Planet Mando

Jun 29

Iron Man Sequilitis

Don’t get me wrong, I have very little bad to say about Iron Man 2, the Rise of the War-machine or whatever title they’re giving it, but I’ve got to step back from it and call it as I see it. It’s a fine piece of film-making. As sequels go, it ain’t half bad let me say. It extends the aura of awesomeness that Robert Downey Jr. has surrounded himself in over the last few years and it basks in the small details of the property. War-Machine, check. Justin Hammer, check. Pepper Potts as much more of a love-interest, check. Happy Hogan played by Jon Favreau in his typical sidekick role, check. By the numbers. Some great CGI. A decent villain in Whiplash, or rather the amalgam of the comic-book whiplash with a semblance of the Crimson Dynamo, which is a very good extension of the mythology past the Cold War iconography of the strips.

That’s the good part. Oh, wait, hold for it, Scarlet Johansson as Natasha Romanov (the Black Widow) with the sleek, black rubber suit and the bumpy, gold bracelets? Yumm, oh well, I guess I wasn’t done with the good parts. Here are the disappointing bits. As is usual, too many villains. You’ve got the weasily Hammer, played the exceptionally weasily Sam Rockwell, and the imposing Mickey Rourke who looks even buffer and less sympathetic than his performance in The Wrestler, but neither really leave much of an impression, and why is that?.

Because the Marvel Universe is invading, bleeding in from all the foreshadowing. Can we stop with the obvious plugs for Captain America, Thor and The Avengers. I know it’s coming, it’s obvious that it is, but the specter of those movies has taken all the drama out of the structure of this movie. Tony Stark can’t reach rock bottom and pull himself out of it, because here’s Nick Fury (definitely not the Nick Fury I grew up with, but that’s just me) looking out of his one, brown eye and playing the deus-ex-machina role right outta the park, giving Tony the answer to his perplexing problem. His dead father fixes him, and the newly bad-ass Iron Man faces the Hammer-droids, with the help of Don Cheadle, and kicks the shit out of Mickey Rourke, and quickly, with little dramatic effect, because wait, we have to set-up the next set of movies. Boom, here’s Captain America. Boom, here’s Thor. Boom, here’s The Avengers. No spoilers, but the hints are so obvious. There will be an Iron Man in that movie and it might not be Robert Downey Jr. He probably wants too much money, so they added a scene. He might be written out of it.

I’m sorry. I always wanted these movies to be linked together, in the same world, but can nobody coordinate the scripts any better, allowing for better continuity? I guess not. I liked it, but I did not love it like I loved the first one.

Jun 08

Dr. Who and Vincent Van Gogh

Have you ever thought that things were more than what they seemed, that a mere science fiction program had more to say to you than what you would have first thought, then listen to this.

The latest Dr. Who episode, Vincent and the Doctor, starring Matt Smith as the youngest Doctor ever in the long running BBC series, is probably one of the most wonderful episodes of true science fiction I have ever witnessed. It’s written by Richard Curtis, the screenwriter of Four Weddings and a Funeral and loads of movies and television series, but I have to say he has crafted one of the most affecting works in the genre for many a year.

The antagonist is rather tame, an invisible alien monster that is stranded lost and alone on Earth, but it is a metaphor for the real culprit: depression, bipolar disorder, madness, or whatever you want to call it, it is the real culprit that leads the episode. I won’t give away the denouement, it must be savored and enjoyed, but it is the most poignant use of time-travel I’ve ever seen. The Doctor knows that time is a flowing river, that there are important cruxes in the stream that must not and cannot be tampered with, but he nonetheless gives Vincent Van Gogh the opportunity to witness some semblance of dignity regarding his life, that there are people who he touched with his art after he left and maybe just maybe that he the Doctor might have been able to save a life in his travels. It resonates with the Doctor himself, those he has lost along the way and can’t forget, and also

It’s a wonderful thought, that maybe the past is mutable and that an act of love or heroism can change a person’s destiny through time travel, save a life that is doomed, and that may or not be be the point. Our ends I think are defined. It may just be that the greatest effect one person can have is helping us find our true purpose until we find that last breath.

A Short Tale of Zombies

Infection peaking. Odd. No pain. Brains…..

Jun 05

Lost in Paradise

After six years and numerous deaths, births, writer’s strikes and untold suffering of this group of castaways lost on an island paradise with polar bears, smog monsters and frankly the detritus of over-stimulated creative types like you and I, I presume, the end has come, the answers have been revealed, and yet I’m still confused.

