Blast from the Past Movie Review: Guyver 2: Dark Hero (1994)

Although the film podcast Myopia: Defend Your Childhood did an episode on the film The Guyver on my suggestion, it didn't seem like there was much of an interest from anybody in doing an episode on the sequel Guyver: Dark Hero. Given the film's iffy quality, I can't exactly blame them. Since movies and e-books are very helpful in getting me through otherwise-dull elliptical sessions, I snagged this one off Amazon Prime for a pre-Thanksgiving workout and off we went...

The Plot

It's been a year since Sean Barker (David Hayter) bonded with the Guyver, a suit of biomechanical armor of alien origin. With the evil Kronos Corporation and its alien Zoanoid warriors defeated, the armor's urge to battle evil prompts Sean to fight (and oftentimes kill) drug dealers and other criminals. This alienates him from his girlfriend Mizki (Billi Lee) from the first film, who thinks he's going insane and has no time for his "I don't kill, it kills" excuses. Plagued by strange dreams and seeing news on television of "a werewolf attack," Sean sets off for an archaeological dig in Utah overseen by Cori Edwards (Kathy Christopherson) and her father Dr. Marcus Edwards (Stuart Weiss), a pair of renegade scientists investigating things like Bigfoot, crop circles, etc.

Unfortunately, the Kronos Corporation turns out to be involved, as are a bunch of even more skilled and dangerous Zoanoids. Sean is in for the fight of his life...

The Good

*It's a fast-moving and entertaining film--most of the time.

*The script and the dialogue, although they have their issues, represent a significant improvement over the ponderous original. Watching clips of the original on YouTube (they've taken down the full movie since we watched it for Myopia, it seems), it's clear just how clunky the original was and how improved this one is.

*The opening narration is a vast improvement over the original, which had a laughably obnoxious combination of a Star Wars opening crawl ripoff and a ponderous voice-over. Instead we get a quick introduction complete with the image of the Guyver unit flashing and doing its thing and then we cut to a bunch of drug smugglers murdering a security guard.

*Replacing Jack Armstrong with David Hayter in the role of Sean is a vast improvement given how poor Armstrong's acting was in the original film. Even though Mizki is absent for most of the film, Billi Lee is an improvement on Vivian Wu. No unintentional hilarity, hard-to-understand accents, and overdramatic silliness from these two.

*Cori is a much stronger and more driven character than the passive Mizki.

*The fight choreography has improved quite a bit over the original film. In-universe I suppose it's because Sean has had more time to train in martial arts and learn about his armor and these Zoanoids aren't just Kronos's hired gang-banger muscle, but regardless it's much less silly to watch.

*We finally figure out just what Kronos's master plan is besides "conduct grossly unethical medical experiments to turn people into shape-shifting monsters."

The Bad

*There were several parts of the movie, particularly those taking place at night or in the cave system where the archaeological stuff was taking place, that were difficult to see. This might've been because I was watching it on my Kindle at my not-as-well-lit apartment gym (the LA Fitness didn't have that problem), but I don't think I've had that problem before. Something to keep in mind.

*Toward the end of the film there are some parts where it dragged.

*Given all the crap Sean and Mizki went through together in the first film and how they're still together a year afterward despite her knowledge of what Sean does with the armor, I would have liked more acknowledgement of their relationship. Instead Sean moves onto a new love interest relatively quickly--the film seems to take place over the course of only a few days, meaning that he and Mizki broke up at most a week before. It would have been much more interesting if he'd written her a letter or called her from the archaeological site indicating that he had found Zoanoids and she followed him there, with the Kronos Corporation taking note that she's the daughter of the traitor Dr. Segawa. Given the need to keep the run-time concise, throwing in a full-on love triangle might not fly, but Sean just forgets her too quickly.

*Speaking of Sean, in the first half or so of the movie he's really self-absorbed and aggravating. Somebody really needs to read How To Win Friends and Influence People and commit it to memory.

*Given how the Zoanoid Striker (Jimmie Walker) from the first movie survived and is implied to have defected to the CIA, it would have been amusing to see him again. Although he was easily the weakest of the Kronos Corporation's minions and didn't seem overly dedicated to the cause ("JUST DOING MY JOB!"), he did rough up Mizki and I imagine Sean would not be pleased to see him again. Furthermore, given his outlandishly stereotypical antics in the first film, perhaps fellow African-American Atkins (Christopher Michael) finds him embarrassing and has forced him to get his 'hood tendencies under control, including no longer letting him speak entirely in rap.

(I'm now imagining a scene where Atkins unleashes Striker against Kronos's Zoanoids and he relapses into his ghetto persona in front of Sean. An embarrassed Atkins has to chew him out.)

*The opening credits after the battle with the drug dealers are way too long.

*There are some unintentionally hilarious slow-mo scenes and scenes where Barker is trying to yell. Although Hayter is an improvement over Armstrong, he still has his Narm-ish moments.

The Verdict

An improvement over the original, but still not exactly great cinema. Worth renting or streaming, but not really worth buying. 7.0 out of 10.

How To Improve WILD WILD WEST (1999)

For the 200th episode of Myopia: Defend Your Childhood, our mighty host decided we ought to do Wild Wild West, the Will Smith and Kevin Kline vehicle based on the 1960s TV series). I'd only seen some bits of the movie on HBO at my parents' house long ago and I'm an aficionado of steampunk, so this was something I wanted to see. Here's the podcast. Although I found much of the film hilarious--the only member of the crew to do so--I admit there were some areas that needed improvement.

So here's how I would have improved Wild Wild West while keeping as much of the film intact as possible. Here there be spoilers for a movie that's 20-odd years old, so be ye warned...

*Instead of the prologue with the scientist being killed by the flying blade pursuing the magnetized collar around his neck, have a flashback to the end of the Civil War in which Confederate General "Bloodbath" McGrath (Ted Levine) and Dr. Arliss Loveless (Kenneth Branagh) attack the free black town of New Liberty with their steampunk war machines. Fortunately a nearby detachment of black cavalry including Jim West (Will Smith) is nearby and is able to relieve the town. In the process Loveless loses the lower half of his body and this can be played for laughs. I'm thinking some kind of explosion triggered by West blows Loveless in half, with body parts flying through the air.

