E.R. Torre's Blog, page 13

The Batman (2022) a (almost right on Bat-time) review!

It’s something that was unthinkable only a few years ago: I’ve found myself getting tired of seeing all these superhero films being released.

Back when Guardians of the Galaxy and the first Dr. Strange movie were released in close proximity, I saw them and… I didn’t like either.

Something in me broke, to be honest, and while I have caught a Marvel movie here and there, I haven’t been seeking them out as I did before. Further, while I have the final two Avengers films, I haven’t found the time or inclination to see them. The last Marvel film I saw was Spider-Man: Far From Home and… I really didn’t like it much at all.

I’ve seen many of the DC hero films but have a few I have that I haven’t watched either (Shazam! and Wonder Woman 84).

So maybe I’m getting a little burnt out, as I said above, with the genre yet when The Batman was in production and once it was released, I was curious to catch it. Then I heard it was 3… hours… long... and I just couldn’t see myself going into a theater and sitting there for that long, regardless of how much I loved the character (he’s easily my favorite super hero).

Anyway, the film was released to theaters, did very well, then was released to HBO Max and, in the comfort of my house, I finally gave it a go. For those living in a cave, here’s the movie’s trailer:

The Batman features Robert Pattinson as Bruce Wayne/Batman, Andy Serkis as his reliable butler Alfred, Jeffrey Wright as Commissioner Gordon, Zoe Kravitz as Selena Kane/Catwoman, and, in a fascinating turn, Colin Farrell as Oswald Cobblepot/The Penguin.

Given the film’s length, I figured I’d see it over the course of two days, one day for one half, the other for the finale. But as it turned out, the film moves quite well and, despite my fears, never felt drawn out or too damn long.

The story features a mysterious new villain, The Riddler (Paul Dano), who has taken upon himself to kill very high level governmental officials in Gotham while drawing Batman into his mysterious and grim “game”.

Before the movie’s release, director Matt Reeves noted he wanted to show us a Batman who was a “detective” and in this case, I’m pleased to say he gives this to us. In the villain, we have a man who lays out a string of clues as to his future actions and victims and Batman is there, with his “right hand man” Commissioner Gordon trying to figure them out.

It is a very good film, certainly a higher tier comic book film, and the characters and setting are well done. If there is a criticism to level against The Batman it is what I wrote above: We’ve seen much of this before, whether it be in other superhero films -or specifically other recent Batman films- and video games. By virtue of this fact alone, it’s impossible to view The Batman as anything but another interpretation of the familiar character and his world.

Still, it’s a worthy trip to take because the film is so well made and, dare I say it, even if you feel more than a little tired of superhero films in general.

Recommended.

It sounds like the stuff of science fiction…

…yet it is something scientists have pondered: Whether it is wise to send signals into outer space so that alien races might find them and therefore find us.

Again: Is that a wise thing to do?

As presented in this article by Ellie Abraham on indy100.com, some scientists feel this is not a wise thing to do…

Broadcasting Earth’s location into space could cause an alien invasion, experts warn

If you’ve followed my writings, you know about my Corrosive Knights series and, well, what its ultimately about (not SPOILERS!).

The idea of an alien race finding out about us, one optimistically hopes, would be a good thing, that we would engage with a more advanced race and together make our way into the stars.

Of course, any race that can make it to Earth would have to be a more advanced race than ours, at least at this point. The furthest we’ve made it to taking humans ”out there” is the Moon, though we have sent automated/robot vessels to other planets within our solar system, including Pluto.

So this theoretical alien race which might get our signal and therefore might come visit us, we hope, is a peaceful one…

…but…

What if it isn’t?

I know, I know… it sounds like science fiction and all, but assuming there is a race out there that hears our signal and has the means to visit us, what’s to say it isn’t a warrior race?

What’s to say it isn’t a race with bad intentions toward any other alien races?

The bottom line is… I feel this is a legitimate concern. We want to find other alien races out there. We like the idea that we’re not alone out there. But we simply have no idea what may happen if/when we do get in touch with them.