Well, confused isn’t the answer. I’m in my general state of geek rage. When I was a kid, I excused the disrespect that television writers and producers had for the material because I knew they didn’t know any better. Manimal, Ark II, Westworld, Buck Rogers, Land of the Lost, Logan’s Run, they all had flaws and I excused them because they didn’t take themselves seriously. No one did.

Nowadays they do. We all take science fiction shows seriously, the producers of Lost say they do at least, but then they end a genuinely epic mystery of myth and time travel, a smorgasbord of science-fictional tropes bent to new-age experimental narrative structure, and they end it in the dullest way possible.

It’s the same gutless meandering that inflicted the Matrix movies. Here was something new, a religious parable without the usual leadened structure of Christ-like birth, death and renewal, and how do the Warchowski’s end it? By shoehorning a Christ-like plotline and stringing it out over two dull sequels. Imagine that though, over six years.

For six seasons the producers have maintained that the characters were not dead, that they were not in purgatory and that the experiences they were having were real and not imagined. In two and a half hours they reneged on their promises. Sure, they can support their statements, everything was real. There was an island. It did exist and everything happened as written, but in the end they end up in purgatory, waiting for each other’s deaths to seek the great beyond together.

What a rip-off.

When Jeffty was 5

Some things are better today. We don’t get childhood illnesses. Medical procedures are safer. Our lives are longer and, so they say, more productive. Our inventions bring distances closer. The wealth of human knowledge has been digitized, en-capsuled in a cloud of bits and bytes, waiting to be passed on, shared and commented on. I realize it was all available at a short walking distance to the local library, knowledge in the context of your own surroundings (how droll), but how much easier is it today, in this democracy of Wikipedia, this state of technological relativism we wade through when all arguments are accepted and everyone has a right to any opinion, to lose sight of the truth. When all opinions are valued equally then none have true value. Not even my own. Not now at least.

It isn’t nostalgia that keeps me there, in the past, and it isn’t just a vague idea that things were better as a whole when I was a kid. It was. Better. I’d love to be able to turn on the television and watch a block of shows like the ones I got to watch after coming home from school. A couple of Three Stooges shorts, maybe some Our Gang comedies to go with it and rounded off by some Abbott & Costello. I could watch Dragnet, Superman or even Rin Tin Tin after that. On the weekends it was Rat Patrol, and Andy Hardy movie or some Popeye cartoons, the original Fleischer ones not the dreck that it devolved into later, and this wasn’t even the 1950’s. This was the Technicolor 70’s we’re talking about here. Even then I instinctively knew that things were better in the past. We got all the old shows back then. On three or four local channels, roughly 70 years worth of entertainment, and we still had access to it, before they ghettoized the whole lot of it.

Nowadays they pipe the damn programs into your home, they shut down over the air broadcast channels because the cellular companies crave bandwidth, and they lure you with the words high-definition and better picture, forcing you to dump the old television that has worked for 15 years solidly and get a new one that has a lifespan. Imagine that. A television that you absolutely know how many times you’ll be able to turn it on before it goes the way of the eight-track tape. In a dumpster replaced by some new cultural stimulation device.

And for what I might add? For the opportunity to watch bad writing, sometimes no writing at all if you’re an Apprentice, or a Survivor, or Real World, reality television whore whose only qualifications are categorized by any collection of spray-on-tans, boobs in a bottle, butt-plants, calf-plants, collagen, botox, or even plug-in-noses. Did we misplace the need for talent, charisma, or even a set of genetically perfect cheekbones? No, we just think those can be bought in a clinic. What about the esteemed professions of acting coach or scriptwriter? Unnecessary if the result is to obfuscate rather than reveal the truths that define human nature.

The sitcom is dead. The one-hour drama is on life support; a high-concept, paint-by-numbers, overly franchised shell of itself. Westerns? Gone. Our cultural history, that which connects us to our ancestors, snarkily thrown in the waste-basket of history, leaving us with the pre-masticated pablum of Generation X, respackled and reconstituted for even shorter attention spans, the CGI texture mapping hiding the dessicated heart of a fourth generation Saturday morning serial. Thank you James Cameron.

It is not enough to say, as Harlan Ellison did in his story “Jeffty is 5”, that the present kills the past. That monochrome world of decoder rings and air-rifles that eternally 5 Jeffty lives in didn’t stand a snowball’s chance of surviving under the boot-heel of progress. In today’s world however, I’d probably use the term systematically butchers rather than just kills. Ellison probably never envisioned that our world, our culture would degrade even further, and that his world’s political scandals would seem quaint when compared against our Blackwater present. Dick Cheney’s corporate circle-jerk would be televised for our edification by Rupert Murdock’s Faux News Empire. A system of stupid people, by stupid people and for stupid people. 

