F.C. Schaefer's Blog, page 13

The man who saw our America coming and tried to warn us.

A new subgenre of book has emerged in recent years, one I would call “the inside story of the making of…” In place of the ellipsis, I would place a movie title, a good example of what I am talking about is Glen Frankel’s excellent book about John Ford’s THE SEARCHERS, which came out a few years back, Frankel has followed this up with a book on HIGH NOON; similar treatments have recently been given to 2001: A SPACE ODYESSY, GIANT, and just this month, the publication of Chris Nashawaty’s recounting of how CADDYSHACK came to be. These books are not necessarily a treatise on the greatness of a particular movie, but often an argument that the story of what went on behind the cameras, and what occurred before and after said movie was made is just as interesting, if not more so, than anything an audience paid to see in the theater. They are not necessarily about the movie stars we remember, but often center on the gifted and creative person, usually a writer or a director, who became enamored with a story, or simply with an idea or truth that they just had to tell, and were willing to do the very hard work to get the movie made and before the public.

Dave Itzkoff’s MAD AS HELL, tells the inside story of the making of the 1976 film NETWORK, and the creative man who made it happen, that man being Paddy Chayefsky, a writer who had earned considerable fame in the early 1950’s by writing dramas for live television, an industry then in its infancy. Chayefsky was short, but powerfully built, a proud Jew with a short fuse who channeled his anger into his writing. He was a veteran of World War II and a political liberal at a time when liberals were proud to be tough guys; Chayefsky had a knack for writing dialogue, giving his characters, often common men and women, a special eloquence; this was on full display in his first big network hit, MARTY, the story of a lonely Bronx butcher, the movie version of which won Chayefsky his first Oscar for screen writing in 1955. It was a Golden Age and it did not last, soon Chayefsky was working in Hollywood putting his talents to use in the movie business, and television was no longer putting dramas with the quality of MARTY on the air, but were now serving up the likes of THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES every week. As the 60’s gave way to the 70’s, Chayefsky observed these changes, and it stoked his anger.

Itzkoff’s book is story of how this anger became an idea, the idea became a story, the story became a screenplay, and the screenplay a movie. The finished product would be a profane look at the inner workings of a fictional TV network’s news division, where corporate interests and the desire for higher ratings (which meant higher add revenues) have forced the scraping of old standards, causing the vaunted profession of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite to be turned into just another entertainment show to attract the attention of an America shell shocked by assassinations, an unwinnable war, riots in the streets, epic corruption in government, and an energy crisis. At the center of the movie is Howard Beale, a venerable TV anchorman who has a break down on air, starts telling it like it is, and becomes a ratings sensation, one the suits at the network, and their ruthless female programming executive, are more than happy to exploit. Scene by scene the movie is both a condemnation of what TV had become, and a warning at what yet could be. What I enjoyed most about Itskoff’s book is the recounting of the creative process that brought all this about; especially the pages discussing Chayefsky’s writing process, how he had to have an office to go to everyday and sit alone and write for at least four hours, and how the finished product bore little resemblance to the first draft. Chayefsky was extremely protective of his words, and on the set, had the clout to resist actors and director’s attempts to rewrite or dumb down his work, a position many script writers would surely envy.

Itzkoff also introduces us to the other talents who made NETWORK such a success, starting with director Sidney Lumet, who had a knack for this kind of material, coupled with the ability to handle prickly talent, both in front of and behind the camera. The book makes the case for Lumet being the indispensable man behind NETWORK; the time it went from a screenplay to finished movie was remarkable, and a lot of that credit is given to producer Howard Gottfried, a friend and partner of Chayefsky, who knew how to get things done. The principle photography took place in January and February of 1976, on location in New York and Toronto, with the movie opening in November. Itzkoff gives us a day to day breakdown of which scenes were shot and in which order, which should be of great interest to anyone interested in getting into the movie business, we also get some great behind the scenes info on how the editing went, including some obvious mistakes that were deliberately left in the picture.

Of course we get some background on the casting, and the actors who were ultimately hired. One gets a good understanding of why Faye Dunaway has a reputation for being difficult; then there was Ned Beatty, who bluffed his way into the role of Arthur Jenson, after Roberts Blossom, who had been hired to play the part of the corporate big wig, was let go early in production. We learn why George C. Scott passed on the part of Howard Beale, a role that he would have been a natural for, and that Henry Fonda, Gregory Peck and even James Stewart were considered for the role that Peter Finch ultimately made his own. One of the best things about the book is Finch’s story; he was a British born, Australian raised actor who had made a career out of being in movies in which his leading ladies – Elizabeth Taylor, Audrey Hepburn, Julie Christie – were bigger stars than him. Like his fellow Brits, Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton, Finch had a fondness for alcohol, but unlike the other two, he often brought that certain masculine charm distinct to actors from the Land Down Under to many of his roles. By the mid 70’s, Finch was pushing 60 and thought that the best years of his career were behind him, and was settling into semi retirement in Jamaica with his second wife and young children. Through his agent, he got a chance to read for the part of Beale for Lumet and Chayefsky, and the role of a lifetime was his. The iconic “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore” scene was only shot once because Finch was too exhausted and had to quit half way through a second take. Nevertheless, he knew his career had been given a new lease on life even before NETWORK opened; he become the front runner for the Best Actor Oscar, and began practicing his acceptance speech in front of a mirror. He also moved his family back to Los Angeles as the phone began ringing with offers of other roles. But a cruel fate intervened.

Even crueler was the fate of William Holden, who played Max Shumacher, the head of the news division who is still trying hang on to his integrity, while having an affair with Faye Dunaway’s Diana Christenson, the soulless programmer. By 1976, Holden was no longer the handsome leading man of the 1950’s as years of heavy drinking and a history of depression had taken their toll, but like Finch, NETWORK gave him a great part that played to his middle aged strengths and the air of weariness he could project like no one else; and as Itzkoff tells it, Holden had to use much of his talent to be believable in a love making scene with Dunaway, who proved to be every bit the diva, then and later. Holden would get a late career Best Actor nomination for his performance, but ultimately, and so sad for his many fans, his demons would get the best of him. Dunaway would win the Best Actress Oscar, and it proved to be the high point of her career; NETWORK would net Chayefsky his third Oscar for screen writing, it would prove the be his greatest success, and his final triumph. In fact, NETWORK makes a good case for the Oscar jinx.

Itzkoff’s book is only 243 pages long, but it packs a lot of information; as expected, the final section attempts to put NETWORK in perspective. Though he did not live to see the proliferation of cable channels and the 24 hour news cycle, much of what Chayefsky foretold has come to pass. At the time of its release, NETWORK was frequently called a satire by critics, while others referred to it as a “black comedy,” while many others took Chayefsky to task, calling him a has-been, bitter at the industry where he’d done his best work and then dispensed with his talents. Nobody used the word “prophet,” but now in the age of FNC, MSNBC, and CNN, and the fractured world of information delivery, much less the vast number of news and opinion websites online, nobody can look at NETWORK now and not feel that Chayefsky was looking into the future.

Yet, MAD AS HELL left me wanting more, if for no other reason than because it came out four years ago and missed the tumultuous 2016 Presidential election where we saw a man elected who could fairly say he’d taken a page out of Howard Beale’s play book in articulating the public’s rage and anger. But where Beale was just plain crazy, Donald Trump was crazy like a fox, at least when it came to his manipulation of the voters and the media. It was not for nothing that during that year, many people referenced Elia Kazan’s A FACE IN THE CROWD, and NETWORK, as the two movies that perceptively saw the future decades before it arrived.

In the end, Itzkoff calls Paddy Chayefsky the “angriest man in movies,” but as he makes clear in his book, it was not a resentful anger directed at scapegoats, the kind we often see on the public airwaves today; for Chayefsky believed that an angry American was a good American, that silence was truly unpatriotic and to do nothing but sit on the coach in front of the television made him the angriest. He pointed his finger at his fellow Americans and said that if you think the country is going to hell, it’s your fault for keeping silent about it. Many speculate that if Chayefsky could come back today, he would say “I tried to warn you.” That he might, but the man in Dave Itzkoff’s book would then immediately get busy writing, for he would have a lot to say.