It might be a beautiful thing.

But it might be something tragic.

Happy Tax Day…!

Wooo…?

Coronavirus Diaries 25

So today a Federal Judge struck down mask mandates for travelers…

CDC Mask Mandate For Travelers Struck Down By Federal Judge

Not a terribly big shock the Florida Federal judge who issued this ruling was appointed by Donald Trump in 2020.

Here’s the thing, though: The CDC extended the mask mandate to May 3rd, a grand total of two weeks and one day from today.

Did this judge really need to wade into something that, for all we know, may be a moot point in a very short period of time?

From the article:

A Biden administration official familiar with the White House’s decision previously told CNN the goal of the extension was to gather more information and understanding of the BA.2 variant of the coronavirus. Covid-19 cases in the US are on the rise, leading universities and the City of Philadelphia to reimplement indoor mask mandates.

COVID is most dangerous, data would suggest, to those who aren’t vaccinated. Many of those who aren’t vaccinated appear to have bought into the -let me try to be diplomatic here- hot air about lost freedoms and governmental overreach and no doubt will cheer this decision, even though they might become the ones most vulnerable to the ill effects of it.

When I used to live in a very cold climate and in winter, I -and many people around me- wore scarves over their mouths to protect them from the cold.

To my mind, wearing a mask in this time of the pandemic is the same. Only instead of protecting yourself/others from the cold, you’re doing this to protect them/yourself from transmission.

Is that really such a bad thing?

The question, alas, is rhetorical at this point.

Will the Biden administration appeal the decision? I suspect they will.

What if another even worse pandemic should rear its head? Will the CDC be completely powerless to advise travelers to wear some kind of protective masks?

Stay tuned kids…

Coronavirus Diary 24

You know, for a while there I was feeling like maybe we were done with this.

The number of COVID cases and hospitalizations had gone down quite a bit, almost to a near negligible level. Treatments have been developed so even those knuckleheads who still refuse to get vaccinated have a better chance of surviving, provided they get to a Doctor or hospital, than those who contracted it before.

…however…

As good as most recent news is, Dr. Fauci is warning we aren’t completely done with COVID quite yet and he worries there might be a surge in cases in the next few weeks and possibly another surge come fall…

U.S. Likely To See A Surge In COVID-19 In The Fall, Dr. Fauci Says

It really sucks to read something like this because, as I said above, things seemed to be settling/slowing down regarding the virus and I was hopeful that maybe, just maybe, we were finally entering the end stages of this dreadful pandemic.

Of course, Dr. Fauci’s worries are, at the moment, just that and perhaps things won’t play out quite like he worries it might.

On the other hand, he is an incredibly experienced virologist and, despite how hard the right tries to put his opinions down, has proven time and again to have a great grasp of how this pandemic has progressed. Has he always been on target? No. But when he states an opinion he’s very clear it is just that and in this case… well… I feel like one should take his words and prognostications seriously.

Hopefully things don’t pass as he worries it might.

Yet there’s no harm, in my opinion, in being careful a little longer.

Bruce Willis

For a few years now I’ve noticed rumors appearing on the internet about Bruce Willis’ health. Specifically, his mental health.

An “A” level actor whose films once topped the box office, of late he has been appearing in Video on Demand works where, further rumors had it, he would appear to film for one or two days of work at a staggering million dollars per day.

Many of these VOD films featured Bruce Willis in what amounted to cameo roles, often doing little but sitting at a bar or in a car or something similar, saying his lines and whatever “dialogue” with other actors was made up using film tricks, cuts and close ups and, often, the appearnace the other actors’ work was filmed later on, when Willis was long gone.

There were snickers about his “work” ethics, of Willis “phoning it in” and not giving a shit anymore. Of taking the money and running but now, with the news released yesterday of Mr. Willis suffering from aphasia and “stepping away” from acting (you can read the full article here, from CNN), the jokes have abruptly stopped and an outpouring of sympathy has followed.