(Given how the podcast group objected to the mood whiplash between silliness and serious James Bond-type spycraft, combining a massacre of civilians by evil racists with said racists getting hurt in hilarious ways would be tricky to pull off. Still it's probably doable.)

*Trim down the opening credits. They're more entertaining than the over-long opening credits of Spawn, but they go on and on and on...

*The first chunk or so of the film is generally good, with a lot of goofy humor, fight scenes, and the introduction of steampunk techie Artemis Gordon (Kevin Kline) but it reveals one of the film's major flaws. Many of the jokes in the film are funny, but they go on too long. We're talking Family Guy level of jokes going on too long here. The scene where West is having sex with a woman in a town's water tower is amusing, but the joke about him pretending to kiss her when he's really kissing empty air and she's getting progressively more annoyed goes on much longer than it needs to. The point has been made; let's get to the gunfight in the bar.

*In general, more practical effects. A lot of the CGI in the film is simply bad.

*Nixing the opening with the fleeing scientist losing his head means we lose the "that's a man's head" scene between Gordon and West, but perhaps someone else can lose their head instead. Somebody at the bar at the beginning, perhaps? McGrath is there and he's intent on running nitroglycerin to Loveless in New Orleans, so perhaps one of his minions' corpses is captured? That scene was pretty funny and it would be a shame to lose it.

*Considering how one of the guards on Loveless's estate accosts West and berates him using racist language (calling him "boy") when he sees him skulking around outside, I would expect him to have a much more hostile reception inside. Instead none of the Confederate die-hards attending his ball seem to care that a black man (and a member of the current U.S. Army no less) is roaming about armed and talking to white people as an equal rather than a servant, at least until he gropes a white woman he thinks is Gordon in disguise. Given how he absolutely refused to go as Gordon's manservant--his explanation allows for both humor and to show how incredibly degrading that would be. Perhaps instead he could have gone in disguise as some kind of African prince, Coming To America style? Ex-Confederates would disdain former slaves but might think somewhat better of a wealthy foreigner.

*When we first meet Rita Escobar (Salma Hayek) she's being held prisoner by some scantily-clad entertainers. The vibe I was getting was that Loveless had hired prostitutes to keep his captive scientists entertained, with Rita pretending to be a more respectable actress or singer who refused to participate. The idea that Loveless is using the carrot as well as the stick to control the scientists--and especially the particular nature of the carrot--could be played for more comedy.

*Although most of the group objected to the scenes where Loveless needles West about being black and West in turn needles Loveless about being disabled, a lot of that I actually found pretty funny. Not only does it appeal to my sense of humor, which relies heavily on wordplay and tasteless, shocking comments, but it would be realistic for its time. Loveless, being a Confederate die-hard, would be incredibly racist, while West would retaliate using the most obvious avenue, especially given how sensitive a subject this is for Loveless.

*The way they talk to each other implies they've interacted in the past, although there's really no reason for them to have. Perhaps they fight, or at least talk to each other, in the new prologue?

*That said, the attempted lynching of West that's played for comedy (!) doesn't go well at all. Gordon deliberately set it up (!!) to distract the guests from his searching Loveless's estate to find the captive scientists and it does allow for some amusing Will Smith jokes, but they're not going to be letting a man they intend to murder talk for so long like that. I would have made it so Gordon just needs to distract the party guests long enough to rescue Rita and then the two of them quickly intervene to keep West from being killed. Searching the estate would take hours and West would be long dead by then, but springing Rita from Loveless's sex-dungeon bedroom and then saving West is much less risky. Later in the film, West can in turn put Gordon at gross risk of bodily harm that's both funny and makes the point that what nearly happens to West is serious Dude Not Funny territory. Given how West absolutely refuses to pretend to be Gordon's servant we know that enslavement left a mark on him even though he escaped as a child, and lynching would be a much more fearful possibility for him than for a white man like Gordon.

*West references having been raised by Indians after escaping slavery as a child, but nothing about Native Americans happens at all even though they're in the Old West. His revealing how he was separated from his parents and how they were killed by McGrath at New Liberty was necessary plot-wise to get Gordon to stop feuding with him, but there was no need for the Indian back-story unless it was relevant--say if his adoptive Indian tribe showed up to help fight Loveless or something. I'd just nix that completely because bringing in an Indian war party on top of everything else would make the whole thing needlessly complicated.

(Unless of course West sets up Gordon to be scalped or undergo something like the "sun vow" scene from A Man Called Horse in revenge for Gordon trying to get him lynched earlier. That might actually be funny.)

And that turn ties in with my next point...

*Loveless's plan to divide up the United States between various former colonial powers makes things needlessly complicated and raises some awkward questions--namely an alliance of Mexico and various European powers supporting a terrorist to break up the United States would be grounds for immediate war if it went wrong. And given how President Grant knows the various European countries are involved, that's the obvious sequel and people would be wondering. I'd have just stuck with him trying to kidnap and/or kill President Grant, perhaps using McGrath and his Confederate die-hards as cannon fodder to punish them for losing the war. After all, I did like that Loveless hated the Confederates for losing the war and making his crippling ultimately pointless as much as he hated the Union for crippling him--it shows how much of a narcissist he is. Loveless's betrayal of McGrath and the murder of his men could be here instead of much earlier at the estate.

*Given how much West needles Gordon about dressing in drag for his missions, West having to dress in drag to rescue Grant and Gordon is an amusing ironic punishment. However, like many of the film's jokes, the scene goes for way too long. Yes, Will Smith pretending to be a sassy belly dancer in a veil to secretly unchain some people is funny, but get to the point already.

