F.C. Schaefer's Blog, page 10

The Rise of Skywalker, and the end of the road.

For the last two years, the fan base of the STAR WARS franchise has been a contentious place in the wake of THE LAST JEDI, the middle film in a new trilogy that began with THE FORCE AWAKENS, the first films in George Lucas’s epic scifi world after he sold his company to Disney. THE LAST JEDI was a polarizing film, as director Rian Johnson seemingly threw out the groundwork J.J. Abrams laid in the first film, and took the franchise in a different direction, and in the process, seemed to enjoy confounding the expectations of devoted fans. This was true right from the start in the opening scene of JEDI, when an aged Luke Skywalker tosses away his light saber right after Rey had traveled far to give it back to him.

Abrams is back in charge for SKYWALKER, and seemingly determined to undo the damage of the previous film, and give this trilogy a wrap up that would please the fans. And I can say that to a large extent, he has succeeded, as this latest film has everything a fan could seemingly want: brilliantly rendered alien worlds and creatures; epic light saber battles; epic battles between Imperial battleships and rebel spacecrafts; quests to find MacGuffins; narrow escapes; fortuitously timed arrivals; emotionally satisfying callbacks to the original trilogy; satisfying final appearances by beloved characters; lots of villains; long hinted at secrets finally revealed; and a final shot that truly does come full circle. The heart of this new film is the relationship between Rey, the rebel girl with the awesome power of a Jedi, and Kylo Ren, the inheritor of the Skywalker line, now seduced by the Dark Side, and I thought their character arcs were the best thing in the film, a battle between good and evil worthy of Lucas’s original work. I was glad that Rey, Finn, and Poe Dameron finally got to go on an adventure together, something promised since the FORCE AWAKENS. I especially liked it that C-3PO had something of an arc of his own in this film, even if some other interesting characters (Rose Tico and Maz Kanata) got short changed. The acting was good, as Oscar Isaac, John Boyega, and Daisy Ridley clearly gave it 100%, and the supporting players, including Richard E. Grant, Domhnall Gleeson, newcomer Keri Russell, Abram’s regulars Dominic Monaghan and Greg Grunberg were excellent. Who wasn’t happy to see Billy Dee Williams back as Lando Calrission; he might be older and slower, but the man still has tremendous screen presence. For me, the real star of the movie is Adam Driver as Kylo Ren, the one consistently fascinating character in this third trilogy. The pace is fast, almost frantic, and sometimes it feels like everyone is in a hurry to be in a hurry, but I thought once the “Ghosts of Star Wars Past” show up, the story kicks into high gear. There are three big confrontation scenes with Driver and Ridley that are on par with the best of Lucas. And who isn’t happy to see Lando and Chewbacca show up in the nick of time once again? I can firmly say there is a lot to like in THE RISE OF SKYWALKER.

But this film has some big problems, ones not easily fixed by Abrams’s retconning from the previous film. The return of Emperor Palpatine, which occurs very early on, feels like a desperate move to get the series back on familiar ground. It’s nice to see Ian McDiarmid back in the role he owned, but does not the resurrection of The Emperor then negate the finale of THE RETURN OF THE JEDI, and dilute the redemption of Darth Vadar? The appearance of Palpatine and his new fleet of planet killer battleships feel like a comic book twist, and not in a good way, as it has been barely foreshadowed in previous films. And once the return of the original Big Bad was leaked out, it was very easy to solve the mystery of Rey’s origin. It also felt like lazy plotting when, after apparently manipulating Kylo Ren and Rey for decades, Palpatine just decides to do it all himself when they balk at going along with his possession scheme.

Looking back, I feel it was a mistake to make the character of Rey central to this third trilogy, in that until the final quarter of SKYWALKER, she has consistently been an underwritten and undeveloped protagonist. A young woman with a traumatic past, whose personal conflicts are emotionally internalized, and whose true identity and origin was only hinted at for more than two films, made it hard to genuinely invest in her character. I’m not knocking Daisy Ridley’s acting, she did everything asked of her and more, they just didn’t give her enough to work with. Contrast Rey with Luke from the first trilogy, and how much we learned about him early on, even before his true parentage was revealed in one of the greatest cinematic plot twists of all time. In my opinion, it would have been much better to have built these later three sequels around Ben Solo (aka Kylo Ren), and his journey through the Dark Side of the Force, as he was just naturally a more interesting character.

I was not a big fan of the CGI Princess Leia, but liked the flashback to a young Luke and Leia in Jedi training.

And in the end, too much of SKYWALKER, with its twin themes of self discovery and redemption, felt like it was covering ground that the first trilogy covered, and done better the first time. I think when all is said and done, these last three movies will be seen as a missed opportunity, one where we could have gone deeper into this unique universe, explored its conflicts and cultures more, and given us a far richer tale of good and evil. I wish that Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher could have come back to the iconic characters we will always associate them with, and been given better material.

By all accounts, THE MANDOLORIAN, playing on the Disney App, has given fans the Star Wars saga they have craved in the movies, and were denied. It’s time to let go of the icons of the past, they’ve done their job, let them rest. The universe of Star Wars has outgrown George Lucas’s original concept, a simple morality tale, and it is past time move on to brand new characters, and brand new worlds, and find a brand new magic to dazzle us once again.

I am an indie author and my latest novel is ALL THE WAY WITH JFK: AN ALTERNATE HISTORY OF 1964. It is available at the following:
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From Nixon to Reagan; how the Right Wing found its voice and its leader.

Nobody particularly liked the 70’s when they were living through them, much of the time it felt like the long hangover from the big out of control party that was the 1960’s in America. But now, long after those days have faded from the rearview mirror of history, it can make for compelling reading. Rick Perlstein’s THE INVISIBLE BRIDGE: THE FALL OF NIXON AND THE RISE OF REAGAN is one thick piece of reading, and an exhaustive look back at those times, but if you like a deep dive into American history, then Perlstein’s book is a veritable Marianas Trench. This is the third book of a trilogy that covers roughly a decade in American politics, starting with BEFORE THE STORM, a history of Barry Goldwater’s consequential losing 1964 campaign against Lyndon Johnson; then followed by NIXONLAND, which covered the fracturing of the American political consensus in the late 60’s, the turmoil of Richard Nixon’s first term and his landslide re-election, even as the Watergate scandal begins to fester. In this third book, Perlstein covers the period from late 1972 through the nomination fights and political conventions in the summer of 1976, as a divided country attempts to move on from the deep wounds of the Vietnam War and the scandal of Watergate.

