might even say until the third season) to really get a lot of chemistry between the whole cast.  In the same way it's because the main character starts as an outsider and those around her don't really like her.

You can fill in any other examples you might think of.  Basically the point is that you have more chemistry with casts when they're friends than when they're enemies or rivals or or whatever.  This is true for books as well as TV.  If you have characters who are friendly with each other they'll have much better chemistry than if they're enemies or rivals.

One of those things that's probably obvious but if you're writing a story and characters don't seem to be clicking, maybe that's the problem.

Integrated Media Is Fun For Committed Fans and Less Fun for Casual Viewers

In the old days there was always this separation of things on TV and things in movies.  It's why Tom Welling, the Superboyman on Smallville could never be Superman in a movie.  Or why no matter many crimes Ezra Miller commits, DC/WB will never let Grant Gustin be the Flash in a movie.  Or why Clark Gregg could never return to big screen Marvel stuff unless it was in the past.  Or why Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and Iron Fist never showed up in any MCU movies no matter what was going down in New York, where they pretty much all live.

But largely thanks to Star Wars that's all begun to change.  Ironically I think it began with Solo when Darth Maul appeared in a cookie scene, which was a reference to his story arc in the Clone Wars TV show.  Then at the end of the first season of The Mandalorian, Moff Gideon pulls out the darksaber, which was seen in The Clone Wars and Rebels.  And then they amped it up a notch in season two when Ahsoka Tano appeared and got a spinoff show that will probably include live action versions of a lot of Rebels characters.  In the last couple of episodes, Katee Sackhoff reprised her role in The Clone Wars and Rebels as Bo Katan.  Then in The Book of Boba Fett near the end there was an appearance by bounty hunter Cad Bane who was in The Clone Wars and The Bad Batch.  And then sometimes now it works in reverse like when bounty hunter Fennec Shand of The Mandalorian and Book of Boba Fett showed up on The Bad Batch. 

So instead of TV and movies being separate, they are fully integrated with each other now to make one continuity.  Since they started doing shows on Disney+, Marvel has also got into the act now.  Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness actually leans pretty heavily on WandaVision since the Scarlet Witch is the main villain of the movie.  The Captain Peggy Carter from What If...? also appears as does Anson Mount's Black Bolt from the failed Inhumans TV show and Patrick Stewart's Professor X from the original Fox X-Men movies.

If you watch all that stuff then it's pretty cool how it all crosses over and connects and stuff.  But for casual viewers who might not have seen everything, it probably makes it less fun because you're not going to get all the references or know where all this stuff comes from.

I guess part of the idea is cross-marketing so you'll want to get Disney+ and watch shows like WandaVision because stuff from that will pop up in Dr. Strange 2 or Captain Marvel 2 or whatever.  I'm not sure how well that actually works with people who are less rabid about the MCU.  I don't really care that much though I did watch that show ahead of time--most of it in fast-forward.

Since it's probably been successful for Disney, I wouldn't be surprised if you see it more for other brands too.  Though first other brands really have to have TV shows and movies to cross over.  That's really the problem with Star Trek for Paramount+ in that right now they have no movies.  It would be cool to see Mount's Chris Pike alongside Chris Pine's Kirk and Patrick Stewart's Picard and Michael Burnham of Discovery and hell, why not live action characters from Lower Decks and Prodigy?  Multiverses are the in thing right now.  While DC practically invented multiverse crossovers, DC/WB would have to get their shit together in a way I'm not sure they can ever really manage for a big screen version.

But the more TV and movie franchises become integrated, probably the more annoyed casual fans are going to get.  Because really it's like if you're reading a comic book story and there are chunks of it that take place in other titles that you haven't read and don't really want to spend hundreds of dollars collecting them all to read the entire story.  That happens with big crossover events like The Blackest Night or House of M or Civil War or whatever the current Marvel thing is; there are stories in pretty much every title but who wants to spend the money to read all of them?

So if you're like me you just read the main title and hope for the best.  Still it can sometimes be disconcerting to wonder, Wait, who's that?  How'd they get there?  When did that happen?

It's kind of the danger of integrating TV and movie properties.

2015 Movies Grumpy Bulldog vs Tony Laplume

Last November Tony Laplume had gone over a bunch of 2014 movies on his Film Fan blog and since he wouldn't allow comments (and still doesn't) and I realized I had also reviewed most of the movies, I put together sort of a Siskel & Ebert thing showing his review vs. my review.