*The big reveal at the end that Rita's "father" isn't really her father but her husband would've been a lot funnier if the actor was someone younger and better-looking than Gary Cervantes. As someone pointed out on the podcast, perhaps Antonio Banderas? Given how West and Gordon are competing for Rita's affections the entire time, I get they were going for the shocking reveal she was married, but it would have been funnier if it was to a man widely-regarded as a sex symbol in a way Kevin Kline is not. And as they leave at the end, perhaps Mr. Escobar can wink at them? That would be pretty funny, plus it shows he's perceptive enough to know that his wife had been playing them the entire time and he's gloating that at the end of the day, it's him she's going home with. Maybe that'd make him a bit of an Ungrateful Bastard, but it'd be funny.

Hopefully all these suggestions would tighten the film up and fix some plot holes all while preserving the good bits.

On Halle Bailey's Ariel and the Egyptian 25th Dynasty

Disney recently announced that Halle Bailey, an African-American singer and actress from Atlanta (represent!), has been cast as Ariel in a live-action version of the Disney animated classic The Little Mermaid. Although I haven't seen any ugly commentary on social media about it myself, I have heard some people are getting upset and I can easily imagine this being true, either due to authenticity concerns about the source material, straight-up racism, or other issues.

Firstly, although The Little Mermaid is based on a Danish story (by author Hans Christian Anderson), the mermaid civilization is not connected to my knowledge to Danish society in any significant way. If it turns out they're descended from Vikings mutated by some kind of magic let me know, but it's my understanding that's not the case. The mermaids could easily be migrants from somewhere else who settled in the vicinity of Denmark, perhaps due to the Medieval Warm Period making their original homeland in the Mediterranean or even West Africa inhospitable. Therefore, even though the landlubbers nearby are white, the mermaids could be Semitic or even black. Although I'm generally not a fan of "if it's fantasy it doesn't have to be 'realistic'" attitude, the above explanation is a plausible one for a large Middle Eastern or black (mermaid) population in an otherwise European setting. After all, the Gypies (whose actual name for themselves is Roma or Romany) are originally from India and the Hungarians are a Turkic or Finnic people originally from Russia.

Secondly, even if the mermaid population generally is of European in appearance, ruling elites don't necessarily match up with the local population. Much of northern England was ruled by Vikings for awhile, the whole of England was ruled by different French dynasties from the Norman conquest of 1066 until the Welsh Henry Tudor took power in 1485, parts of or all of China were ruled by non-Chinese steppe peoples on many different occasions, etc. More appropos would be the 25th Dynasty of Egypt--although the Egyptians were a Semitic people, the 25th Dynasty was originally from Nubia, much farther south.

So here's where it gets Game of Thrones. Triton is originally from somewhere else and is the founder of a new dynasty, either elected by other members of the mermaid elite after the previous king dies without an heir or who seizes power in some kind of civil war. As king he exiles Ursula, ostensibly for practicing witchcraft and other sorts of bad behavior but really because she's a member of the previous dynasty. However, not only is Triton foreign, but Triton is a widower with no interest in remarrying and has only daughters, no sons. This makes his regime vulnerable and Ursula plays on Ariel's interest in human culture as part of some kind of scheme to seize power.

Yes, that's needlessly complicated for a kids movie, but they did elaborate on the original Aladdin to make the new live-action version more elaborate (Jasmine seeks to become the next ruler of Agrabah in the vein of Razia Sultan, the only female ruler of the Muslim Delhi Sultanate, Jafar is a "street rat" himself who rose to become the grand vizier). If this is too much and if Disney wants to keep Triton as a white Zeus-alike, they can always depict his late wife as being black and Ariel takes after her mother rather than her father in looks.

Movie Review: FREE STATE OF JONES (2016)

This afternoon I rode up to the old homestead in East Cobb to see the Matthew McConaughey historical movie The Free State of Jones, based on the book Free State of Jones, with my friend Nick. It hadn't been long since I'd learned the Confederate secession was lacking in democratic legitimacy (if you combined the white Unionists with the blacks, one could make a very strong case the majority of the population opposed secession), but I'm not aware of Hollywood actually acknowledging internal opposition to the Confederacy. The only exception I can think of is Cold Mountain, and I hadn't seen the movie or read the book.

So how was it? Let's see...

The Plot

Newton Knight (Matthew McConaughey), a Confederate medic from Mississippi, deserts from the army to take home the body of his son (or a relative of some kind, it's not 100% clear), who had been drafted by Confederate soldiers who had also taken most of the family's crops and farming equipment. Already upset by the "20 slave law" that exempts the sons of large slave-owners from the draft, he protects a widow and her daughters from the thieving Confederates, who then chase him into the swamp using bloodhounds. He falls in with some runaway slaves and organizes a rebellion against the Confederacy. Along the way, he romances the slave Rachel (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) after his wife Serena (Keri Russell) leaves him. After the war, he and his fellow guerrillas become staunch Republicans (the white South was strongly Democratic at the time) but soon face the coming of lynching, disenfranchisement, and Jim Crow.

The Good

*Great, great history that has rarely if ever been told on film before. The period where film emerged as an art form and Hollywood emerged as a cultural machine coincided with a period called "the nadir of American race relations," the age of widespread disenfranchisement, Jim Crow segregation, and lynchings. The dominant historiography of Reconstruction at the time, the Dunning School, taught that Reconstruction governments had been run by corrupt Northern migrants and inept, foolish blacks. It's no surprise that the first film with an actual plot is the Klan-glorifying The Birth of a Nation, while mega-film Gone With The Wind romanticizes the antebellum South. There's even the 1940 film Santa Fe Trail that depicts abolitionist John Brown as a maniac who burns the Kansas countryside and so frightens the slaves that they don't want freedom if it's him bringing it.

Furthermore, when movies began depicting the Confederacy and slavery in a negative light, the story was told very simplistically. Union good and anti-racist (the film Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter depicts abolitionists holding signs declaring blacks and whites equals, a notion most opponents of slavery would have viewed with disgust), Confederacy evil and racist (Glory emphasizes the atrocities inflicted on black Union troops and their white officers by Confederates). The nuances of the conflict, such as Northerners hating blacks and refusing to fight in an "emancipation war" or poor Southern whites opposing the Confederacy as a rich man's project they're expected to die for, are generally ignored.

