Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 77

The Pulp Writer Show, Episode 132: Autumn 2022 Movie Reviews

In this week’s episode, I take a look at the movies and TV shows I watched this autumn and share my opinions. This includes Top Gear Maverick, Morbius, Jurassic World Dominion, Rings of Power, She-Hulk, Andor, and others.

As always, you can listen to the show on Libsyn, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Amazon Music.

-JM

How to handle a 1-star review?

Tomorrow starts National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, and thousands of writers will embark upon writing their novels. Some of them will actually finish and publish or self-publish their NaNoWriMo books. 

Which means thousands of writers will soon undergo that rite of passage: their first 1-star review.

If you happen to watch a lot of online writers’ groups, the reactions to the first 1-star review usually predictable. What should the new writer do? Should they contact Amazon and demand that the review be taken down? Should they confront the reviewer and explain what they got wrong about the book? Should they rewrite the book from scratch to address the reviewer’s criticism? Should they unpublish the book since it’s clearly not ready for prime time? Or should they give up writing altogether since they’re obviously no good at it? 

Of course, the truth is that none of these reactions are helpful or constructive, and some of them can be highly counterproductive and even destructive. 

So, how best to handle that first 1-star review? 

The very first bad review you get as a new writer is painful, there’s no doubt about it. 

I can still remember the first bad review I ever got. However, this was like almost twenty years ago at this point. There have been hundreds of bad reviews since then, maybe thousands if you count Goodreads, and I have a better chance of remembering what I had for lunch today (soup and a bag of frozen vegetables, I think, or maybe it was a sandwich?) than any of those bad reviews. 

You can say I have some experience in the matter. Based on that, here are some tips and tricks for dealing with bad reviews. 

1. ) Acknowledge that it is a painful experience.

No one likes to be told that their work is bad, and depending on the review, it could contain various personal insults as well. It is normal to find this unpleasant.

However, everyone has unpleasant experiences, and some experiences are quite a bit more unpleasant than someone saying they don’t like your book on the Internet.

How you react to an unpleasant experience is very often more important than the experience itself, so let’s move on to that.

2.) Reflect that people have a right to their opinion, and not everyone will like your book.

The great thing about self-publishing is that you can pretty much write and publish anything you want, so long as you don’t violate any of your local laws. This is an excellent freedom that we should cherish, since it’s a lot better than having to deal with agents and acquisition editors.

However, if you accept that, then you also need to accept the other edge of the sword – that just as you have the right to self-publish anything you want, people have the right to think and say whatever they want about what you wrote. You cannot have one without the other. It is fundamental to the nature of the enterprise.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion – but more on that below. 

3.) Realize that a billion people speak English.

It always feels bad when someone doesn’t like your book. However, if you’re reading this, you probably read books in English. According to Google, something like 1.5 billion people in the world speak and read English, and a very large percentage of them have ereaders or read stuff on their phones.

So if one person doesn’t like your book, oh, well – there are literally tens if not hundreds of millions of other readers who might enjoy it. It’s just a matter of finding them, which is a separate topic.

4.) Under no circumstances engage with the reviewer.

Never, never, never, never, never respond to a bad review. (Especially on Goodreads.) It almost always never goes well. At best, you might have an awkward interaction with someone. At worst, it might go viral on Twitter and you will have an Internet mob show up to complain on your social media pages. 

If the review contains incorrect information, you might be tempted to respond to point it out. It’s almost always a mistake to do that. Like, an exception could be if the review complains about the bad formatting, and you could say “that has been corrected, contact Amazon support and they’ll push the updated file to your device”, that kind of thing. However, it’s best to do this judiciously and rarely.

Don’t cyberstalk the bad reviewer and start leaving anonymous comments on their pages, or sending angry phone messages to their employers. There have been numerous documented cases of this, and they never end well. 

Never track down a bad reviewer and confront them in person. There have been a few cases of angry authors turning up at reviewers’ houses to vent their complaints. And for God’s sake, don’t show up at the reviewer’s workplace and attack them with a wine bottle. This actually happened in Scotland a few years ago.  

Remember – you have the right to write whatever you want, and the reviewer has the right to write whatever they want about your book, and it’s best to leave it at that. 

5.) Acknowledge that most people’s opinions are generally pointless. 

That said, it is also good to remember that most people’s opinions on most topics are pretty pointless. 

The modern age is an egalitarian one, where even billionaires and politicians feel the social pressure to make gestures that show they are part of The Common Man, and everyone thinks their opinions are just as good as everyone else’s. Overall, I think this is better than the sort of society where one can be executed for making accidental eye contact with one’s social superior or arrested for using astrology to determine the day the King will die. However, this overlooks the fact that most people’s opinions on most topics are useless. 

