E.R. Torre's Blog, page 91

Oh Al…

Politics be here… beware!

There’s so much going on in the world -the Bizarro Trumpworld we’re currently in- that its hard to focus on one thing but I’ll try.

Time magazine offered a brilliant, IMHO, “Person of the Year”: The Silence Breakers.  It was about the women -and men!- who spoke out about sexual harassment and blazed a trail which has led us to a point where we, as a society, are finally confronting something which should have been confronted a very long time ago.

There are many people, some shocking to find, who have engaged in these types of sleazy activities.  Many of them have lost their jobs, rightfully, while at least a couple of prominent ones -talking about you Trump and Roy Moore- who are determined to swim against the tide and continue the “they are lying” defense, which rings hallow, to say the least.

Another who has been exposed is Al Franken.

I like Mr. Franken, senator.  I feel many of his philosophies are in line with my own and I think it was incredible the way he cornered Jeff Sessions in a lie.  I wish there were more senators out there who vote the way he does.

And having said all that… he needs to resign.

While the allegations regarding Franken’s alleged harassment isn’t anywhere near being in the neighborhood of what Roy Moore is accused of (let’s face it, that man is in a perverse, disgusting world of his own), there comes a point when one either is against harassment or isn’t.

If we are to believe the allegations about what he did, which included forcibly kissing unwilling women, that’s quite enough, thank you.

As a politician, I really like you, Al.

Now do the right thing and resign.

If you’re sincere about being ashamed of what you did, provide restitution.  Volunteer your time to shelters that provide aid and comfort to victims of sexual harassment.  Show penance.  One day very soon, you could step back into the political limelight, a renewed, hopefully forgiven man.

Who knows, you may even be elected again to office.

Oh, and Mr. Moore?  Mr. Trump?  I’d ask you two to drop out and do the same but it seems you’ve lost your shame a very long time ago.

If you ever had any to begin with.

Puerto Rico and Tesla…

If there’s anything good to come from an incredible tragedy, it may be Tesla’s involvement in powering up the island of Puerto Rico with their battery projects, as presented in this article by Fred Lambert and presented on electrek.com…

Tesla deploys 6 battery projects in order to power two islands in Puerto Rico, more to come

When I first heard of Tesla’s battery pack idea, I was intrigued with the concept.  Essentially, the goal is to provide electricity to people via battery packs of various sizes.

In theory, one might in the future have solar panels (or some version of solar panels) on one’s house which feeds directly to a battery pack within your house which will then provide electricity to your home.

Granted, this is something that will work far better in areas like where I live in, which has plenty of sunshine.  However, even if one doesn’t live in an area like that, the battery packs could be charged on your local electrical grid and then used in peak hours of energy usage.

Its intriguing stuff and I’m most curious to see where this all leads… and, of course, whether it works!

Quentin Tarantino to direct… a Star Trek film?!?

Didn’t see this one coming.

The following article, by Mike Fleming Jr. and presented on Deadline.com, notes that…

Quentin Tarantino Hatches Star Trek Movie Idea; Paramount, J. J. Abrams To Assemble Writers Room

The bottom line is this: Mr. Tarantino apparently went to J. J. Abrams with a Star Trek movie pitch/idea, the idea was met positively, and as the article’s headline notes, writers are being hired to create a script based on Mr. Tarantino’s ideas.

As someone else might say…

I’m not a huge Tarantino fan but the man, let’s face it, is a talent and can create some great -if often foul mouthed and violent- stuff.

It would seem a man like him is not the person you’d want doing Star Trek but, frankly, I find the concept (here we go again) fascinating.

Frankly, I don’t think this will come to fruition.  I’m not trying to be pessimistic, its only that Mr. Tarantino is currently (I imagine) getting things together for his latest film involving the Manson killings of the late 1960’s (the actual plot of the movie is unknown other than it is set in/around that time) and that movie is scheduled to be released in 2019.  With that in mind, I can’t help but think if he does go from that to Star Trek, it’ll be a while -if ever!- before we see it.