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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Marvel's very own EMPIRE STRIKES BACK

We were warned that AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR would be like none of the previous Marvel Cinematic Universe movies that had preceded it, and they were right, in fact, I would say they underplayed it, for the finished product is a true gut punch for us fans. Marvel and Disney have been laying the groundwork for this ever since the end of the first Iron Man movie when Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury turned up in a post credit sequence and asked if Robert Downey Junior’s Tony Stark might be interested in something called the Avengers Initiative. And this payoff, coming nearly ten years later, is striking in that it does not give the audience what it wants or expects, for unlike most of the 18 other films in the MCU, this is not a straight up gang of misfit super heroes take on a seemingly unbeatable Big Bad, and manage to vanquish him in the final act story. Many of those other film’s plot points and beats are present in INFINITY WAR, but this time things go in a very different direction, and the movie is all the better for it. I have not walk out of the theater this happy in many years, maybe not since THE DARK KNIGHT.

I know a lot of fans may be very disappointed in the outcome of INFINITY WAR, many others are surely devastated by it, and I won’t argue with them, or tell them that their reaction isn’t valid, but my joy at the end of INFINITY WAR comes from the enormous risks the Russo brothers took with the material, and the fact that they are willing to go there, to kill off beloved characters, to up the ante on emotional involvement, to ask a lot of an audience and a rabid fan base, and to do it in a big popcorn franchise American movie, shows me that the creative exhaustion of Hollywood may not be quite as complete as we thought it was.

We have been seeing hints of the villain Thanos ever since the post credit sequence in the first Avengers movie, and his scheme to obtain the six gemlike Infinity stones has been touched on in the other movies, at the end of THOR: RAGNOROK the survivors of Asgard encounter Thanos’s ship, and it is on that cliffhanger that INFINITY WAR opens as the big bad purple man and his Black Order (all super creepy) now take direct action to get their hands on the stones, which together, will give the owner of them near omnipotent power.

To stop Thanos, heroes from every end of the MCU must come together at last, and for us die hard and long time Marvel fans, this is what we have been waiting for; from the moment Doctor Strange meets Tony Stark on the streets of NYC, to Thor’s rescue by the Guardians of the Galaxy, to Steve Rogers and company’s arrival in Wakanda (and a reunion with Bucky). This plays out like a great comic book story, as characters we know like the back of our hand meet for the first time and get to know each other in scenes that hit the right note every time. I don’t know what was better, Tony Stark and Stephen Strange’s big egos trying to coexist in the same frame, or Peter Parker and Peter Quill’s battle of the pop culture references. Teams split apart as heroes who were strangers only minutes before must now find a way to fight together; loved the trio of Thor, Rocket and Groot, and their crash landing in the middle of the battle of Wakanda was the very definition of bad ass. It is a tribute to the great script that this massive cast of characters manages to come together and flow so well, and without the feeling that someone’s favorite was badly short changed. That is unless you are a Hawkye or Ant Man fan.

But if this movie belongs to anyone, it is Josh Brolin’s Thanos (in a motion capture performance), which is quite a departure in making the villain the central character. This seems to make up for all the criticism of MCU and its underdeveloped bad guys i.e. the first Doctor Strange film and THOR: THE DARK WORLD. They give Thanos a motivation that makes sense to him, and is true to the adage that the villain is always the hero of his own story. Thanos does not want to rule the universe, he wants to save it from itself. And to do this, he needs the six infinity stones, hidden on earth, or in the case of the Soul Stone, in an obscure corner of the universe. The scene where he goes to claim it is the central one of the second act, as he pays the price to obtain the stone at the expense of his daughter, Gamora, and the tear he sheds at this prospect is the true revelation of his nature. The unexpected brief reappearance of the Red Skull at this point was a pleasant surprise.

For me one of the pleasures of this movie was the way it lets our heroes and villains brawl, none of that shooting energy beams at each other until someone just gives up. Not only the battle Wakanda, but the epic fight on Titan’s moon where the team of Doctor Strange, Iron Man, Spider-Man, and the Guardians of the Galaxy go head to head with Thanos in an attempt to get the Infinity Gauntlet off his hand in a plan that cooked up by Peter Quill is the high point. It’s a play on the tried and true trope where at the end, all the heroes combine their might and take down a heretofore unbeatable foe. It worked in Dragon Ball Z when the Z Fighters took on Cell, and the same in X-MEN: APOCALYPSE. But it has been done so many times that it is now beyond a cliché, and just when it appears as if it is working on Thanos, Quill goes and ruins his own plan by acting impulsively upon learning the fate of Gamora. This is followed by face offs between Thanos and Captain America and Thor in Wakanda that show us once and for all what Marvel heroes are made of. I would give them bonus points for not trotting out the old energy beam up to the heavens as a means of a portal for the villain’s hordes to attack earth; Thanos’s Dark Order use nice big clunky space ships and that’s just fine.

There are so many little touches and casting choices that help make INFINITY WAR work, like the surprise appearance of Peter Dinkledge in a truly offbeat role; that FOOTLOOSE joke; Thor calling Rocket a rabbit; the true sense of the Marvel Cosmic Universe that expands it light years beyond anything we saw in the GUARDIANS movie; all the actors who have always brought their A game in the previous Marvel outings, but who bring their A+ game here: Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Mark Ruffalo, Benedict Cumberbatch, Chris Hemsworth, Chadwick Boseman, Paul Bettany, Tom Holland, Don Cheadle, Zoe Saldana, Chris Pratt, Dave Bautista, Elisabeth Olsen, the voice work of Bradley Cooper and Vin Diesel, Anthony Mackie, Sebastian Stan, Tom Hiddleston, Danai Gurira, Benedict Wong, Idris Elba. It has the feel as if The Magnificent Seven, the Dirty Dozen, and The Wild Bunch had come together in one ultimate epic. I’m sure Cinema Sins will post a half hour video on You Tube in about a month, nick picking the whole thing to death, but I won’t care

Of course, the thing everyone is going to talk about is the finale, which is true to Jim Starlin’s original story, in which the ranks of our heroes are decimated after Thanos uses the Infinity Gauntlet to fulfill his plan, and fan favorites, in fact, multiple fan favorites, disintegrate before our very eyes. Like I said, it is a true gut punch of an ending, and nobody in the audience is going to walk out unscathed. For me, the sight of Tom Holland’s Peter Parker telling Tony Stark, “I don’t want to go,” was the one that hit the hardest. I look at it as Marvel’s version of THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK.

Pay attention to the interaction between Tony and Stephen Strange on Titan’s Moon, especially after Strange has surrendered the Time Stone to Thanos in exchange for Tony’s life. It points to directly to the second movie and what the heroes have to go through in order to win. So to the end credits scene, which hints at the introduction of another major Marvel hero we have not seen before. Somebody has to get the Infinity Gauntlet off Thanos's had in the next movie and reset the universe. And what about Adam Warlock, he was hinted at in the end of GOTG2, and supposedly will be in the third movie in that franchise, but could he be in INFINITY 2?

But if INFINITY WAR is EMPIRE, is the second movie, scheduled for 2019, to its JEDI? I don’t know how Kevin Feige and the Russo brothers will top this, and maybe they shouldn’t try. This second movie could turn out to be what the second DEATHLY HOLLOWS was to the Harry Potter series, a corrective that restores a new status quo. And every good Marvel reader knows, nobody stays dead except Uncle Ben.

But there is one thing: in the trailer they put out months ago, they show the Avengers in Wakanda charging through the jungle in what is clearly the prelude to an epic fight. It looked royally bad ass, but that scene, as presented in the trailer, is not in the movie; more to the point, it features one prominent member of the team who is MIA for most of the movie, and is nowhere in sight during the finale in Wakanda. In the words of that noted cinephile, Annie Wilkes, “They cheated us…”

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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Anne Rice and the Talking Undead.

Back in the day, I read the first three books of Anne Rice’s THE VAMPIRE CHRONICLES, followed by THE MUMMY, and then, though I had multiple books by her on my shelf, I stopped reading her for no good reason. I’ve always been a horror fan, one who has tried their hand at writing some vampire fiction on my own, but Anne Rice and I just went our separate ways. That is until recently, when I picked up my copy of THE TALE OF A BODY THIEF and got back into her world of bloodsucking immortals.