(And even though poor whites were generally racist themselves--the rich whites used racism or the possibility they too could become big slave-owners to manipulate them--poor whites and blacks could work together. A populist biracial movement in North Carolina functioned--and even governed--for several years before being toppled by voter fraud and outright violence by Southern Democrats. I mean, seriously, they organized an outright coup d'etat against the municipal government of Wilmington. Thanks The Dollop podcast for reminding me just in time.)

*Some people were concerned that the movie would be a "white man saves poor blacks" movie, but that's not the case. At first it's a group of runaway slaves who save Newton, providing him shelter from Confederate soldiers hunting him and medical attention for his injured leg. The runaway slave Moses (Mahershala Ali) is portrayed as a leader of the runaways and later as a Reconstruction political activist registering blacks to vote. Knight is the one who first organizes them to fight, but he's a trained soldier and blacks both during and after slavery were purposefully kept ignorant of guns. Historically Knight did lead the insurgency against the Confederacy and later as a strong supporter of blacks' rights (he served as the commander of an all-black unit tasked with fighting racist paramilitaries), so downgrading him to avoid treading on certain people's toes does him a disservice.

*There are some good character moments, like Rachel crying when Newton leads her to a feather bed. Given what we learn about how she'd been treated as a slave, feather beds might bring back some very bad memories. The racial tensions that exist within the guerrilla band do get revealed when the blacks are pointedly not participating in a cookout and a white guerrilla tries to keep one of the blacks from eating some of the leftovers.

*Knight's Christian faith is strongly emphasized. Much is often made about how the Confederates quoted the Bible to defend slavery, but his defense of the lone woman and her daughters against the thieving Confederates reminds me very much of James 1:27. Some of his economic ideas echo the Catholic notion of distributism.

The Bad

*For a war movie this was extremely, extremely non-exciting. Even the battle sequences were boring, and that's really saying something. There are gigantic time skips linked together by onscreen text and images. There have been movies covering spans of years before that handled transitions of time in a more subtle or more interesting fashion. Instead we get a disjointed mess of a movie. It's the single worst aspect of the film. Nick is wondering if there's a three-hour director's cut out there somewhere and hopefully he's right. Hopefully that cut includes some battle scenes earlier in the movie--it's not until at least an hour in that we get serious combat between the guerrillas and Confederate authorities. And the climactic battle sequence is too abbreviated.

Would it be too hard to have a montage of Confederate soldiers deserting, Home Guard stealing crops and hanging deserters, Knight organizing runaway slaves and Confederate deserters into an army, etc? Come on, this is basic film class stuff here.

*Peppered throughout the Civil War story of Newton Knight is the tale of his 20th Century descendant Davis (via Rachel) getting persecuted by the state of Mississippi. Though he is to all appearances white himself, since he has a black great-grandmother by the laws of the state he's considered black and his marriage to a white woman is illegal. If The Free State of Jones were a television miniseries--an exploration in the vein of Roots about how many white Southerners have black ancestors perhaps--using the younger Knight's story to bookend the tale of how his black foremother and his white forefather got together would make sense. Here it just adds to the film's running time. Davis Knight's story would be better as some kind of epilogue or even an on-screen graphic explaining the ultimate fate of Netwton and Rachel's descendants.

*There's not a clear antagonist. It would have been better if they combined the local Confederate colonel and cavalry lieutenant Barbour (Bill Tangradi), who extorts taxes "in kind" from the poor farmers, into one chronic enemy of Knight's. Think how Jason Isaacs' character in The Patriot was Mel Gibson's singular nemesis. The colonel at one point orders something that clearly troubles Barbour, but we don't see any disagreement (unlike the scene in The Patriot when Jason Isaacs orders the burning of a church with Patriot civilians inside, horrifying one of his subordinates) or any real character development on his part.

*Reconstruction lasted for around a decade in Mississippi, but we never see the period of large-scale black participation in the government (including two black U.S. Senators) that so riled white racists. Seeing Moses facing off against local planter James Eakins (Joe Chrest), who manages to reclaim his estate and even some of his slaves as "apprentices" after swearing an oath to the Union, as rival political leaders would have been interesting.

*The potential political power of Mississippi blacks--they were more than half the population--is never discussed, even though blacks voting plays a big part in the last section of the film. There's a reason disenfranchisement was particularly zealous and stringent in Mississippi. I remember a map from a US history book (that I can't find at the moment) depicting Virginia and Georgia as having double-digit percentage of blacks voting before the Voting Rights Act (40% and 25% if I remember right), but Mississippi and Alabama having only around 5%.

*There's a scene where some of Knight's band are hanged by Confederates and we never see them beg for mercy, claim they weren't supposed to be hanged, etc. That's a weakness, especially given the circumstances that lead to the hanging.

The Verdict

Newton, Rachel, and the others who stood against the Confederacy deserve a better movie than this. It's good history, but it's not a good movie. I was originally planning on giving it a 5.0 out of 10 (worse than what I gave Hook), but out of consideration for how little-known the history of anti-Confederate whites is, I'll give it a 6.0.

Do better next time. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III was more entertaining than this, and that movie was so mediocre I didn't have much to say during the podcast we had on the movie and didn't bother writing a review. Jeez.

Blast from the Past Movie Review: Live and Let Die (1973)

The first Bond movie Myopia: Defend Your Childhood, the film podcast I'm part of, defended was 1973's Live and Let Die, also known as James Bond's foray into blaxploitation. Here's the podcast. Now for the review...

The Plot

After three MI-6 agents "on loan" to the United States are killed in 24 hours in various interesting ways (a high-pitched noise to the ear causing some kind of seizure, a stabbing, and even a voodoo human sacrifice), James Bond is assigned to investigate. After hijinks in New York City, he travels to the Caribbean island of San Monique, where he encounters two women, CIA agent Rosie Carver and the mysterious Solitaire. More hijinks--and voodoo--ensue.