In June he did 2015 movies, so let's do it again!  Yee-hah!  And again I'll try to use actual reviews whenever possible so I'm not changing my opinion after the fact, but some like Star Wars or Ant-Man the review I wrote was too long so I'll just kind of sum it up.

Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens (Laplume)

rating: *****

review: For me the sequels started out with a significant bang.  Admittedly, I'm not exactly square with a lot of mainstream opinion, particularly about the Star Wars saga.  I loved the prequels, and I loved the rest of the sequels, too, but didn't much care for Rogue One, which is the only recent entry fans actually did like.  I loved the new characters instantly, but what really seals it for me is that thing that made everyone instantly love the trailer: Harrison Ford's return as Han Solo.  I thought even his death was handled perfectly.  Too many people accept the simplest way of describing a thing to be the only way to view it, and of course Force Awakens has parallels with A New Hope.  But the results are very different.  I'm a huge admirer of J.J. Abrams as it is, so the fact that he got this assignment at all was absolutely best case scenario.

Me:

After another 10 years without a real movie (just the Clone Wars animated movie) and the bad taste left by the prequels in general there wasn't a high bar for Episode VII.  Perhaps owing to how Disney rushed this into production after buying Lucasfilm, the story winds up being a faded copy of Episode IV.  There are a lot of things that don't make much sense:  Poe getting "thrown from the wreck" and somehow falling out of his jacket; the Millennium Falcon being there for years with no one noticing; Rey being able to fly it almost instantly; going to lightspeed inside a hangar and through a shield (why didn't they just do that in Rogue One?)...but there was potential, which Rian Johnson squandered because he wanted a gritty and "real" epic space opera--an oxymoron if there ever was one.  Don't get me started. (3/5)

The Hateful Eight (Laplume)

rating: *****

review: Quentin Tarantino has been able to assemble absolute dream casts throughout his career while also pursuing talent he himself sought out that was otherwise being ignored.  Eight is as close to an all-star Tarantino cast as he's gotten, led by Samuel L. Jackson, whose breakthrough film was Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, and Kurt Russell, star of what too many dismiss as a minor Tarantino flick, Death Proof.  Famously, Tarantino initially thought to shelve this script when it leaked, but thankfully he thought better.  Unlike other period films he's pursued this one doesn't much worry about its place in history, but simply allows Tarantino to settle into the characters he's created, and there are few writers in any medium who creates as vivid characters as he does.  An underrated pick for best film he's yet directed.

Me:

I don't really like Quentin Tarantino movies but I've watched most of them.  This is the 8th one I guess and like Django Unchained it takes place in the late 19th Century.  A bounty hunter is taking a woman to Red Rock, Wyoming to hang, though he could have saved us all about 3 hours if he'd just killed her.  I mean the reward is "Dead or Alive" so it's the same either way, but it's some kind of point of honor with him.  Anyway, there's a blizzard and they have to stop at a "haberdashery" or inn, where there are some other people.  And then people start dying and secrets are revealed.  It all moves at a snail's pace, with lots of excess blabbing because critics told Tarantino he's good at dialogue.  There's also an excessive amount of blood and gore to make this akin to a torture porn movie.  For some reason there's a narrator after about 90 minutes, which really makes no sense.  Cut it about in half and it would be OK. (2/5)

Self/Less (Laplume)

rating: ****

review: Tarsem caught everyone else's attention with The Cell, a visual spectacle starring Jennifer Lopez just before she became Jennifer Lopez, but it was The Fall that continually captivates me, and I have been following his lamentably sporadic career ever since.  Self/Less also has the virtue of starring Ryan Reynolds, whose career instincts generally seem to intersect with my viewing interests.  Reynolds often chooses roles in which the person he's playing is someone other than he actually is, for a variety of reasons.  This one is a richly textured role in a truly impossible situation where he's trying to reclaim his life, bringing forth his perennially underrated dramatic chops.