As a writer, I have always had great respect for Anne Rice, not just for her writing, but for the way she promotes herself and her work; she is the classic example of the scribbler who came up with a new take on an old genre and then struck a chord with an audience. Back in the 1970’s, she had the notion to write a novel told from the vampire’s point of view, this coming at a time when vampire lovers mostly had to make do with paperback copies of DRACULA, or hybrids like Richard Matheson’s I AM LEGEND. Then came INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE in 1976, which introduced us to Lestat De Lioncourt, a young French nobleman from the late 18th Century, the first of a whole cast of Undead characters inhabiting a unique universe. INTERVIEW was followed by THE VAMPIRE LESTAT, and QUEEN OF THE DAMNED, and a literary juggernaut was launched. Rice’s books appealed not only to traditional horror fans, but also to readers of romantic fiction and the burgeoning Goth culture, while developing a large gay fan base, and a following among those who just wanted something different. It helped that New Orleans native Rice proved to be a hell of a salesman for own work, becoming a distinct personality in her own right after many appearances on TV talk shows which highlighted her long raven black hair, and equally dark attire; many fans thought she was a vampire herself; detractors said she was so deluded she actually thought she was creature of the night. Anyway, through good hard work, she made herself into a mini industry that has produced 35 books and sold nearly a 100 million copies. And her influence has been enormous, without Rice, there would never have been an Angel or Spike, nor Edward Cullen either for that matter.

THE TALE OF THE BODY THIEF came out in 1991, a couple of years after THE QUEEN OF THE DAMNED, and at the time, many fans thought it was something of a letdown after the epic arc of the first three novels, still, it was a huge bestseller. For me, diving back into the Vampire Chronicles after all this time, BODY THIEF was an easy entrance back into Rice’s world, as it does not force the reader to get back up to speed with the huge cast from the earlier books. Lestat is back front and center here, and there is an appearance by Louis, a New Orleans bloodsucker made by Lestat two centuries before, along with the ghost of Claudia, the vampire child they created and then lost. It seems that after the near apocalyptic events of QUEEN, Lestat has fallen into despair and disillusionment with his vampire existence, cutting himself off from his fellow bloodsuckers; his only friend is the elderly mortal David Talbot, the leader of the Talemasca, a group that studies the supernatural. The lonely Lestat is approached by Raglan James, a young man who claims he has the ability to switch bodies, telling Lestat that he is really a 70 some year old man who has purloined the young body he now inhabits after hijacking it in a British mental institution, where it was in a fatal coma. James has a proposition for Lestat, they switch bodies for a few days, so that Lestat may regain his humanity, while James can enjoy being inside the immensely powerful body of a vampire for a short time. What could possibly go wrong? Though Lestat is warned by Louis and David that this is the worst of all possible ideas, and the reader can clearly see that James is bad news, the offer prompts an itch that Lestat just has to scratch.

The best part of the book is the middle part where Lestat, now in a human body, finds that being a mortal is not quite what he remembered it to be; not with a bout of pneumonia, and learning how to take a dump again, among other indignities. But he also finds love with a nun on leave from her order, and gets to enjoy some good hot sex. Of course James is a kleptomaniac with no intention of returning the vampire’s body; Lestat turns to his Undead compatriots for help and is spurned, only his mortal friend, David, will aide him, and together they set out to track James down and return Lestat to his rightful body. But no plan ever works out as anticipated, and the plot takes some twists and turns before it is all resolved. There is one ending, where the reader is warned that they may regret going any further, but it is in this final chapter where we are reminded why Lestat is one of modern fiction's most renowned anti-heroes.

A lot of this book is Rice at her best, especially when Lestat and David have lengthy conversations about God and the Devil, and the nature of good and evil, this is something Rice is famous for, and it is clear Lestat is her alter ego, especially when he talks about what he has learned after observing the human condition for two centuries. Truly her vampires have a marvelous gift of gab; it is one of the hallmarks of her style. I may not always agree with what Rice is saying through her characters, but it is always worth hearing. The other secret to the success of her vampire books is that she surreptitiously makes the reader feel as though they are one of the beautiful immortals themselves, that when Lestat is talking to them in the first person, he is conversing with one of his own kind.

Reading it today, there are some things about BODY THIEF that badly date it, such as mentions of faxes and laser disks, and the absence of cell phones and the internet; there is a sexual encounter between Lestat and a waitress that might be a problem today, and I doubt it would get past an editor in its present form.

But for me, reading THE TALE OF THE BODY THIEF was like getting reacquainted with members of a family you knew years ago, Lestat being a brother with many siblings to catch up with, while at the center is a matriarch, her hair a little grayer with the passage of time. Anne Rice’s writing has taken some interesting turns in the years since BODY THIEF came out, and now that I’m back in the coven, so to speak, I look forward to reading them all.

My book, BIG CRIMSON 1: THERE'S A NEW VAMPIRE IN TOWN, can be found on Amazon at: https://amzn.to/3GsBh2E
and on Smashwords at: https://bit.ly/3kIfrAb

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:
http://bit.ly/2nxmg

Visit my Amazon author's page at: https://amzn.to/3nK6Yxv

My Thoughts on Season 8 of The Walking Dead.

For many of us long time, and long suffering, TWD fans, Season 8 turned out to be a rough slog after a very rocky Season 7, which began with the introduction of Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s uber Big Bad, Negan, and his subsequent beating to death of Abraham and Glenn, to fan favorites who have been greatly missed. All this went down in a season premier so nihilistic and depressing that many fans, including some die hard ones, just bailed on the show never to return, a fact reflected in a noticeable ratings decline.

It did not help that it took the entirety of Season 7 to finally get around to the All Out War plotline, where the Saviors and the Survivors took on each other in a fight to the death, an arc beloved by many Walking Dead comic fans. It was the hope of many that when the real fighting came, the series would get back on track and right the ship, but Season 8 has turned out to be just as problematic as the one preceding it; running hot and cold, often in the same episode. I will say that when Season 8 hit the right beat, and had the characters we loved doing what they do best, it was TWD at its best, but for every home run, there were an equal amount or more of foul balls and outright strike outs. It was a season of starts and stops, and a jarring right turn, especially at mid season with the death of an original character that came as an unwelcome gut punch.

Right off the bat, in the season opener, “Mercy,” Rick and company begin All Out War by rolling up the Sanctuary, armed to the teeth and ready for battle, and then have a conversation with Negan and his chief underlings for some minutes with Negan standing out in the open and easily within the cross hairs, and nobody takes a clean shot at him. Things do improve once everybody gets down to business, and the second and third episodes of the season, “The Damned” and “Monsters” gives us fans some great epic battle set pieces, plus the brief return of Morales; these where shows filled with energy and drama, Rick and the good guys got the upper hand. Then the tide turns in the favor of Negan, as the survivors from Alexandria, the Hilltop, and the Kingdom suffer dire casualties and are forced into retreat. Back at Alexandria, Carl is bitten helping out Siddig, a new character – a death that is a real departure from the comic, but not before he writes letters to his father and Negan, imploring them to stop the killing and find a way to forgive and live in peace. At this point all the energy of the first half of the season runs out, as we mourn for the death of a child. Chandler Riggs, who was often knocked for his acting, was very good in Carl’s last episode, “Honor,” but it was a big downer just when we should have been getting pumped up for a final battle between Rick and Negan, one that should have brought the various plot threads of the season together.

Some of those plot threads being: Eugene’s apparent self serving treachery by helping Negan and the Sanctuary; Dwight’s playing both sides; Father Gabriel’s capture by Negan and imprisonment at the Sanctuary, setting up a crisis of faith; Maggie’s leadership of the Hilltop and desire for revenge; Darryl’s differing with Rick over tactics; King Ezekiel’s loss of the Kingdom; Morgan seeing things again; just who’s side was Jadis and the Junk Yard kids on; Simon’s plan to mutiny against Negan; Gregory’s plan to be a total coward no matter what; little Henry wanting revenge for his brother; where’s Jesus; anybody remember Heath; that helicopter?

