Yesterday morning was cold and overcast (a true rarity in southern California!) so it felt like a good day for Drag Me to Hell (2009), the recent Sam Raimi chiller that looked like a “return to roots” project with an old-fashioned creepy feature vibe.

The story follows a bank loan officer, Christine Brown (Alison Lohman),   a young woman struggling for respect both at home and at work, where she denies a mortgage extension to a creepy old woman.  The woman responds by placing a curse on Christine, and what follows is a gruesome and thoroughly predictable shockfest, as she’s tormented and terrorized by vicious evil spirits that want to…well, see the title.

The horror movie genre is one that I always tend to go into with lowered expectations, so it never ceases to amaze me that, despite that, they still almost invariably disappoint me.  The best thing I can say about Drag Me to Hell is that it’s the kind of movie I’d have loved to see if it had been made by Alfred Hitchcock in, say, 1961.  Indeed, the film opens with an old-school film-making feel that I found winning in the early-going, but subsequent sequences stomp all over that refreshing vibe, as the sight gags (and I use the word “gags” literally) and familiar gorey gross-out effects push the film into Comically Stupid territory.  Lohman gamely does everything the script asks of her, and the acting is generally well done, but ultimately this one was another horror dud for me — never truly scary or even interesting, and not entirely certain whether to take itself seriously.  Not bad enough to be truly good, this one might be an enjoyable diversion if you’re predisposed to this kind of thing, but for me it was a pretty forgettable piece of business.

Originally published at Christopher East. You can comment here or there.

It feels like time for a catch-up post of random odds and ends…aka, a post that isn’t strictly a review of something or about Futurismic. 

• For the last couple of months I’ve been feeling even more cautious than usual about money — staying in on weekends, not eating out, limiting my casual spending, etc.  All of this kind of in anticipation of the holiday financial crush, I suspect.  It feels a little like it’s translated into being antisocial, too, but that certainly wasn’t my intention.
• That said, we did get out last week for a blissfully relaxed Thanksgiving potluck at Jenn’s studio.  There I got my first experience playing Rock Band, and I have to say, it’s fun but I don’t think I’d buy it for myself.  Interestingly, I seemed to be better at the drums than the bass!
• On Sunday Jenn and I went to the Burbank Ikea and bought an inexpensive bookshelf for the bedroom.  For the second time in a year, we built furniture together without driving each other crazy.  Is that normal?
• A final thumbs-up on Uncharted 2:  Among Thieves, an exciting and beautifully rendered action video game that seems destined to become a movie starring Nathan Fillion.
• My GarageBand obsession continues, and Episodic now has 19 songs — almost complete!  I’m starting to feel like I’m butting up against the limits of my composing ability, unfortunately, but this is less depressing than a “writing plateau” since I have no professional aspirations here.  So far my favorites are my alien dance club tune “Area 54,” and the warped slow jazz of “Learning is Fun at the David Lynch Preschool.”
• Speaking of music, a recent windfall of iTunes gift cards enabled me to spend without spending recently, and I’m now stocked up with new albums from Angelspit, Fishbone, Mike Keneally, and Tipsy, plus a couple of artists new to me:  Steroid Maximus and Zu.

I think that about covers it for now; keeping busy, and largely happy!  I’m working up to doing a “year-in-writing” post later this month, which I feel like I should be dreading more, since this really wasn’t a great year for me professionally.  And yet, in other ways I feel pretty good about how writing went this year.  Anyway, more to come!

Originally published at Christopher East. You can comment here or there.

The next stop on my international film tour takes us to Romania, for 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (2007), a hard-hitting film set in the late 1980s about two young students (Anamaria Marinca and Laura Vasiliu) who are forced to go to great lengths to arrange an abortion for one of them, which is highly illegal in this severe, oppresive communist society.

There’s little need to go further into plot summary than that, really.  This is a difficult film to watch, which isn’t at all to say that it’s bad; rather, it’s highly effective at depicting its unnerving society and the bleak plight of its characters.  The film paints a stark, realistic picture of what it’s like to be powerless in an oppressive, dictatorial regime, where every human interaction involves suspicious give-and-take, and this leads to highly uncomfortable dramatic suspense throughout as the characters are forced to move through their day-to-day lives like undercover agents in their own country.  Marinca in particular gives a brave and powerful performance, and there’s effective support from the rest of the cast.  This one isn’t particularly enjoyable to watch, but it’s hard not to respect as powerful film-making, an unsettling glimpse of a world we should never have to live in.

Originally published at Christopher East. You can comment here or there.

Readers hoping for a new story at Futurismic this month will be disappointed to find that, instead, there is merely a blog post from me explaining that we are taking the month off.  The simple upshot is, we just couldn’t find a story in time for our December deadline.  I’m going to really hit the books this month, though, in the hopes that we can stock up for a good start in 2010.