And those were deep wounds, as Perlstein takes time to give the reader a wider picture of the times and the culture. This was the era of Patty Hearst’s kidnapping; when a member of the Manson family attempted to assassinate the President and a mentally ill police informant followed her up with another assassination attempt two weeks later. An Arab oil embargo in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War jacked the price of gasoline at the pumps, and resulted in long lines at stations, making the term “energy crisis” a household word. Out of control inflation ate away at wages, as trips to the grocery store became an exercise in sticker shock. Jobs disappeared, and the sense of economic security a generation of Americans had taken for granted seemed to vanish overnight. “Peace with Honor” went down the drain in Southeast Asia, as South Vietnam collapsed and the Communists rolled into Saigon, leaving Americans to grapple with fact that over 50,000 brave young men had seemingly died for nothing. A hidden history of domestic spying and harassment by the FBI was exposed, while the CIA’s dirty laundry, including plots to assassinate foreign leaders, were dumped before the public at Senate hearings. A crime ridden New York City went broke and needed to be bailed out by the taxpayers. Marijuana, cocaine, and heroin became part of daily life for many. Feminism and Gay Rights movements challenged and upended the social order. Cults and “self help” gurus flourished, as some joined the Moonies, while others checked out EST and Primal Scream theory. The movie AMERICAN GRAFFITI, and the TV show HAPPY DAYS, cashed in on a wave of nostalgia for the supposedly simpler 1950’s. Other films, like JAWS, THE GODFATHER PART 2, CHINATOWN, THE PARALLAX VIEW, and NASHVILLE, expressed the fears, paranoia, suspicions, and divisions of the times. Parents in West Virginia revolted against “pornographic” textbooks, white working class citizens of Boston turned violent when their children were bussed across town to black schools, and a lot of American women took a look at the Equal Rights Amendment, and wanted no part of it, and wanted no part of it in the Constitution. These events are all things Perlstein recounts in his book, often with an ironic eye.

The main focus of the book is on the politicians who dominated the times: Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and to a lesser extent, Jimmy Carter. None of whom come out of the book unscathed. I thought Perlstein did a good job recounting Nixon’s fall in the Watergate scandal, but what caught my interest more was his writing on the return of the POW’s from North Vietnam, which the Nixon Administration tried to spin into a great American victory narrative. We’d fought and fought, and bombed and bombed, for years, and years, and years, and at long last, our heroes could come home. Never mind anything else. That was the narrative Nixon and his men tried sell to a weary and, sadly, indifferent public. The truth, like it often is, was much more complicated. Gerald Ford is portrayed as a bumbler, in over his head, easily parodied by Chevy Chase on SNL. “Damned if he did, damned if he don’t” is how Perlstein dismisses him. I think history has been much kinder to Ford than Perlstein; a man whose basic decency served him and the country well in the long run. I won’t argue with anybody when it comes to the faults and failures of Jimmy Carter’s leadership, but Perlstein, like many of Carter’s critics, appears to have a personal dislike of the man, and the culture he came from. Carter has always been a hard man to like for many, and no doubt Scoop Jackson, Morris Udall, Frank Church, Lloyd Bentsen, or Birch Bayh, all competitors of his for the 1976 Democratic Presidential nomination, would have been more successful as President, but they either ran bad campaigns, or simply lacked a compelling message that resonated with voters. One thing Perlstein does give Carter the proper credit for is that he, and his supporters, outworked every one of his rivals in 1976. Sometimes it is just a matter of wanting it more.

Ronald Reagan, more than anyone else, gets the most attention from Perlstein. The portrait he paints is of a glib and genial fabulist, ever able to project optimism no matter what, no doubt a reaction to a meager and trouble filled childhood spent in the mid west. That Reagan could spin anecdotes and stories, and present then as true, has been well documented elsewhere, but Perlstein does a good job of pointing out just how well Reagan could bend, or break, the truth, and how well that talent served him. I think Perlstein runs into the same problem many of Reagan’s biographers run into: it’s simply impossible to really understand what made him tick. The man was not introspective, like many of his generation, never bothering to look deep, and certainly never bothering to explain himself to the wider world. He expected to be taken as he appeared: honest, sincere, and forthright, which is how his many supporters saw him: a man who had no use for Communists, liberals, protesters, and anyone who had a bad word to say about America. In him they saw a leader who told it like it was, or at least, how it should be. The truth was, of course, more complicated. Betty Ford would be savaged by conservatives for “permissive” views on abortion and sex, but there is little doubt that the First Lady and her husband were far better parents than the distant, and disinterested, Ronnie and Nancy Reagan.

Perlstein does a good job of detailing what at the time was one of the least noticed, certainly by the mainstream media, stories of the mid 70’s: the rise of the right wing political activist. For decades, but especially in the 1960’s, it had been the political Left that had organized, taken to the streets, marched when necessary, stood in the way if that’s what took, on behalf of their causes, be it for better wages and working conditions, equal rights for minorities, or against a war they considered a crime. But those protests against bad textbooks in West Virginia brought together house wives, social conservatives, and evangelical Christians to fight for a common cause. Same for the parents in South Boston, who stood against a Federal judiciary who had taken their neighborhood schools away from them. Then there were the women who were horrified at the prospect of unisex bathrooms, women being drafted into the armed forces, or being compelled to pay alimony if the ERA became the law of the land. Others feared what they saw as a resurgent Soviet Union, and the prospect of America losing the Cold War, while others bristled at the idea of America “giving back” the Panama Canal to a tinhorn dictator. America was changing, and they didn’t like it, and they were going to change it back, if only they could find the right leader. They got organized fast, and often with far more discipline than their compatriots on the Left, quickly building a fundraising apparatus like none before. They took a big chunk of the old Democratic working class and middle class constituency away from the party of FDR and JFK, which now seemed have been taken over by anti war pacifists, affirmative action advocates, and politicians who never met a tax hike they didn’t love. This New Right would be scorned by liberals and progressives as racists, reactionaries and Bible thumpers, and not taken seriously. They heard the laughter and derision on the Left, and it just made them work harder.

Without a doubt, the high point of the decade was the Bicentennial celebration on July 4th of 1976, a day of simple pride and gratitude, where a divided country put their disputes on hold for a short while. But something else of note happened that Bicentennial year, a battle for the Presidential nomination in both parties that were among the all time great political throw downs. In the last section of his book, Perlstein does this epic struggle justice. The Democrats had a huge field of candidates, but it would be Carter, with his anti-Washington message, and promise to restore integrity to government in the wake of Watergate, who quickly jumped to the head of the pack and became the front runner. But it was not a done deal until the last primary in June, as Carter’s fortunes rose and fell from one week to the other, as he won and lost primaries against spirited opponents like the never say die Mo Udall, the late entry candidacies of Senator Church and Governor Jerry Brown of California, not to mention a nearly successful movement to get Hubert Humphrey into the race.

But it would be the Republican battle that would be the most hard fought, and consequential. Try as he might, the beleaguered Gerald Ford could not please a restive right wing in the Republican Party, who didn’t like his wife, Betty, not to mention détente, and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Reagan was their man, and initially, it looked like the former movie star and ex California Governor would unseat a sitting President seeking the nomination of his own party. But Ford had some real talent working for him, namely a young Dick Cheney, and they managed to defeat the insurgent in a string of early primaries, starting with New Hampshire. Within a matter of weeks, Reagan’s campaign was on the ropes and out of money. The situation was so bad, even Nancy was urging him to drop out. But Reagan rolled the dice, and made a last stand in North Carolina in late March. Hitting Ford hard on the issue of détente (appeasement to conservatives), and the Panama Canal, while getting a lot of help from Senator Jesse Helms’s New Right organization, Reagan won in what turned out to one of the most decisive Presidential primaries ever, going on the win in Texas, and a string of other states. With this new momentum, Reagan was able to pull even with Ford in the delegate count, and take the fight all the way to the Republican Convention in Kansas City in August. Some reviewers have complained that Perlstein’s book is slow and dull in the final hundred pages, as it winds through ancient arcane political history: the ill-fated Richard Schweiker Vice Presidential choice by Reagan, the hardball politics of the fight for Rule 16-C, the battle to squeeze delegates out of the uncommitted Mississippi delegation, the near chaos on the convention floor as Reagan and Ford delegates tried to outdo each other in demonstrations whenever the First Lady or Nancy Reagan entered the hall, to the writing of the platform, where the Republican Party came out squarely against the ERA, gun control, and legalized abortion for the first time. If any of this had gone differently, American history as we experienced it in the ensuing decades would not have happened.