The Good

There's not really a whole lot that's good here (at least in comparison to the bad stuff), but I'll try...

*The film is notable for its abandoning of the ridiculousness of earlier Bond films to focus on more mundane sorts of evils, in this case drug trafficking. I'll give it points for trying to take the franchise in a new direction, although the blaxploitation stuff is incredibly dated.

*I liked the "use a car side mirror as a means of assassination" when Bond first comes to New York. Pretty clever.

*Solitaire is referred to as being involved in "Obeah," which is a sort of Caribbean sorcery that isn't as well-known as stuff like voodoo. Props for research.

*Geoffrey Holder is clearly having fun as Baron Samedi, even though he's not in the movie a whole lot.

*I now know where some of the Bond tropes the first Austin Powers film mocks, like the "easily escapable and overly elaborate exotic death" and the "henchman comes back to interrupt an amorous moment" come from. I hadn't seen any of the pre-Pierce Brosnan Bond films in their entirety before this, so now I'm more educated.

*The goofy blaxploitation stuff is actually pretty funny. And I think they satirize it a bit by depicting Rosie's Afro actually being fake.

*There's a Continuity Nod when Bond is told that a "Mrs. Bond" is waiting for him in San Monique. From Bond's facial expression and delayed reaction, it seems he remembers Tracy and the events of On Her Majesty's Secret Service.

*However racist people might accuse the film of being due to its jive-turkey dialogue and what-not, Sheriff J.W. Pepper's depiction matches up with how an actual racist cop would behave. He pulls over one of the bad guys not just because he was speeding but because he was a black guy driving a nice car and therefore must have stolen it. TVTropes lists him as a Badass Bystander and credits him with subduing a very dangerous henchman (all technically true), but he wasn't aware of that at the time.

*The death of the second MI-6 agent was pretty cool. He's watching a New Orleans funeral parade and asks a bystander whose funeral it is. The man says, "Yours" and things go poorly from there. I'm not overly familiar with New Orleans jazz funerals, so that's actually kind of cool.

*Bond's watch having a super-magnet in it is discussed from the very beginning and actually put to some amusing use (involving a woman he's "entertaining" at the time) before it becomes important. Writers often forget the importance of Chekhov's Gun, but that didn't happen. This time.

*The film actually tries to develop the henchman Tee-Hee as a character. When Bond is at his mercy, he waxes poetically about the differences between alligators and crocodiles and their various physical attributes. He actually has a hobby and a passion rather than just being "Thug #1."

The Bad

*The movie was at least half an hour too long. It was actually boring. They somehow took probably one of the longest boat chase sequences in a movie--one that involved multiple jumps over bayou-spanning roads, boat-jackings of people who lived alongside the river, an invasion of a wedding, and more--and made it dull. The boat chase scene could have been either an awesome action sequence or a Blues Brothers-style action-comedy conga line of destruction and it was dull.

*The death of the first MI-6 by murder-earpiece was ridiculous-looking. Leaving aside whether that would actually work, his agony came off as more than a little over-the-top and even comedic.

*Solitaire is referred to as a practitioner of Obeah and in the podcast I referred to her as the world's whitest voodoo queen, but she seems more like a tarot card reader in the European mystical tradition rather than someone involved in any sort of Afro-Caribbean magic. Her clothing in a couple scenes looks like something from a Mardi Gras festival. Tarot and voodoo/santeria/whatever aren't the same things.

*And while we're at it, the villain's death is pretty goofy, although I could imagine that being intentional. Especially when Bond then drops one of his one-liners.

*Why are M and Moneypenny just showing up at James Bond's house like that? If they've got a mission for him, can't they just call him on the phone? I imagine this is mostly for the "how fast can Bond's current lover hide" comedy, but it was just kind of stupid.

*If you're sensitive to racism/racial humor, this movie might not be for you. This isn't a parody like Black Dynamite, but a whole lot of use of the word "honky," pretty much everybody in Harlem being in on a criminal scheme, soul-food restaurants being used as fronts for dealing heroin, gigantic Afros, etc. Some of it was pretty funny, but some of it was neutral or kind of dumb. And the portrayal of the white Louisianans is pretty ridiculous and stereotypical too. As someone in the podcast crew pointed out, this movie [can be construed as] racist against everybody.

*And Rosie Carver, the first of the film's two major Bond girls (there's a third but she doesn't really have much characterization) is probably the most incompetent CIA agent ever. Even when she seems to manage something impressive, she bungles it. Granted, it might be deliberate on her part (not going into detail for reasons of spoilers), but she just comes off as useless.

*The song "Live and Let Die" is used in the soundtrack or even outright performed by a musician multiple times in the film, while actual James Bond-associated music (like, you know, the actual theme song) is grossly underused.

*Bond at one point frees himself and Solitaire from being tied up using a rotary-saw device on his watch. The magnet on the watch was stated to be there from the very beginning, but this came out of nowhere. Chekhov's Gun, people!

*The opium poppies look like giant fields of cabbage. Wouldn't poppies, you know, have flowers?

*When reacting to a character's romantic treachery, a villain rants about how he could have provided all the love the other character could have wanted. That he has romantic feelings for this other character is never even hinted at before, and he didn't really come off as betrayed and heartbroken. If he had, that would have been an improvement on his character--he's not just a greedy criminal.

The Verdict

Just don't bother. 5.5 out of 10.

My Thoughts on Ferguson and a Poll For You

The situation in Ferguson, Missouri seems to be winding down right now, but it was a pretty wild few days. We had such wonderful things as:

*The police using what looks a lot like military equipment to intimidate protesters.

*Rioting and destruction of property.

*Armed store owners keeping the hooligans away.

*Journalists roughed up in a McDonald's.

*Journalists getting gassed.

*Foreign propaganda outlets use this to make Americans look like a bunch of hypocrites.

*Someone writing in a respectable outlet called it a "police coup."