It did all come together in the season finale, “Wrath,” where Rick and Negan finally square off for the last time, and for a minute there, it did look like Negan was a goner before Rick, honoring his dead son’s wishes, has Siddig save his mortal enemy, much to Maggie’s fury. It is a pay off that that is honestly earned by what came before it, no cynical cop outs, and it does keep with the comic outcome as well. There really is a lot of story left in Negan, and I’m glad he is going to be around for awhile at least. Also satisfying was the outcome for Eugene, who even if he did save the day by sabotaging the Savior’s ammunition, more than deserved to be punched out by Rosita, and not just for puking on her in “Worth,” but for being a cowardly, self serving rat at heart. Another well deserved punch was the one Father Gabriel landed on Negan when the guns exploded, but was I the only one who half expected the Whisperers to introduce themselves by coming up behind Gabriel in his final scene at the burned out church and decapitating him? Leaving out even a hint of The Whisperers in this finale makes me uncertain about the future, after that scene where Maggie (in full Governor vibe) appears to plot with Darryl and Jesus to overthrow Rick’s leadership after he let Negan live – this just feels like a wrong turn and so out of character, especially for Darryl and Maggie. Then again, maybe they just realized what a terrible leader Rick Grimes really is, one that walked right into Negan’s ambush after being fed bogus info by way of Dwight.

What I liked best about Season 8: Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s performance as Negan, though he may come off as a hateful clown to so many, and we wonder why one of the Saviors hadn’t put a bullet in the back of his head when he wasn’t looking, JDM is never anything less than awesome every time he’s onscreen; Stephen Ogg as Simon, the only Savior you are certain is worse than his boss; that Savior who gets cut cleanly in half, right down the middle, by Jerry to save King Ezekiel; the very well staged battle scenes between Survivors and Saviors; Eugene’s explanations and self justifications; the well staged fights and attacks from Walkers, which often hark back to the best of George A. Romero, reminding us of the series’ horror film roots, and the one thing the show consistently gets right.

What I like least about Season 8: show runner Scott Gimple, who keeps relying on big death plot twists, and fake outs (Glen under the dumpster) to generate interest in the show; bringing back Morales for all of five minutes only to kill him off, thus wasting an interesting character; setting up Henry as Carl’s replacement; inconsistent characters, and I’m mainly talking about Carol for the past two seasons; anything and everything about Carl’s death; just in the nick of time rescues like Ocean Side saving Tara and company at the Hilltop in the finale; Jadis and the Junk Yard kids; lots of clunky plotting, like Eugene’s sabotaged ammo, which could have all gone south if somebody’s finger had slipped or merely test fired their weapon; just the barest hint of the Whisperers in the finale, when everyone wanted and expected more.

At least we were spared another Big Character Death in the finale, but Morgan Jones, as a way to clear his head of his demons, headed west and after a couple misadventures on the road, including meeting some new characters, met up with the Clark clan in FEAR THE WALKING DEAD.

Now that All Out War is all out of the way, there seems to be a time jump due for Season 9, which is a nice way of saying they are doing a reset – which won’t fix the problems with this show. But maybe we will find out the story behind the mysterious helicopter (the Commonwealth?). Surely we will see Jayne Atkinson’s Georgie again, and find out what’s up with that.

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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Ready Player One: My movie review.

All I really knew about READY PLAYER ONE was that it was Steven Spielberg’s first science fiction movie in nearly ten years, and as a huge fan of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, RAIDERS, JURASSIC PARK, and MINORITY REPORT, I picked up a copy of Ernest Cline’s novel this past Christmas to read with the anticipation of seeing the movie opening weekend. Spielberg seemed like a natural to direct a book that leaned very heavily into 80’s nostalgia, one that had the plucky young protagonists many of his classics spotlighted.

Yet, after seeing the film, I have come to the conclusion that RPO was really not worthy of Spielberg’s awesome talents, that the man who was the biggest influence (with the possible exception of George Lucas, Michael Jackson and MTV) on pop culture during the Reagan Era should put his efforts into making the RAIDERS OF THE ARK of the 21st Century, rather than make a film filled with Easter Eggs from the days when Freddy Kruger and Jason Voorhees ruled at the box office and Pac Man was the game to play at the arcade. The premise of the movie, as with the book, is that in a future America where everything has gone to hell, and everybody spends their time on the Oasis, an advanced VR world where you can be whoever you want to be and do whatever you want. When the creator and owner of the Oasis, James Halliday dies, his will states that whoever wins a contest inside the Oasis, will inherit Halliday’s company. The main protagonist is Wade Watts, a young man of meager prospects, who sets out to win the prize, despite competition from fellow hunters (or Gunters as they are called in the book and movie), along the assembled forces of a rival corporation, typical nasty corporate bad guys who will do anything to win. My problem is that this whole plot is a cut and paste from WILLY WONKA, while there is no proper world building inside the Oasis, as it is nothing but references to the 80’s. There are some big changes from the book, starting with the world of 2045, where in the book, the economy has crashed because oil has run out, while in the movie, it is suggested that the Oasis itself is the cause for the decline of civilization because most people just lost interest in reality. In the movie, we never get a real feel for how the dystopian world of 2045 works, or does not work, so we never get a feel for why everyone would just give up and live in a VR world.

To me, seeing all these 80’s references had no emotional impact because they were all outside of context, Chucky might show up, but there is no sense of menace at all; I know people love the Iron Giant, but his appearance does nothing here; characters might end up inside The Overlook from THE SHINING, but that does not mean that it is even remotely frightening. One might get more out of an episode of VH1’s Inside the 80’s. The animation for the avatars, at least according to some hardcore gamers, is not even state of the art; Parzival, Art3mis, and the others simply do not have expressive enough faces to make me care. The best of Spielberg’s plots flow and have tons of heart, RPO simply jerks along in series of confrontations, clashes and chases.

My other big problem is that I don’t care about a VR world, there are simply no stakes for the characters there; I know avatars may get killed in the Oasis, but I know their counterparts in the real world are still alive. King Kong and T-Rex show up in the first race sequence (along with the motorcycle from AKIRA) and I don’t care, because no flesh and blood is at risk. There are a number of plot threads that just don’t play out, such as having the villain, Nolan Sorrento, played by Ben Mendelshon, start out as an intern for Halliday back in the day, then have it never mentioned again. It is implied that the Halliday who greets Wade at the end of the story is something other than an avatar - maybe the sentient part of the Oasis, or even God himself – but it is just left dangling with the answer “No.”

And there is really something sad about watching teens in the future be so obsessed with the pop culture of three decades ago; the 80’s was one of those eras, like the 50’s before it that left such an enormous impression and legacy; the movies, the styles, the music, TV shows, all left a deep and lasting impression on the people who lived through them, especially the young. But nostalgia is not what it used to be, if anyone wants to immerse themselves in the 80’s, all they have to do is take a deep dive on YouTube into the videos of Van Halen, ZZ Top, and Hall & Oates, or stream some selected films of John Hughes, Wes Craven or Spielberg himself.

I shook my head at the scene of hundreds of people on the street with wearing VR headgear as though walking into traffic is not a problem, same for the scene late in the movie, where a gun toting Sorrento confronts a crowd made up of the denizens of a vertical trailer park (called the Stacks) and no one points at least one Saturday Night Special back at him as if in this version of the future, the 2nd Amendment has been repealed.

READY PLAYER ONE is not a bad movie; Spielberg’s technical skills are undiminished after all these years, nobody stages a big scale – or small scale for that matter – action scene better. And his affinity for plucky young characters (the Spielberg kids) is still there; Tye Sheridan and Olivia Cooke are excellent (especially Cooke), so too are their cohorts Lena Waithe as Aech, Philip Zhao as Sho, and Win Morisaki as Daito. I just wish we had gotten to know them better. Mark Rylance (as Halliday), and Simon Pegg do not fare so well. Only TJ Miller, as a villainous henchman avatar for Sorrento, comes off best among the adult actors.

These days, as it has been pointed out, Spielberg is more comfortable making films about history – LINCOLN, WARHORSE, BRIDGE OF SPIES, THE POST – than in the genre he once dominated so well. That makes me sad, but there is talk about making another Indiana Jones film, even at this late date. Good enough, he owes us for THE CRYSTAL SKULL.

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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The Dirty Dozen: my second favorite war movie of all time.

I have always been a big fan of the war movie genre, especially those great World War II epics that came out during a time period that lasted from the late 50’s through roughly 1970, or from the release of BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAII through the release of PATTON. In between we got THE GUNS OF NAVARONE, THE LONGEST DAY and THE GREAT ESCAPE among others. But for my money, the best and most bad ass of them all was THE DIRTY DOZEN, a cynical, no holds barred ode to carnage that broke new ground in what American film makers could show and say in popular entertainment. It’s toxic masculinity at its best, and I love every damn minute of it.