I remember my internal life as a kid and it was better there. I want that for my son who is in the hospital today and thinking of him reminds me of Jeffty. Just recently I read that Jeffty was based on a friend of Harlan’s named Josh. Josh became Jeff became Jeffty in the story, but his actual name was Josh Andrew Koenig. Josh was the son of actor Walter Koenig who most people remember from his role as Chekhov on the original Star Trek television series. Josh grew to be an actor himself, in signposts or markers for Generation X culture like Growing Pains where he played Boner, My Two Dads and My Sister Sam. He was even on G.I. Joe, 21 Jump Street and in a bit of inspired irony, Star Trek: Deep Space 9. He was also a political activist; involved in the U.S. Campaign for Burma. Unfortunately with so much right in his life, there was something in him that didn’t allow him to enjoy it, a depression that took his life, and I wondered if Harlan still thought of Andrew/Josh/Jeff/Jeffty when he thought of the world, now 35 years on from the world when Jeffty was 5. With the light now gone from Andrew’s as well, is it still any better Harlan? Are we any better?

Aug 22

Dream a little dream

You know, sometimes I have no idea what my  subconscious wants to tell me. I had this weird dream last night. It was eerie in a bright colored sixties Mad Men kind’ve way. The whole time I’m thinking about a woman I love. I’m going home to her. I haven’t seen her in a long time and I have finally admitted to her over the phone that I love her. I know she feels the same way but “life kept us apart” and all that rubbish. I get home and see her in bed. The bed is huge and there a number of women in bed. I notice only the last two in a line. One of  them is a lady I only refer to as “Paulie”. Well, Paulie is what I call her because she looks like Paulie Walnuts from the Sopranos. Yes, I know. She’s not the one I expected to be in my bed, but I steel myself to it because I haven’t seen this girl in a long time, I don’t know what she looks like so I go to the other side of the bed and start removing my clothes. Paulie looks up from the bed. She says, “Let me move over, I think you’re looking for this other girl right next to me.” Well, of course. Why did I think that she’d be interested in a guy like me. I mean, the real Paulie wouldn’t be caught dead with a guy at all, let alone like me. So I crawl into bed and I recognize her immediately. It’s the sister of my best friend during high school. She’s nice and beautiful, slim and demure, and totally wrong for me, but in the logic of a dream she’s the one. We talk, but I barely remember anything else, the dream fades at this point and I wake up.

The odd thing is, is that I really disliked her. She had the uncanny ability to miss every joke I ever told in her presence. What makes this dream insidious however, is that while I disliked her, I was really in love with her sister. She was the one I carried a torch for through my 20’s and 30’s despite “falling in love” with another woman who reminded me of her but who would always fall short in my eyes. She was as beautiful as her sister. Older. Tall, as tall as I was, but awkward, like a swan. She’d moved away after high school and I felt she was running away from Los Angeles blaming the pain of two failed relationships on the city itself and ultimately on me.

Yet, we talked many times a week. Hours at a time. We had the same routine. Talk about what’s happening in our lives then end with a back and forth questionnaire about what we’re listening to, reading, watching. No conversation was ever the same, everyone a painful reminder of what I had and what I could never truly have. She loved me, I’m sure of it, but she never had the courage to take the next step. She asked me once why I would flake out and not come up and see her like I had promised. Why I wouldn’t call her sometimes for weeks or months on end. Why did I disappear and then step back into the remembered rhythms. It was hurtful, stupid and flaky of me I said, but what I never told her was that there was only so much that I could stand being around her. How painful it was to be so close yet so far away. I didn’t have the courage either. By that time the situation was even more complicated. I was married, but conflicted, to someone that seemed like a poor substitute.

I told her a few months ago how I felt finally. 20 plus years to tell her that the one defining relationship of my 20’s and 30’s was the girl that got away? How much of an idiot I was. I carried a torch for her for far too long and much too close. that torch burned everything I held near to me. I no longer carry that torch. I met someone else.