On the plus side, it’s the first blog post I’ve made to Futurismic in, well, years actually, and I’ve kind of resolved to contribute more this year, on the theory that my being completely invisible is kind of bad marketing.  (That’s just a theory; maybe after I start posting it will reveal itself to be good marketing…)  Anyway, if any of my loyal readers here spots near-futurey SF news or other tidbits that might be of interest to Futurismic, feel free to shoot me links.  As you know, blogging doesn’t exactly come naturally to me…I need all the help I can get!

Originally published at Christopher East. You can comment here or there.

Since discovering the work of Alan Furst, I’ve been rationing out his novels in order to make sure I always have a new one in my back pocket for special occasions.  Last week, I indulged by grabbing The Foreign Correspondent (2006) off my reading pile, and blazed through it in about three or four reading sessions.  Damn, only one left now!

Set in the late thirties in the anxious months leading up to World War II, The Foreign Correspondent features, as most of Furst’s historical spy novels do, a somewhat reluctant European hero caught in the middle of clashing political ideologies.  In this case it’s Carlo Weisz, an Italian citizen from a disputed-border area near Slovenia and Austria, who fled Mussolini’s fascist regime to resettle in Paris — always a major character in this author’s work.  A journalist for Reuters, Weisz moonlights for an émigré resistance newspaper called Liberazione, writing anti-fascist copy which is smuggled into Italy as an alternative news source, thumbing its nose at fascism.  Unfortunately for Weisz, the Italian secret police has gotten wind of Liberazione and targeted its staff for murder and harrassment, which thrusts Weisz squarely into the crosshairs of multiple intelligence organizations.  Complicating matters, Weisz’ brief assignment to cover Berlin rekindles a love affair with an old flame, Christa von Schirren, now married to a German military officer and embroiled in her own dangerous resistance activities.  As a border-crossing polyglot, Weisz is perfectly situated to help her, and a combination of conscience, circumstance, and opportunity compel him to risk everything to fight against the burgeoning might of the Axis powers.

As noted in my review of Kingdom of Shadows, my only real complaint about Furst’s work is that it tends to rely on familiar elements that recur from book to book.  But when it comes down to it, while formula it may be, it’s a formula I really, really like, and Furst executes it here pretty much to perfection — on completion, I pegged it immediately as his best book since Dark Star. It lacks that novel’s length and scope, perhaps, but I think part of its success is that it’s one of his most tightly focused books, boiled down to a more manageable cast of characters and plot elements, so that the pace feels a bit brisker than normal.  Even so, it displays the traditional broad canvas of Continent-spanning adventures, centered on Paris intrigue but also featuring tense sequences in Spain, Germany, Czechoslavakia, and Italy, and as usual the protagonist — and I should note that Weisz makes a particularly likeable one — moves through a convincingly rendered pre-war Europe filled with interesting historical detail.

When it comes down to it, you just can’t do much better than Furst when it comes to engaging combinations of intrigue, adventure, romance, and history.  The Foreign Correspondent is a superb addition to his body of work, and I have half a mind to race out and grab The Spies of Warsaw, because it occurs to me that maybe my hoarding strategy is flawed…I’m bound to read this all again eventually, so why not get to it?

Originally published at Christopher East. You can comment here or there.

One of the more peculiar novels I’ve read in a while, M.M. Buckner’s Watermind (2008) felt a little like a book with an identity crisis:  a unique amalgam of hard SF mystery, terrestrial first contact, unusual creature feature, near-future techno-thriller, and environmental allegory.  I’m not sure it all entirely comes together, but it still kind of works…provided you don’t hitch your reading mindset too firmly to any one mode of interpretation.

While there are many characters, the star of the show is clearly the main protagonist CJ Reilly, an impulsive, quick-minded MIT drop-out and ne’er-do-well who has been drifting through life since her academic career went bust, living in the heavy shadow of a famous scientist father.  Her latest stop in life, working on an environmental clean-up crew in the Mississippi delta, puts her on the scene of a scientific mystery when she and her new boyfriend, Creole musician Max Pottevents, stumble across a fascinating discovery:  out of the toxic spew of river pollution, a weird entity has formed, soon to be called “the colloid.”  The colloid is a spontaneously evolved “watermind” borne of years of advanced technology that has swept down through North America’s polluted river system.  Fascinated by its properties after a mysterious first encounter, CJ wants to study the find, but this pits her against her boss Roman Sacony, an ambitious corporate bigwig on whose land the colloid has formed.  Smelling lawsuits, Sacony wants the colloid contained and destroyed, and therein lies the central conflict of the novel, which escalates from slow-boiling mystery to full-blown adventure.

It’s a well paced and engagingly written novel, and Buckner has a sure hand with character, particularly Reilly, who is a well developed and lively protagonist — she’s perhaps a bit too plucky to be true, at times, but generally likeable and sympathetic.  I found the main concept too implausible to swallow whole, but even so the premise is compellingly realized and neat enough that I was able to suspend disbelief (and my Mundane SF proclivities) to enjoy the ride.  I ricocheted through several reading mindsets with this one — hard SF?  monster movie?  cautionary metaphor? — before deciding it was best read as a straight-up SF adventure, and I can picture it making a fun big budget film with its unique visual potential.  There are aspects of the book I didn’t like — the obtrusively omniscient viewpoint (generally not my favorite narrative choice), a particularly unconvincing romantic subplot, the tendency of characters to talk to themselves — but for the most part I enjoyed the read.  It’s a brisk, enjoyable book that tries to be many things, and mostly succeeds.