Perhaps, some wonder, Mr. Willis was cashing in on those roles because he knew his mental deterioration meant he only had so much time left to build up a proper nest egg for his family. Others also noted the rumors and stories on Wilis being a (to put it politely) handful on sets was maybe a manifestation of the anger and confusion he had early on in the progression of his disease.

I suppose its all possible.

What I take away from this is the sad realization of just how frail a human body is, and how people who are “normal” can find themselves deteriorating and, ultimately, not being able to function as they once did.

Now that the news of his retirement from acting has come out, it seems more of the stories about Bruce Willis’ deterioration on sets is also coming out. The following article, by Ron Dicker and presented on Huffingtonpost.com, notes…

Bruce Willis Has Struggled On Set For Years, Co-Workers Say

Truly it is a sad thing to read and find out how at times Mr. Willis was confused and didn’t even seem to understand exactly what he was doing on certain sets.

More often than not I’ve enjoyed Mr. Willis’ acting. I first noticed him way, waaaaaayyyyy back in 1984 in the episode “No Exit” of Miami Vice. He played that episode’s (the 7th one aired during the first season of the show!) bad guy, and he was damn nasty in the role as a wife beating scumbag…

He would then get the co-starring role in the very popular TV show Moonlighting before moving on into films. His first couple of films, Blind Date (1987) and Sunset (1988), didn’t do all that well, but a little film named Die Hard (1988) was right around the corner.

I hope Mr. Willis’ sunset years will be peaceful and comfortable. It seems like he has a large and loving family and it feels like he’s hopefully in good hands.

I suppose that’s all anyone can hope for.

The New 2021/2022 Novel Update #14

Yesterday, March the 27th, 2022, was a truly magical day, at least for me.

I didn’t realize until yesterday that, since last year and the passing of my parents in the collapse of Champlain Towers South on June 24th, that I’ve been in a sort of mental fog.

I suppose I knew this to some degree. Things that usually gave me joy didn’t. I was doing the things I needed to do to get through each day but I did so on a sort of autopilot rather than with any pleasure.

I worked on my new novel during this time, but it too was done in such a piecemeal fashion and without the mix of love and frustration (truly, writing a novel is usually a combination of extreme pleasure and frustration!) I normally have for my works. Not that what revisions I was doing were bad, mind you, only that the emotions behind it weren’t there like before.

And this went for pretty much most of the activities in my life this past nearly a year.

Unless there was no good relationship between offspring and parents, the loss of one’s parents is a traumatic event. And for me, for my family, the shocking way they died made the situation all the worse. From the collapse itself to waiting for their bodies to be found to dealing with all the lawyers and trying to settle their estate (not only did I lose them, but all the paperwork they had in their home) to running their businesses… its a lot to take one and find the time to properly grieve as well.

But yesterday, for whatever reason, I found myself a little after twelve noon feeling extremely exhausted and needing to take a nap. This is not totally unusual for me, there are days here and there where my body simply reaches the point I need to rest.

Only this time, when I lay down and took a deep thirty minute or so nap and woke up, I felt… different.

I felt incredibly refreshed and, for the first time in far too long, alive like I hadn’t been in too long.

Perhaps for me the extreme sadness which came from the trauma of the building’s collapse and their deaths has finally crested, though it certainly isn’t anywhere near gone. I still miss my parents tremendously, but it felt like after that nap I was energized and for the first time in a very long time I felt I was past that emotional fog.

I picked up my new novel, which printed out runs to 195 single spaced pages and of which I had the last 1/4th of the book, some 50 pages or so, left to revise and, in the course of yesterday afternoon, I did that revision.

I read through it and made my red ink notations and it was such a freaking joy to do so.

Time eventually heals all and while I don’t feel like I’m fully healed yet, at least as of yesterday and for the first time in too long a time I felt like I was a little bit back to my old self.

Let’s see if it lasts.

So… how about them 2022 Academy Awards…?

Of late, I’ve not taken much of an interest in watching the Academy Awards. Granted, because of COVID the last couple of years have been very strained regarding the awards and, for that matter, the release of films.