She is everything to me; smart, highly educated, the sort that quotes Karl Marx and understands what he wrote about. She’s read Nietzche and can tell you what he was really talking about especially because she says people read him and don’t understand what he’s really talking about. She writes like I wish I could, holding that pen not as a sword or a rapier, but as a scythe, cutting hypocrisy down to size. She loves movies, cheesy science fiction movies, weird television and comedies, lots of comedies. She can cook but she’s plays down her abilities. Her eyes are the clearest, sharpest blue eyes I have ever seen. An award winning smile and a cute overbite to boot. She’s short. Athletic because she was once a competitive swimmer. Freckles, so many freckles, skin damage she says, the skin of a 70 year old she says, all the years of working in the sun as a lifeguard. To me she is beautiful, radiant even, and in my opinion necessarily modest about it.

I love her more than I think I can even begin to fathom. I am marrying her today in front of my friends and my family. The torch has been passed and I no longer care if my friend is available or not. I don’t care  that she’s here for the weekend visiting family. What I care about is why the hell am I dreaming about getting into bed with her sister?

Aug 21

Ellen

She danced. She loved the Los Angeles Kings and Marcel Dionne. She loved music, and most of all she loved teaching. She was my third grade teacher. When I was goofing off in class, pretending to be Benny Hill, slapping another kid on the head, a smaller kid with short hair, that looked like the old guy on that show, slapslapslap, instead of getting angry with me, she said if I liked English humor that I should look for Monty Python’s Flying Circus: that would be the humour for a smart kid like me.

She loved Simon and Garfunkel, the Year of the Cat and Elton John. He aint heavy, he’s my brother, teach your children well, and she did. She inspired. I remember her Gucci fixation. Her dark bangs touching her eyes and her light summer dresses. Her dark eyes. She made me be who I am today. A teacher, like her which I never revealed. She left us, a pain in her breast, I never knew until she was gone. She had stayed at the same school, I never knew if she had married or if she had any kids, but I always thought of her. I thank her still.

Aug 20

Idiocracy

I have a problem with my weight. I am over 300 pounds. My double chin has a double chin and the flap at the back of my head is pronounced. I have back fat. The folds underneath my stomach are restricting my movement. My thighs touch and I sweat profusely. I get skin-flaps from the irritation and weird pimples to boot. I can’t get into or out of my car without a struggle and my left knee hurts because there’s alot of extra weight on a joint that should have been surgically repaired years ago.

I know I’m fat. You don’t need to remind me. I look at myself in the mirror every morning and I see it. You can’t say anything to me that I haven’t thought in my own head a million times. And yet, I still go out of my way to treat you the way that I’d like to be treated. I hold out hope that there are people out there that are going to look beyond my exterior and everyday I am disappointed. No, scratch that, there are people here that are. My fiancee loves me for who I am, so do my kids, and my friends never tell me that I am any less of a person because I am big enough to be two persons.

But you would think that as my father you would be sensitive enough to know that I am most vulnerable when I am with you. Is it polite for your friends to talk to you and remark how fat your son has gotten, and that your only response is that, “Well he just doesn’t keep an eye on what goes into his mouth, haha?” I realize that your friends are the sort that make up this fine idiocracy that we live in, the sort that complain about others weaknesses while ignoring their own, the tobacco and the cheap tequila and the lousy women, but what of you?

What is it in you that allows that behavior to happen? I walked away, glad I had a book in my hand to ignore you as I have always done, but what is it in you that has always sided with them over me? It is ironic that your failure as a father led to your father-in-law stepping in to instruct me in the manner in which a gentleman is supposed to behave in this life which in turn placed you in my hands when you went blind and couldn’t take care of yourself anymore.

Just be thankful. If I had been taught to be more like you I would have abandoned you to your sorry state long ago. Fuck you and good night.

Aug 17

District 9

District 9 is a science fiction movie. It is an action movie and it is a thinly veiled allegory. Now I like allegory, but much of the time science fiction stories are dragged into unnecessarily because, well frankly like that embarrassing double-jointed aunt who comes over for Christmas and keeps showing off her ability to reach back and grab her ankles, well she’s good at it despite the fact that it’s obviously embarrassing for her at such an advanced age. Same thing for sci-fi allegory. It’s good at taking the heavy political messages and weaving itself through them but too often the author get lost in the cool “special effects” moments and drops the proverbial ball. In short, that’s what’s happening here in District 9.

The set-up is that there’s this ship, a huge spaceship like the one we got in the early 1980’s in V: The Mini-Series, but instead of dealing with an alien plot to take over the world and a beautiful alien baddie played by Jane Badler, we get what looks like a derelict ship filled with humanoid insect creatures who have arrived malnourished and dying. Not only is there no sense of wonder at first contact, the film begins with faux-interviews with the local human inhabitants, filmed chronologically 20 years after the fact, and it is a hate-filled bigot fest. The “prawns”, who have built a shanty-town below the ruined Mothership, are petty and disgusting, living short and disagreeable lives for sure, but the humans (both black and white) are even more brutish than their alien neighbors. Did I mention that the film was set in South Africa?