That isn’t harsh, that’s just the nature of opinions. Like, if I were to offer an opinion about the current state of Welsh politics, it would be pretty useless because 1.) I’m not Welsh, 2) I don’t live in Wales, 3.) I don’t speak Welsh, 4.) I’ve never visited Wales or the rest of the UK, and 5.) I can’t name a single actual Welsh politician. (I do know that the Welsh parliament is called the Senedd, but only because I was considering something similar as a character name and I Googled it.) 

A lot of negative book reviews are like that. Many of them boil down to “I don’t like this book for reasons I am unable to articulate clearly.” Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but that doesn’t mean the opinion contains any information other than “I don’t like this”, and that’s no reason to stop writing or to completely remake your book. 

6.) Acknowledge that sometimes criticism is hallucinatory, outright insane, or just looking to stir up trouble. 

Then there are the bad reviews where you wonder if the reader actually read the book, or if the reviewer might actually be insane. 

Occasionally, I have had bad reviews or readers write to me about things that did not actually happen in the book in question. I once got a very angry email from a reader offended at the violent rape scenes in GHOST IN THE FORGE. Except…there are no violent rape scenes in GHOST IN THE FORGE! Not one! Or in the entire GHOST series, for that matter. I would have assumed that the reader got me mixed up with some other writer, but she mentioned several characters and locations from GHOST IN THE FORGE. So, either the reader 1.) imagined scenes that didn’t happened, or 2.) was bored and was trying to sir up some trouble. 

I definitely didn’t respond to that email.

There are also times when someone’s personal experience causes bad reviews. There was one reviewer who just hated, hated, the love triangle in one of my books and wrote a lengthy review complaining about how it reminded her of her ex-husband, and then went through and left a one-star review for every other book in the series. For obvious reasons, it was especially wise not to respond to that one, nor to share my opinion that her ex-husband was probably quite a bit happier now.

And sometimes people are just looking for a fight. One time I got a Facebook message from someone saying that his wife was an English teacher who was sitting on the couch laughing at my books because they were so bad. Obviously, any number of snappy comebacks come immediately to mind – that it’s nice of his wife to give him permission to have an opinion, that his wife might need a reading break after seeking satisfaction elsewhere because he was quite obviously unable to provide it, etc – but, of course, I simply ignored the message.

(Also, if you’re going to send angry messages to someone, best not to use Facebook Messenger – the recipient can see your profile and many of your pictures.)

There are also bad reviews caused by utter failures of reading comprehension. 

Once someone went through FROSTBORN: THE GORGON SPIRIT and reported to Amazon that every instance of the word “manetaur” should have been “minotaur.” But the creatures in question were in fact named manetaurs! They appear in several of the FROSTBORN books. Poor Brad Wills had to push his voice to make “manetaur” voices in the audiobooks, not “minotaur” ones. This is just bad reading comprehension. 

So if you have a bad review caused either by hallucinations about the book’s actual contents or poor reading comprehension, it is definitely best to ignore them. 

7.) If you own or control the platform in question, delete the bad review.

If someone leaves a bad review on your website or social media page, go ahead and delete it. There’s absolutely no reason to allow bad reviews or negative comments on any pages you control. You don’t have to be contentious about it – just hit the delete button without replying. Facebook has as surprisingly useful feature called Hide Comment. A hidden comment is invisible to everyone except the person who posted it and people on their friends list. That means most people will not see the comment, and human psychology being what it is, the commentor will just assume no one is interacting with the comment and forget about it. 

Also, if someone leaves bad reviews in comments on your website, go ahead an delete it. If you have a website and let bad reviews appear in the comments, that means you are literally paying to host a bad review! Why spend your money doing that?

Never respond to a bad review, but neither are you obliged to actually host the bad review on your site.  The delete button is there for a reason. 

8.) Sometimes the bad review is right, but that can be validating. 

As you gather more experience writing, you tend to make more and more specific creative choices. Not everyone will like those choices, and will sometimes express themselves in a bad review.

If you get a bad review like that, it’s a good thing – it means you achieved what you set out to do. A couple of times I’ve gotten bad reviews that say “I HATED the way Character X did this” or “I HATED this plot development.” When they’re things I’ve specifically set out to do, that’s a good sign – it means I did them. Returning back to item #2, not everyone will like your book, and that means not everyone will like the creative choices you made in that book. 

So if you get a bad review complaining about something you intended to do in the book, that means you hit the nail on the head.

9.) Continue writing.