Originally published at Christopher East. You can comment here or there.

The Norwegian film O’Horten (2007) may be the first film I’ve ever watched based entirely on being intrigued by the movie poster (spotted a while back  at the Encino Laemmle).  The poster features a faintly smiling, aging man wearing an engineer’s uniform, holding a large dog with sad-puppy eyes.  I’m not sure why this image captured my interest, and it certainly doesn’t say much about the film…but oddly, the film turned out to be exactly what I expected.

Odd Horten (Baard Owe) is an engineer reaching the end of an illustrious forty-year career in the rail service.  A calm, clockwork man, Horten’s  retirement party is the first in a number of low-key, mildly amusing adventures in disrupted routine that characterize his difficult adjustment to the post-working world.  It’s a very…okay, very slow film, particularly in the early stages, and certainly by design — O’Horten’s routine, play-it-safe existence until now makes shifting to the endless free time of retirement an epic struggle, and director Bent Hamer milks that dignified awkwardness for all its worth.  It requires a patient viewer, but I think the slow-build pays off, as the protagonist’s transformation truly feels earned.  And meanwhile, the snowy landscapes of rural Norway and the dark, slick streets of Oslo provide a unique glimpse of another corner of the world (another reason I enjoy foreign cinema).  This one’s not for everybody, and definitely slow, but ultimately I found it a good-hearted, rewarding film.

Originally published at Christopher East. You can comment here or there.

If you thought public concern about ubiquitous surveillance was a recent phenomenon, The Anderson Tapes (1971) — a crime caper with a distinctly 1970s political angle — will probably disabuse you of that notion.  This was one of the few Sidney Lumet films from that time period I hadn’t seen yet, but now I’ve caught up via Netflix.

The story revolves around an elaborate burglary, orchestrated by Duke Anderson (Sean Connery), a safe-cracker who’s just served a ten-year prison sentence and is anxious to get back to work upon his release.  Shortly after a booty call to his old flame Ingrid (Dyan Cannon), Anderson decides — somewhat arbitrarily — to knock off the entire ritzy apartment building she lives in.  To that end he rounds up a crew, which includes such notables as Martin Balsam and a young Christopher Walken, and he secures funding from an old mafia connection (Alan King).  Then he leads his team into action, planning to loot every last valuable from the highly secure building.

It all sounds like classic heist material, but think again — if you’re expecting precision timing, narrow escapes, and pure visual story-telling, you’re not going to get it.  The film isn’t so much about the crime as it is  about the muddled and incompetent response of the authorities, who are surveilling many of the criminals from the outset (and the film makes no bones about this) but are so uncoordinated they fail head it off adequately.  Sadly, something of a timeless message, there…but unfortunately it’s embedded in rather dated packaging.  The Anderson Tapes is very much a product of its era, from its “futuristic” title fonts to its esoteric, if jazzy, Quincy Jones score.  It also pulls off that dubious 1970s trick of incorporating ostensibly liberal/progressive elements, without really doing so all that flatteringly.  (See Balsam’s flamboyantly homosexual antiques dealer and Cannon’s sexually liberated golddigger — characters that probably would have been controversial a few years earlier, and therefore welcome in a sense, but not all that sympathetically treated by the script.)  Still, one of the things I like most about movies from this time period is that they can be so casually ambitious thematically; this could easily have been a mindlessly enjoyable entertainment, but its inherently political message makes it a much more interesting film than it otherwise would have been.  I wish it had made that message a bit less sloppily, but even so I found it worth a look.

Originally published at Christopher East. You can comment here or there.

After years away from the format, I feel like an inexpert judge of comic books, but lately I’ve been dipping into some of the stuff on Jenn’s shelf and I’ve been rather enjoying Joss Whedon’s comics work — to be specific, his futuristic sequel to the Buffy universe, Fray, and his Astonishing X-Men books.

Fray is an effective continuation of Whedon’s slayer lore, set in a gritty dystopian future that nonetheless contains some spiffy Gernsbackian sense of wonder elements.  It involves the new Slayer, Melaka Fray, an urban thief very much in the mold of Buffy and Faith, who learns of her fate when a fierce-looking demon Watcher comes calling.  There’s a new Apocalypse a-brewin’ and Melaka is the latest reluctant Chosen One.  Fray shows in miniature a lot of what Whedon does best in his TV work — strong characters, distinctive and funny dialogue, high stakes situations, groups standing together against dire threats, betrayal and tragedy and maintaining hope against seemingly insurmountable odds.  I’m not sure I’d call it essential reading, but Buffy and Angel completists will probably enjoy checking it out.