Still, I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t love to see a Star Trek film with Mr. Tarantino behind it, if only for curiosity’s sake.

Sketchin’ 38

Love the look of Kate Beckinsale in the Underworld movies, even if the movies got progressively worse as they went along.  Mind you, not trying to be judgmental here, as I have noted before I’ve positive feelings (guilty, admittedly) for the Resident Evil films.

So, here she is, Ms. Beckinsale as Selene in the Underworld movies…

[image error]

Now for some insider type stuff:

What I love about digitally “inking” these pieces (I use an iPad and Apple Pencil with the Procreate program) is that it allows me to play around with white just as easily as I do with blacks.

Way back when I used to use an actual brush and ink in my work, black ink moved beautifully with a brush on the page but there is really no equivalent with physical white “ink”.  In fact, white “ink” is really just a corrective.  It’s used mostly to patch up errors in your work and is often used just to create certain effects such as stars or splatter.

Now that I’m doing my artwork digitally, all colors, including black and white, work the same and therefore I can now do white effects (I’m working up to going into colors, so bear with me).

In the case of the above piece, most of Selene’s hair was creating using white (digital) “ink”.

Enjoy!

Unproduced Police Squad script…!

If you were to ask me to state what my all time favorite comedy movie is, I’d probably say Airplane!

Don’t get me wrong, there are many, many, great comedy movies out there, but this film, IMHO, is the heights of absurdist, hundreds (seemingly) jokes a second, Mad-Magazine style parody/comedy which, thanks to the use of then very “serious” actors in absolutely absurd roles (believe it or not, when Airplane! came out, Leslie Nielsen -among other well known actors within the film- was known for his dramatic, serious roles!).

Now, if you were to ask me my all time favorite TV comedy, that one would be the very short lived (six episodes!) run of Police Squad!

After Airplane!’s its makers, Jim Abrahams and Jim and David Zucker recruited Leslie Nielsen to star in their very similarly themed absurdist comedy series.  Here is an example of one of the show’s intros…

I still chuckle at that opening bit, from the “In Color” announcement (TV shows of the 1960’s, when they went from Black and White to Color, would announce the fact that they were “In Color” to promote themselves to people with B & W TV sets and, hopefully, convince them to buy them), to the sequence with the shootout in the station (the guy on fire, the lady with the baby who flings it, etc.), to the wonderful special guest star (whose sole scene in the show was his/her death), to the “Rex Hamilton as Abraham Lincoln” absurdity.

Then there were the show’s endings, which made fun of the popular “freeze frame” endings found on many TV shows back then…

Anyway, the show would be revived with the Naked Gun films, but I found this fascinating article concerning the script to an un-filmed episode of Police Squad!, which is now available online.  The article is by Matthew Dessem and is found on Slate.com…

All Units, There’s an Unproduced Police Squad! Script on the Internet, Please Respond

Read the article and find out that its about David Misch’s unproduced seventh episode of Police Squad!, the script of which can be found in full here:

Testimony of Terror

To all those fans of the absurdist Abrahams and Zucker Brothers comedy, its a neat bit of (unproduced) humor.

You’re quite welcome!

Ghost in the Shell (2017) a (mildly) belated review

Back in 1995 and after becoming a popular Manga comic within Japan, the animated version of Ghost in the Shell was released to great acclaim.  In fact, it, along with the animated Akira, were the two major anime releases that brought a virtual wave of such material to the attention of fans within the United States.  Here’s the animated film’s trailer:

Not so very long ago I saw the anime film (for the second or third time) and gave it a review which you can read here.  From my review of the anime film:

Ultimately, (Ghost in the Shell) becomes something not unlike 2001: A Space Odyssey, a meditation on the thin line between machine and humanity.  While by today’s standards the story may not be quite as deep and mysterious as it was when it was released (there have been many such meditations offered since), Ghost in the Shell still holds its own.