A bad review is no reason to stop writing. Keep working on the next project, and the next project, and the next project, and eventually you’ll have so much stuff that you’ll arrive at the next point.

10.) It gets easier with experience. 

I’m coming up on publishing my 135th book. I’ve written so many books that I had to go and double-check that yes, in fact, I am working on book #135. I tried to write a novel for the first time in 1997, I was Traditionally Published for the first time in 2005, and I’ve been self-publishing since 2011.

So I can say that if you do this long enough, you get to a place where the bad reviews don’t really register for long and quickly slip from your memory, and eventually the unsolicited opinions of strangers start to matter much, much less than they did with the first book.

I realized this had happened to me a few years ago when I saw a long, ranty review on one my audiobooks. I thought it was hilarious and started to read it aloud of a family member, expecting it would get a laugh. Instead, the family member in question was horrified and sincerely asked if I was okay. I was baffled by this reaction, but then I understood that I had been writing for so long that I had, indeed, developed the thicker skin that comes with experience. 

That turned out be a really long post! So here’s the TLDR version.

1.) Bad reviews happen. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. You aren’t obligated to listen.

2.) Never respond to or engage with a bad review.

3.) Keep writing.

Hopefully, if you are a new writer who has just gotten than first 1-star review, this will prove helpful. 

-JM

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-JM

autumn 2022 movie reviews – Rings, Other Things, Hulks, Bill & Ted, Bond Songs, and Top Gun

So, it’s time for my 2022 Autumn Movies/Streaming Media Review Post!

How did I find time to watch this stuff? In my household, unless something else is happening, Friday nights are traditionally Movie, Popcorn, and Refreshing Adult Beverage Night. And then if there’s nothing happening on Saturday night, movie night repeats.

I should also mention that these are just my personal reviews and preferences, and are in no way objective. It’s not like I was sitting there with a pen and paper writing things down and saying “hmm, I would give the visual effects only a 54, but the performances a 97, so average the two together…”

My tastes, as I long ago learned, are idiosyncratic. It took me twenty years to even first try playing HALO, for heaven’s sake! So it’s entirely possible and indeed likely that you will disagree with my opinions. Almost all art is ultimately subjective, and opinions about it are even more so.

That said, I don’t form an opinion on something unless I’ve seen it. I try to keep an open mind and not let the opinions of random Internet personalities influence me. There’s a great quote from Sherlock Holmes saying that it’s a capital mistake to theorize without data, and I think “theorizing without data” is generally the modus operandi of social media, so I try to avoid doing that at all times.

I should also note that I’m generally easier on documentaries than I am on nonfiction. So long as a documentary tells its story in an entertaining fashion and doesn’t blatantly lie, I’m generally good with it

With those caveats in mind, here’s what I watched in autumn 2022, and what I thought of it!

TOWER OF TERROR (released 1997)

This wasn’t a great movie, but it was a bad movie done competently. Alas, competence is a rare enough quality in 2022 that it should be recognized at the infrequent moments it appears, even in a made for TV movie about a Disney ride. Steve Guttenberg plays a journalist who was driven out of his job after reporting on a corrupt mayor, so he turned to the inevitable destiny of most corporate journalists, making up fake stories for money. Specifically, stories of the supernatural. (If the character lived nowadays, he’d have a YouTube video blog about ghost sightings.)

But when he’s summoned to investigate a haunting at a hotel that looks suspiciously like a certain Disney ride, it might turn out the ghosts are all too real.

Not exceptional, but competently done with some funny bits, and it follows the rules of story structure well. It was also interesting to see an early part of Melora Hardin, who played Michael Scott’s increasingly insane boss/girlfriend Jan Levinson on the US version of THE OFFICE.

Overall grade: C+

BRIDE & PREJUDICE (released 2004)

First, this feels like a Bollywood movie, but it isn’t. It was directed by Gurinder Chadha, who is an Indian living in the UK. So while it has a lot of the tropes of Bollywood movies, including elaborate song and dance numbers, it isn’t one.

Anyway, it’s a modern adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. The modernization is clever – Darcy is a rich American business magnate who looks down on India, and Elizabeth (an Indian woman named “Lalita” in this version) is immediately offended by Darcy’s attitude, and assumes the worst interpretation of his every statement and action even when he’s trying to be helpful. Just like the book! The culture clash between American business magnate and Indian woman is a good substitute for the strict rules of early 19th century public behavior in the original story. Otherwise, it mostly follows the plot of the novel pretty closely.

Additionally, the song “No Wife No Life” is hilarious.  I wonder if American action movies could be improved with a massive Bollywood/Tollywood style song and dance number in the middle of the film.