*I'd heard something about a state representative getting arrested too, but I haven't been able to find any corroborating evidence. I think it was referring to this state senator getting tear-gassed.

*Real soldiers sounding off on how inept the police were even with their military hardware and how if this was the "militarization" of the police force, it was the most inept militarization they'd ever seen.

*Cops telling people not to film them, even though that's perfectly legal.

*The hacker militia Anonymous shutting down much of Ferguson's government.

*A no-fly zone being declared. Very convenient for keeping away news choppers, I think, although it's the FAA and not the local cops declaring it.

Here're my thoughts. I identify as a conservative politically and/or as a Libertarian and I think this is bugnuts insane. Even IF the police shooting that set this all off was justified--and based on witness reports it almost certainly was not--the police massively overreacted to citizens exercising their rights to speak freely, assemble, petition the government for redress of grievances, etc. That the local thug element used this as an opportunity to make trouble doesn't justify the sheer overkill involved.

Some online left-wingers have been claiming Tea Party types, libertarians, militia types, people waving the Gadsden Flag, etc. have been awfully quiet about the situation, with the implication they're entirely cool with brutal police-state stuff if it's directed at black people.

Well, as a big fan of the Gadsden Flag (I plan on having the protagonist in my Wastelands series use it as his personal insignia), here's my response:

The police here have been behaving in a ridiculous manner, to the point their authority in the area has been revoked and the State Highway Patrol (led by a black officer who grew up in the area) has been brought in. Things seem to have gotten a lot better.

(And by the way, libertarians have been complaining for awhile.)

Now for some political thoughts:

*The militarization of the police has gotten absurd in this country. I could understand the need to have some kind of heavy iron for an emergency, but a lot of departments have stocked up on gear they're not likely to ever need short of an alien invasion. I'm an Eagle Scout and I'm all for being prepared, but there's not unlimited money out there. Although the problem in this situation is more of attitude than equipment, I'll steal a page from Rahm Emmanuel and suggest that a good crisis never go to waste. A relevant bill has been put forward. At the very least it might help control government spending.

*From eyewitness reports, the officer straight-up murdered the man. The robbery-suspect thing seems like an ex post facto justification for what happened, given how it didn't come out for days. If the eyewitness claim is true (it may not be--there hasn't been much of an investigation so far), he needs to be charged with the appropriate degree of murder and subject to the appropriate punishment (up to and including execution). Police have a reputation for closing ranks in the event of an accusation of wrongdoing and that needs to stop for the sack of justice.

*I've seen the suggestion floating around the Internet about having police carry small cameras on their persons to record the events of their shift. This seems like a good idea, in order to reduce police brutality and provide evidence to protect the cops themselves if a suspect attacks them and then claims to have been brutalized. It might also give them another source of information for their reports and all. Here's a poll from one of my major clients on cop cameras. If you could vote in it, that would be spiffy.

And because I'm a nerd, here's a selection from Battlestar Galactica about why the police and military are two different things.

A Four-Story Andrew Patel Collection?

My friend Jeff Baker, in an addendum to a guest post I wrote for him awhile back, said that in order to really get one's Kindle sales going, one should have 20-25 items available. Counting the new Spanish version of "I am the Wendigo," I only have eight KDP stories available at present alongside the professionally-published Kindle anthology that hosted "Coil Gun."

I do have another short story planned (although it needs more revision and so it'll be awhile), with another cover courtesy of Alex Claw. However, I do remember reading online somewhere that stories priced at $0.99 don't sell as well as more expensive offerings due to the theory they're not very good. I had "The Beast of the Bosporus" and "Picking Up Plans In Palma" priced at $1.25 for awhile (and "Beast" is still $1.25 on Smashwords) due to their length, but I think Amazon lowered the "Beast" price to $0.99 on its own and I lowered "Palma" to $0.99 to try to get more sales.

So here's the plan. I've got two stories centered on supervillain Andrew Patel ("Ubermensch" and "Needs Must") already available and ideas for two more stories focused on the further consequences of the events of "Ubermensch." I'll write both of those stories and package them with the first two in a four-story collection selling for $3.00 each. Although short stories aren't necessarily worth the time spent on them, this would be providing my fans something different at a somewhat higher price point. And the second two stories (tentatively titled "Actions Have Consequences" and "New Friends, Old Enemies") won't be available individually, at least at first.

Should this gambit succeed it might be worthwhile to write more stories following Andrew Patel, both a planned set of prequel stories involving a rival supervillain based on the Nuwaubian Nation and more stories set after the original tetralogy following the rivalry between Patel and the hero Silverbolt. And perhaps pricier deluxe editions of the original stories that've got illustrations of key scenes?

Hmm...that's an idea I could implement for all of my stories...

On Developing A Character Without Much Agency...

One of the criticisms the early drafts of my novel Battle for the Wastelands received is that the character Catalina Merrill, sister of rebel chief Alonzo Merrill and unwilling concubine of the villain Grendel, is a "stereotype." One of my early readers has described her as a princess in a tower awaiting someone to rescue her.

My immediate response was that she's not in a position to realistically do a whole lot. She's one of if not the youngest of a small number of concubines (Grendel's harem numbers in the single digits and is guarded by a couple trusted soldiers, while the notoriously intrigue-ridden Ottoman harem numbered in the hundreds and was policed by large numbers of eunuchs). This puts her (and other concubines as well) in a weak position for harem intrigue (especially when Grendel is around and can keep an eye on things), and due to her being essentially a political prisoner, she has the least personal freedom of the bunch. I viewed criticism of her lack of activity as akin to those people who complained about Sansa Stark not punching Joffrey "Baratheon" in the face or trying to escape King's Landing, where she's a hostage of the ruling Lannisters, in the A Song of Ice and Fire novels. All that would accomplish would be to get both of them killed (or at least punished severely) and given the history of victorious oppressors in our world, most people would rather live on their knees than die on their feet. The actress who plays Sansa in the TV show pointed out that if she "acted out" like Arya, she'd be dead. Although Catalina is too valuable to Grendel's schemes for him to easily kill, she doesn't know that, plus there are other things to fear besides death.