Fast forward to last year when word came out that a live action version of Ghost in the Shell was in the works and that it would star… in the lead role.  Unfortunately for her and the film itself, this coincided with people realizing -and becoming quite vocal- about Hollywood “whitewashing” ethnic roles.  The Major, the protagonist of Ghost in the Machine, many argued, should be played by an Oriental woman and not someone like Scarlett Johansson.  Worse, the film’s ending (I’ll get to that in a bit) kinda pressed one’s nose into that whole controversy.

I know, I know… such a minor matter to worry about nowadays when dealing with all the lunacy in Washington D.C., sexual harassment, etc. etc., but I suspect the outrage in no small part helped to make the live action version of this film fizzle at the box office.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Ghost in the Shell, the live action film, was directed by Rupert Sanders, who had a hit with Snow White and the Huntsman.  While that film managed to have a sequel made, Mr. Sanders moved on to make Ghost in the Shell and the controversy that followed.

Look, I understand the controversy.

If you are making a movie set in a futuristic Japan -a setting that is central to the story- then perhaps you should think about having a more “Oriental” cast of characters rather than a couple and, certainly, you may have wanted to think specifically of using an Oriental actress to play the lead role.

Having said that, let’s face facts here: Scarlett Johansson is about as BIG a star as one could get to play the lead role in a film whose protagonist is an ass-kicking cyborg.

When I finally got to see the film yesterday, let’s also face facts, so much water has gone under the bridge (Trump, sexual harassment, etc. etc.) that I couldn’t really get myself all that riled up to the casting choice controversy, though to be honest it never did rile me up all that much to begin with, at least in this particular ocassion.

So I just sat back and watched the film and tried to judge it on its own merits.

Alas…

Look, Ghost in the Shell isn’t a bust.  Far from it.

Its visual looks clearly pay an awful big tribute to Blade Runner, as did the original anime, and there are several scenes within the live action movie which mimic the anime scene for scene.

The movie stumbles, however, when the film makers alter the story presented and, frankly, dumb it down.  What was originally, as I pointed above, a mediation on the fine line between machine and humanity becomes, frankly, a remake of the original 1987 (not the terrible remake) Robocop.

The Major here is a machine created by a company to be a bad-ass cop but hidden within her is an actual soul which, eventually, comes out.  The corporation people that did this to her are bad and she emerges by the end to show her humanity.

Again, Robocop.

If I want to see this story, why bother with the live action version of Ghost in the Shell when I can simply watch Robocop again?

I’ll get into the film’s ending (SPOILERS ABOUND!), so if you want to see the film without it being spoiled, don’t go past the trailer below.

In sum, Ghost in the Shell is a decent enough film with some beautiful visuals whose biggest problem, if you’re not too bothered by the casting whitewashing, is that it echoes too strongly the plot of Robocop.  Having said that, I’ve seen far, far worse.

Now, the film’s ending.

Again…

SPOILERS!!!!

So here we have a movie that, like Robocop, features a machine/human hybrid where the corporation has tried to use the person’s “soul” in a machine.  They’ve also tried to remove all memory traces and those memories start to come back.

By the movie’s end, the Major knows who she is and this is where that whole whitewashing stuff really comes roaring back.  For the movie takes place, like the anime and the manga, in a futuristic pseudo-Japan and the person the Major was… was an Oriental female.  In the closing moments of the movie, the Major sees her tomb and tells her mother “You no longer have to come here”.

Wuff.

Again, the whitewashing stuff didn’t bother me as much as it did many others, but the filmmakers, with this ending, essentially acknowledge their whitewashing and throw it back in the faces of those who were protesting such a thing.

I grant you, they didn’t do this on purpose as I’m certain filming of the movie happened before this controversy blew up to the proportions it did, but still… how unfortunate.

Ah well.

Sketchin’ 37

This is my latest piece…

[image error]

Really like it, was happy with the results… sort of.

Sometimes you make a piece and parts of it work really well while others… don’t.  In the full sized piece, you get more of Angelina’s body but I felt the face was what really, really worked in this picture so I cropped out the body.

Interestingly, I wouldn’t mind zooming into the face even closer and remove a little more of that lace.