Overall grade: B

A KNIGHT’S TALE (released 2001)

I would describe this movie as Dumb, But Entertaining To Watch. Heath Ledger plays William, the squire of a minor country knight named Sir Ector. When Sir Ector unexpectedly dies, William and his friends decide that William should take Ector’s armor and enter the tournament under a false name.

It’s an interesting premise, though the movie is about as historically accurate a portrayal of 14th century England as World of Warcraft, complete with the spectators at the tournament clapping along to “We Will Rock You.” That said, the jousting was always interesting to watch, and this was filmed back before you could basically CG everything, so the movie had to be made with stunt work and practical effects. (For example, the lances were made from balsa wood and packed with uncooked pasta so they could create a convincing shattering effect on camera.) Horses are expensive and difficult to manage even when they’re not on camera, so the movie gets a higher grade than it would otherwise.

Overall grade: C

BILL AND TED’S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE (released 1989)

For all the impact this had on pop culture, I never actually saw it. Then it turned up on Prime, so it was time to watch. (MGM made the BILL & TED movies, and Amazon bought MGM, which means most of the MGM stuff is going to be on Prime permanently now.)

Basically, Bill and Ted are two slacker California high school students who are more interested in forming a band than passing history class. Except if Ted fails history, his dad’s shipping him off to military school in Alaska. But then a time traveler named Rufus arrives from the future, explaining that the formation of their band is vital for human history, and offering the services of his time machine to help with their report. Bill & Ted light upon the idea of bringing famous historical personages from the past to speak in their report.

I don’t generally like time travel stories, but that said, time travel works excellently as a comedy. BILL AND TED was pretty funny, and I like movies from the 80s – they’re generally more self-confident than anything produced nowadays, with certain key exceptions (see TOP GUN MAVERICK below).

Overall grade: B

BILL AND TED’S BOGUS ADVENTURE (released 1991)

This movie had 280% more budget than its predecessor, and I think the director decide to use that money to make the movie 280% weirder, while crossing it with the plots of DANTE’S INFERNO and THE SEVENTH SEAL. It’s not the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen (EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE still has that honor), but it was definitely weird enough that it lost some of the charm of the original movie. I think that weirdness, like garlic and turmeric, is best used sparingly.

Overall grade: D

BILL AND TED FACE THE MUSIC (released 2020)

I didn’t think I was going to like this – I didn’t particularly want to see sad middle-aged Bill & Ted attempting to relive their glory days. But this was the best and funniest of the three movies, and surprisingly uplifting. 25 years after BOGUS ADVENTURE, Bill & Ted still haven’t written the song that will unite the world, and time’s running out. Literally, since if they don’t think up the song by 7:17 PM, all of time and space will collapse.

Bill and Ted decide to travel into the future to steal the song from their future selves, while their daughters decided to recruit the best musicians from across history so that their dads will have the best possible band to play the song.

I won’t spoil the twist at the end, but I think what we all want, deep down, is for the next generation to do better than we did.

Overall grade: A

THE TRANSPORTER (released 2002)

I believe this was the first in a long line of movies that boil down to “Jason Statham, playing a morally gray antihero with a rigid code of ethics, punches bad guys in the face.” It definitely gave off 80s Action Movie vibes, complete with a soundtrack that even sounded very 80s in places. Anyway, Statham plays the Transporter, a criminal who specializes in moving other criminals around while remaining undetected. When he finds out that his latest cargo is in fact a captive, he almost changes his mind, but delivers her anyway.

Then his employer tries to kill him – big mistake!

An entertaining action flick.

Overall grade: B

THE YOUNG VICTORIA (released 2009)

This was basically a historical romance piece, with Queen Victoria and Prince Albert as the romantic lead and her love interest. That said, I am told (by people who know more about this time period than I do) it is one of the more historically accurate accounts of this period of Queen Victoria’s life, albeit with some dramatic embellishments. I was surprised to see that it was written by Julian Fellowes in the pre-DOWNTON ABBEY days.

Since the movie is basically a romance, it doesn’t have much of a villain. The chief contender would be Sir John Conroy (excellently played by Mark Strong, who also played the villain in the 2009 SHERLOCK HOLMES), who absolutely dominated Victoria’s mother and had her raised under the “Kensington System”, this elaborate and insane set of rules 1.) designed to make Victoria helpless and dependent upon him, and 2.) and would probably get Conroy arrested for child abuse nowadays. The plan was that Conroy would completely control Victoria and get her mother appointed as her regent, who would then make him a peer. However, because Conroy’s ambition exceeded his limited intellect, what actually happened was that Victoria despised him and had him banished from her presence (and, effectively, the royal court), the minute she became Queen.