However, although that response works on the macro level, it does not work on the micro level. It's been a long time since I've read A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords where most of the "Sansa in King's Landing" story takes place, but I do remember the following:

*When the drunken Ser Dontos makes a fool of himself at a tournament, Joffrey orders him to be drowned in wine, but Sansa suggests he instead make Dontos a fool (jester) because this would be "crueler." Joffrey, a sociopathic sadist who isn't particularly smart, falls for this. Despite her weak position and regular torment by Joffrey and his lowlife bodyguards, she is able to manipulate him and save a man's life.

*When Stannis Baratheon lays siege to King's Landing, Sansa tells Joffrey that her brother Robb always leads his troops into battle in person. This provokes Joffrey to spend at least some time on the front lines of the besieged city rather than hiding in the Red Keep. I don't remember this part clearly, but I get the distinct impression this was Sansa's sly attempt to get Joffrey killed without putting herself at risk.

*Sansa does manage to warn Oleanna Tyrell, grandmother of Joffrey's intended Margarey Tyrell, that Joffrey is a sadistic monster. This leads to Oleanna, a political mastermind and the real ruler of House Tyrell, to conspire with Littlefinger to have Joffrey assassinated and Margarey married to Joffrey's kind-hearted but weak younger brother Tommen "Baratheon." Good riddance to bad rubbish.

And on a historical note, it's not like oppressed people sat around being passively miserable all the time. They had coping mechanisms like religion (Santeria in the Caribbean and what strikes me as an early form of Pentecostalism in America, the Bacchal cult in ancient Rome), art (there's a fascinating essay I read in high school discussing religious quilts made by black women as a form of creative expression as well as an act of religious devotion), pets (to use a more modern example, Jaycee Dugard and those women kidnapped in Cleveland had them), etc. And one can be free in one's own head, at the very least.

How does this affect Battle for the Wastelands? Well, in addition to some earlier edits making Catalina's weak position more obvious, I've also devised some ways to foreshadow some of my future plans for her in the way Martin seems to be foreshadowing Sansa becoming a political mastermind (Littlefinger spirits her away after Joffrey's death and makes her his apprentice in political intrigue). Over this past weekend, I've come up with some bits of internal monologue that would not only develop Catalina as a character, but also to foreshadow some things I have planned for her later. They don't require her to do stupid things or even amount to major changes in the novel, but they make for a much more developed character and set things up for later.

For my fellow writers, particularly those writing about time periods (or fictional worlds analogous to those time periods) where people were oppressed and had their activities restricted, hopefully this post will be useful to you.

On "Game of Thrones" and White Female Messiahs

I've been followed Saladin Ahmed on Twitter since I heard him make a presentation on the podcast Writing Excuses that helped me find the extremely helpful book series "Daily Life In..." This morning, I found some Tweets from him criticizing the most recent episode "Game of Thrones," in this case the ending featuring the Arab-looking inhabitants of Yunkai all but worshiping the light-skinned Danaerys Targaryen for freeing them from slavery.

Here's one tweet:

aaand the season ends with a bunch of grown-ass brown people calling a white teenager 'Mommy!' It's 2013. Cut that shit out, #gameofthrones!

Here's another:

"You bring war and hissing monsters. You leave behind ruined cities. PLEASE LEAVE, CRAZY WHITE GIRL!" - what ppl would really say to Danerys

I am not so ignorant that I don't recognize how "save the brown people" was used by white countries to justify imperialism and aggression on both the macro scale (one defense of imperialism in Africa was fighting the slave trade) and on the micro scale (I remember a political cartoon from the antebellum era claiming slaves in America were better off than free blacks in Africa), but there is legitimate historical precedent for what Game of Thrones depicts however paternalistic it might seem.

This account of the occupation of Richmond at the tail end of the American Civil War depicts the freed slaves greeting Abraham Lincoln with all kinds of physically affectionate, almost worshipful gestures. They touch him, they kiss his clothes, etc. Is anybody going to call REALITY racist for depicting black slaves hero-worshiping a white man who has freed them?

To be fair, this isn't as over-the-top as what was depicted in the show (see the YouTube clip later), but at the same time, Confederate slavery is not as over-the-top monstrous as slavery in Essos. The slavers of Meereen crucify 163 slaves to thumb their nose at Danaerys, while the way the Unsullied slave-soldiers are created is absolutely murderous and vile. Confederate slavery featured the rape of slave women by masters (why do you suppose African-Americans are generally lighter-skinned than Africans?), but the city of Yunkai specializes in the training and sale of sex slaves. A whole city doing this kind of thing on an industrial scale. Given how the cities of Slaver's Bay are so much more ridiculously evil than the Confederate slavers, the reaction of the people freed from their tyranny would in all likelihood be much more grateful.

And although foreign war is a useful way to rally the population around a dictatorial regime (the Falklands War in Argentina, for example), if a regime is sufficiently brutal and inept, the population may not simply fall for it. Allied forces were greeted as liberators from Mussolini by the people of Naples, for example. Although the Iraqi insurgency began soon after the fall of Saddam, that resulted in a large measure from inept U.S. occupation policies perceived as discrimination against Sunni Muslims, not just knee-jerk "the people dislike foreign invaders and prefer domestic tyrants to them no matter what." The Iraqi people were overjoyed when Saddam fell--they didn't throw themselves at U.S. troops en masse in defense of their regime because the U.S. brought war and frightening, destructive machines (analogous to "hissing monsters"). Obviously there were people who didn't like a long-term occupation of their country by foreigners, but that isn't the same as "we prefer our slavery to your scariness."

Having watched the snippet in question (I had a YouTube link posted, but the video is gone now), I think it's too long and a bit overdone, but considering how unbelievably atrocious Essos's slavery is and the whole "Mother of Dragons" thing, it's plausible.