We’ll see.

Yesterday in politics…

So this happened yesterday…

Yikes.

Worse is the fact that he made this terrible, horrible, awful joke with the President Jackson portrait hanging behind him.

Double yikes.

This is Naked Gun level stupidity, only nowhere near as funny…

We truly live in interesting/shit-your-pants-scary times.

News of the very grim…

Over on CNN.com, I found this story, written by Kaori Enjoji and James Griffiths…

Ghost ships wash up in Japan with skeletons on board

Here’s a photo from the article, showing one of the ships that grounded ashore…

So, what’s this about?

The article (I don’t want to give it all away, so if you are interested please click on that link and read!), notes that the ships are thought to come from North Korea and the reason they’re showing up has to do with the ugly conditions in the country: Food is scarce and the country has allowed more and more people to fish for their food… and many of these people do not know and/or do not have the proper experience to do so.

They sail out and get lost or lose control of their vessel in the currents/weather and become lost and unable to save themselves.

A horrible, horrible way to die.

The article truly sends chills down my spine.

Six Wakes (2017) a (mildly) belated book review… and more!

Been a while since I’ve offered an opinion on a book but sometimes you run across one which is so intriguing, so fun, that you have to give it a shout out.  Afterwards, I’ll offer another review… at least of a book I tried and had to give up on…

First, the positive review:

Released early this year, Mur Lafferty’s Six Wakes is a really clever, enjoyable sci-fi book that reads like an Agatha Christie mystery, but set in outer space (for the most part).

The book is an interesting amalgam of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None and, to some extent, Murder on the Orient Express.

And Then There Were None, perhaps Agatha Christie’s best known novels, involved a group of 10 strangers are brought together to a remote island and then they’re knocked off… one after the other, and the big mystery is who brought them here and why is this person killing them off.

Now take that general concept and have the main characters already killed off and their latest clone versions are awoken moments after the last of the original crew was murdered on a large vessel in deep space and have these “new” clones of the murder victims try to figure out who killed their previous selves… and why.

In this novel, one’s last stored memories are imported into the fresh clones and in the case of the people aboard the ship, the last memories are from when they boarded the vessel some 24 years before.  They have no idea what happened between then and now, and the mystery of which one of them -one or more!- were involved in the ghastly murders committed and why.

As I mentioned above, the book also had some similarity to Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, but to delve into that aspect would be a little too spoilery so I’ll just bite my tongue.

By the way, though there are similarities in concept, this is absolutely NOT a negative but rather a compliment. My admiration for the works of Ms. Christie is high and for me to put this book in that sphere is indeed a compliment.

The only negative I would give the book is that in the early chapters things take a little bit to get going and the back and forth between the present and sometimes very distant past got a little confusing given we’re introduced to many characters almost at once.  However, when you have a grip on who’s who, things really click.

Recommended!

Now, the book I didn’t make it through…

Stephen King is arguably the most popular novelist today, having sold many millions of copies of his books over the years and having not only released a staggering number of works, but also having a staggering number of them be made either for the movies or TV.

So I don’t feel too terribly bad giving one of his novels a big thumb’s down.

Joyland sounded really interesting, based on the description on the back of the book.  The time frame the story took place in, for the most part the early 1970’s, was also intriguing to me as I was a very young child at the time and was curious to read a story set in and around that era.

But the book, unfortunately, proved dull and off-putting.

I managed to get some 60+ pages into it when I decided enough was enough.  The book purports to be a mystery/thriller with supernatural elements but what it really appears to be is Mr. King doing a thinly veiled growing up/maturing story… and it proved a real chore to read.

If you’re doing a story about someone growing up, then try to make the character interesting and the main character in this novel, at least to the point where I read it, is more annoying than interesting.  Love sick and blue balled (pardon the expression, but its a fact of the book) by a girlfriend we’re told early on is about to abandon him and then, for sixty pages, we keep coming back to her and his feelings for her and it… is… soooooo… irritating.

I recommend Six Wakes.  Can’t say the same about Joyland.