Conroy failed to learn the chief rule of royal politics – kings & queens might forget their friends, but they never, ever, forget their enemies.

Anyway, if you’re interested in the time period, it’s a good historical romance, though I admit “mostly historically accurate romance” really isn’t my genre.

Overall grade: B+

MORBIUS (released 2022)

This movie was one of 2022’s more prominent box office failures. For some reason Sony thought the “It’s Morbin Time!” meme that was circulating on Twitter was proof of a groundswell of popularity for MORBIUS, and so lost a lot of money bringing it back to theaters. Though it appears that the movie did in fact end up in the black, earning back about twice its budget. Anyway, MORBIUS ended up on Netflix with suspicious speed, which is where I watched it.

It’s the origin story of the Spider-Man villain Michael Morbius, a scientist who has a rare blood disease. In his efforts to cure it, he decides to splice his genes with that of a vampire bat, and so he turns into a superpowered vampire with a constant thirst for blood. Despite his illness, Morbius somehow lands in Unsympathetic Character territory, probably because 1.) he straight-up murders a bunch of people who probably didn’t deserve it, and 2.) he consistently makes bad decisions.

Oddly, the VENOM movie from 2018 worked quite a bit better despite more or less following the same formula. I think the difference is that this version of Eddie Brock was a much more sympathetic character and faced off against villains much worse than he is. MORBIUS lacked a strong central villain, other than Michael Morbius’s own bad decisions.

The actors tried their darnedest, the visual effects were slick, and I liked the music enough that I’ll listen to it when writing, but the movie just didn’t gel.

Sony really, really wants an interconnected Marvel-style Cinematic Universe of Spider-Man characters as badly as Saruman wanted the One Ring. But like Saruman and the One Ring, the Sonyverse just isn’t going to happen.

So, in the end, I guess it wasn’t Morbin time after all. Then again, it appears that there is in fact going to be a Morbius 2 and Sony is still planning more Sonyverse Spider-Man movies, so maybe I am wrong.

Overall grade: D+

WEREWOLF BY NIGHT (released 2022)

Imagine an Edgar Allen Poe short story, and then rewrite it to add about 45% more Marvel movie. Then you have WEREWOLF BY NIGHT!

This was a pretty good Halloween show based off a particularly obscure Marvel comic. The Bloodstone family has hunted monsters for generations, and the head of the family, Ulysses Bloodstone, has died. To determine who will obtain use of his magical Bloodstone, his widow organizes a hunt. Whoever kills the monster and survives their fellow hunters will inherit the Bloodstone.

It’s not much of a spoiler to say that this had the increasingly tiresome Humans Are The Real Monsters, Monsters Are Just Misunderstood trope, but that was telegraphed a mile away.  Despite that, it was an interesting story and entertaining to watch.

Overall grade: B

JURASSIC WORLD DOMINION (released 2022)

This movie got terrible reviews, but I don’t think it deserved them. I would say it was a solid action flick with dinosaurs. Of course, it brought it in a billion dollars at the box office, so I guess sometimes what the public really wants to is to see two different generations of popular actors get chased by dinosaurs. It may also demonstrate once again the disconnect (or, occasionally, the yawning gulf) between what critics like and what people actually want to see.

Anyway, the plot involves a sinister corporation called Biosyn that has gotten its hands on the dinosaur genetic editing technology. Biosyn sells genetically altered crops, and the company plans to release a swarm of genetically edited Cretaceous locusts that will eat their competitors’ crops while leaving their own alone. (There are certain Real Life agribusiness companies that would totally do that if they could get away with it.) Of course, since Biosyn is playing with fire, the plan gets away from them, and it’s up to the protagonists of the JURASSIC WORLD movies to team up with the protagonists from the original movies to stop Biosyn from unleashing ecological catastrophe.

What I appreciated most about the JURASSIC WORLD movies was how they built upon the idea of the original JURASSIC PARK. Like, the idea of JURASSIC PARK was that science discovered a method of cloning dinosaurs, the backers opened a theme park, and then it all fell apart. However, if someone in Real Life discovered that kind of gene editing biotechnology, just because the theme park failed the technology wouldn’t go away. People would find other uses for the technology, some beneficial, and some sinister, and JURASSIC WORLD gets some good story mileage out of that.

Overall grade: B

SHE-HULK (released 2022)

Basically, SHE-HULK is a 90s-style Feisty Miniskirt Single Female Lawyer show with Marvel superhero elements added in.