I get the heavy-handed analogy. The “prawns” are the interstellar immigrants, the latest challengers in an already crowded sea of competition, and the humans want them moved out, in camps away from the city, in smaller more crowded spaces so that they can live even shorter and more disagreeable lives. It’s a downer of a movie for sure, but the script never gets too bogged down with the thematic skeleton and the director gives it a grimy coat of sci-fi cool action like Halo meets Mad Max meets Alien Nation.

Still, my biggest complaint of the movie isn’t about the allegory, heavy handed or not, but about the set-up. When science fiction is good on the screen, it’s because the writer did his homework and made the movie follow its own internal logic. See Alien, Blade Runner, god even David Lynch’s Dune had a better raison d’etre. It doesn’t have to be hard-science, you don’t need to dot all the eyes and cross all the tees, but you shouldn’t be spending too much of the movie wondering why things are happening the way they are happening in your movie. You should not be asking questions like:

What is the significance of the spaceship? Why did they come to Earth? Why are so many of the prawns barely intelligent and yet one of them is a genius with a genius in the making son? What makes him special? Why did it take 20 years to collect the space juice? If the space-juice is the ship’s propellent, why did it trigger a genetic mutation? Or even: if the ship has no juice, then what’s keeping it up in the sky?

There are a hundred similar questions, I could go on, but I’d say that I’m not revealing any spoilers to say that none of them were satisfactorily answered. I get that the racism is what is keeping the characters from asking these questions, that it took one character to spend 70+ hours in another man’s exo-skeleton to start asking those questions, but a film has certain basic needs regardless of plot and character and thematic content. It needs to make sense. It’s an exciting movie. It’s made a ton of money for such a small film and my fellow geeks have raved about it, calling it the best sci-fi movie of the Millenium, which it is clearly not.

Aug 13

Rant of the Day

Most people as they get older, they get wiser, they have more to lose so they get more conservative. Me, I’m getting more and more liberal. You see, I used to be an idealist. I believed that the system allowed for a fair and balanced amount of discourse and that Americans could argue and discuss their problems in public, air their differences and commit to a fair compromise. I don’t believe that shit anymore.

Our President has a political mandate to change the status-quo, the current state of affairs, that which  a generation and a half of Conservative, Republican, Free Market anarchists have inflicted on us, and rolled-back what we had, before the New Deal was gutted. Their policies have eroded our infrastructure, destroyed our economy, corrupted the ideals we stood for, the social compact we developed, all for a buck. Our schools have no money. Our banks have no credit. Our utilities gouge us; we can’t afford electricity or fuel, our water isn’t safe to drink, nor is our food safe to eat. What about terrorism? 9/11 happened on their watch. Are we safer now than before Iraq and Afghanistan? Where is Osama bin Laden? None of these questions have been answered after 8 years of Bush/Cheaney. They had a monopoly, a clean sweep of the three houses of Government with the media, the fourth estate as it were, what normally called the counterpoint to their rhetoric, checked on the facts and made the politicians honest, was a willing co-conspirator, no less than a governmental mouthpiece, a propaganda machine.

They ran on a platform, a recipe of just another four years, more of the same, more of the same shit that hadn’t worked in the previous 8. They lost the election on that platform, and instead of offering real solutions, a counterpoint to “liberal bias” they have spent months looking for ways to tear down this Presidency. They say, “Obama is a socialist, a communist, a terrorist, and worse than that he may not even be American.” Close to 50% of people polled recently in Fruitcake-land North Carolina think either that our Hawaiian born President is a foreign-born national or are undecided as to his origin. 50%?!?!? 8% of these knuckledraggers either didn’t know or were undecided that Hawaii was even a State. These weren’t illegal immigrants, ethnic minorities siphoning off the teat of Public Education. These are racists, bigots, ignoramusses content to prostrate themselves at the fat steaming carcasses of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. And they want us to return them to power?

In the past we have backed off, allowed them to continue their lies and propaganda, but no more. We can’t afford to let them take over our debate just because they screem louder. They have had their turn. Their screeching doomsday calls are falling on deaf ears. Their rants have galvanized support from the left and the center. Obama’s numbers are rising. So is my support for him. He isn’t as liberal as I thought he would be. He spends far too much time listening to the extreme right’s talking points. He should get to the business he was elected for. He has a mandate. Do it.