Like I said, Perlstein’s book is thick and deep, it’s not a casual read, and many would think by just covering the years of 1973 to 1976, only half the story is being told, but he makes the case well the events of these years made not only the 1980’s possible, but likely inevitable. This book is the story of how the conservatives who got bloodied in the disastrous Goldwater campaign, endured the calamities of the Nixon years, began to build a national political machine that would take control of the Republican Party, and make it a political juggernaut in the decade ahead. It’s one if the best short histories of Reagan the man, the sportscaster from the Mid West, who became a likable Hollywood leading man before discovering his true calling as a politician. The GE spokesman, and later California Governor, who gave speeches extolling free enterprise, denouncing the evils of big government and Communism, and most of all, expressing his undying faith in the goodness of America no matter what, and to millions in this country who felt it had lost its way, he was the man who would lead it back to the greatness of bygone times. Even for someone like me, who does not consider themselves a conservative, this is a good story, and an essential one in understanding the times we live in.

THE INVISIBLE BRIDGE ends on the last day of the 1976 Republican convention, with Ford nominated, Reagan vanquished, and at the ancient age of 65, seemingly too old to mount another campaign in the future. Around that time, an episode of ALL IN THE FAMILY had a defiant Archie Bunker shout, “You’re getting Reagan in 1980.” We know who laughed last, and it makes me wonder if Rick Perlstein doesn’t have another book in him.

My book, BIG CRIMSON 1: THERE'S A NEW VAMPIRE IN TOWN, can be found on Amazon at: https://amzn.to/3GsBh2E
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My alternate history novel ALL THE WAY WITH JFK: AN ALTERNATE HISTORY OF 1964 can be found on Amazon at: http://amzn.to/2jVkW9m
and on Smashwords at: http://bit.ly/2kAoiAH

Visit my Goodreads author's page at:
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Back to the bad days of the 70s.

A trip back to the cultural and political turmoil of the 1970’s does not sound like fun reading, but if you are interested in American history, and genuinely want to understand how we got to where we are, then MAD AS HELL: THE CRISIS OF THE 1970’S AND THE RISE OF RIGHT WING POPULISM (that’s a mouthful) by Dominic Sandbrook is a great place to start. Sandbrook is British, and he brings an outsider’s view to events and personalities that are by any measure, uniquely American. While the bulk of the book concerns the political arena, he does pause and highlight cultural trends – Charlie’s Angels, Bruce Springsteen, Disco music, the Dallas Cowboys – that were manifestations of how Americans reacted to changing and challenging times. Sandbrook adopts a ground level view of these tumultuous days, looking at them through the eyes of middle class Americans trying to make sense of epic political corruption in Washington, out of control inflation, declining economic growth, feminism, gay rights, military defeat in Vietnam, the rise of the Ayatollah, gasoline shortages, and a general sense that America was adrift, and in an irreversible decline.

The book begins on the day Richard Nixon resigns, and ends with the inauguration of Ronald Reagan, and the seeming triumph of a new American conservatism, one determined to repudiate and reverse the course of the decade just passed. If the 60’s had belonged to anti war protesters and civil rights marchers called to action by an unjust war and a racist society, then the 70’s would belong to a very different kind of activist, those who stepped in front of liberals and progressives and said no to the Equal Rights Amendment, gay rights, and the high taxes that funded government waste and welfare. Sandbrook takes the reader back to long forgotten controversies like the West Virginia citizen’s revolt against “permissive” school text books, Bob Jones University losing its tax exempt status because of discrimination, working class Boston rioting in the streets over court ordered school busing, and how they galvanized so many into action. Nixon’s Silent Majority was silent no more, and the author makes a good case that these events came together into a national movement that in time would embrace opposition to both the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion, and would become a true political juggernaut despite never coming close to representing anything like a real majority in the country. At the same time, Sandbrook portrays a clueless liberalism, arrogant after banishing Nixon, increasingly elitist and enamored with identity politics, and losing its long affinity with the working class, who were being hammered by rising taxes, and vanishing jobs, not to mention resentful of hiring quotas for minorities. The book has some telling quotes from the likes of George McGovern, who dismiss the anti government rhetoric of the day, along with tax revolts, like California’s Proposition 13, as nothing more than racism. This was a long way from the stirring words of FDR and JFK, and working Americans took notice. Along the way we meet such names as Phyllis Schlafly, Jerry Falwell, Richard Viguerie, and Anita Bryant, and come to understand why their impact, though often overlooked and disdained by the larger media, was so meaningful. We also see how exploiting division became very good business for some.

What really impressed me about this book was the way Sandbrook was both fair, and very tough, on Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, the two Presidents who presided over a very rough patch of history. Both men are portrayed as decent and hard working, willing to do the right thing even at a political cost to themselves, but Sandbrook does not shy away from their faults, and their failures of leadership, which in the case of Carter, are many. If you are an admirer of the 39th President, this book will make you wince, for few men were their own worst enemy more than Jimmy Carter. Dour, self-righteous, thin skinned, disdainful of those he considered morally lacking, and seemingly unable to communicate in a manner that could gain public support, Jimmy Carter and his Presidency were destined for trouble from the get go. But Sandbrook shies away from portraying Ronald Reagan as America’s savior the way many of his acolytes do, showing the man to be a far more compromising and pliable politician than even he would acknowledge. Perhaps Reagan’s best asset was his sunny optimism in America and Americans; Sandbrook makes the case that this, not his conservative philosophy, is what carried him to a landslide victory in 1980 over an exhausted looking Carter, beset by the Iranian hostage crisis and stagflation. When voters went to the polls that year, they were casting ballots against not just the failures of the late 1970’s, but against the endless parade of crisis and upheaval, along with the failure of leadership in Washington, that had gripped the nation ever since Kennedy’s assassination seventeen years before.

What impresses me the most about MAD AS HELL is how much it resonates today. Though the book was written nearly a decade ago, and the events it chronicles occurred more than 40 years ago, its portrait of a divided America, especially its alienated middle and working class, tells us that much has not changed in the decades since, if anything, the problem has gotten worse. Stagflation and the Soviet Union are gone, but the divisions and anxiety remain. Early in the book, there is a poignant quote by the old liberal, Hubert Humphrey, bemoaning the divisions of another time, reminding America that only a sense of “mutual needs, mutual wants, common hopes, the same fears” could overcome those same gnawing divisions. Today, in a country where divisions along race, culture, class, and gender are gleefully asserted and exploited daily, we are further from those sentiments than ever.