Me:

OK sci-fi thriller where Ben Kingsley is sick and transplants his memories into Ryan Reynolds.  If it had been me it would be Ben Kingsley transplanting his brain into Jennifer Lawrence (I almost literally did that in the first part of Transformed Into a Bimbo Too.  Anyway, after that it sort of turns into a combination of The Bourne Identity/Legacy with a little Robocop thrown in.   It's good and not entirely predictable. (2.5/5)

The Martian (Laplume)

rating: ****

review: I honestly thought we were going to enter a golden age of Matt Damon as a movie star, as in him becoming a reliable top box office attraction, after this one.  That didn't really happen, but the results are still pretty magnetic in this adaptation of one of the viral literary hits from that time.

Me:

This was my second-favorite movie of 2015 after The Force Awakens, though in retrospect maybe it would now actually be on top.  After a bunch of flops, Ridley Scott scored a winner with this and Matt Damon provides all the charm and charisma he never had in those Bourne movies.  Really the whole thing works because of Damon's charm and charisma that keeps this castaway tale from being too dreary or dull. (4/5)

The Revenant (Laplume)

rating: ****

review: Everyone now thinks of this as the one where Leonardo DiCaprio has that encounter with the bear, but it's also the role that finally snagged him the Oscar, and gave Tom Hardy his closest shot at mainstream legitimacy, which of course he accepted in one of his most unrecognizable appearances ever.

Me:

I finally got tired of waiting for this to show up on cable and just Redboxed it.  Was it the best movie of last year?  Meh.  I mean I certainly didn't enjoy it like Star Wars or The Martian.  It's your basic tale of survival and revenge.  In the 19th Century(?) in the wilderness, Leo DiCaprio is mauled by a bear and left for dead by the nasty Tom Hardy, who for added measure kills Leo's half-Indian son.  From there Leo crawls around, goes over a waterfall, eats raw buffalo, falls off a cliff on a horse, and then goes all Empire Strikes Back on the horse to shield himself from the cold.  All so he can inevitably track down Tom Hardy.  The end is reminiscent of Gladiator, though not with as good of music. A well made movie but not one you're going to watch over and over. (3/5)

Legend (Laplume)

rating: ****

review: If you remember, Hardy had that shot for a movie we'll reach a little later in this chronicle, but there was also this gangster flick in which he plays brothers, which ended up being dismissed "because we'd seen that movie before."  Which is crazy, because no, nobody had.  But this was also the point at which everyone seemed to conspire in dismantling the old Hollywood system of, y'know, movie stars.

Me: 

It's funny when a true story turns out to be a lot of cliches.  You wouldn't think true stories could be cliches but then it's probably "true" in the Aaron Sorkin biopic-writing sense.  This is a story about two gangsters in London who were twin brothers.  Reggie is the more normal one while Ronnie is crazy and also homosexual.  Both of them are played by Tom Hardy.  Then like I say it's a lot of gangster movie cliches.  There's a girl who marries Reggie but of course realizes the gangster wife life is shit.  He tells her he'll get out of the gangster life but of course he doesn't.  There's a cop on their tail and there's conflict between the two brothers and so on.  Other than the twin brother angle nothing really stands out.  There's certainly nothing legendary about it.  Mic drop! (2/5)

Tomorrowland (Laplume)

rating: ****

review: If you want the poster child of modern Disney, you only have to look at the inexplicable rejection of this movie, the most recent attempt by the studio to create something of its own.  And, I guess, the last time Geoege Clooney was a movie star.

Me:

I might have gone to see this in theaters but never got around to it.  Anyway, it's the movie based on the old Disneyland attraction.  What I like about the movie is how it questions our increasingly bleak worldview.  I mean when the most popular books, movies, and TV shows are all featuring apocalyptic and dystopian scenarios it's hard to believe in optimism. Where's that can-do spirit that was so pervasive in Star Trek?  Or in the earlier days of science-fiction?  The movie is good then at reminding us that we should try to solve problems instead of whining about them.  This was something good about The Martian too, in how everyone banded together instead of arguing and finger-pointing like what happens after every school shooting.  Anyway, the irony is the movie itself features an apocalyptic/dystopian plot in that the guy running Tomorrowland thinks we all need to die.  I'll admit I didn't pay attention through the whole movie, which was kind of a problem.  Something shallow is that the girl playing the teenager who teams up with George Clooney looked like she was thirty.  The intro got a little annoying too in "let's start here" "no, let's start here."  Just start somewhere!  Anyway, it was OK and if you really like old-timey sci-fi then it's fun for that too.  Probably a good thing Disney bought Star Wars for the scenes in the old toy shop where they have lots of Star Wars props.  (2.5/5)

Ant-Man (Laplume)

rating: ****

review: I honestly don't believe any movie in the MCU has nailed the MCU formula better than this introduction of Paul Rudd's Scott Lang.  Except maybe the sequel.