Whedon also displays a sure hand with The Astonishing X-Men, which I also enjoyed, to a somewhat lesser degree.  I’m a bit out of touch with the Marvel universe but from what I can tell its lore has been revised and rebooted pretty continually, so I feel a little lost there figuring who’s dead, whose alive, what timeline we’re in, and so forth.  Even so, Whedon has a deft handle on his particular X-Men lineup (Cyclops, Emma Frost, Kitty Pryde, Wolverine, and Beast) and the art is exceptional here (I’m particularly fond of how Beast is rendered).  Anyway, some fun, if not terribly deep reading…I like comics but they sure seemed to last longer when I was a kid!

Speaking of Whedon, Dollhouse has officially been given the axe by Fox, which sadly does not come as much of a surprise.  I, for one, am  disappointed — although wildly uneven, at its best Dollhouse is an impressively dark and ambitious show, and it’s gotten increasingly more interesting since the last few episodes of season one.  (The most recent couple of episodes have been particularly strong.)  That said, Dollhouse has never really seemed like Whedon in his wheelhouse, so part of me isn’t too upset that this experiment is going to close up shop.  It just means we’ll get to see an entirely new project down the road; looking forward to it!

Originally published at Christopher East. You can comment here or there.

So my TV writing ambitions are pretty solidly fixed to the backburner these days, but I still like to sample shows — for “research,” and also to make sure I’m not missing anything.  DVR is awesome for this, and now we can stream Netflix to our TV, so it’s easier than ever find stuff to watch.

First up:  White Collar, which is on USA Network.  It’s about an FBI agent in the white collar crimes division, Peter Burke (the awesome Tim DeKay), who takes on as an unofficial partner notorious con man and counterfeiter Neal Caffrey (Matthew Bomer).  Burke’s methodical investigative skill and Caffrey’s brilliant criminal mind and shady underworld connections make them an effective crime-stopping duo.  This one reminds me a bit of Castle – the professional cop saddled (a bit unconvincingly) with an unorthodox partner, a mystery-of-the-week procedural, getting most of its mileage off the interplay of its starring duo.  I think it might have more potential for surprise than Castle, though.  DeKay (who played Jonesy on Carnivale) and Bomer (superslick spy Bryce Larkin from Chuck, a tonally similar show) have instant odd-couple chemistry, the white collar territory is a nice change of pace from the homicide/forensics material so often dominating these kinds of shows, and the lore surrounding Caffrey’s girlfriend looks like it could lead to interesting throughlines.  The pilot was quite promising, the second episode pretty messy, but DeKay and Bomer are solid in both.  (Also featuring Tiffani Thiessen as the “agent’s wife the writers won’t know what to do with every week.”)

In a similar vein, we caught the first episode of TNT’s Leverage, a modern-day update of Mission: Impossible…or maybe The A-Team…at any rate, a derivative but energetic show about a team of brilliant criminals who undertake impossible heists at the behest of their Robin Hoodish mastermind (Timothy Hutton).  The tactics are familiar, but if the pilot’s any indication it’s got style and confidence to burn, great music, and a promising cast (including Coupling’s Gina Bellman and Angel’s Christian Kane).

On the science fiction front, I’ve given up on FlashForward – I just couldn’t bring myself to care about its run-of-the-mill characters, and lost interest pretty quickly.  And now having seen the pilot episode, I’m having a similar reaction to the new V, the latest property to be getting the reboot treatment (forgive me that bloody word).  It feels a little like Battlestar Galactica is what they’re going for, but so far I’m not convinced.  As with FlashForward, I had a hard time getting behind its generic characters — and as much as I like Morena Baccarin and Alan Tudyk, so far that’s not looking like it’s going to be enough.  Also, the subliminal politics seem a little fishy…only sinister reptilian aliens would offer the world universal health care, right?  Evil commie-liberal aliens, really?  Food for thought.  Well, maybe.  I have some nostalgia for the original series, so I might give it a few more chances.

I kind of had a Better Off Ted reaction to Community, a well cast and well performed comedy that has all the elements of a funny show, but that wasn’t quite funny enough to win me over.  It’s got potential, but I’m throwing my time to Modern Family instead.

Also, if you haven’t been watching Dexter, by all means check it out.  I don’t have Showtime so I’ve been watching it on DVD, and just finished season three — it’s gripping, addictive stuff.  Michael C. Hall and Jennifer Carpenter are amazing in it…probably my favorite show running since The Wire wrapped up.  Not for the feint of heart, but fascinating…check it out.

Also quickly noted:  I’ve been enjoying old episodes of The Rockford Files (I so relate to Rockford’s self-effacing eye-rolling behavior), L.A. Kings hockey (they’re looking dangerous this year!), and Uncharted 2:  Among Thieves, which I will consider a viewing experience:  it’s a video game on the PS3 that alternates between being a “third-person shooter, with jumping” and an Indiana Jonesish adventure movie.  The graphics need to be seen to be believed — I mean, seriously stunning — and this is a gaming title that really seems to be taking advantage of the potential for video games to be engaging story-telling enterainment.  Fun stuff.

Originally published at Christopher East. You can comment here or there.