Once the 70’s were over, America moved on in a hurry, seldom looking back, and seldom with a good word for those times. But history that we’d rather forget often has the best lessons, and Dominic Sandbrook’s MAD AS HELL is a great text book for those who want to learn.

My book, BIG CRIMSON 1: THERE'S A NEW VAMPIRE IN TOWN, can be found on Amazon at: https://amzn.to/3GsBh2E
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My alternate history novel ALL THE WAY WITH JFK: AN ALTERNATE HISTORY OF 1964 can be found on Amazon at: http://amzn.to/2jVkW9m
and on Smashwords at: http://bit.ly/2kAoiAH

Visit my Goodreads author's page at:
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Nixon't still the one.

We never quite understand history as it is happening around us, only when events are fading into the rear view mirror do we truly grasp what has occurred. That is the premise of JANUARY 1973, by James Robenalt, which takes a single 31 one day period and explains how American history took a decisive fork in the road during that month. A relatively short book, with just over 300 pages, Robenalt focuses on three pivotal events in the month that Richard Nixon was sworn in for what he thought would be full second term: the negations that would end the Vietnam War; the trial of the Watergate burglars and their immediate superiors; and the behind the scenes deliberations at the Supreme Court that ended in the Roe V Wade decision legalizing abortion in all 50 states for the first time. Nixon is the central character here, as he has a hand in everything, from his fateful Supreme Court appointments, and the politics that surrounded them, to the men around him who had no qualms about going outside the law to insure his re-election, to the determination to end what was then America’s longest war on terms that Nixon could call “Peace with Honor.” A secondary story in the book is the passing of Lyndon Johnson, which occurred on the fateful 22nd day of the month, along with the death of Harry Truman on the day after Christmas, 1972, both of which seemed to punctuate the ending of an era.

The sections on the Vietnam negotiations takes the reader behind the scenes as a determined Nixon pulls out all the stops to get a cease fire agreement negotiated in Paris, including the controversial Christmas bombing campaign in December, where American B-52’s unleashed hell on North Vietnam, though the real sticking point was President Thieu, of South Vietnam, who quite correctly suspected the Americans of being willing to sign an accord that left North Vietnam in control of much territory in the South, a move that would put Thieu’s country at a great disadvantage going forward. The real problem for Nixon was that the Democratic Party controlled Congress and was about to end funding for the war altogether, and he was literally under the gun to get an agreement done. Ultimately, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger was able to hammer out an agreement in Paris, but not before an ultimatum was given to Thieu, along with assurances that the United States would intervene with the full force of its military when the North inevitably broke the terms of the Paris Accords and resumed the war. Robenalt does a good job of giving the low down on Nixon and Kissinger’s relationship, which was anything but smooth. Though Nixon made much of the Vietnam peace agreement, it was greeted with little enthusiasm in an exhausted country at the time, most feeling that the war’s end was coming many years too late. The best that could be said about it was that the brave POWs, like John McCain, were released after far too many years in captivity, and allowed to come home.

The parts of the book concerning the trial of the Watergate burglars in Judge John Sirica’s courtroom are the best as far as I am concerned, taking us back to an often little discussed part of that momentous scandal that often focuses too much on the men in the White House. It’s the story of a cover up that nearly held despite a motley crew of characters, some of whom were fast losing their nerve as the prospect of a long jail term loomed. There was a Federal prosecutor much too willing to simply accept the defendants stories at face value, and a Federal judge much too willing to exceed his authority when, in his eyes, the prosecution dropped the ball. Behind the scenes was a cover up that went all the way to Oval Office, one which included the paying of hush money for the defendant’s silence about others involved, and willing perjury by the men running Nixon’s re-election campaign. Once familiar names like E. Howard Hunt, G. Gordon Liddy, James McCord, Earl Silbert, Jeb Magruder, Charles Colson, and Hugh Sloan return to play their parts in the drama; I used to listen to Liddy’s right wing radio show, and well remember the contempt he showered on Judge Sirica, the man who sentenced him to more than two decades in prison for a crime of which he was clearly guilty, and now I much more understand G. Gordon’s animus, though I don’t agree with it.

The driest part of the book is the back story of how Roe V Wade came to be, as it is hard to make this kind of material riveting, but it is a good window in how things are done at the Supreme Court, and how important junior clerks can be to the final decision. It’s also a good example of the law of unintended consequences, as Harry Blackmun, put on the court by Nixon to be a reliable conservative, law and order justice, manages to fashion a 7 – 2 majority decision legalizing abortion, a cause that would become a corner stone of American social liberalism in the years ahead. What struck me is how free the deliberations were of the kind of political invective this issue would go on to engender, nary a “my body, my choice” or “baby killer” to be heard. What also struck me was how naive the justices were in thinking this ruling would settle the abortion issue in America. Also, I felt that this book, informative as it is, did not begin to do justice to Roe V Wade, and its impact on America, and the way abortion would be weaponized in the years ahead for political gain.

Thanks to the release of his taped White House telephone conversations, the portrait of Richard Nixon that emerges in these pages of one of a hate filled and vindictive man, incapable of being magnanimous, he had just swept the country in a 49 state landslide, yet was determined to see a lone anti war protester prosecuted to the fullest extent when he attempted to disrupt Nixon’s inaugural parade on January 20th. Robenalt makes a convincing case that his legacy, and the legacy of that long January of 1973, is still with us; Vietnam had already divided the country along generational and cultural lines, Watergate would further alienate millions of Americans from their government, while the Roe decision would pour gasoline on the nascent Culture War between the Left and the Right, radicalizing many, and creating a grass roots movement that would help propel every Republican President into the Oval Office from then on. The political consensus that Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson represented disappeared, never to return, as compromise and common ground came to be seen as betrayal.

JANUARY 1973 is a must read for history buffs, especially ones like me, who are fascinated by the latter half of the 20th Century. This book really gives us an insect on the wall view of intimate moments behind closed doors as judges, conspirators, crooked politicians, and even a few patriots, make more history than they probably realized at the time.

I am an indie author and my latest novel is ALL THE WAY WITH JFK: AN ALTERNATE HISTORY OF 1964. It is available at the following:
http://amzn.to/2jVkW9m on Amazon
http://bit.ly/2kAoiAH at Smashwords

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The Joker our times deserve; my review of the movie.

I must admit that I was not really looking forward to this film, a standalone movie built around the greatest rogue in Batman’s rogue’s gallery, where the Caped Crusader would not appear. Plus I had some difficulty seeing Joaquin Phoenix in the part. Then I saw the trailer, and I was blown away, and after seeing the finished product, I am happy to say the hype was true, JOKER more than stands alone as a film, free from any Batman franchise, it is a masterpiece of the anti-hero genre, a film that shines a light in a dark, dark place, and is not afraid show us what is there. It is also a film that harks back to great era of film making, as director Todd Phillips has said his primary influences were TAXI DRIVER, and KING OF COMEDY, both directed by Martin Scorsese. This is more than reinforced by the casting of Robert De Niro as Murray Franklin, a glib talk show host who could easily be a successor to Jerry Lewis’s Jerry Langford. There is also more than a little NATURAL BORN KILLERS and BIRDMAN in the mix as well, especially the latter, as we are often seeing events through the eyes of a mentally ill protagonist, and that what we are seeing on the screen at any given time might all be happening in his head.