"Red Tails" Movie Trailer

Now this looks cool.  I don't know about the Red Tails specifically, but the Wikipedia article about the movie depicts them as being part of the Tuskegee Airmen.

The air battle sequences look cool and I'm interested in both war and history, so I'll definitely be seeing this one.

White Boy(s) Rap for Jesus

Stepping Out at VBS from North Avenue on Vimeo.

We watched this video during services at church earlier this week, I think.  Phil Cobb (the dark jacket and the dollar-sign necklace) and a guy I don't know put on a rap performance as a sort of orientation for the kids of Vacation Bible School.

Given North Avenue Presbyterian Church's urban location, putting the church's message into rap might be a good way of reaching people.  I admit it does come off as more than a little goofy, but given the target audience, I don't think that's a problem.

(I remember watching the cartoons I loved when I was a kid like Transformers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and G.I. Joe and they're goofy.  But I didn't recognize that at the time.)

Hope you all enjoy it.

An Interesting Draka Fan-Fic (SPOILERS)

Proof Through the Night

Found this the other day and read through the whole thing in one sitting.

I really like the story.  It's good to see Eric von Shrakenberg trying to balance the fact that the system he serves is EVIL and he darn well knows it with his dedication to the survival of his family and his people.  In the canon timeline, he solves this equation (thanks to his niece deliberately leaking plans of the Draka superweapon to an Alliance spy to force his hand) by launching the Final War that kills 700 million people and then trying to hand out Citizenship to as many Alliance survivors as he can.  Rather tragic, considering how he described the Citizen lifestyle as "a way of life based on death" and sent his serf-born daughter to America to be free when he was a young man, at great risk to his life.  This timeline will give him a happier ending.

It's also good to see someone on the side of the angels not being a complete moron as far as the Draka are concerned, one of the canonical series' major failings.  The elaborate backstab the Anglo-American alliance pulls on their ostensible Draka allies is well-done.

The strategic picture of the nuclear Pearl Harbor inflicted on the Domination by the United States and the British is really cool.  On the micro level, there's a race against time as Eric tries to take his army to Genoa and then across the Mediterranean into Africa, which the Draka have ruled in its entirely since the 1880s while an American carrier group trapped in the Mediterranean attempts to nuke the last surviving Draka-held port in southern Europe and strand him there.

There are also some nice little touches, such as:

-Selections from this timeline's version of Eric's daughter's autobiography hinting that with the fall of the Domination, she could safely seek out the father she'd missed so much.

-The hint that Eric's sister Johanna had survived the war as well (her daughter is quoted in the epilogue).

-The way the vile Security Directorate hooligan Vashon and his men get what they deserve.

-The famed Tuskegee Airmen obliterating the descendants of exiled Confederates.

-Eric toasting the end of the Domination with wine from his family's African estate--the last vintage it will ever produce--and Sofie's speech about why she can't join him.

-The line earlier in the story where Eric tells Vashon that it's time "to come to Jesus" when he finds out Vashon hasn't been telling him that U.S. agents have been smuggling radios to European resistance groups for the last year and that they're likely coordinating in the aftermath of the nuclear strike.

The only flaw I can think of is that the Domination in Africa crumbles far too easily too quickly, but when 10% of the Citizen population lives in Archona (our world's Pretoria) and 10% of the Citizen population lives in Alexandria and both of them go up, the fact that the Draka are outnumbered 9-1 by their slaves presents a bigger problem than usual.

A nice treat for Draka fans, especially since this time, Evil is not victorious and yet its destruction does not take its most noble adherent (Eric V.S.) down with it.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the Draka, here's the Wikipedia entry on the whole series:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Domination

John Monds and Why He Could Be Good for the GOP

I read about John Monds, the Libertarian candidate for the Georgia governorship, in the Atlanta Journal Constitution this morning.

Here's the article about him:

http://www.ajc.com/news/libertarian-candidate-john-monds-616835.html

Although voting for a third party with a similar position to an established party tends to benefit the established party's rival (Greens hurt Democrats; Libertarians hurt Republicans), the circumstances of this particular Libertarian candidate indicate he could do significant damage to the Democrats this time around.

For starters, the Democratic Party has been very strong among African-Americans for the last several decades.  Monds was a leader in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and many African-Americans believe, rightly or wrongly, that the Republican Party is racist.  A black Republican could be branded a token, a sellout, or window-dressing, but Monds is not a Republican and he was the president of the Grady County NAACP.

Some African-Americans are already interested in him, for that reason:

http://dekalbganaacp.blogspot.com/2010/01/will-georgia-elect-its-first-black.html

Furthermore, I believe research has shown that African-Americans are incarcerated at a higher rate for drug crimes than whites are and it is the incarceration rate (and the consequent difficulty in getting jobs or education after being jailed) that has hurt the African-American community, particularly men, rather badly. 

Given how the Libertarian Party has historically been opposed to the War on Drugs, this position could help make Monds attractive to African-American voters (in addition to him being black and involved in the NAACP).

Also, of the two policy positions Monds takes in the article, one of them is a socially-liberal defense of allowing horse-racing, casino gambling, and Sunday alcohol sales in Georgia on the grounds that although he may not like them, it's not the state's job to enforce his moral notions.  I don't think socially-conservative members of the Georgia Republican Party, the ones who picked Nathan Deal over Karen Handel, are going to be defecting en masse to Monds due to this issue.

However, those who are leery of social conservatism but also leery of the Democratic candidate Roy Barnes due to his previous term might be willing to vote for Monds.  See the book The Emerging Democratic Majority and the strong showing of Karen Handel, a more socially-liberal Republican who did well in Metro Atlanta, where half the Georgian population lives.

In short, Monds might be able to keep the Democrats from making inroads among independents and could divert black votes from Barnes, weakening him but affecting the Republican Party less severely.  And since he is an effective campaigner--he got over a million votes running for Public Service Commissioner in a prior election--he could do some real damage.

Even if all he does is force a runoff, this would force the Democratic Party to spend more money on Georgia, money that could be spent elsewhere.