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I decided to publish a short-story collection. Having gone through the publishing process with Bootstrap the Far Side, it seemed silly not to put out a collection. I see myself as primarily a short-story writer, so I should publish them. Of course, some of my stories have already been published in magazines, but if you're a fan, it can be quite annoying (and expensive) to ferret around the internet to find all the individual magazine issues that contain my stories. Some of the venues, like Deep Magic, are no longer in business. Then there are all the unpublished stories. Some of them will never reach readers if I don't publish them myself.
I'm calling it "Attack on Boredom." The name is part of the prompt I used in Midjourney to generate the front cover art. I also like that it sounds like a pulpy sci-fi movie title. More practically, it reflects my intention for the book. I don't have any pretentious theme. I didn't want to use one of those self-important titles about my life that I sometimes see authors do for collections, like "Reflections on…", "My…Journey" or some drivel like that. The organizing principle of the book is right in the title. I want to please the reader by attacking their boredom with engaging stories. I strive to give people an escape for a little while by transporting them away from the chaos of the world. My ego is in there somewhere, but mainly as a function of whether or not I was able to delight readers. The story lineup for the book is tentatively done. The book is formatted and I just ordered proof copies of the paperback version for final quality checks. There is one story in the collection that I already had out for consideration at a magazine, so if they pick it up, their contract's exclusivity clause would keep me from putting it in a collection for many months. I'm supposed to hear back by the end of December 2024. I might have to do a last-second substitution for that story ("You Get One Warning") if it gets picked up. For that reason, I can't tell you the exact lineup yet, but when it's finalized, I'll post the list in this blog. My planned release date is April 18th, 2025. I'll keep you posted. It was another slow movie week so I ended up going to see Smile 2. I saw the first one which was mediocre but watchable, so I gave it a shot.
The first thing the movie lets you know is that it is a Parker Finn film. He wrote, directed, and produced it, and he doesn't want anyone to forget it. He's got some of the most obnoxious credit typography I've seen in years. So it's all his fault. If anyone hires him again, there'll be no excuse. Ostensibly he didn't do the casting because Naomi Scott is a strong performer. To start with, it's simply a very boring story. We all know how Smile worked. It's like a play on Final Destination, the curse that keeps on giving. If you witness one of these demon-inhabited people kill themselves, then you're next--no exceptions. My point is that this isn't a movie about exploring the curse. That's what Smile was about. So how did they make Smile 2 interesting? They didn't. There was a fragment of a thread about a guy who thought he could sorta-kinda break the murder chain, but they never engaged with it. The movie is pretty much nonstop on the main character, a pop idol named Riley Skye. Since this is the 21st century we can't have a protagonist who isn't piteous, so she's a recovering drug addict who lost her man in a car crash a year ago and suffered some serious injuries. No doubt that is supposed to wring some pathos from us. At the very end of the movie, we get to see that she grabbed the wheel from her boyfriend and wrecked the car herself. Yay, I like her less. In fact, the entire movie is one long string of scenes that make Skye less and less likable. She starts out as a poor-little-rich-girl who lost her man and picked up a few scars, but by the end, she is a raging psycho bitch whose bitchiness has nothing to do with the demon. When her death came it was good riddance to bad rubbish for me. That's problem one: Skye is not ever a likable character. Problem two is that the story is a milquetoast collection of banal scenes in which we have to watch Naomi's face react to yet another psychological onslaught. It's just boring. Oh, and she drinks water in nearly every scene. There's a line where she says that's what her therapist said to do when she wants to use, but they have her down an entire liter of water on camera nearly every damn time she's not moving. I'd call it bad writing, but the Voss product placement probably earned Finn Parker more money than the movie will make. How many times can Skye wig out in her apartment in an interesting way? How about when she wigs out in her drug dealer's apartment? Or in her dressing room? Or in a hospital room? Or the dingy walk-in freezer of a boarded-up Pizza Hut? The movie is mostly Skye standing in a room wigging out. She's a decent looking woman, but it got old almost immediately. That gets us to direction. Apparently, Parker Finn can't do an exterior shot without contaminating it with his idea of cool. So we have to suffer these long exterior shots that rotate through 360 degrees…because. We have to look confusingly straight down on Riley's NYC apartment building…because. No doubt he could explain some lame visual metaphor for psychic turbulence, but I certainly didn't enjoy it. Worse, there are entire sequences that are disavowed. We get some crazy happenings with broken stuff and mess and chaos, and then, it didn't happen--it was all in her demon-infected head. Horror movies do that sometimes to great effect, but this movie did it so much that it eroded my trust in what was on screen. It became impossible to tell which bits of the narrative were real and which were fake. It's way too much of what is sometimes a good thing. It turns the watching experience into an abstraction. You can't react to anything because it's probably just another of Skye's fugues. For instance, she spends a lot of the movie interacting with her childhood friend who it turns out wasn't really there. These moves pollute so much of the narrative that the movie just becomes a completely ungrounded abstract collage of images--boring images mostly. Putting it all together, we have a poorly shot boring script about an unlikable main character that doesn't explore the supernatural element whatsoever. She dies at the end. Big whup. The upside is that writers like me can take heart that even heaping piles of shit get bought and produced, though if your material is properly awful, you might have to direct and produce the thing yourself as well. Aurealis is an Australian science fiction ezine. At one time it was the Australian science fiction magazine. They occupied a special place in my heart because they gave me my first speculative fiction credit when they published my story "Taggant 31."