The plot is so well known now that it has become a cliché: a ragtag group of misfits and losers – in this case American soldiers convicted of high crimes - including murder – are brought together by a tough leader who believes in them, whipped into shape until they can work as a team, and then attempt an impossible, or suicidal, mission. In the case of THE DIRTY DOZEN, they are GI’s imprisoned near London and waiting to be hung a few months before D-Day. Somebody in the high command (it is never made clear who) orders that a group of psychos, thieves, rapists, and back shooters be trained and then dropped into occupied France just prior to the invasion, where they will take out a large contingent of the Nazi brass who are on R & R at a country estate. They executed this plot so well, that many believe the movie, and the bestselling book it was adapted from, are based on fact, but as Dale Dye makes plain on the commentary for two disc DVD edition, no sane American officer would ever sign on to such a scheme. That didn’t matter to audiences in 1967, who responded enthusiastically to the movie’s gritty anti-authority attitude and lack of restraint when it came to violence; it was a year filled with films that spoke to the turbulent mid 1960’s in America: BONNIE AND CLYDE, THE GRADUATE, COOL HAND LUKE, IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT. And THE DIRTY DOZEN proved to be their equal, and they did it within the setting of the United States military, a very controversial institution in a country where young men were being drafted and sent to fight in an increasingly unpopular war. Moreover, THE DIRTY DOZEN would prove to be just as popular with many members of the Greatest Generation as well, no small feat.

One of the reasons why I love this movie is the fantastic cast, headed by Lee Marvin, one of my all time favorites; who had just won the Best Actor Oscar for CAT BALLOU, and was now a certified leading man after years of playing some of the vilest villains ever to grace a Hollywood film. It is interesting that Marvin’s Major Reisman is often just as nasty as any of his bad guys. In almost all of his roles, and certainly in his best ones, Lee Marvin radiated menace and a capacity for violence that was palpable; off screen, he was a hard drinking Marine veteran of combat in the Pacific, and the barely contained ferocity he brought to so many of his parts came from an honest place. And Marvin was given some real hard cases to play off of, starting with Jim Brown’s defiant black soldier who killed some racists who messed with him; John Cassavetes’s drafted street punk; Clint Walker’s easy going, until you push him too far, American Indian; Telly Savalas’s religious fanatic rapist; Donald Sutherland’s too dumb to know better loser; and best of all, Charles Bronson, as a good soldier who made the mistake of shooting a coward in the back in front of witnesses. Then there is Ernest Borgnine and Robert Webber as a pair of Generals, George Kennedy and Ralph Meeker as fellow officers, Robert Ryan as Reisman’s chief antagonist, Richard Jaeckel as an MP. All together, they make one of the finest ensembles ever assembled for any movie, and every one of them at the top of their game.

But the real hero of THE DIRTY DOZEN is director Robert Aldrich; a man who excelled in any and all genres: horror, comedy, westerns, and melodramas. A thorough professional who knew how to get the best out of his actors, while delivering solid entertainment, DOZEN would prove to be one of his greatest and most enduring hits. The DVD commentary quotes verbatim from some of the memos Aldrich sent to the producers at Warner Brothers early in the production, and they reveal a man who knew how to get to the heart of the material, understood what he wanted and how to get it altogether up there on the screen. It was Aldrich who took Nunnally Johnson’s original script, which was described as “perfect for a rollicking comedy in 1945,” and had it rewritten to match contemporary sensibilities, tuning it from a John Wayne (who had been hired originally) war film into a Lee Marvin war film. There was a big difference. It was Aldrich and new screenwriter, Lukas Heller, who made the changes that gave the film its punch, such as having the one black prisoner, played by Brown, say things like “that’s your war, not mine;” he could just as easily have been speaking about Vietnam and not the war against the Germans. They were responsible for turning Marvin’s character into a maverick officer, one who has just as little respect for his superiors as do the condemned men he has to lead to the slaughter. There is a definite us against the system theme right from the very beginning, where Major Reisman witnesses a condemned soldier go to the gallows before getting his marching orders from Borgnine and Webber. That those in charge cared only about enhancing themselves at the expense of those they could exploit had been a long time theme in American popular culture, and Aldrich and Heller infused the script with the working man’s point of view that those who get their hands dirty can fix the problem much better and in much less time if only the bosses would get their useless rear ends out of the way and let them do what needs to be done. That the working stiffs and underdogs here are guilty of the worst crimes is part of the subversive appeal of the DOZEN. That the United States military would find a way to make expert use of the worst kind of killers was a bracing dose of cynicism at the time. Aldrich and Heller also made it a redemption story where the scum of the earth learn to work together, trust each other, follow a leader who earns, and learns to return, their respect. By the end, they are stand up heroes (except for Savalas’s hateful degenerate), who fulfill their mission at the cost of most of their lives.

A good example of Aldrich’s touch as a director is plainly seen when Marvin meets with Borgnine and Webber to argue for his men when the Generals are ready to scrap the mission after weeks of training and send the prisoners back for execution of their sentences. When the camera is on either Borgnine or Webber, a bust of a patrician Roman is in the frame. In contrast, on the wall behind Marvin is a portrait of Franklin Roosevelt, as if to align the brass with the tyrants who went thumbs up or thumbs down on the lives of those beneath them, while a democratically chosen leader, and champion of the common man, literally has Marvin’s back.

As someone who has done some writing, I am a great admirer of the story structure of THE DIRTY DOZEN, which is laid out in three perfect acts; the first defines the mission, introduces the principle players and proceeds with the training; the second act concerns a crucial war game where the unit proves to Reisman and his superiors that they can pull off their dangerous mission; the third act is the mission itself behind German lines and at the chateau in France, where things turn very deadly. Along the way, there are some of the most memorable scenes from any war movie, starting with Marvin’s individual meeting with Bronson, Brown, Savalas and the rest, where characters are defined with only a few words; Major Reisman’s “encouragement” when Trini Lopez (how did he ever get cast in this?) chokes during a rope climbing exercise; Sutherland inspecting the troops when he has to impersonate a General on the spur of the moment; the capture of Ryan’s HQ at the climax of the war game, when Bronson and the rest of the men laugh triumphantly at having made utter fools of their betters. The high point of the movie is of course the assault on the French chateau, where one man has to sacrifice himself on the roof to knock out a radio tower in one memorable bit. This is where Aldrich really let the cruelty and sadism of this story shine, especially in the scene where Jim Brown douses the trapped German officers (and their women) with gasoline, and then ignites the cellar by tossing grenades down an air shaft. The sight of a black man smiling at the prospect of incinerating whites was a very potent image in 1967, and one that offended the sensibilities of many. One critic flatly stated that American soldiers had never acted in this way; clearly he wasn’t watching the nightly news from Vietnam at the time. It has been speculated that the image of Brown murdering white people cost Aldrich an Oscar nomination for Best Director. Also very memorable is Savalas’s encounter with the German whore, which ends badly for all involved.

If most of the actors were cast to type, then they rose to the occasion and did their best work, although Borgnine does chew the scenery in some his scenes; his work here, and that of the criminally underrated Ryan, helped get them parts in Sam Peckinpah’s THE WILD BUNCH. Both Brown and Bronson would go on the be stars in their own right in the years ahead, though out of the large cast, only Cassavetes, who is very good, would get a Supporting Actor nomination. Aldrich’s directing career would continue for nearly two more decades, but I don’t think he ever again made something as special as THE DIRTY DOZEN.

But as much as I love THE DIRTY DOZEN, I do understand that it has been a long time since I first saw it as a kid, and when I recently purchased the two disc set and was able to watch and uncut version for the first time in too many years, I wondered how well it would hold up. Would the aspects of it that spoke to the 60’s so well and the wonderful cast filled with some of the greatest tough guy actors of all time appear hopelessly out of date in the 21st Century? I say no way, for the big ensemble action movie has never gone away in the years since THE DIRTY DOZEN was released, it has just changed with the times and the audience. Action flicks like THE ROCK and CON AIR are literal descendants of the DOZEN, and when I went to see CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR and GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY a few years ago, I could hear echoes of Lee Marvin and company in the theater. That is quite a legacy.

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READY PLAYER ONE - My review.

I picked up READY PLAYER ONE mainly because I knew a movie version was coming out, and it would be Steven Spielberg’s return to the scifi genre after being away for more than a decade. And I love nothing more than a good treasure hunt story, or a yarn built around a quest, so the plot of RPO had a lot of appeal to me. What I am not is a gamer; that part of the story was potentially a turn off for me, but like any American who has lived through the last few decades, it is simply impossible not to have picked up at least a passing knowledge of video games.

