Category Archives: Reviews

Anti-nationalist sentiment – The Pursuit of Happiness (1934)

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First up, thanks to all of you who sent notes of encouragement after last week’s lengthy discussion of Alzheimer’s. It’s not an easy road to travel, but since when was life ever easy? It’s good to know how many people I have in my corner.

pursuitNow on to the blog I started writing two weeks ago, a group of thoughts about a movie I watched even more weeks ago, almost by accident. It’s old. So old that, if you search it on IMDB, it doesn’t even show up on the initial list of possible films, even if you type its exact title. It was made in 1934, and I discovered it because I was watching some films with Joan Bennett on YouTube. (Not a lot of Joan Bennett’s films are available on NetFlix streaming!) I was watching Joan Bennett films because I was reading a biography of the Bennett family, which was recommended by Lara Parker in her latest book, which I reviewed recently. All this discussion of her early film work got me interested in seeing some movies. That’s the way my mind flows. One thing to the next.

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Thor: The Dark World – Checking off the Boxes

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thor__the_dark_world_v_2_by_natetravis23-d5dktesSo I says to my wife this morning, I says, “Hon, is it just me, or are a lotta folks throwin’ a lotta other folks under buses nowadays?”

And she says to me, “Oaaaah, yeah, hon, they’s been throwin’ each other under buses right and left out dere in de alley!”

Okay, so, no we don’t really talk like that. We’re Baltimorons only in the geographical sense.

My actual question concerned my growing perception that people in the workplace are faking it. They take credit for work they didn’t do. They’re desperate to make it look like they’re accomplished big things, and they’re equally desperate to make it look like they never make a mistake. They therefore cast a lot of blame and aspersion on their colleagues. Colloquially, they throw each other under the bus an awful lot.

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Leadership Lessons in Ender’s Game

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enders-game-posterI had a meltdown Friday night. Fairly small thing, but one damn thing on top of many other things had me spending about fifteen minutes screaming at the heavens, demanding to know why I keep getting, um… used for the universe’s gratification without benefit of lubricant… when, day in and day out, I feel like I do nothing but the right things.

Huge self-pity fest. You have those sometimes. Nothing to do but get over it. I consider it the equivalent of the pressure valve on the water-heater kicking off, venting off some steam, and preventing the whole system from exploding. If it happens once, you may not even notice, or you notice and just monitor. If it happens once too often, well, there’s an obvious need for intervention.

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Review – Dark Shadows: Wolf Moon Rising by Lara Parker

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Wolf-Moon-RisingLara Parker is the (still) lovely lady who played the witch Angelique (and a few other roles) on the 1960s horror soap opera, Dark Shadows. She appears very briefly in Tim Burton’s recent film adaptation of the series, and she’s done a boatload of Dark Shadows audio productions for Big Finish, also usually playing Angelique.

Wolf Moon Rising is her third novel set in the Dark Shadows universe. (Or, more correctly, the Dark Shadows multiverse, which she’s expanded with this volume.) In her first venture, Angelique’s Descent, she gave us a biography of her character. That is, she chronicled one of Angelique’s numerous lives, albeit a short one. Angelique Bouchard was born in the 1770s and lived on the island of Martinique, where she was a servant to Josette DuPres, daughter of a wealthy French merchant. As a very young woman, Angelique fell in love with an American, Barnabas Collins, a young man on his first business trip abroad, representing his family’s company. Sadly, Barnabas had his fun with Angelique, then met her mistress Josette and forgot all about the poor servant girl. Josette, as heir to another fortune, was more fit to be the wife of a rich New Englander.

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Don Jon – Losing it

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Explicit Language Warning!

Yeah, that’s my second warning in as many weeks, isn’t it? Of course, you only know that if you’re still here after last week, right? Are you still here? I promise, this time out, not to say anything that will offend the sensibilities of my left-wing readers. Oh, except this observation: Miley Cyrus is a lot prettier when she’s trying to look like Michele Bachman than she is the rest of the time these days. There. That’s done. You’re safe now. On with the show. Which may offend the sensibilities of everyone not offended last week.

don-jon-posterJoseph Gordon-Levitt is an actor I admire a lot, ever since I first saw him play David Collins in Dan Curtis’s 1991 primetime remake of Dark Shadows.  He’s one of the most talented performers of his generation, taking on roles that are sometimes provocative, sometimes downright bizarre, but, even when he’s doing a comedy like 3rd Rock from the Sun or a blockbuster like The Dark Knight Rises, never pedestrian.

Recently, he broadened his career horizons by making his debut as a writer-director with Don Jon, a film in which he also starred. This film is laugh-out-loud funny, insightful and daring. I recommend it wholeheartedly… but… It may make you uncomfortable. It is very, very explicit. The opening line, narrated by Gordon-Levitt as Don Jon, contains the f-word and describes the state of his genitalia. It gets more explicit from there. So be warned. It made a lot of viewers in the theater where I saw it uncomfortable, even as they enjoyed it. Continue reading →

Atlas Shrugged Part III: Who Is John Galt? – Making the most of Social Media

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Screen Shot 2013-09-23 at 7.04.01 PMSo, in case you didn’t know, I’m a huge admirer of Ayn Rand. (And a few of you who did not know may have just defriended, unfollowed and generally banned my name from being spoken in your presence. I’m prepared to live with that.) Agree or disagree with her views, I don’t think you can claim that anyone in popular discourse (and certainly no other bestselling novelist) has quite so clearly presented the argument against collectivist thought as Ms. Rand. That’s why so many people dislike her work so intensely.

