Brendan I. Koerner's Blog, page 131

Shove to Shovel

We know you’re sick of hearing this excuse, but we’re seriously slammed on the screenplay today; hoping to get a complete rough draft done by end-of-day Friday, so the weekend can be all about Microkhan Jr. So we’re gonna be lazy right this second and just post a great video of yore—the public-access-style promo for the quasi-gothic gangster anthem “Tried by 12.” If Sergio Leone had been fixated on East Flatbush instead of the Wild West—and had been born a few decades later—this tune would certa

Elbow Grease and Lots of Kevlar

We’re a sucker for unintentionally wry headlines, so we were delighted to come across this gem last night: “Demining efforts to make Taiwan’s Kinmen island more tourist-friendly.” Why, yes, that seems quite logical—few tourists are fond of vacationing amidst landmines.

Yet once we stopped chortling, we couldn’t help but become engrossed in Taiwan’s project. Kinmen was a site of savage fighting exactly 60 years ago, as Chiang Kai-shek’s retreating Chinese Nationalists were pursued by Mao Zedong’s

The Toughest Traveller in Teesside

Two weeks ago, we posted about a pub kerfuffle in Ireland that appeared to stem from anti-Traveller prejudice (mixed in, perhaps, with some randy behavior by the Travellers themselves). We’ve since kept our eyes peeled for Traveller-related news, seeing as how we only scratched the surface of the community’s history and contemporary situation.

The news, alas, hasn’t disappointed. A harness race in northern England was recently marred by a nasty case of apparent Traveller-on-Traveller violence. A

Battling the Inner Sisyphus

We’re suffering from a major, extremely ill-timed case of writer’s block today, and have thus been relegated to listening to the above song on repeat in order to reboot our creative powers. We’re actually far more familiar with the Ashe Bhosle version, which sounds a touch more ethereal to our amateur ears. But this’ll do in a pinch—we’re especially fond on the flashback scenes around the 1:40 mark. No real clue what’s going on here, plotwise, since our Bollywood knowledge is sadly limited. But

Little Lightning

Those few of you who’ve perused our mission statement know that Microkhan’s a devoted fan of female billiards. Our favorite player has long been Vivian “The Texas Tornado” Villareal, in part because of the classy way she endured a weirdo kidnap drama. But we’ve recently considered switching our allegiance to South Korean upstart Yu Ram Cha, a 21-year-old protege of Charlie “The Korean Dragon” Williams.

Rest assured, we can already hear you chortling that our Cha fandom is all about her looks—a co

First Contact: New Zealand

Our semi-regular First Contact series continues with a look at the needlessly violent encounter between Captain James Cook and the Maori of New Zealand. Cook himself is our source, as he was a fastidious diarist during his travels around the world. And he recorded the strange events of October 9th, 1769 in great detail.

Things went awry virtually right off the bat, when the coxswain of Cook’s landing boat shot a Maori to death before even a single word had been exchanged. Cook tried to salvage th

The Struggles of Stuntmen

We always figured that the advent of cheap CGI effects would have a deleterious effect on living, breathing stuntmen. But we had no idea things were so rough in the Filipino film industry. The Manila Times sheds some depressing light:

Stuntmen are not covered by life or health insurances, but merely hope for the assistance of the Mowelfund Film Institute in times of troubles. “Our purpose is to alleviate marginalized workers in the industry and to put up dignity because we noticed that those beh

Before I Let Go

That’s a wrap for the work week, as we look forward to a weekend full of goat roasting and screenplayin’. What might you have missed if your Microkhan-ing was sporadic these last few days? So much good stuff, dear reader, so much good stuff. We’re talking hilariously frivolous lawsuits against your humble narrators, the launch of the Now the Hell Will Start paperback, a lingering controversy over the origins of Filipino stick fighting, and the curious intersection between breakfast cereal and Co

The Utter Failure of High Concept

For today’s installment of Bad Movie Friday, we’d like to shred a flick that must’ve seemed so great when William Friedkin pitched it: Cruising, a murder mystery that’s several degrees clumsier than the worst Encyclyopedia Brown shortie.

Now we can see why this got made. The milieu (the gay leather-bar scene) was ultra-edgy at the time, and, hey, Al Pacino doing his Serpico thing. But, alas, the result is pure ham-fisted dullsville, featuring Pacino in full scenery-chewing mode. (Check out his i

A Yardstick for the Fuzz

Several years ago, we read a revealing interview with Wilbert Rideau, former editor of the newspaper at Angola State Prison. He was asked whether harsher sentences, including the death penalty, would deter criminals. Rideau bluntly answered “no”—criminals never think they’re going to get caught. That’s in part because (as noted in the chart above) the majority of cases are never solved. The only way to deter crime, argued Rideau, was to increase police clearance rates, and thereby convince poten