I haven’t been writing all that much lately, which is usually a bad thing, but lately it’s just because my writing time has been usurped by GarageBand.

GarageBand is a music program that comes on the Mac.  When I first switched from PC a few years ago, I gave it a cursory test drive, but didn’t find its workings all that intuitive and I sort of forgot about it.  But recently I gave it a more concerted effort, and it turned out to be less difficult to use than I thought.  Now that I’ve got the fundamentals down, I’m using it pretty obsessively.  It’s a  great tool for the lapsed musician, especially an ear player — my theory has always been pretty shoddy, but I’m good at figuring things out, so GarageBand is a perfect fit for me.  Basically by layering beats, percussion, and loops, and bending the pitches to give the songs shape, you can actually “compose” music.  (It’s a little like finger-painting with notes, in some ways, so I’m sure real musicians would look at it as a “cheat” — but hey, that doesn’t make it any less fun!)  My weak area tends to be coming up with melodies, but I’m working on it.

So anyway, if my blogging has slowed down in the past month or so, or if you’re an editor eagerly awaiting my next story [*snurk--spit-take--hahahaha!*]…well, GarageBand is to blame.  I’m working up a collection of songs, most of which sound like 1970s TV theme music — remember when TV shows had theme songs?  The album-in-progress is called Episodic. Not available in stores…

Oh, and just in case you weren’t aware how awesome my girlfriend is she surprised me yesterday with plug-and-play keyboard and percussion pad accessories.  Jenn, you rock! 

Anybody else played with this program?  Are the expansion kits worth buying?  If I’m still enjoying this a couple months from now, I might try have to try them out.

Originally published at Christopher East. You can comment here or there.

Wow, these months really aren’t slowing down much…it’s time for the new Futurismic story already, and this month we go a little deeper into the future with “Spider’s Moon” by Lavie Tidhar.  Tidhar has a unique voice and this one’s full of cool, intriguing ideas…stop by and check it out!

Originally published at Christopher East. You can comment here or there.

One of the publishers-of-choice for high-quality genre fiction collections has got to be Golden Gryphon, and Nancy Kress’ Nano Comes to Clifford Falls and Other Stories (2008) continues that tradition nicely, collecting thirteen of the author’s stories from the 2000s.

By and large it’s a strong collection of mostly hard SF, focusing equally well on the immediate personal interests of its characters and the wider, larger concerns of its Big Ideas.  I tend to prefer Kress (as, let’s face it, I tend to prefer most SF) closer to home, so perhaps unsurprisingly the highlights for me were its near future tales — in particular, “Wetlands Reserve,” which regards a scientist’s investigation of a startling find in an upstate NY wilderness preserve, and “Computer Virus,” which contains some intriguing speculation on artificial intelligence.  Both these stories trend in the cautionary direction, and indeed that seems to be fairly common throughout the volume, from the amusing short-shorts “Patent Infringement” and “Product Development,” to the title story, “Nano Comes to Clifford Falls,” which involves the arrival of a powerful new technology at a small community that’s rather reluctant to embrace it.  Although interested by the subject matter, I found this particular story kind of flat and muddled, an odd choice to headline the collection.  (But if the author’s note is any indication, this one spawned a number of conflicting reactions, so clearly your mileage may vary here.)

The deep-future, space-based, Big Idea SF on display here isn’t without merit either, of course.  Particularly effective for me was “Ej-Es,” which involves an intergalactic Peace Corps and their investigation of an odd colony world struck with a strange, mass hallucination virus; this one pulls off a neat trick in its final moments that really sells its theme.  The deep, deep future of “Mirror Image” presents some of the collection’s most inventive and ambitious world-building (really I should say “universe-building”), and while I found this one perhaps a bit overlong, I was terrifically impressed by the breadth and detail of its setting and the scope of its ideas.  Alas, the only major “miss” of the collection for me also fell into this category — the predictable, retro space fiction “First Flight,” which celebrates old school, 1950s SF TV.  (Clearly I’m not the target audience for this one.)  Overall, there’s plenty of strong work on display here to recommend the collection.

Originally published at Christopher East. You can comment here or there.

I enjoyed a pair of Paul McAuley’s near-futurish thrillers from earlier in the decade, Whole Wide World and White Devils, so I was looking forward to his next, Mind’s Eye (2005) — which ended up never getting a US edition.  I finally tracked down a copy, and found it to be similarly satisfying, although I didn’t outright love it.

Not entirely science fictional, the premise of Mind’s Eye is nonetheless genresque and fantastical.  Unknown to most, there exist in the world ancient glyphs that, when viewed, have potent mind-altering effects on those who see them.  The story focuses on two people in London who take an interest in these glyphs when they begin popping up around the city in the form of anti-war graffiti.  Harriet Crowley is a freelance spook, and the descendant of a secret society dedicated to keeping these dangerous glyphs hidden from the world so that they aren’t misused.  And Alfie Flowers, a more unwitting descendent of this group, is a freelance photographer whose childhood run-in with the glyphs has  rendered him particularly susceptible to their effects. Alfie and his erstwhile friend Toby, a wise-cracking, chain-smoking journalist, attempt to track down the source of the graffiti, in the hopes of curing Alfie of the life-shaping seizures that have plagued him since the childhood incident.  Meanwhile, Harriet works behind the scenes trying to prevent the glyphs from falling into the hands of some decidedly villainous interests.  Their paths intersect when what begins as a search for an artist gradually grows more perilous as the protagonists cross paths with interests attempting to seize the glyphs’ power.