One thing that must be said, JOKER is not a comic book movie, it’s not based on some classic arc from DC comics, there is no convoluted plot, full of action and intrigue. The movie centers on Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck, who is in literally every scene. Arthur is a marginalized citizen of Gotham City in the early 80’s, a dark concrete and brick jungle, over run with predatory criminals, literally drowning in garbage. But the rot on the outside in nothing compared with what is festering inside Arthur, who makes a living, such as it is, as a clown, but there is clearly trauma and damage in Arthur’s past, as evidenced by his uncontrollable outbursts of laughter at any given time. Arthur is saddled with an ailing mother, played by the superb Francis Conroy, who in the past was employed by the Wayne family. Arthur has delusions of being a comedian, a true clown upon the stage, welcomed by people like Franklin, giving joy and happiness to the world, but you can’t give what you don’t possess, and eventually Arthur starts giving back to this world twice over the pain it has inflicted on him. The pace of this movie is best described as a slow, but inexorable, circling of the drain, as Arthur descends into true madness, and in that madness, finds an empowering identity, and a legion of adoring followers, never mind all the corpses he leaves behind him. When does the victim become the predator, and when do we stop having sympathy for him? Those are some of the many questions JOKER asks, and leaves it up to the viewer to provide the answer.

Joaquin Phoenix does not give a performance, so much as a transformation; from the body language, to the weary voice, to the wary eyes, he creates what is destined to be one of the all time great psychos in movie history. It is a performance where so much is done with the face, from the glee in his eyes when Arthur entertains a room full of sick children, to the joy he beams when in one of his delusions, De Niro’s Franklin asks him to come out of the audience and stand beside him on the stage, to the smoldering hurt writ on his face during his encounter with Thomas Wayne, played by Brett Cullen, and made up to suggest Donald Trump. To me, the iconic image of this film is Arthur, in full make up, dancing down the steps as he heads to a fateful appearance on the Franklin show. The other hero of this film is Todd Phillips, the director of comedies like OLD SCHOOL and THE HANGOVER. Phillips, who laments that he can no longer make the kind of bro comedies that put him on the map, has made the complete opposite of those films. In these times, when deranged nobodies, not unlike Arthur, become instantly notorious with acts of mass violence, Phillips has given us a glimpse of where some of this darkness comes from. Though it does seem incongruous that Phillips stages big protests against the wealthy at the dawn of the Reagan era, when the majority of the country was buying into supply side economics and the trickledown theory, the downside of which would only come much later.

I am sure the purists will complain that you can’t have the Joker without Batman, Phillips does clearly ground this Gotham in a DC universe, just not maybe the DC universe of any future franchise, as the finale teases us with possibilities of what might be. One thing for sure, we do get one iconic image from the Batman origin that will forever link Arthur to Bruce Wayne, but the violence in JOKER, when it comes, hits like a gut punch, brutal and horrific, and nothing cathartic about it, the kind of bloodshed impossible to do in a big budget PG-13 super hero blockbuster. Maybe it’s just as well, if, like Travis Bickle and Rupert Pupkin, his cinematic forefathers, we never see the like of Arthur Fleck again.

Where does Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker stand when matched against Cesar Romero, Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger, not mention Mark Hamill’s voice work on BATMAN TAS or Cameron Monaghan’s on TV’s GOTHAM? I don’t think it’s a competition, each era gets the Joker it deserves, and who can deny that Phoenix’s take the character is a perfect fit for ours.

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I praise the 90's Stephen King.

I got the paperback copy of Stephen King’s DESPERATION for Christmas some many years back, and it sat on my shelf far too long before I picked it up and read it. This was one of King’s 90’s efforts, which some of his avid fans think is his lesser period after he’d kicked his alcohol and drug habits, although I would disagree. I remember catching a TV miniseries version back in the 2000’s, co-starring Ron Pearlman, but as good as that show was, the book is so much better, even if in many ways, DESPERATION is a potboiler, where a sundry group of characters are thrown into a perilous situation, and must find away to save themselves. If the book hits on some of King’s familiar horror tropes, then he plays them here like a master here.

Many horror stories succeed or fail on the nature of the Big Bad, and in DESPERATION, I would give King an A+ with his creation of Tak, an evil entity (the Unformed) existing deep under the Nevada desert, that is until an old mine shaft is opened in the China Pit just outside the little town of Desperation, located in the middle of nowhere off of Rt. 50. Tak may well be a pagan God, one that ravenously craves death. Though unable to leave its underground lair, Tak is able to take physical possession any unwary human who wanders too close, and falls into its grip, literally entering their bodies and grotesquely swelling them with its life force. Not only that, but most of the local wildlife – canine, insect, reptile, and avian – come under the entity’s control. First a mine manager, then a receptionist, and finally a cop, becomes Tak’s vessel, and soon the human population of Desperation has all but been wiped out. But I give King credit, he does not make his villain all powerful, it may deal out a lot of carnage with its oversized victims, but the possessed bodies very quickly break down, necessitating a constant jump to another one, which just as quickly starts to fall apart. In Collie Entragian, the monster sized cop from hell, King has created one of his most fearsome, and memorable, antagonists. In some ways, Tak is similar to Pennywise from IT, another evil force that hides itself underground and lures the unsuspecting into its clutches, but in DESPERATION, the sober King wisely does not give this evil a cosmic mythology that nearly derails the book.

The other thing DESPERATION has going for it is King’s deft talent for characterization, as the malevolent Entragian picks off one traveler on the highway after another, and throws them into the Desperation jail. I became totally invested in these people right from the get go, feared for their safety, and worried what final fate would befall them. The two standouts of this group, who must ultimately face Tak on his home ground, are eleven year old David Carver, and the very middle aged author Johnny Marinville. King has always had an uncanny ability to write wonderful child characters, from the boys in THE BODY, to the Losers Club in IT, to THE GIRL WHO LOVED TOM GORDON, to Danny Torrance in THE SHINING; they remain among his most vivid creations. I think David might be among the author’s best, a boy whose faith in God is put to an awful test. Marinville is a character familiar to any King reader, a once famous literary lion whose talent has been rusted away by alcohol and toxic fame. David’s family makes the mistake of traveling to Vegas in an RTV, while Marinville, hoping to get his writing mojo going again, takes a cross country motorcycle trip, which ends with all of them fighting for survival against Tak in the town of Desperation. Johnny and David instantly go to the top of my list of favorite King characters, a pair of most unlikely heroes. And I think the sober Stephen King treated his characters better than the substance abusing 80’s version, as I have always thought that some of his work from that time, such as THE TOMMYKNOCKERS, had a streak of meanness in it.