Me:

The long-gestating Edgar Wright movie finally came to the big screen--without Edgar Wright for the most part, though he got a writing and EP credit.  I saw a video on YouTube that hilariously compared this to Iron Man and it really does follow that formula, only the hero is an ex-con not a billionaire.  Like Iron Man succeeded largely thanks to Robert Downey Jr, this movie works mostly because of Paul Rudd being able to walk the tightrope between action movie and family movie and managing to make a criminal likable. (3/5)

Joy (Laplume)

rating: ****

review: David O. Russell had finally built himself into one of Hollywood's most significant directors when he chose this project as a star vehicle for Jennifer Lawrence.  The result is everything it should have been, except a project that let him keep that spot.

Me:

I saw a preview for this I think last year when I watched The Martian, but the preview gave me no idea what the movie was actually about.  There's Jennifer Lawrence and she's a mom...or something...and there's Bradley Cooper and Robert de Niro so it must be a David O. Russell movie...but anything beyond that I had no idea.  Finally it was on HBO and I watched most of it.  Basically it's the story of the woman who in the early 80s invented the Spin Mop or whatever it's called; it's a mop with a detachable cloth head and rolls up with a handle so you don't have to get your hands wet trying to wring it out.  She faces a lot of adversity trying to get her invention to the public.  Big Mop didn't want a mop that could be reused; they'd rather you buy a new one every year.  Finally she convinces Bradley Cooper to put it on QVC, but it doesn't sell until she goes on to demonstrate it herself.  But that's not the end of her troubles.  It's a decent drama about a subject you probably didn't know or really care about. It really just needed some better marketing.  (3/5)

The Peanuts Movie (Laplume)

rating: ***

review: Sometimes these things will be filled with movies I really just need to watch again (and somehow I didn't even manage that when I was spending recent months wading through that back catalog).  But I suspect doing so would improve my opinion of these particular results.

Me:

It's cutesy and nonthreatening, like pretty much all the TV specials and comic strips.  Lovable loser Charlie Brown is on a quixotic quest to win the heart of a red-haired girl, but as always the best part is Snoopy.  There's a subplot where he's writing a story about trying to save Fifi, a French poodle terrorized by the Red Baron in WWI.  Really, next time just make the whole movie about Snoopy. (3/5)

Ex Machina (Laplume)

rating: ***

review: One of the prototypical modern cult classics, propelled by a fresh cast including Oscar Isaac, Domhnall Gleeson, and Alicia Vikander.

Me:

I saw this in a theater in Louisville with my brother and his wife.  It was really good if you like a smaller, slower kind of movie.  The pacing reminded me of the remake of Solaris.  In this case some Richie Cunningham looking guy is invited to the bunker/mansion of a billionaire software guru who reveals he has built an android with artificial intelligence.  But there's a lot more going on than meets the eye.  The end was just brilliant with a really great twist.  It's not playing in a lot of theaters (especially by now) so be sure to check it out on Redbox/digital download. (4/5)

Sicario (Laplume)

rating: ***

review: This one became a full-blown phenomenon, and further propelled Denis Villeneuve to Hollywood royalty, and yet its ambiguities are such that the apparent lead character is overshadowed by two characters even the sequel (not directed by Villeneuve) is uncertain that we should cheer them on, even when one of them is Benicio del Toro in a role worthy of his talents.

Me:

An FBI agent (Emily Blunt) is drafted onto a team that is illegally going to go into Mexico to take out a couple of drug dealers.  Benicio del Toro is a sicario (or hitman) who is working for the Americans (temporarily) for his own reasons.  It's OK but felt a little slow.  And really Emily Blunt sucks at fighting.  She gets choked out by the new Punisher, shot by del Toro, and wrestled and almost choked out again by Josh Brolin.  She really needed that fighting suit from Edge of Tomorrow. (2.5/5)

Terminator: Genisys (Laplume)

rating: ***

review: It's the popular thing to dislike every new Terminator movie past the second one, to find some reason to utterly dismiss it, so it really doesn't matter what you've heard or personally think of this one, it's already obvious.  But popular opinion isn't always right.  Another entertaining entry in the series.