But last night’s awards… ho boy…

What’s left to say? Will Smith didn’t like Chris Rock’s joke and, frankly, I’m not in Smith’s shoes so I don’t know how badly that joke landed given what his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, has dealt with regarding her alopecea. Then again, there are those that are thinking -because Will Smith was shown laughing at the joke originally- that maybe Jada made some comment and got his goat up.

Chris Rock’s joke, that he couldn’t wait to see Jada in G. I. Jane 2, obviously referenced her baldness, which is in part due to that alopecea and…

…look, again, I’m not in Will Smith’s shoes. I would never condone violence and, it seemed later in the program when Will Smith actually won the freaking Academy Award, he was clearly having second thoughts about his outburst… though in all his blubbering and apologies, he didn’t apologize to, you know, the guy he hit.

I feel for Chris Rock, of course, the victim of the violence. His joke might have been inappropriate and even dumb/insulting, but come on… that’s all it was. A bad joke, I grant you. An insensitive joke, absolutely.

But still.

What should have been a great night for Will Smith, to win the Academy Award, was instead marred by this outburst. No charges were pressed by Chris Rock and, hopefully, the two will make their peace, though reports are the Academy Awards are going to investigate this situation.

I know there’s a sense of “the show must go on,” but perhaps in this case maybe it would have been better to get security there. Not to say Will Smith was capable of doing something worse, but who knows.

What a night.

POSTSCRIPT: Saw this on Reddit… the reactions of various stars…

Ryan Gosling there at the end… man oh man…!

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) a (evil doppelgänger) review

It’s always interesting to see, over time, how certain movies which were once popular fade away in interest while others become better liked or even achieve a certain cult status. Big hits of yesterday sometimes receive far more critical second consideration while some which were at best modest successes receive second and third -and much more positive- looks.

So it is with the Phillip Kaufman (The Right Stuff, The Unbearable Lightness of Being) directed 1978 film The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. This film, the first remake of the Don Siegel classic cold war paranoia film of the same name released in 1956 (there is at least one more, perhaps two other remakes which have followed, I do believe).

The plot is essentially the same as the original film: Space spores come to earth and, while people sleep, the spores create pods which replicate the sleeping individual while sucking their life-force from them. When all is done, what is left behind is a ”pod person” (I suppose that’s where the expression comes from, no?) who looks just like the original person, but who shows odd emotional displays and interacts with other ”pod people” to further the goal of replicating the people around them.

In the original film, the action was limited to a rather smallish American city, if memory serves (its been a very long time since I’ve seen that film, which means it may be time to give it another look!) while in this remake the story takes place in San Francisco, hardly a ”small” city even then!

Elizabeth Driscoll (Brooke Adams) plays a lab tech who works for the city and who discovers a strange bud/flower she can’t quite identify in and around the parks she frequents. That night, while sleeping, her boyfriend has the bud in a glass of water on the nightstand beside the bed.

When Elizabeth wakes up, she finds her boyfriend already dressed and cleaning up broken glass and water from the rug… the bud she found has tumbled from the nightstand and her boyfriend is acting very oddly.

In work, Elizabeth tells Matthew Bennell (Donald Sutherland) her co-worker and a health department head, the strangeness of her boyfriend’s actions. He suggests they go see Dr. David Kibner (Leonard Nimoy), a psychiatrist who is having a book release party that night and that he may help her with whatever is troubling her.

At the party they meet up with Jack Bellichec (a very early role for Jeff Goldblum) who is a frustrated poet who can’t seem to have the same success with his books as Kibner does and is agitated by this.

Dr. Kibner, Elizabeth finds, is dealing with a woman who claims her husband isn’t her husband but an impostor. Elizabeth clearly feels the same about her boyfriend and, afterwards, when talking to Dr. Kibner, he tells her there seems to be some kind of psychological virus going on and there are many people he’s seen who are talking about impostors around them.

I won’t get into too many more details about the plot and quickly offer a high recommendation to anyone interested in seeing this film. It has aged beautifully and is quite suspenseful and even shocking at times. The pace, I found, was also good and the acting by everyone strong.