But I grew up being told that joining the herd, or letting others control you, is a bad thing. The herd mentality provided the motive force behind movements like Nazism and Soviet Communism. When I was growing up, everyone around me accepted that those philosophies were wrong. They were the philosophies of people who wanted to harm us. As I grew and developed my own personal moral philosophy, I concluded it was both sensible and moral to resist any attempt by others to make me conform to their ideals of what made a good person, or to make me live to serve their ends. When I discovered Ayn Rand’s powerful arguments, which supported what I believed, I became a fan. I especially loved Atlas Shrugged.

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Carter Hall is one bloodthirsty guy… A Review of The Golden Age Hawkman Archives, Volume 1

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gahaHawkman has been one of my favorite comic characters since I first heard of him back in the early 1970s. You might rightly ask if there’s a comic book character I’ve heard of who is not one of my favorites. A fair question. I don’t like Lobo or the Punisher. Wolverine wears on me after a while. He’s a great supporting character on a team, but I have little desire to read a whole book (or see a whole movie, even starring Hugh Jackman) about him. But if you were to ask me if there was a character created before 1975 who isn’t a favorite, well, probably no. I love them all. Each for different reasons.

In Hawkman’s case, I loved the fact that he came from another planet. I loved that his wife Hawkgirl was his equal partner in adventure. (She was later Hawkwoman, when we became socially aware, and then Hawkgirl again, when social awareness, um… took a cruise? I’m not sure.) I loved that he dressed in red, yellow and green. Not everyone can pull that off. There’s definitely not enough green in the superhero spectrum. If recent films are to be believed, there’s little color at all. Isn’t it sad that, after they went to all the trouble to invent Technicolor, that our films (superhero and otherwise) are now effectively in black and white again, they’re so drab? No, that’s not fair. Black and white films of yesteryear had far more color than many of our films do today.

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LSH RIP

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LSH_Cv23_ecyo86666t_And so it ends… With issue #23 of The Legion of Super-Heroes, the ninth American series from DC Comics to bear that title, the Legion is no more. Does anyone care? Seriously, call out if you do, but I’m really wondering. Well, it’s clear that Paul Levitz cares. He’s been writing the title for the past few years, and wrote it from 1977 – 1989.

Come to think of it, it’s a toss-up as to whether or not I care. I waited several days to read the damned thing, and I believe I let the penultimate issues pile up into a stack of about six before I read them, all in one sitting. (I skimmed.) Was a time I would have read the new issue the day it came out, probably in the car on the way home. (I should point out I refer to a time when I did not drive. My mother drove, whilst I perched in the shotgun seat with a lime Slurpee. I learned early not to drink and drive, and certainly not to read comics and drive.) Nor did I skim in those days. Indeed, I told everyone around me to shut up, because I was reading. Or I hid in my room where the TV somehow never distracted me, because the comics were so good. Continue reading →

Review – The Tarzan Collection (Well, the last half, anyway)

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TarzanCollThis DVD collection include six movies: Tarzan the Ape Man, Tarzan and His Mate, Tarzan Escapes, Tarzan Finds a Son, Tarzan’s Secret Treasure and Tarzan’s New York Adventure. These comprise all of the MGM Tarzan films, filmed between 1932 and 1942, which starred Olympic Gold Medalist Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan and Maureen O’Sullivan as Jane Parker. (Ms. Parker was an Englishwoman, unlike her namesake from the books, Jane Porter, who was a Balmer gal, the daughter of a Hopkins professor, as I recall.)

I’ve had this sitting on my shelf for a while, and had only watched the first three films. I stopped short of Tarzan Finds a Son some months (probably years) back. I suck at time sense. My kids tell me all the time. Or are they my grandkids? Hmm… Continue reading →

Review – Starbrat by John Morressy

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StarBrat1So I believe I mentioned in my Balticon report that I bought a lot of books Memorial Day weekend. Now, by no means am I going to impose any ridiculous rules upon myself to limit book-buying. If you would suggest to me that I should only buy in a year what I can read in a year, or that I shouldn’t be allowed to buy one new book until I finish two others that I already own, well, you’re suppressing my natural joy and impinging upon my creative process! So… well… Shut up!

But I know I ought to try to be reasonable. Maybe a little. My therapist suggests it’s a good idea, anyway. I therefore have resolved that at least every other book I read should be one that’s been sitting on my shelf for a while. I suppose some would go with an organized process, LIFO or FIFO or some such. I just pick stuff at random. Sometimes I go digging for the zine I bought 30 years ago and forgot to read. Sometimes I just grab something off the library cart that’s sitting in my office… Continue reading →