Me:

This was a soft reboot where everyone except Schwarzenegger was recast.  To explain why Arnold looks older, they had him go back in time to Sarah Connor's childhood to protect her, which had a creepy Time Traveler's Wife vibe.  The rest wasn't terrible as it brought in a lot from the previous movies, but in the end it just didn't work for people.  The one thing that didn't make sense was at the end Sarah and Reese are in 2019 and haven't had sex yet, so how can John Connor be born to lead the resistance? (2/5)

Spectre (Laplume)

rating: ***

review: The third Daniel Craig entry in the Bond series left me cold, and circumstances left a considerable gap in my viewing of this fourth one, and so I'm probably still processing it.  But for me, there's little question that his are the entries that will, at least to this point, best stand the test of time, once we stop worrying so much about protecting older material.

Me:

This was written to be the last appearance of Daniel Craig as Bond and presumably Sam Mendes as director.  There are a lot of little Easter eggs to tip the cap to previous Bond films, like at the end when Bond drives off in the car from Goldfinger.  As with most of the Craig movies it's a lot of chase and action scenes strung together with a few beats of quiet inbetween.  I've always thought Craig is a lot better in the non-action scenes.  Anyway, this felt as if it were 4 hours long. I'm pretty sure it wasn't.  (2/5)

Ted 2 (Laplume)

rating: ***

review: I've developed this weird thing about seeing sequels without having seen the original, and this is one of them.  It's pretty much exactly what you would expect.

Me:

The first one was OK but this just felt so goddamned lazy.  Most of it is recycled Family Guy jokes and celebrity cameos.  Mark Wahlberg was the star of the last one but this time he's just the sidekick to Seth MacFarlane's talking teddy bear, which is not for the best.  Really hoping it didn't make enough for a Ted 3. (1/5)

Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (Laplume)

rating: ***

review: It's more popular to think of it as the one where Rebecca Ferguson joins the ensemble, but I tend to lament it as the one where Jeremy Renner takes a huge step back after having briefly threatened to take over in Ghost Protocol.

Me:

Seemed pretty much the same as the last one.  What happened to the women of that one?  There was a woman on the team, right?  And wasn't there the woman from the third one at the end working as a nurse or something and Tom Cruise was going to see her?  Neither one shows up here.  Anyway, seemed impossibly long. Boom. (2/5)

Fantastic Four (Laplume)

rating: ***

review: "There's never been a good film version!!!" is what you're always going to hear, but of the three that've been released to date, I like 'em all, including this effort to give the team a more youthful appearance.  The only problem with Miles Teller's Reed Richards is that he necessarily takes a passive role in the proceedings, since the rest of the team has to catch up with him eventually, even though the movie clearly pivots around him.

Me:

I don't think this was nearly as bad as many people claimed.  I think it's one of those cases like 2003's "Daredevil" where it became a cause celebre to hate on the movie.  I'm not saying it's a great movie either, but it's not anywhere as terrible as "Batman & Robin" or "The Spirit."  It's not even as bad as Ang Lee's "Hulk."  If you can pretend to understand why teleporting to another dimension gives people superpowers, then it's a reasonably OK story. (2/5)

Mad Max: Fury Road (Laplume)

rating: ***

review: This is the one everyone went absolutely crazy about, and so of course it features as minimal a role for Tom Hardy as possible, surely the only Mad Max film yet produced, with his name right there in the title, to be able to say that.

Me:

I never watched the original three Mel Gibson movies, the last of which was like 30 years ago.  This isn’t a reboot even though Mel Gibson has been replaced by Tom Hardy.  Since the last movie was like 30 years ago you might think they’d do something to fill you in a little, but nah.  The video game commercial before the movie actually was more helpful setting up the world of Mad Max than anything in the movie.  But um there’s an apocalypse and now water and gas are precious commodities.  There's some freaky dude called Immortus Joe who has a bunch henchmen who look like Fester Addams.  They capture Max early on and use him for a mobile blood bank when Joe’s right-hand woman Furiosa (Charlize Theron) decides to make off with Joe’s favorite concubines in a “war rig” which is a tanker with water and gasoline.  There are two questions I have:  if the women are in the tanker, wouldn’t they suffocate?  That’s what happened in a crappy movie about blind bank robbers I watched; they tried to hide in a hollowed out tanker truck and died.  And Max is hooked up to a blood line for the better part of a day and can unhook it without even being woozy—then proceed to punch a shitload of guys and blow up a bunch of shit.  How much blood does that dude have?  More than the average person that’s for sure.  Despite that his name is in the title, Max is more of a secondary character in this.  He has less personality than most of the vehicles.  There are some cool action sequences though. (2/5)