I found READY PLAYER ONE to be an easy read, one of those novels set in a not so distant dystopian future America where crude oil has all but disappeared, the economy has crashed, poverty is endemic, and most of the population escapes this grim reality by logging onto OASIS, a fantasy filled virtual reality utopia, where the possibilities are as endless as reality is stifling and dead end. The main protagonist is an Oklahoma teenager named Wade Watts, who lives in a stack of house trailers – the slums of this ruined world. Like all his peers, Wade attends school inside OASIS, and looks forward to not much of a future. But he has one chance; that is to solve the puzzle left by the late James Halliday, the creator of OASIS, and inherit his billion dollar fortune. There are powerful and ruthless corporate forces, with endless access to resources, who want to solve the puzzle themselves and gain control of OASIS. When young Wade gets the first clue to the puzzle, he is off on a wild adventure, competing with friends and allies, while facing off with a villain willing to do anything, including murder, to win.

The twist on this is that Halliday was obsessed with the pop culture of his youth, that era being the 1980’s, so that to solve his puzzle and win his fortune, a player has to know literally everything about 80’s movies, TV shows, music and especially those early and ancient video games from the Commodore 64 days and before.

The author, Ernest Cline, writes in a straight forward manner, using the first person (Wade’s) point of view in a way that lays out the action in a way that is easy to follow; if his characterizations are not especially deep, they do ring true, creating heroes worth rooting for and bad guys worth hating. Wade is an appealing underdog, and the girl he falls in love with, Art3mis, a fellow player and competitor for Halliday’s fortune, is a female protagonist worth winning. The chapters are short and action filled, my paperback copy comes in just under 400 pages, making it an easy read compared with the thousand page epics found on the shelf in Science Fiction and Fantasy section of the bookstore.

But try as I might, I could not love this book anywhere near as much as many of its devoted fans; first of all, virtual reality does not do it for me, at least most of the time, an exception being Tad Williams’s OTHERLAND epic. I will take an imaginary world sprung from the minds of Dan Simmons, Stephen Donaldson, George RR Martin, among others, any day over computer code and hardware. Then there is the info dumps Cline shoe horns into the story to bring the reader up to speed, they may be necessary, but I didn’t read them so much as slog through them. Then there is the overall theme of the book, which seems to be a nerd’s wish fulfillment where he flees an unsatisfying reality into a computer generated fantasy, where his avatar is everything he believes he is lacking: handsome, strong and brave. PRO has been criticized as promoting a “toxic gamer culture;” this might be unfair, and the book’s final pages does give lip service to refuting this claim, but it comes awfully late in a story that seems to revere all things high tech. That mid 21st Century teen Wade worships and enmeshes himself totally in the pop culture of the 80’s does seem kind of sad at times; we all have love for the decade when the first Star Wars trilogy was fresh and new and the young Spielberg made Raiders and E.T. in back to back summers, but it is a time and place that came and went. Some have called Cline’s book “Nostalgia Porn,” which may be true, although I suspect he was just mining the deep affection so many have for a decade that might well have been American popular culture at its zenith. Personally, I’ll take the 90’s any day; but to each, his own.

Anyway, I plan to see the movie, and hope for the best, but somehow I doubt Spielberg will make us forget about Indiana Jones, a rampaging T-Rex, or even Pre-Crime.

I would appreciate any and all comments and feedback from anyone who had taken the time to read this post. And if you are interested in reading my book, it can be found at the following:
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ALTERNATE HISTORY: The Second Kennedy-Khrushchev summit that never happened.

In my novel, ALL THE WAY WITH JFK: AN ALTERNATE HISTORY OF 1964, I detail the second Kennedy-Khrushchev summit that never happened. As recounted through the eyes of Marine Colonel Martin Maddox, a member of the President’s national security staff, this fateful meeting occurs in the aftermath of multiple international crisis in the spring of ’64, including the American invasion of Cuba, a result of the revelation that the Castro government was involved in the failed attempt on the President’s life in Dallas, Texas, the preceding November. That invasion sets off a series of events that lead the super powers to the brink of World War III, a calamity averted at the last moment by an agreement to have the leader of the United States and the Soviet Union meet face to face in New Delhi, India. Of course, as revealed in the excerpt below, there are complications.

Excerpt:

We arrived in New Delhi early on the day before the summit was scheduled to begin; no sooner had the President was settled in at the American embassy to catch up on some much-needed sleep, a whole new problem arose. It seemed that in their capacity as hosts of the summit, the Indian government had not just invited the leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union to attend, but had also extended a blanket invitation to all nations with a grievance to send a representative. In all the rush to get to the meeting with the Soviet leaders, this fact had been overlooked. Now we were greeted with the news that Chinese Premier Chou En Lai had arrived by plane only an hour after Air Force One had touched down to represent the North Koreans and the North Vietnamese.

The presence of the #2 man in Red China at the summit put most of the President’s men in a panic; since 1949, as far as the USA was concerned, the only legitimate leader of China was Chaing Kai-chek, currently enjoying his exile on Taiwan. So adamant were we in this, that in 1954, then-Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had reportedly refused to shake Chou’s hand during the Geneva conference that settled the partition of Indo-China. Then there were the Chinese troops Mao and Chou had sent to aid their fellow Communists during the Korean War; I’d had the pleasure of meeting a few of them personally in 1951. Any Democratic President who so much as thought about acknowledging the existence of Red China was opening himself to charges of appeasement, especially in an election year.

Behind the scenes, Secretary Rusk was most insistent that the President not be in the same room with Chou, if necessary, he should be prepared to simply get on Air Force One and leave rather than give any recognition to the Communist government in Peking. Some of the others, like my old boss, McGeorge Bundy, advised the President to simply ignore Chou and his presence at the summit. A tired John F. Kennedy listened to all this and then called his brother in Washington, who told him it was too great a risk in an election year to acknowledge Chou, he would be handing the Republicans an issue to run against him; just let it wait until the second term.

As soon as he concluded the call to his brother, the President then called in Secretary Rusk and instructed him to call the Indian Foreign Minister and request that he serve as an intermediary between the American delegation and the Chinese Premier - this was asking something of the Indians because of the short war they’d fought with Red China in the fall of ‘62 over some piece of territory in the Himalayas, but as President Kennedy pointed out, the Indians had taken it upon themselves to host the summit, so it was the least they could do under the circumstances. To their credit, our hosts readily agreed, settling the matter for the moment and allowing the summit to proceed.

While the President was able to sleep off some of his considerable jet lag in a nice bed inside the embassy, I was up all night preparing reports on the situation in Cuba among many other things for the President to take into his first meeting with the Soviets in the morning. As of the first week of June, we had over 125,000 combatants engaged in pacifying the island; organized resistance was supposed to have ended two weeks before, but units of Castro’s forces refused to give up and even though our casualty rate was down dramatically from the first week of the invasion, we were still losing at a minimum a half dozen men a day down there. As of the 10th of June, there was no real governing authority in Cuba other than General Abrams; Castro himself was being held under guard in the Guantanamo Bay hospital, his brother Raul had reportedly sought sanctuary with Andreyev while Che Guevara had escaped back to Argentina.

All of this was in the report I handed the President in the morning as he left the embassy for the site of the summit, an old 300 room British colonial era hotel called The Burnham. It was a massive building, a relic from the days of the Raj and perfect to host a superpower summit. The sessions between the Soviets and us were to be held in the main dining room, an ornate area with a high chandelier dangling from the ceiling over the long tables where the delegations were to sit. John F. Kennedy made sure he was there a good 45 minutes ahead of schedule, and though he had been complaining of back pain earlier, he made it a point to jump from the back seat of limo when the car pulled up in front of the Burnham, vigorously shaking the hand of the Indian Foreign Minister for all the news cameras to record.

The self-assured public image the President was projecting was helped immeasurably when the Soviet delegation turned out to be late; there was much speculation as to the condition of Nikita Khrushchev after seemingly being AWOL throughout most of the crisis. The Soviet leader we observed enter the Burnham was noticeably heavier and moving slower as he ambled through the same doors the President walked through earlier. The biggest contrast between the American President and the Soviet Chairman was the entourage who followed close on Khrushchev’s heels. At this time, we had no knowledge whatsoever of the recent events behind the walls of the Kremlin, but something appeared different here, as Brezhnev, Kosigyn, Mikoyan and Gromyko, among others, shadowed their supreme leader. Our Kremlin experts had pages of notes ready by the end of the day.