Getting Leonard Nimoy, who at that time was probably so very typecast as Mr. Spock, to play the role of a psychiatrist was a stroke of genius. He came in with so many expectations and… well, I won’t get into SPOILERS as I said before.

What I liked the most about the film was the way it subverted certain expectations. Again, I don’t want to get into SPOILERS but I love the fate of Brooke Adams’ Elizabeth. It’s a shocker in the end. I love the way we never get a solid grasp on Donald Sutherland’s Matthew.

Is he, to put it bluntly, one of those bureaucratic pricks that seems to live to give others headaches? Our first brush with him it appears he’s just that, checking out a French restaurant and giving them a hard time because of a condiment he finds in their soup, which he claims is a rat turd and they say is a kaper.

Later on, when he returns to his office, Matthew gleefully says he will shut the restaurant down and, intriguingly, the movie never really tells us if Matthew was right or if he was just being a jerk.

The relationship between Matthew and Elizabeth is also presented in a naturalistic way and we’re never spoon fed all the full details. They are clearly very close friends and there does seem to be a spark between them but, for most of the film anyway, Matthew seems to be nothing more than a concerned friend and doesn’t force his way between Elizabeth and her boyfriend. Further, when things start to go sideways, this potentially irritating, possibly angry/petulant bureaucrat becomes a heroic figure and tries his best to not only save his friends, but also solve the mystery of the impostors and save humanity itself.

Yes, I wound up really loving the film even though when I first saw it many, many years ago I felt it was good but not necessarily terrific.

I’ve certainly changed my mind since then!

A very easy recommendation here. The 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers very much deserves its current re-evaluation and is a top tier suspense/horror film.

A couple of fascinating notes: Early in the film there’s a scene where a priest is on a swing. He glares at Elizabeth and looks really creepy. That priest is played by none other than Robert Duvall in a quite literally seconds long cameo without any dialogue! Later in the film, when Elizabeth and Matthew are being taken by taxi, the taxi driver is played by Don Siegel, the man who famously directed the original 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers (and, more recently at that point, Dirty Harry!). Finally, there’s a brief sequence early in the film where a man pounds on Matthew’s car and yells almost incoherently about the threat the invaders pose. That man is played by Kevin McCarthy, who was Dr. Miles Bennell (as opposed to Matthew Bennell in this film), the protagonist of the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on the 2021 Academy Award Movie nominees…

Stumbled on this while killing some time online and found it absolutely fascinating.

Sports superstar/writer/actor Kareem Abdul-Jabbar offers his take on the three films which seem the favorites to take the ”Best Picture” award for 2021 releases… and -SPOILERS- he finds them wanting…

The 3 Most Disappointing Films of 2021 Are Best Picture Nominees!

Not to spoil the article, but the three films he’s referring to are The Power of the Dog, Don’t Look Up, and Nightmare Alley.

Full disclosure: I have seen none of these films, though I had the opportunity, thanks to the various streaming services, to see the lot of ’em.

But what Abdul-Jabbar writes I find fascinating. Don’t Look Up certainly has its fans… and detractors, and the most common criticisms I found were reflected in what was written in Abdul-Jabbar’s article. I’m hot and cold on director Guillermo Del Toro and it seemed like Nightmare Alley was also a film people were split on. I love the visuals of all of Del Toro’s films -the man certainly knows how to film a scene!- but the stories he tells can be underwhelming, at least to me. Further to this, Del Toro has a tendency to make every scene/sequence look like something big and climactic and, unfortunately, by the time we reach the movie’s end, all those highs dilute the strength of the climax.

As for The Power of the Dog, that seems to be yet another film that has its fans and detractors. Those who don’t like the film really don’t like it, while those who do are big fans.

Again, I haven’t seen any of these films, despite having the opportunity to do so with each, and I don’t know if I ever will. I have so many films I want to catch up on and so little time!

Regardless, if you’ve seen the films -or even if you haven’t- the article and the insights provided by Mr. Abdul-Jabbar are fascinating.