It alternated between tedium and moments of genuinely excellent comedy. Jennifer Walters is a likeable and charming character who nonetheless manages to be thoroughly unsympathetic – a high-powered lawyer who is prone to complaining about how hard it is to be a high-powered lawyer. Walters was supposed to be Fierce and Independent, but she generally seemed more like that one co-worker who has a screaming fit at the poor vending machine guy when the Snickers bars are out of stock.

Of course, the best way to make an unsympathetic character sympathetic is to turn them into an Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist who has to eat humble pie every episode like Frasier Crane, David Brent, or Basil Fawlty. The show was at its best and funniest when Walters’ plans blow up in her face – like when her new boyfriend prefers her She-Hulk identity to her real self, or she gets fired for saving the life of the jury, or she gets dragged into a group therapy session for sketchy D-list superheroes, or when she has to bring a string of bad first dates to testify in her trademark infringement trial.

I think the basic problem of the show was that it would have worked really well with Walters as Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist ala David Brent or Basil Fawlty, but instead it tried to make her Fierce & Independent, and it didn’t quite work.

The show tried to have Social Commentary about Internet mobbing, but framing it through the experiences of an irritable superhero lawyer at a high-powered law firm was probably not the best way to go about it. For that matter, the villains were basically a poorly disguised version of Reddit. Now, don’t get me wrong, if Reddit shut down tomorrow very little of value would be lost, and Internet harassment, mobbing, & misinformation are unquestionably a serious & worsening problem in the modern world, but the way SHE-HULK went about it was kind of lame.

The ending (no spoilers) was just bizarre and kind of a cop-out, in my opinion.

A better approach to the topic of Internet trolling was in J.K. Rowling’s recent THE INK BLACK HEART. I read that in September, and that far more intelligently and effectively used an Internet troll as its central villain.

Overall grade: D (maybe D- if I haven’t had any coffee yet)

STAR WARS ANDOR, the 1st six episodes (released 2022)

It’s funny, I thought I was going to dislike ANDOR and enjoy SHE-HULK, but the opposite turned out to be true. I suspected SHE-HULK would be a fun comedy and ANDOR would be ponderous political lecturing, but neither assumption turned out to be true.

Once again we see Sherlock Holmes’s warning about the capital mistake of theorizing without data!

ANDOR feels like a murky neo-noir spy thriller, but one set IN SPACE! This makes sense, because the showrunner Tony Gilroy wrote several of the early Jason Bourne movies. You can see a lot of the Bourne style elements in the show – the far-flung locations, the sinister intelligence bureaucracies staffed by bitter professional rivals, the high-level political intrigues, the secret government programs, the quick-cut fight scenes. (Jason Bourne and the Treadstone Project in many ways would fit right into an environment like Palpatine’s Empire.)

What’s interesting is that Cassian Andor is a vastly more sympathetic character than Jennifer Walters. Which doesn’t make sense on the surface – Cassian is a murderer, a thief, a con man, and a liar, and he straight up murders a dude in the first five minutes of the series. Jennifer Walters doesn’t do anything remotely that evil. Yet Cassian has much bigger problems than Jennifer, considering that he is a wanted man by the Empire and his allies in the Rebels either a.) don’t trust him, b.) are basically terrorists, and c.) will probably shoot him if it becomes convenient. The scale of his problems, and Cassian’s efforts to deal with them (he has a knack for swallowing bitter truths and getting on with things), make him sympathetic.

Indeed, ANDOR is something of a masterclass in making an unlikeable and immoral person sympathetic to the audience. The character of Inspector Karn, the overzealous and bumbling corporate cop hunting Cassian, is obviously a villain, yet by the end of his initial arc you feel bad for him as everything he does turns to cascading disaster. There’s a scene in Episode 3 where the actor playing Karn (I believe his name is Kyle Soller) looks like he ages ten years in the space of a few moments, and you can almost feel his shocked horror as he realizes just how badly he screwed up.

Honestly, I personally prefer the way THE MANDALORIAN and THE BOOK OF BOBA FETT approach Star Wars, but ANDOR was still an excellent show.

Overall grade: A

ROGUE ONE (released 2016)

Before ANDOR came out, I re-watched ROGUE ONE to refresh my memory.

It holds up pretty well, thought you can tell that the movie was basically taken apart and reshot in places.

Ben Mendelson’s Orson Krennic was one of the best parts of the movie. He is a thoroughly believable 21st century villain – a malevolent bureaucrat. In Real Life, he’d be a university provost, the deputy director of a federal alphabet agency, or the head a US state’s environmental department. (In fact, Krennic looks like he should be testifying before the US Senate about how the botched coronavirus response was totally the fault of a different department.) Ruthless, ambitious, intelligent, and completely willing to throw people under the bus – but totally out of his depth with real power players like Grand Moff Tarkin and Darth Vader. I got the impression the only reason Vader didn’t kill Krennic in a fit of irritation was because the Emperor said he couldn’t until the Death Star was operational.