Though Khrushchev appeared older and slower at first, his old aggressiveness came back the minute he walked into the hotel, again becoming the man who’d greeted President Kennedy at Vienna in their first summit almost three years to the day in 1961. He marched across the lobby with his hand thrust forward for the President to grasp, and then with his finger jabbing the air, made it clear through an interpreter, that as far as the Soviet Union was concerned the Americans were solely responsible for the tense circumstances which had made the summit necessary. Despite all the nastiness inside the Kremlin, Khrushchev and the rest of the gang put on the tough guy act when confronting their enemies from the West. When the President finally got a word in, he suggested “it took two to tango,” and Khrushchev shot back that they were most certainly not there to dance.

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
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Black Panther: my review.

One of the best things (among many best things) about CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR was the introduction of Chadwick Boseman’s T’Challa, the Black Panther, and a member of Marvel’s original bench from the Golden Age of the 60’s. It took a while for the monarch of Wakanda to get to the silver screen, much less a solo film, but it was way more than worth the wait; for the final result is an absolutely spectacular and unique looking super hero movie. For me, BLACK PANTHER truly brings the Marvel universe of the comic pages to life, as though they sprang right straight from the books drawn by Jack Kirby. For us Marvel fans, this is a true delight, as some other films in the MCU feels like they were attempting to graft the world of Iron Man and Spider-Man onto the real world, while BLACK PANTHER feels and looks like something completely organic.

One of the biggest pluses for BLACK PANTHER is the script, which moves along at breakneck speed, introducing us to a large cast of characters and the African nation of Wakanda, while touching on the origin of the hero, and then doing a great detour into James Bond territory with a visit to a South Korean casino. The heart of the story is a challenge to T’Challa’s rule by the main villain, Erik Killmonger, a story that is well laid out in three distinct acts (my only complaint is the fake out hero’s death at the end of the second act). A lot of characters interact and square off, sides are taken, and it all comes together in a great LOTR style battle on the plains of Wakanda, one of the best actions scenes in a long time; there have a been a lot of final battles between the heroes and the villains in these Marvel movies, but the BLACK PANTHER substantially raises the bar.

A lot of super hero films rise and fall on the strength of their villains, and in this, BLACK PANTHER succeeds very well, as there is nary a CGI God from outer space in sight. In Michael B. Jordan’s Killmonger, we get a bad guy on the level of Ian McKellan and Michael Fassbender’s Magneto, one with a believable motive centered on childhood abandonment; Killmonger is a perfect mirror of T’Challa, and Michael B. Jordan gives a star making performance, all big muscles and in your face, a contrast to Boseman’s sleek Panther. So good is Jordan that you almost end up rooting for him. Then there is Andy Serkis’s Ulysses Klaue, whom I really loved in this; there is nothing like a bad guy who laughs out loud and clearly enjoys doing evil. Klaue is one of the great old school Marvel villains, one of T’Challa’s long time foes, who was also Dr. Doom’s right hand man in the first Secret Wars series. One complaint I will make is that Klaue is gone from the film too soon; he should be around for a final confrontation with T’Challa. Then again, we saw Killmonger fire his gun, but not see if he actually took Klaue down, and we only get a brief glimpse at the body later. He’s a comic book villain in a comic book movie, so there is always hope.

For the most part, the CGI is pretty well done, although the dreamlike scenes of T’Challa visiting with his deceased father were clearly done on green screen. With so many effects in one film, there is no way they are going pull them all off perfectly. Boseman and Jordan are backed up by a great cast, starting with Danai Gurira and Lupita Nyongo as a pair of bad ass women, with Winston Duke and Daniel Kaluuya as frenemys and not so loyal allies of T’Challa; Angela Bassett is his formidable mother, and Forest Whitaker as a member of the court who played a pivotal part in events in Killmonger’s past (although is there a rule that says every time Forest Whitaker is cast in a big tent pole movie, he has to die). Martin Freeman returns as Everett Ross, the role he played in CIVIL WAR. And Letitia Wright steals every scene she’s in as Shuri, T’Challa’s tech wiz little sister. The real star is director Ryan Coogler, who truly did justice the hero and the story. There are two credit scenes, the last one, between Shuri and Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barns hints at some real bad assery in INFINITY WAR, anyone who has seen the trailer knows that it promises a big battle scene with some heavy hitters of the Marvel pantheon of heroes in Wakanda.

There was an awful lot of political noise around the opening of BLACK PANTHER, all of which I totally ignored; all I care about is seeing the Marvel heroes I so enjoyed reading about in comic books when I was a kid (and still enjoy reading about today) portrayed well, or even awesomely, on the big screen. In this, BLACK PANTHER succeeds quite well.

And if it hadn’t been for King Kirby, there never would have been a King T’Challa; I think Jack Kirby would be most pleased with how all this turned out.

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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Marvel, the Clone Saga, and "just tell good stories."

As any comic reader knows, Marvel is in a world of hurt right now, not in the least for the SJW tilt of its books, a direction the editors in charge took their titles after the SECRET WARS Big Event in 2014, which reconfigured the Marvel Universe. This move brought big changes to the status quo of almost every major super hero book – Thor is a female, the Hulk is an Asian dude, Iron Man is a black teenage girl, Bobby Drake, the Iceman, is gay – and long time fans were not happy, sales plummeted, and more than one comic shop is looking at closing their doors. I have been a Marvel reader for more years than I care to count, and I can say that, sadly, we have been here before, though this SJW makeover has set a new low for the House of Ideas. What I am hearing from most of my fellow Marvel fans is a variation of the old refrain that goes something like this, “all they need to do is just tell good stories,” the same thing I heard during the low tide that was the Heroes Reborn mediocrity of the 90’s and the all over the place Ultimate era of the 00’s. “Just tell good stories,” the faithful and long suffering readers would say, and everything will be fine, just like it was back in the Golden Age, when Stan Lee, and Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko, and the rest of the Bullpen were building the Marvel Universe one great issue at a time.

If only it were that easy.

There is no shortage of good story ideas, always has been, and always will be, even more than 50 years after Fantastic Four #1 got the whole thing rolling. The rub comes in the execution, in the second and third acts after a great premise has gotten off the ground. Spider-Man is my main go-to hero for Marvel, has been since the beginning – Fantastic Four was my other main stay, but that is another blog – I’ve stuck with Spidey through good times and the bad times, and believe me, there is nothing worse than a bad Spider-Man story. And for us Spidey fans, the dubious gold standard, at least for many years, was The Clone Saga, a lumbering mess of a narrative that played out across numerous Spider titles from 1994 through the end of 1996, in which some of the best writers, artists, and editors at Marvel had their names forever sullied by their association with a project whose title would be spit out by critics and fans as if it were vilest of epitaphs.

In the mid 90’s, there were four monthly Spider-Man titles, roughly one every week, and in the wake of the record breaking sales success of the “Death of Superman” event at DC, the editors at Marvel, wanted to do a similar and controversial (which would drive up interest and sales) Big Event for Spider-Man, moreover, many felt that Peter Parker had gotten too far from his roots, he was now married to Mary Jane Watson, and they were expecting a child. This had come about because some of the writers in the 80’s were guys in their late 20’s who were just married, and they wanted to make their hero’s life more resemble theirs. As these things go in comics, a few years later it was deemed that Peter Parker needed to be single again. In a meeting, Terry Kavanaugh pitched the idea of bringing back the Spider Clone, who had been introduced in a Gerry Conway story in 1975, and have him revealed to be the real Peter Parker, and the Spider-Man whom everyone had been following for nearly two decades to have been a clone. About the best thing that can be said for this is that at least they did not kill off Mary Jane the way they did Gwen Stacy. Editor Tom De Falco signed off on this story and the Clone Saga was a go, and at first all went as expected, the sales were strong, and fan reaction was positive. The plan was for the whole thing to wrap up in Amazing Spider-Man #400, with the supposed clone (but really Peter Parker), Ben Reilly, taking over as Spider-Man, while Peter Parker (really the clone) leaves with Mary Jane and their newborn child – just writing that makes plain the problems with this whole concept.