In many of King’s books, he speculates about the nature of God, none more so than in DESPERATION. As in THE STAND, the God who emerges from King’s writing is not the loving deity of Sunday morning sermons, but a harder and sterner God, one who asks terrible things of his children when they are beset by a vile evil, when even his most faithful break under the weight of the struggle. There is an ongoing argument between the young believer, David, and the selfish cynic, Johnny, that I found most interesting, and to be some of King’s best writing. That King raises questions and then leaves it to the reader to answer fully is as it should be. One thing King is not mysterious about is the nature of evil, for his Tak is an all devouring entity, alien in every way to humanity, incapable of feeling anything but a voracious desire to kill and destroy. It is the embodiment of selfishness itself.

Those who like what King calls “the gross out” will not be disappointed here, the story has a high violence and gore content, even by the King’s standards; all that and plenty of creepy crawly encounters with spiders, rattlesnakes, scorpions, not to mention man killing coyotes and a hateful wolf. There is a high body count, and no punches are pulled when it comes to certain characters that would have been considered safe in many other mainstream horror novels. As in many of King’s books, there is a pause near the end of the mid section of the story where a lot of back story, exposition, and explanation are laid out, a necessary trope in order for the main characters to gain information they will need to take on Tak in the novel’s climax. If a lot of the final showdown feels familiar to any “constant reader,” that’s fine by me, as I feel we have become so invested in David and Johnny, along with Steve, Cynthia, Mary, and Ralph, that we should hardly notice. And there are a few references that date the book to the mid 90’s, like video rental stores, Albert Belle, spotty cell coverage, and hating Bill Clinton instead of Hillary. If King were writing it today, he would have to tweak it in the era of GPS and the Internet.

There is a companion book to DESPERATION, written by King under the name of Richard Bachman, titled THE REGULATORS, which I managed to read a few years back, and though not quite the epic ride of DESPERATION, it is a nasty (in the best way), and fun read on its own. I highly recommend it.

A few years after this book was published, Stephen King narrowly survived being hit by a motorist while out on walk. He pulled through, and was able to resume his writing career. Many readers have noted a change in his books since then, complaining that he too often rewrites himself, and regurgitates old themes he’s already visited. Too often in these latter books we are forced to witness another character’s struggle with substance abuse, or muse on the finer points of making music – two things very important to King. But this latter period has produced some great books: 11-22-63, DUMA KEY, FROM A BUICK 8, DOCTOR SLEEP, CELL, and the Bill Hodges trilogy. I would consider any of them to be among his finest. And after the success of IT on the big screen, I am sure some Hollywood producer, either at the studios, or at Netflix or Amazon Prime, is looking for another King title to make into a movie. I would respectfully suggest they take another look at DESPERATION and consider a reboot. It has a good story, great characters, and plenty of opportunities to scare the audience in the best way possible.

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My review of IT CHAPTER TWO

One of the most anticipated movies of the year has been director Andy Muschietti’s IT CHAPTER TWO, the second part of the his adaptation of Stephen King’s much beloved and mammoth 1986 novel, which had been adapted before in a much beloved TV miniseries in 1990. The first film, released two years ago, was both a box office and critical success, more than that, this new big screen version of King’s story resonated with audiences, drawn to the story of a group of misfit teen agers, who dub themselves The Losers, and who must confront an ancient evil entity haunting their small Maine town of Derry in the summer of 1989; this entity, who presents himself to the world as a malevolent clown named Pennywise, lives on fear, especially the fear of children. It’s a great coming of age story, with some of King’s most vividly realized characters, not mention one of his most terrifying villains.

This second film, which centers around Bill, Beverly, Richie, Mike, Ben, Eddie, and Stan – The Losers – 27 years later and now adults, who must now return to Derry and take on a resurrected Pennywise. And it has problems, not the least of which is the nearly three hour running time, but more to the point, a story line that is overstuffed with a lot of business. These were same problems with King’s thousand plus page novel, which I have always thought would have worked better as two books. The movie does get off to a strong start, where we are introduced to the adult counterparts to the kids we met in the first movie, all of whom are scared in some way by the trauma they endured in Derry – Beverly is married to an abusive man, Eddie is still a germaphobe, Bill is a once successful writer now blocked – who come home and catch up over a meal in a Chinese restaurant, where things take a turn. In the second half, the group (sans suicide Stan) ventures out on their own, attempting to reconnect with their childhoods, and to find a personal totem that time that will help them defeat Pennywise once and for all. Here we are treated to essentially the same scene over and over, where Bill, Beverly, and the rest, visit an abandoned movie theater, and old apartment, a drugstore, the park, have a flashback, and are confronted by Pennywise. And boy is this section heavy on jump scares, so much so, that after awhile you can see them coming. To me, jump scares are the equivalent of a sugar high. It’s also very heavy on the CGI, some of which is better than others – I was impressed with the long tongued leper who torments Eddie, the monstrous Paul Bunyan statue that comes to life and chases Richie, and the old lady thing Beverly encounters. But I didn’t find any of it particularly scary though. In the third act, our heroes descend deeper into the sewers under Derry for a final confrontation with Pennywise, and this plays out much more like a giant monster film than anything else. It’s a satisfying ending, even with all the obvious CGI, but I understand if anyone finds this wearying. There is still the Ritual of Chud (not the mutant cannibals from that other 80’s horror movie), but much is left out from King’s book, which for many, went cosmically off the rails in the finale, which included the giant turtle Mataurin, who spat out the universe. It’s a classic example of something that might have worked on the page, but would have looked ludicrous on the screen. Many think King attempted a concept in that finale that he failed to pull off, though many fans love it. Also missing are subplots involving Beverly’s awful husband and Bill’s movie star wife. A central problem with this second film, which was true for the book as well, is that the adult Losers’ story lacks the sense of wonder, discovery, and triumph that was palpable in their teenage versions.

Still, despite all of its faults, I could not dislike this movie. James McAvoy, Jessica Chastain, Bill Hader, Isaiah Mustafa, Andy Bean, and James Ransome are first rate as the grown up Bill, Beverly, Richie, Mike, Eddie and Ben; all of them give winning performances, totally selling me that they are the older versions of the young actors who played them in the first film, which could have been a problem when those young actors show up in flashbacks (though some have been noticeably digitally de-aged, because kids change a lot in two years). Bill Skarsgard owns Pennywise every bit as much as Tim Curry did in the miniseries. There are a number of scenes that really work, starting with Pennywise luring a little girl under the bleachers at a ball game that is scary and terrible in the way great horror movies should be; the hate crime murder of a young homosexual that shows that things in the Derry of 2016 are just as awful as ever; Ben and Beverly reaching for each other in the final showdown when Pennywise is about to drown them in their own fears. Stephen King himself turns up in a funny cameo, where he chides the adult Bill Denbrough for the bad endings of Bill’s books, a knowing wink to King’s own fans that have made the same complaint for years. Director Peter Bogdanovich turns up as well to make the some complaint. And though I’ve disdained CGI plenty, there is one creature that is a nod to one of the most infamous effects from John Carpenter’s THE THING that I loved. I also like the tweak Muschietti did with Stan’s suicide, something absent from the book.