Given that STAR WARS takes its roots from Flash Gordon, Joseph Campbell, and Westerns, ROGUE ONE/ANDOR is probably about the maximum limit of grimdark that the setting can tolerate.

Overall grade: B

THE RINGS OF POWER (released 2022)

You know, for all the negative press around this show, it wasn’t bad. I mean, it’s basically very expensive Second Age Tolkien fanfiction, yeah, but it’s pretty enjoyable Second Age Tolkien fanfiction. Other than the inevitable compressions and changes required in adapting something to film, I can’t think of anything wrong with it – the performances were good, the music was excellent, the fight sequences were good (Arondir’s vicious death struggle with the orc champion was a highlight), and everything looked pretty. Maybe this was yet another example (as if we needed another) where the sturm and drang of social media has no connection to reality.

I don’t think RINGS OF POWER at all deserved the big negative reaction it got online.

And it’s good to have a big fantasy series that isn’t as pornographic and incest-centered as GAME OF THRONES.

I think RINGS just had the bad luck to land on a very major fault line in the US culture wars. Perhaps it is a testament to the greatness of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien that people in many different bitterly opposed identity groups nonetheless greatly enjoy THE LORD OF THE RINGS. (The Venn diagram of “enjoys LORD OF THE RINGS” has some wildly divergent circles to it.) However, each of these bitterly opposed identity groups has a very specific vision of how Tolkien’s works ought to be adapted, and get annoyed when the adaptation doesn’t align with their vision.

Overall grade: B+

JAMES MAY: OUR MAN IN ITALY (released 2022)

This was a fun show. Curmudgeon James May journeys across Italy in a travelogue spanning six episodes. Most of the world outside the UK knows James May from TOP GEAR and GRAND TOUR, where he plays the part of the fussy pedant to Jeremy Clarkson’s bombastic braggart and Richard Hammond’s good-natured jokester. In this show, he’s free to indulge his interests without Clarkson and Hammond mocking him, though the director frequently has to rein May in for the sake of the show.

May samples various bits of Italian culture, ruminates on them, and gets into comical situations. Very enjoyable, and even somewhat educational!

Overall grade: A

THE GRAND TOUR PRESENTS: A SCANDI FLICK (released 2022)

The Grand Tour returns with a drive across the Artic circle. Jeremy Clarkson, James May, and Richard Hammond have to drive rally cars from Norway to Finland, staying above the Arctic circle the entire time.

It was thoroughly funny, and we learned that 1.) driving at a concrete wall in winter is a really bad idea, and 2.) driving across a frozen lake is a really bad idea. I wonder if Amazon let James May do OUR MAN IN ITALY as an apology for all the times he almost got killed during this episode.

Overall grade: A

THE SOUND OF 007 (released 2022)

As mentioned above, Amazon paid like $8.5 billion dollars to buy MGM, which means all the MGM stuff turns up on Prime, which includes the James Bond movies. To accompany this is THE SOUND OF 007, a documentary about the music of the James Bond films. It’s really interesting, and some musical heavyweights have been involved with the Bond movies. Louis Armstrong, for instance, did the song for ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE, and apparently recorded it in one take despite being quite ill at the time. There’s an amusing clip of Michael Caine describing how he got kicked out of his apartment and stayed with composer John Barry for a while. Barry kept Caine up all night working on his piano, and when Caine got up in the morning, he got to be the first person to hear the theme for GOLDFINGER. The sleepless night had to at least be worth the entertainment value of the anecdote!

Definitely worth watching if you’re interested in the topic.

Overall grade: A

Finally, here in my opinion is the best thing I saw this autumn:

TOP GUN MAVERICK (released 2022)

I missed this in theatres back in May, but then for some reason our local theatre had it again (I think they re-released the movie for Labor Day Weekend).

So I went to see MAVERICK, and I absolutely loved it. It achieved the rarest of all accomplishments, a sequel that surpassed everything about its predecessor. It was a perfectly crafted movie with no weak points.

Sometimes summer movies have too much spectacle and action and not enough emotional development and character arcs (like THE GRAY MAN), or sometimes a movie has a lot of character stuff but not enough plot. MAVERICK has both – amazing visual spectacle and compelling character arcs. I thought it was classy how they brought Val Kilmer back, and I thought Tom Cruise’s message at the beginning thanking the cast and crew and thanking the audience for coming was also classy.