In the Heart of the Sea (Laplume)

rating: ***

review: Based on the true story that inspired Moby-Dick, this is one I unabashedly just need to watch again.

Me:

This is supposed to be the story that inspired Moby-Dick.  I fell asleep before it even got to the white whale. (1/5)

Avengers: Age of Ultron (Laplume)

rating: ***

review: Hugely ironically, because I'm no big fan of his, but Joss Whedon did exactly what Joss Whedon always does with this one.  I honestly think the only reason it's not popular is because audiences were disappointed not to find Thanos in it.  But it proved integral to later developments in the MCU anyway.  Eventually fans will just view it as another entry in the series.  For me it's just par for the course.

Me:

I didn't like it all that much.  It's OK but I think the problem right from the get-go is that this is a placeholder movie.  I mean the end of Avengers introduced Thanos so everyone was psyched for the Infinity Gauntlet thing but then they announced Age of Ultron and that the Infinity War would be the third movie.  So really this movie was always just to bridge the gap.  Besides that is just the whole weight of the Marvel cinematic universe, so that really most of the movie feels like it's just setting up stuff (Wakanda, Infinity Stones, etc.) for down the road.  I'd give it a solid B or (2.5/5)

So there you have it.  I think this time around I was harder on most of these movies than Laplume was.  You might think from this and the 4th of July post that I'm picking on him or obsessed with him but really he's one of the few people I know who still blogs much.  If you don't blog or only blog like once a month it's kind of hard to find material to respond to, innit?  Just saying.

Star Wars: Resistance Was Also Hindered By Its Own Premise

In Monday's entry I mentioned rewatching the Star Wars animated series The Clone Wars, The Bad Batch, and Rebels.  And then I figured since I did that, I might as well rewatch Resistance too.  And like I said about The Bad Batch in that entry, Resistance is hindered by its own premise.

Whereas The Bad Batch is largely hindered by the characters all being clones of the same dude, Resistance is hindered by decisions made in its setting and just the overall sloppiness of the sequel universe.  If you haven't watched it, the series is to date the only animated show to take place after the original trilogy.  It starts a few months (I think) before The Force Awakens.  Poe Dameron recruits a young New Republic pilot named Kazudo Xiono to infiltrate a refueling platform on the remote planet of Castilon.  The platform is home to races of modified starfighters piloted by the "Aces" who also double as the station's protection from pirates or other threats.  Kaz is given a job at a former Rebel Alliance soldier's repair shop, despite that he really knows nothing about repairing ships, and starts to find out the truth about the First Order.

There are problems right from the jump.  First, you have your main character working as a mechanic.  Who, especially little kids, is going to want to watch a show about mechanics?  Did they really think kids were going to want to watch Kaz half-assedly fixing ships or fetching parts?  Which is why they have to get him off the platform a few times on missions with Poe.

The other problem is the First Order can't be exposed as bad guys until almost the end of the first season because the New Republic wasn't at war with them at the start of The Force Awakens.  That makes things kind of hard when you have bad guys who can't really be shown as bad guys.  And again, this kind of intrigue and stuff isn't really what little kids are going to want to watch.  When I was a kid what were the three main things about Star Wars?

1. Lightsaber duels!
2. Space battles!
3. Bounty hunters!

We have almost none of that in this show because we can't have Jedi because Luke Skywalker is off feeling sorry for himself and Mary Sue Rey hasn't had her Force Awaken yet.  Setting the series on a platform in an ocean made it kinda hard to have space battles--until they moved it into space in season 2, which was too little, too late.  And strangely there was a lack of bounty hunters except for two second season episodes, something they probably regretted once The Mandalorian was a huge success while this was canceled.