The plotting is quite well done, and McAuley’s prose is clear and engaging throughout, although at times it shifts gears awkwardly.  Particularly in the first book, set in London, the narrative lurches into flashback without warning on occasion, and at times the writing is a bit distancing.  But things speed up nicely later when the adventure takes the book’s heroes to the Middle East, and events ultimately accelerate to an exciting climax.

With its mix of politics, current events, mysterious secret history and gritty action, Mind’s Eye struck me as a very cinematic reading experience, conjuring early John Frankenheimer movies like Seconds and The Manchurian Candidate, which had similarly unsetlling  quasi-SF overtones.  Perhaps it was the politics, though, that kept it off U.S. shelves?  In spite of its fantastical MacGuffin, it definitely riffs off controversial real world situations — in particular the war in Iraq, and American and British involvement there — which might have been a tough sell here in the Bush era.  I mention this as an observation, rather than a criticism; I found the politics integral, and not that intrusive.  That the villains were pursuing American interests didn’t bother me either, as they were fairly cartoonish villains with a tendency to infodump and monologue at times — another issue entirely, and one of the novel’s more noticeable flaws in my opinion.  Ultimately, though, I found Mind’s Eye well worth the read, an intriguing thriller that, in the right hands, would probably make a pretty good movie.

Originally published at Christopher East. You can comment here or there.

After suffering through The Fountain, I wasn’t all that excited about Darren Aronofsky’s follow-up, but the acting buzz was too big to ignore, so I decided I’d give The Wrestler (2008) a try.  It’s the story of Randy “the Ram” Robinson (Mickey Rourke), an aging professional wrestler twenty years past his prime, now coasting on the remnants of his former glory and eking out a living on the east coast circuit.  Years of physical abuse, from blows sustained in the ring to the dangerous cocktail of pharmaceuticals he uses to keep himself going, have him on the brink of collapse, and when events transpire to threaten the only career he’s ever known, Randy is forced to make some difficult decisions about his future.

Rourke is phenomenal in the lead role, as good as all the buzz would lead you to expect, and really acting is the primary strength of the film, as able support comes from Marisa Tomei (as “Cassidy,” a stripper and Randy’s semi-girlfriend) and Evan Rachel Wood (as his estranged daughter).  The film-making is straight-forward and effective, and the script steers Randy through his journey deftly in a nicely laid out sequence of day-in-the-life scenes, punctuated by the film’s big events.  That said, the story didn’t really deliver anything I wasn’t expecting; as the summary might indicate, this is a tragic tale of someone who loses everything he loves in the pursuit of his own selfish interest — or is it his passion?  It’s an intriguing film thematically, reminding me on some level of Boogie Nights, a movie that put nails into the coffin of a certain aspect of permissive, liberated ’70s behavior.  The Wrestler does a similar number on a particular kind of selfish ’80s mindset, as symbolized by pro wrestling and unsubtle hair-metal, with Rourke as the aging man-boy unwilling to let go of his past.  Like Boogie Nights, The Wrestler is nostalgic for its material and critical of it at the same time, food for thought about changing attitudes.

But, if my clumsy thematic musings don’t interest you, check out The Wrestler anyway. The film’s dark moments aren’t always easy to get through, but I think it’s worth it for its moving moments and impressive performances.

Originally published at Christopher East. You can comment here or there.

Not a hell of a lot of news on the writing front for me lately…and that seems to include blogging!  Over the past couple of weeks, my usual lunch-break writing time has been taken up by composing silly little grooves on GarageBand (a music program), which I’ve been attempting to learn how to use, somewhat half-assedly, but with much amusement.

As for writing, well, occasionally the novel moves forward a few paragraphs, and a new short story is slowly taking shape, but mostly I’ve been a consumer for the past little while:  working my way through Futurismic submissions, going back to basics with Damon Knight’s Creating Short Fiction, and reading some other fiction.  Plus I just got going on a massive history volume about Allied military deception during WWII that looks really interesting.  So, more reviews and posts are in the pipeline eventually, but for now — nothing to see here, move along!

Originally published at Christopher East. You can comment here or there.

The Riches (2007-2008) has everything I like in a good TV show:  a strong premise, effective writing, terrific acting, realistic language, edgy themes, and the odd surprise along the way.  Even so, as I reached  the end of the first season DVD set — which took an uncharacteristically long time for me to get through — I’m just not feeling hooked.  And while I wouldn’t rule out following up with the show’s second and final season, I’m just not feeling at all compelled to do so.