Given how economic gravity has caught up with streaming services this year, Cruise’s insistence on a theatrical release for MAVERICK seems downright prescient.

No doubt Paramount can think of 1.4 billion reasons or so they’re glad they listened to him.

The only thing I can say that seems even remotely critical is that Ethan Hunt from MISSION IMPOSSIBLE started to bleed in a little towards the end. But I like the MISSION IMPOSSIBLE movies, so is that really a criticism?

Enthusiastically recommended.

Overall grade: A+

-JM

CLOAK OF MASKS cover design

Here’s the cover image for CLOAK OF MASKS!

If all goes well the book will be out sometime in November.

-JM

Windows 8 vs. FROSTBORN

And now for a completely different topic with a trip down memory lane.

Windows 8!

It’s hard to believe that it’s been ten years since Windows 8 came out, but here we are. There’s a fascinating interview with Steven Sinofsky, the former Microsoft exec in charge of Windows 8 and the original iteration of the Surface, about the impact of Windows 8. 

My personal experiences with Windows 8 were quite mixed. I was working in IT support at the time, and when Windows 8 came out, we skipped it and Windows 8.1 entirely. Windows 8 had a variety of enhancements and features that are now common in other platforms, but at the time it was too much, too soon. The user experience changes were too much for the average user to swallow, and introducing regular users to Windows 8 would have been a support nightmare. I very strongly suspect that a lot of institutions held off on upgrading until Windows 10 came along. I wrote the first three FROSTBORN books on a little 13-inch Asus laptop that came with Windows 8. Halfway through THE UNDYING WIZARD, the keyboard died. That particular model had a flaw that caused the keyboard to stop working and would require a new motherboard. Dealing with that problem slowed finishing THE UNDYING WIZARD by about week, and I had an irrational dislike of Windows 8 ever since, even though the operating system was hardly at fault for a bad motherboard connector.

I also tried writing and self-publishing a book about Windows 8. I had thought that Windows 8 would be the Next Big Thing, and I wanted to get a book out to take advantage of it. Clearly, this was not the best judgment on my part. Amazon has a tool that lets you look back at the lifetime sales history of a book you’ve published, and my Windows 8 book sold a grand total of 116 copies since I published it in 2012. To put that in perspective, my book about the Linux command line has sold 30,000 ebook copies and 1,300 print copies in the same span of time.

Of course, as clunky as the original Surface was, it improved quite a bit. Apple mocked the Surface at the time, but then quietly went on to integrate several Surface features into the iPad. I ended up writing the final books of the FROSTBORN series and most of SEVENFOLD SWORD and DRAGONTIARNA on a 4th-generation Surface Pro, which ran Windows 10, not Windows 8.

Anyway, if you’re interested in that period of computing history, the interview is definitely worth a read.

-JM

 

CLOAK OF MASKS rough draft done!

I am pleased to report that the rough draft of CLOAK OF MASKS is done!

It came in at 104,000 words.

Next up is BRONZE GAZE, a short story my newsletter subscribers will get for free when the book comes out in November. So this is an excellent time to subscribe to my newsletter.

-JM

The Pulp Writer Show, Episode 131: Creating Suspension Of Disbelief In Fiction

In this week’s episode, I discuss ways to create and maintain suspension of disbelief while writing fiction. I also answer reader questions and talk about the original HALO game.

As always, you can listen to the show on Libsyn, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Amazon Music.

-JM

progress update

I passed the 90,000 word mark of CLOAK OF MASKS yesterday.

If all goes well, I think I will wrap up the rough draft by the end of this coming week. I think it will land at about the 105,000 word mark or so, but we’ll see!

I haven’t decided what I will do for the short story yet – maybe something with Victoria Carrow since she came in second in that poll we did this summer, but it might also be interesting to write a short story from the perspective of a truck driver who’s at the Great Gate complex during a goblin raid.

Hopefully, we’ll have CLOAK OF MASKS out in November.

I’m also 9,000 words into SILENT ORDER: WRECK HAND, and I’m planning that to come out in December. It will be nice to write something slightly shorter to fit around the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays.

After that, it will be full speed ahead on DRAGONSKULL: TALONS OF THE SORCERER.

-JM

GHOST IN THE PACT now in audio!

I am pleased to report that GHOST IN THE PACT, the second to last book in the GHOST EXILE series, is now available in audiobook, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy.

You can get it at Audible, Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon AU, Apple Books, Kobo, Chirp, Scribd, and Payhip.

If all goes well, we’ll have GHOST IN THE WINDS, the final book in the GHOST EXILE series, available before the end of 2022.

-JM