And if any producers are looking for other Stephen King works to bring to the big screen, I’d like to put in my two cents for an adaptation of FROM A BUICK 8, and if anyone really wants to take a risk, take on RAGE from the Bachman books. The latter would be quite controversial, but never timelier in this political climate.

I am an indie author and my latest novel is ALL THE WAY WITH JFK: AN ALTERNATE HISTORY OF 1964. It is available at the following:
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Tarantino makes the best film of the year.

ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD just might be the best ever about the making of movies, and the creative people who make them happen, and this is because director Quinton Tarantino’s love film making, and those very people, suffuse every single frame of his latest film. His recreation of 1969 Hollywood will surely rank as one of his finest achievements, and this film, will likely not be considered his greatest (for me that honor still belongs to RESERVOIR DOGS and PULP FICTION), but I have a feeling that ONCE UPON A TIME… just might become his most beloved film. It is something of a departure for Tarantino, as the tone is far removed from his more recent violent action movies like KILL BILL, and INGLORIOUS BASTERDS, and many have compared it to JACKIE BROWN. There plenty of great dialogue, most of it so funny that it could easily be classified as a comedy, but verbosity of THE HATEFUL EIGHT is missing here; in fact, there is not one of Tarantino’s “big speeches” by any character. This movie is truly character driven, seemingly dependent on great stand alone moments and sequences, especially in the first act, but I thought the plot threads flowed together nicely at the end, even if it did come after a time jump and a lot of narration that would have felt clunky in the hands of a lesser director. At two hours and forty minutes, some will call this movie “slow” and “rambling,” which implies that it is dull, which can’t be further from the truth.

And if this movie is character driven, then Tarantino hands the steering wheel to two of his finest creations: Rick Dalton, a fading star, whose main claim to fame was being the lead in a TV western of the 50’s and early 60’s, and his stunt double, and all around best friend, Cliff Booth, who has been with Rick since his days as a big star. Rick is insecure and fearful, as the TV western is now past its prime, and a changing culture has left actors like him utterly adrift; his career has been reduced to guest starring spots as villains on other network shows. Rick could easily be a stand in for Robert Horton, Robert Fuller, Will Hutchins, Nick Adams, Edd Byrnes, or any other B/W ghost from MeTV. Cliff, on the other hand, is a solid rock, capable of dealing with any challenge or problem, from getting Rick to the set on time, to getting on the roof and fixing Rick’s TV antenna. But there is some darkness in Cliff’s past, and it is quickly apparent that he can be quite violent if the situation requires it – a point that will become important by the end of the movie. And in Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt, Tarantino found his perfect Rick and Cliff, as both actors do career best work here. Their scenes together are the very definition of “chemistry” as they play so well off one another.

The other story, concurrent to Rick and Cliff’s, is that of Sharon Tate, the real life actress who was the wife of Roman Polanski, and the most famous victim of Charles Manson’s murder cult. Tarantino arranges for her to live right next door to Rick Dalton, another fact that will become pertinent in the finale. Margot Robbie is awesomely beautiful in the part, and I must say that I think Tarantino is tremendously respectful to her here.

As I said, ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD does not have the violent swagger of Tarantino’s recent films, and at the twenty minute mark, as was a little worried that he might have taken too deep a dive into Hollywood of the past, giving us a film that was just a meander through nostalgia, but once I adjusted to the specific rhythm of this film, which tells its story through some great sequences, and character interactions, all was well. There are so many scenes that I instantly fell in love with: Cliff’s encounter with a wonderfully cocky Bruce Lee (wonderfully played by Mike Moh); the swinging party at the Playboy mansion (where Damian Lewis not so much as plays Steve McQueen as suggests him); Rick having his faith in himself restored by a child actress on the set the Lancer pilot; Rick singing “Behind the Green Door” on Hullabaloo; Rick imagining himself in the McQueen role in THE GREAT ESCAPE, a part he was up for; Sharon Tate sitting in a movie theater and watching the audience react to her on the screen in the Dean Martin film, THE WRECKING CREW; Cliff’s visit to the Spahn Ranch and his encounter with Manson’s “family,” a scene filled with palpable dread. Then there is the finale, where Tarantino takes a page of his own from INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS, and rewrites history. The finale did put a smile on my face, as I truly loved seeing some of the worst human beings who ever lived getting exactly what they deserved, and having this fairy tale come to a happy ending.

The Hollywood of 1969 is as much a character in this film as any actor, from the cigarette smoke in the bars, the Hippies on the street corners, Neil Diamond on the FM radio (another great soundtrack), old Chevy pickups on the highways, the sideburns and miniskirts, the movie posters for Italian westerns, to the overwhelming sense of a time and place in transition, with the past slipping away fast, and an unknown future rushing in head long. That was the year of the Moon landing and Chappaquiddick, of Woodstock and Manson, as the 60’s ended strong, and not for the last time would Americans look around and say, “How did we get here?”

And what a cast Tarantino has assembled, besides his leads, there is Al Pacino (as an agent who gets Rick a job in Italy), Kurt Russell, Emile Hirsch (as Jay Sebring), old timers Bruce Dern and Clu Gulager, Clifton Collins, Lena Dunham, Austin Butler, Margeret Qually, Dakota Fanning (the last four playing members of Manson’s family), Zoe Bell, Rebecca Gayheart, Luke Perry and Timothy Olyphant as Rick’s costars on Lancer, Michael Madsen, Brenda Vacarro, Scoot McNairy, Nicholas Hammond (as Sam Wanamaker), Marting Kove, second generation talents Rumor Willis, and Harley Quinn Smith, and James Remar. Thankfully, Tarantino did not give himself a cameo, and stayed behind the camera. And I am also thankful that Tarantino did not give much screen time to Charles Manson himself, an individual who got way too much attention when he was alive. There are also enough names dropped of now obscure 60’s Hollywood figures that Millennials will be busy for a week looking them up on their I-Phones (my favorite was the shout out to Sergio Corbucci).

There is long list now of “Once Upon a Time…” movies, the top of the list being Leone’s ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, and ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA, both of them being adult fairy tales, Tarantino’s film will surely be right behind those two masterpieces.

Finally, I am most disappointed that I can’t go on Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, or Youtube and watch “Nebraska Jim” or “The 14 Fists of McCluskey.”

I am an indie author and my latest novel is ALL THE WAY WITH JFK: AN ALTERNATE HISTORY OF 1964. It is available at the following:
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Body horror at its best.

I picked up THE TROOP, by Nick Cutter, because it was highly recommended by Stephen King, my favorite author, and one who, I have found, usually knows a good story when he reads one. This goes double for the horror genre, as I will always be grateful to King for introducing me to Dan Simmons when he praised THE TERROR in his much missed Entertainment Weekly column. And I must say, King has done it again, for THE TROOP delivers more than a few good scares, while building a palpable sense of dread, that builds and builds to a properly arrived at climax.

I am a sucker for a story where a sundry group of characters find themselves isolated and cut off from civilization, and facing a threat to their existence, a threat coming from outside the group, but also from within, as fear and tension cause members to turn against each other. Think of AND THEN THERE WERE NONE and BATTLE ROYALE. I would add THE TROOP to this list, but it is also a great piece of contagion fiction in the tradition of THE STAND and THE WALKING DEAD.