The show follows the Malloys, a nuclear family of five off-the-grid travelers, scraping by on con games, graft, and petty crimes.  Early in the season, the Malloys run afoul of the greater community of travelers, steal some money from them, and make a break for it.  But their escape attempt leads to a  violent car chase, which unexpectedly takes the lives of lawyer Doug Rich and his wife, who are on their way to start a new life in Eden Falls, Louisiana.  The not-insignificantly-named Eden Falls is an opulent, plastic cookie-cutter community, where the Riches have just purchased a brand new McMansion.  Although most of the family is appalled at what’s happened, opportunistic father Wayne (Eddie Izzard) can’t pass up what is soon to become the family’s biggest scam — impersonating the Riches, and living the lives of actual, law-abiding, capitalist Americans (or “buffers,” in their parlance).

It’s well made, well performed, well written, an artistically successful show in most respects.  Minnie Driver is dynamic and effective as Dahlia Malloy, and the children — particularly Noel Fisher as son Cael and Shannon Woodward as daughter Di Di — are sympathetic and well drawn characters.  Wayne’s boss Hugh Panetta (Gregg Henry) makes an engaging quasi-antagonist, while Dahlia’s best friend and neighbor Nina (Margo Martindale) is a wonderfully played and memorable supporting character.  The plots are generally entertaining, and the subject matter is usually pretty interesting.

So why do I feel like I don’t like the show all that much?  I’ve been trying to put my finger on it, and at first I thought it might be that it felt somewhat thematically derivative of other shows — in particular, The Sopranos and Weeds.  The three shows are tonally different, but cover a lot of the same ground.  Eachs suggests that the entitled American family is inherently leading a criminal way of life, merely by participating in the capitalist system, selfish and greedy and callous in its very essence.  I’m tempted to label it a reactionary trend against the me-first Republican regime under which these shows were developed; but that would probably be reading into it too much.

The Sopranos, of course, paved the way in this area, borrowing liberally from traditional crime family/mafia tropes, but then brilliantly layering that milieu over suburban American life and forcing its characters — and, by extension, its viewers — to confront their selfish actions in the name of satisfying their entitled lifestyle choices.  Not without humor, The Sopranos’ chief strength was its dramatic tension, as its appalling anti-heroes went to greater and greater lengths to justify their brutal, selfish activities.  Is a murderous thug like Paulie, ready to kill for his piece of the pie, that much worse than the outwardly reasonable Carmela, willing to turn a blind eye to atrocities she’s tacitly a party to?  The Sopranos fascinates with these moral conundrums, challenging the viewer to question why they’re rooting for anybody.

If The Sopranos punctuates its dark, dramatic focus with moments of unexpected comedy, Weeds takes the reverse approach, maintaining a zany, witty surface while darker materials lurk below.  But Weeds is treading the same thematic ground, successful in its own, entirely different right.  In some ways, the behavior of Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker) and her family in Weeds may even be more appalling, in some respects, because it doesn’t have the heightened reality of epic mafia tropes enabling the viewer to hold it at an arm’s distance.  The Botwins are the essence of entitled American money-grubbing, refusing to play by the rules that impact their comfort — regardless of the consequences.

Enter The Riches, then, which plies similar territory, but doesn’t quite succeed at the same level.  I think, perhaps, the main problem is that The Riches doesn’t really nail its tone.  It’s often too serious to sell its comic shenanigans…or it’s too wacky to convince us to take it seriously…and it’s always kind of hard to tell which way the show wants us to lean.  This tonal dichotomy is embodied in Eddie Izzard’s character, whose credibility hinges on the extremes of the weekly plot — the more ridiculous the scheme, the better he comes off, the more serious, the worse.  I both like and dislike Izzard in this role, depending on the scene.

Another issue is that The Riches critiques from outside, while The Sopranos and Weeds critique from within.  To me, the latter two succeed largely by inviting the viewer to see themselves in the shows’ anti-heroes; contrarily, the anti-heroes of The Riches never really buy into the system from which they’re benefiting, so it always feels a little like they’re talking down to the audience.  It’s a different approach to the thematic issues, and not invalid, but for me it just doesn’t come off as artfully.

Still, I frequently find The Riches interesting and worthwhile viewing — a late-season arc involving guest actor Arye Gross is particularly hard-hitting stuff — and if I can’t recommend it whole-heartedly, I’d surely recommend it with reservations.  It’s a peculiar product, and that’s always worth something in my book.

Originally published at Christopher East. You can comment here or there.

It may be a bit of a stretch to say the Pressure Boys were ahead of their time; as kind of a mutant mash-up of British ska, horn-heavy funk, hillbilly punk, and reggae, there’s plenty of eighties era precedence for their type of stuff (Fishbone and Oingo Boingo leaping first to mind).  Even so, these guys seem like the kind of obscure, niche group tailor-made for fringe creative survival during the internet era — not the old school workings of the music industry of their time.