But this would prove to be a case where initial success would prove to be the ultimate undoing when the Clone story line was repeatedly extended to keep sales up at a time when other books were experiencing a decline; these repeated extensions necessitated changes in key members of the creative team, this, along with shakeups at Marvel among the editorial staff, and a bankruptcy filing, meant that there was no strong hand keeping the Clone Saga in line or staying within a predetermined narrative. It became creation by committee at its worst, and as a result, us Spider fans were stuck trying to make sense out of an epic filled with open plot points that made no sense, many of which came and went from one book to the next. All that, along with the introduction of not just one clone (Ben Reilly), but a second (Kaine), and then a third (Spidercide); the resurrection of Gwen Stacy as a clone; the long expected death of Aunt May, only to have her resurrected at the end (though not as a clone); the return of Miles Warren/The Jackal; Ben Reilly becoming the Scarlet Spider; Ben Reilly becoming Spider-Man; never determining just who Seward Trainer was; never defining who Judas Traveller was; what were The Scriers doing in the story; more clones; the possibility that both Ben and Peter were clones; the introduction of even more clones; murky motivations for some characters, especially Kaine; the death of Dr. Octopus (we saw the body) and the introduction of a female Doc Ock; the introduction of the son of Kraven the Hunter; Maximum Clonage; why some clones began to deteriorate, while others didn’t; and never explaining why Kaine had visions of Mary Jane’s death. No wonder writer J.M. DeMatteis quit out of weariness at one point, while Dan Jurgens threw up his hands and went back to DC because he was stuck with writing Ben Reilly stories instead of writing books starring Peter Parker.

By 1996, Marvel was in deep trouble, both financially and creatively, and it was time to clean up the mess and cut its losses; the Clone Saga was resolved in a four part story that saw the return of Norman Osborn, a villain who had been famously killed off 20 years earlier, a plot twist that negated the climax of one of the most legendary Spider-Man epics, revealing that Osborn had been the mastermind behind the Clone Saga from the start, a reveal without the slightest foreshadowing whatsoever. This finale also contained, what for me, is one of the most tasteless scenes in comic book history: the miscarriage of Peter and Mary Jane’s baby, where Mary Jane desperately asks the doctor why her newborn isn’t crying. On the next page, we see one of Osborn’s minions, dressed as a nurse and leaving the hospital with a package, which she delivers to her boss, possibly implying that baby Parker is not dead, but as Sean Howe has noted, no writer in the years since has ever gone near this morbid dangling plot thread. The climax of this finale arc saw Peter Parker return as Spider-Man, and Ben Reilly killed off by The Green Goblin, his body disintegrating in a way that proved definitively that he was the clone all along – as if anyone still cared at that point. The whole thing felt like a big cop out; I was so mad at the way it was resolved that I wrote a letter to Marvel, ripping them a new one over the way Ben Reilly was disposed of, and to their credit, Marvel printed it. Reading those issues today only drives home just how much it was a badly thought out quick fix to a very deep problem of Marvel’s own making. In the ensuing two decades, Spider writers treated the Clone epic like it was radioactive, although both Kaine and the back from the dead Norman Osborn found their place in the Marvel Universe.

But while most dumped on the Clone Saga, I didn’t join in the chorus, or at least not as loud as some of the others, because underneath all that rubble and suck, there was a great premise which could have made for an excellent story. At its heart, a tale of clones could easily be spun into a modern day Cain and Abel, something that was hinted at with the introduction of a clone named Kaine, but instead of having both Ben and Peter be Abels, the character of Kaine and Ben could have been combined to create a dramatic clash with Peter Parker. Put it simply, the Clone Saga could have been broken down into a story of revenge, and then redemption. In the revenge part, the clone, Ben Reilly, turns up years after his supposed death, consumed with hatred for Peter Parker because he can’t live with the thought that he is a copy of a hero, just a reflection of someone else’s greatness and humanity, along with a consuming jealousy of Parker for the life he has led, a life filled with people who love him – Aunt May, Mary Jane – and a home that welcomes him. This clone, Ben Reilly, has spent years of wandering with no place of his own, and believes he will have no peace, no place in the sun, until Peter Parker is destroyed utterly. That is not the most original motivation for a character, but it is a strong one, and clearly stated – a good foundation on which to build a story.

So Ben Reilly puts on a copy of the famous blue and red suite, and proceeds frame to Spider-Man as a murderous vigilante, having him kill criminals in a fashion that would make The Punisher blush. Pretty soon, the alleys and backrooms of New York are strewn with the bodies of muggers, stick up artists, strong arm guys – the usual petty criminals that fill Spidey’s books – but then the body count comes to include made men in the mob and operatives for Hydra. Soon, the police, the Maggia, Hydra, A.I.M. and just about every villain in Spidey’s rogue’s gallery have all come together to hunt down our favorite Wall Crawler, and just to ice the cake, J. Jonah Jameson puts a huge bounty on Spidey’s head. Before Ben is done, Spider-Man cannot show his masked face anywhere without being in the cross hairs of someone wanting to collect the money. Then Ben betrays Spider-Man’s secret identity to The Sinister Six (Doctor Octopus, Kraven, the Vulture, Mysterio, Electro, Sandman), who come after Peter in his home, injuring Aunt May in the process, and taking Mary Jane hostage until Peter surrenders to them. Everyone is saved at the last minute by the intervention of the Fantastic Four and Captain America, but in the end, Peter Parker is arrested for the murders Ben has committed and his secret identity has been exposed to the world.

At this point, when Ben Reilly has gotten his revenge, the redemption arc kicks in because Ben is truly is a copy of Peter Parker, and the decency inside Peter, instilled by Uncle Ben, is right there inside Ben as well, and it is awakened when he finds that the revenge he has sought for so long and worked so hard to attain, brings him no satisfaction. When Ben sees the collateral damage he has wrought (Aunt May in the hospital and Mary Jane’s career in ruins), that latent decency inside him begins to surface, more so when he sees Mary Jane stand by her man when he is arrested, the same when others from Flash Thompson to Ben Grimm refuse to believe Peter’s guilt despite incontrovertible evidence. At this point in the story, there should be a big reveal where a mastermind steps forward and takes credit for manipulating Ben all along to bring down Peter Parker, the Spider-Man. This mastermind who pulled the strings could be Professor Miles Warren, or Norman Osborn, or even Frederick Foswell. When Ben realizes how he has been used, his transformation is complete, and the stage is set for him to break Peter Parker out of jail and for the two of them to join forces and take down the true Big Bad. Instead of ending with Ben’s death, this Clone Saga could have ended with Ben clearing Peter’s name and going to jail for the murders he committed as the faux Spider-Man. His uncanny resemblance to Peter would be explained in some lame manner that comics are famous for using. Peter goes back to being the one true Spider-Man in time for Mary Jane to deliver their child, while a reformed Ben Reilly, having learned that with great power comes great responsibility, is now set to become a hero in his own right in order to make up for the wrongs he has committed. If anyone thinks this is not the best Spider-Man story ever, I won’t argue, but I will defend it as a better execution of the original Clone Saga premise. If anyone has a better idea - and I know they do - I'd love to hear them.

And for all those who thought having Peter and Mary Jane married with children was such a bad idea, check out AMAZING SPIDER-MAN: RENEW YOUR VOWS, an alternate reality what might have been that has pleased many of us fans greatly. It almost makes us forget Brand New Day…almost. To prove that no bad idea ever really dies, twenty years later, Dan Slott brought back Ben Reilly, and just about everyone else but Uncle Ben, in a multi plot story called the Clone Conspiracy, a saga that Spidey fans loved and hated equally, but at least Ben Reilly survived this time and got his own book.

For all the supposed damage the first Clone Saga did to the Spider-Man books, at least when reading them back in the day, you still felt part of a continuity stretching all the way back to Lee and Ditko’s work on Amazing Fantasy #15, you can’t say that today after three reboots and more than one new first issue – to me, that is what did the real damage. But all is far from lost, even now, well into the 21st Century, there is still no end of good stories to tell, we just have to understand where the true problems lie.

My book, BIG CRIMSON 1: THERE'S A NEW VAMPIRE IN TOWN, can be found on Amazon at: https://amzn.to/3GsBh2E
and on Smashwords at: https://bit.ly/3kIfrAb

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:
http://bit.ly/2nxmg

Visit my Amazon author's page at: https://amzn.to/3nK6Yxv