The basic plot is a simple one: a Scoutmaster and the five members of his troop, all fourteen year old boys, go to a small island off the coast of Prince Edward Island for a weekend filled with nature hikes, and enjoying the great outdoors. But they are soon joined by a fugitive in a stolen boat, an escapee from a medical research facility carrying a bioengineered tapeworm, a virulent parasite that devours its host from within, while reproducing itself by the hundreds, then thousands, each one hungry for a new host. Soon one member of the scout troop is infected, and the others are faced with a free for all for survival, as the military cordon off the island, letting no one get near it, and more ominously, letting no one leave. As the story unfolds, the reader is given excerpts from medical records and testimony from a board of inquiry that impart vital information, and back story, that the kids on the island don’t know. In this way, we know the horrible fate awaiting characters that they do not, ratcheting up the suspense, and creating classic situational irony. In his acknowledgment, Cutter sites CARRIE as an inspiration.

It helps that we quickly become invested in the boys, as Cutter creates a convincing dynamic among the over sized jock who gets his way through intimidation, the overweight nerd who is always deadly serious, the emotionally troubled kid from a badly broken home, and the budding psychopath hiding in plain sight. It is always a tricky thing to pull off when adults attempt to create believable teenagers in fiction, just read about any YA book, and if Cutter’s scout troop appears to be made up of tropes at first glance, he does a good job of fleshing them out.

To me, THE TROOP read like the script of a great unproduced 80’s horror film, the kind with plenty of gross out scenes. This book has plenty of moments that made me wince as it showed just how vulnerable our bodies really are to creatures too small to be seen, and it plays on the fear of bodily invasion, and the subsequent loss of control of our own flesh. This is Cronenberg level body horror, with a touch of Lucio Fulci; the only disappointment to me was an overly ambiguous final scene.

THE TROOP is not for the squeamish, but if you’re the type of reader who takes that statement as a challenge, then this book is for you.

I am an indie author and my latest novel is ALL THE WAY WITH JFK: AN ALTERNATE HISTORY OF 1964. It is available at the following:
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SPIDERMAN: FAR FROM HOME. A review.

In SPIDERMAN: FAR FROM HOME, Peter Parker and his science class take a trip to Europe, and for us diehard fans of the MCU, this film is like our own movie vacation after the emotional intensity of AVENGERS: ENDGAME. We get to focus on one hero, and one super villain, and the fate of the universe, is for the most part, not on the line. This lifelong Spidey fan has enjoyed all of the Wallcrawler’s previous movie incarnations, but I’ve been realistic enough to see that all of them never quite captured the spirit of my favorite comic book hero: Toby Mcguire’s Peter Parker grew up too fast, and was saddled with a less than satisfactory Mary Jane, while Andrew Garfield always looked like he should going for his master’s degree, even when he was still in high school. But Tom Holland gets it right with Peter Parker’s fumbling attempts to do the right thing, fight bad guys, romance Mary Jane Watson, and keep his sense of humor. And while FAR FROM HOME might not have hit the ball as far as HOMECOMING (mainly because the former doesn’t have Michael Keaton in it), it still scores.

As the first post ENDGAME movie of the MCU, FAR FROM HOME has to tackle the aftermath of Thanos’ finger snap, or The Blip as it is called in this movie, where half of the earth’s population was decimated. Conveniently for the story, nearly all the principles, including most of the students at Midtown High, blipped, and then returned five years later. Seemingly, the most pressing problem is that the kids had to start the school year over, and then there is that little geeky kid who didn’t blip, and now five later, has grown to be a dream boat and hitting on Mary Jane much to Peter’s consternation. A world wide holocaust that would have brought civilization to a halt, and crashed the world economy for generations, is just laughed away, but it is a comic book movie, and they get a break.

A comic book movie lives and dies on the strength on its villain, and in FAR FROM HOME we get one of Spidey’s classic old school foes, Quentin Beck, aka Mysterio, the self titled Master of Illusion. I know the trailer presented this character as an ally of Spider-Man, but I’m not spoiling much when I say that was all misdirection. The script gives Beck’s character origin some 21st Century tweaking, but other than that, they nail it. The casting of Jake Gyllenhaal as Beck is spot on, carrying off the feat of playing him as a sympathetic hero for half the movie, before he reveals his true motives in a expository scene (that does a couple of great callbacks to IRON MAN 1 and CIVIL WAR) that might have been much more clunky in the hands of another actor. You’ve got to wonder if Tony Stark could just not have been such a jerk a few times, the world might have been minus a couple of super villains.


Of course there is a lot of CGI, but it never overwhelms the actors or the story, and if the pacing in the early part of the movie seems a little leisurely, it does give the film makers a chance to establish Peter’s circle of friends and family better. Aunt May and Happy Hogan apparently are more than acquaintances, Ned Leeds has a summer fling, Flash is still a jerk, and Mary Jane is not only hot, but she is smart. What FAR FROM HOME does have that many other comic book movies don’t, is an exceptionally strong third act, where Peter, having made a bad error in judgment, must now confront Mysterio and put things right in an epic battle in the streets of London, where we are treated to a recreation of one of the comic book’s classic scenes when Mysterio attempts to trap Spidey in one of his illusions, and our hero can’t discern what is real and what is not.

If ENDGAME disappointed in that there was no post credits scene giving us a hint as to where the MCU is going next, FAR FROM HOME MORE than makes up for it. We get a mid credit scene that not only shakes up the status quo of Spider-Man’s world in a most dramatic way, but brings back a most welcome character from the Toby Mcguire franchise, and played by the same actor – clearly somebody was listening to the fans. The post credit scene pulls the curtain back further, and contains a big reveal concerning Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury and the Skrulls from CAPTAIN MARVEL, and raising the possibility that the MCU is going cosmic in an even bigger way.

What is clear is that with Tony Stark, and Steve Rogers, no longer the center of the MCU, Peter Parker is being groomed to step up, hopefully with a role in a reconstituted Avengers. With Mysterio, The Vulture, and the Scorpion on board, Kraven the Hunter seems like a logical next Big Bad for Spidey to face, maybe a movie adaptation of Kraven’s Last Hunt, with this villain going after Peter, along with his friends and family. Reboot Doc Ock, and The Sandman, and we’ve got the Sinister Six. Then there is Norman Osborn, no Spidey universe is complete without him and his son, Harry, and though he’s been used twice before, their appearance has got to happen sooner or later. Hopefully, in the next phase of the MCU, they will finally do right by the Fantastic Four, and we might get a version of the original Secret Wars series, which highlighted Spidey and FF. Though they hint at the possibility of the Marvel MultiVerse, let’s put the brakes on that for awhile, as it has been used too many times in the comic books by lazy writers and editors.

The best compliment I can give SPIDERMAN: FAR FROM HOME is that it plays out like one of those great collaborations between Stan Lee and Steve Ditko; that is especially true in the credit’s scenes. The movies have finally done right by Spidey; let’s see if director Jon Watts and screen writer, Chris McKenna can keep it up.

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