Appropriate, then, that they should rematerialize on iTunes after years of being painfully out-of-print, and I couldn’t have been more jazzed when I found out.  The Incomplete Recordings: 1981-1988, released last April, finally replaces my lost, lamented, and horribly recorded cassettes of obscure-label vinyl I made at the college radio station back in Fredonia (which had been rife with skips, bad levels, and oops-I-pressed-record moments).

The only thing wrong with this 18-track collection is that, well, yeah, it is incomplete…at the end of the day, I’m still craving a fully remastered copy of their 1987 album Krandlebanum Monuments, which is the one I played into the ground back in my learning-to-play-bass-by-ear days.  Indeed, this new release contains a number of tunes from that album, but out of order and with some exceptions (such as “A Chew and a Swallow” and the E-funk bass riffing that is “Lava Booger”).  Still, having clean copies of great tunes like “Around the World,” “Dial-Tone,”  “Terrible Brain,” and especially “Off to Lake Tumont” — all of which mash raw guitars, groovy beats, and tight horn arrangements to unique effect — is pretty priceless nostalgia for me.

The earlier selections tend to have more of a traditional ska feel, hardly unwelcome, but in the wake of my extensive over-listening to nineties ska a few years back, doesn’t strike me as quite as interesting.  Even so, I’m happy to “discover” some never-heard-before stuff like the unabashed funkiness of “Soul Chip” and the Madness-like groove of “Policeman in My Neighbor’s Yard.”  But generally, the Krandblebanum cuts are still the score of this re-release:  all the celebratory feel of ska, but with some infectious backbeats and gutsy dissonance setting it apart.

These guys may not seem all that special to people steeped in the easier-to-find postmodern genre-fusion of the past twenty years, but back in 1988, while trying to escape the cheesy synthetic dance beats and insincere hair metal of those bleak days, the Pressure Boys were a godsend, and it’s nice to see some of their material find new life.

Originally published at Christopher East. You can comment here or there.

My ever-continuing search for effective spy novelists takes us next to the unimaginatively titled At Risk (2004), the first novel by former MI-5 Director-General Stella Rimington, who brings years of experience in the real intelligence world to this fictional tale of British security service efforts to prevent an imminent terrorist attack.

Rimington’s hero is Liz Carlyle, an officer of MI-5’s counter-terrorist section, who finds herself running point on an important case, tracking the infiltration of an “invisible” — a terrorist agent who can move freely in the target country by virtue of ethnicity and language — onto British soil.  Saddled semi-reluctantly with an erratic MI-6 officer named Bruno Mackey, Carlyle puts her considerable investigative abilities to the test across the British coastlines and countryside, attempting to thwart a jihadist attack that ties into local organized crime, an immigrant-smuggling ring, the US military presence in England, and more.

Rimington’s writing is crisp and effective, with an authoritative voice, and the book is nicely paced and engrossing, focusing primarily on Liz, but also ricocheting through other points of views, including various bystanders and the terrorists themselves.   As one might expect in light of the author’s pedigree, there’s a unmistakeable ring of authenticity to the tradecraft and detective guesswork.  Indeed, there’s more conventional puzzle-solving on display than intelligence service politics — unfortunately, perhaps, as it gives the novel more of a conventional mystery novel feel.  Rimington introduces some late surprises that help, but also attempts to link her hero with the villain in a profound moment of mutual recognition, but it doesn’t entirely come off.  Even so, the milieu is promising, and these complaints feel pretty trivial in light of the book’s well handled mysteries and effortlessly read prose.  I’ll definitely be adding the author’s other novels to my to-read queue.

Originally published at Christopher East. You can comment here or there.

It was kind of a long, rough week, so Saturday came as a welcome respite, and Jenn and I spent a busy and celebratory day together.

First we went to Jenn’s studio in Burbank for a screening party of the new Slangman’s World episodes.  For those who aren’t aware, Jenn has been writing and voice-acting for this animated kids’ show, the next incarnation of which is debuting on Georgia Public Broadcasting tomorrow.  The new shows are a blast and it’s an exciting time for the studio as they anticipate further production.

Then we drove south to the Staples Center in downtown LA to watch the home opener for the Los Angeles Kings.  We’ve never had so much fun watching our team get destroyed.  The visiting Phoenix Coyotes, a team in financial disarray and with its ultimate future still in limbo, shredded our defense to win 6-3.  Decked out in our home blacks, we had fun anyway, and both of our jersey picks — Alexander Frolov and Anze Kopitar — scored goals, leading us to conclude that had we just worn four more jerseys, we might have pulled this one out!  Better luck next time, fellas…

In the aftermath of this busy and exhausting day, we stayed holed up at home on Sunday writing, drinking coffee, napping, watching TV, and generally chilling with the cats.  I also joined my first-ever World of Warcraft PuG raid, an overpowered Molten Core run this morning.  I usually hate pick-up groups but for some reason I got talked into this one, and had fun.  I also came out of it with this awesome screenshot of my orc taking aim at the final boss:

Overall a great weekend, and it couldn’t have come at a better time.  Life should always be all weekend-y!

Originally published at Christopher East. You can comment here or there.