I do not entirely blame creator Dave Filoni for the problems as the sequel trilogy was so messy and ill-thought-out.  They probably figured they had to set it out in distant space and keep it relatively free of referencing other Star Wars stuff (there are really no cameos from previous shows or movies except for General Leia Organa showing up a couple of times) because they weren't really sure what the movies were going to do.  And then Rian Johnson came along and fucked up everything and the whole thing was a train wreck.

If you've followed this blog and paid attention, you should know that usually when I see problems like this I also like to find ways that they could have been fixed.

Here are a couple of rough premises for shows that might have worked better:

• The first one I thought of was to focus on a squadron of New Republic X-wings with Kaz in it.  They try to chase down some pirates who are terrorizing some Outer Rim planets.  In looking for the pirates, Kaz starts to find out that they're backed by the First Order.  This has a lot of the same elements as the TV show but is more action oriented for today's ADHD kids.  You could basically have the same cast with Neeku, Tam, and the Aces as fellow pilots, Yeager as the squadron commander, and Doza as the captain of the ship they're on.  You could even still have the plot with Synara the pirate Kaz "rescues" who becomes a spy until she has second thoughts about betraying them.
• The second one would be more like Speed Racer in Spaaaaaaace!  Poe recruits Kaz to go undercover as a racer on some circuit in the Outer Rim.  As he competes in various races, he finds clues about the First Order and they maybe recruit someone to try to kill him and stuff.  The advantage of this is you could create some neat race in asteroid belts or planetary rings or nebulae or whatever.  But I'm not sure how long you could really sustain the story line.  Again you could keep most of the same cast with Neeku and Tam as Kaz's pit crew, Yeager as the boss of the team, and Doza could be the head of the racing league or whatever.

Anyway, hindsight is 20/20, right?  But also when you're writing, you want to make sure you don't box yourself in with a premise that doesn't work all that well.  And you should try to write to your audience, which if it's kids, they don't want drudgery and intrigue; they want laser guns going pew-pew! And shit blowing up!  Why do you think those awful Transformers movies made like $10 billion? 

Changes: But Are They For the Better?

 After the flap a couple of months ago about racist "fans" attacking Moses Ingram on Obi-Wan Kenobi for the sin of being black, I had a weird train of thought that seemed appropriate for Insecure Wednesday.  I got thinking about how a lot of the time the people who make these complaints will say the character isn't supposed to be black (or Asian, Latinx, or whatever) in the comics or book or video game or whatever.  Sometimes it's funny like when people complained about a contestant in the Hunger Games not being black in the book when she was in fact described in the book as being black.  Duh.

I got thinking that as the author, how would I feel if they made a show of A Hero's Journey or Chance of a Lifetime and cast a black actress as Emma Earl or Stacey Chance?  Would I whine and complain that those characters are white in the books?  (I mean, you can clearly see Emma is white on the cover of A Hero's Journey.)

I want to think that it wouldn't matter to me so long as the woman they hire is good enough to bring the character to life in the way that I wrote her.  It doesn't really matter that Emma is a ginger on the outside so much as her personality.  She's a shy, bookish, polite, and highly-intelligent young woman and yet when she feels strongly about something, she does not back down or give in.  That's why she's the one called to become the Scarlet Knight in the first place. 

Steve Fischer as Steve is gruff and a heavy drinker while inside mourning that he has lost his wife and daughter.  He's also brave, determined, and incorruptible, which is how he winds up at the scene of the robbery that ends up turning him into Stacey Chance.  Stacey is far more vulnerable and emotional and yet when push comes to shove (especially when it comes to Steve's daughter) she's still as brave and determined as she was as a man.

If the actress can bring those traits to life, it doesn't matter what color they are, right?  Right?  I mean, that's the theory.  As much as I want to think it wouldn't bug me, I know I'm not that squeaky clean.  But the thing is, ANY change is probably going to bug me to some extent.  I mean, I love these books.  If it were up to me, any TV shows or movies would be exact replicas of the books I wrote.  What I really want is for people to see what I saw in my head when I wrote it.

But I'm also pragmatic enough to know that can't happen.  There always have to be changes for time or pacing or maybe (like Ready Player One) there are licenses that can't be acquired.  Or there are changes because some nutty producer wants a giant spider in it.  At the end of the day it's really about whether the end product is well-made and a good representation of the spirit of the story.

That's what I keep telling myself.  Maybe someday I'll really believe it.