After some years I decided to submit another story to them. It was more difficult this time because they have "limited demographic" periods wherein only Australians and New Zealanders can submit. Canadian magazines do something similar if they get government grants; such magazines are required to have 80% Canadian content. So I found a submission period, submitted a story, and tried to put it out of my mind. Anyone who has spent time submitting short stories to magazines will tell you that the best thing you can do is try not to think about it because it takes a while to get an answer. Six months later I still hadn't heard back from the people at Aurealis. That was odd. I dug into their submission guidelines and saw that I shouldn't query until it had been two months. Since it had been six, I felt I wasn't being impatient. I sent them a query about my story. This is the reply I got: Dear Ben, Our response time for subscribers is no more than two months and can be more than twice as long for non-subscribers, but we are always aiming for much shorter turnarounds. As your submission came to us as a non-subscriber, it was not fast tracked and is still in the submissions list to be read by our readers. -- Kind regards, Cas Le Nevez Submissions Manager Aurealis Magazine www.aurealis.com.au That put me off. Their submission guidelines indicate a two-month query horizon without mentioning anything about being a non-subscriber. But let's take them at their word. It might be as long as four months for those who dared to submit to the magazine without subscribing. I was making a six-month query and being told that my submission was still unread, not in process, not working its way through the bureaucracy, but "to be read." The idea that my story had been sitting with them for six months and was still unread boggled my mind. The indication that it was my punishment for being a non-subscriber was likewise odd. Setting aside purely emotional responses, I thought it was strange that there was no mention of what I might expect in the future. That's both rude and unprofessional. As of this writing, I have made 886 short-story submissions to various speculative fiction venues, so I consider myself well-experienced in the process. Still, I didn't want to do anything precipitous. Many of these magazines are run on a shoestring by haggard well-meaning people. Sometimes they get touchy at the implication that they aren't being responsive. They have great guilt kung fu. That's why I waited six months to query. Since I was already six months in, I decided to let it ride. Often the act of querying a long-overdue piece gets the wheels greased, encouraging an editor to make a decision on a story. At day 208--as indicated on my handy-dandy Submission Grinder page--I had enough. I was seven months in and they hadn't read it. The complete lack of guidance or sympathy from the Aurealis submissions manager combined with his non-subscriber shaming led me to believe that he intended to string me along for many more months. Feeling well abused, I sent a one line withdrawal email to the submissions manager. It was a triumph of self-control that I didn't embellish it with any smartassery. I was pissed off, but that was the end of it. Or not. I got this reply to my withdrawal (my underlining): Hi Ben, Thank you for letting us know. We hope you continue to submit to Aurealis in future and I wish you all the best with your publishing endeavours. -- Kind regards, Cas Le Nevez Submissions Manager Aurealis Magazine www.aurealis.com.au Ostensibly this human-form turd of a submissions manager was having fun at my expense. No reasonable person would expect anyone thus abused for seven months to ever consider dealing with Aurealis again. So I replied that I would never again submit anything to Aurealis. Unless you are a masochist with abysmal self-esteem, I suggest you do likewise. I have been playing Borderlands for eight years. More precisely, I've been playing Borderlands 2 and the Pre-Sequel; the other games in that family--Borderlands 1, Borderlands 3, Tiny Tina's Wonderland--are absolute crap. In the case of Borderlands 3, I consider it unplayable because the fonts are so small. For whatever weird reason, the normally incompetent Gearbox made a masterpiece with Borderlands 2 and the Pre-Sequel.
My point is that Gearbox, the game developer, is an awful inconsistent mess. They never managed to capitalize artistically or commercially off the success of Borderlands 2, so I had low expectations for this movie. For instance, you'll notice that David Eddings isn't in the movie to voice Claptrap. Why? Because the Gearbox CEO didn't want to pay him more than union scale (on a previous project) and it escalated to the CEO Pitchford assaulting Eddings at a Marriot Marquis--allegedly. A former Gearbox lawyer, Wade Calendar, sued Pitchford for all kinds of malfeasance, including giving himself a $12 million bonus. So, in my mind, I see Pitchford as this acrimonious ass with an ego the size of a planet whose antics poison Gearbox productions. Pitchford still runs Gearbox, so yes, this movie is a turd. The first thing to note is that they pushed the age of all characters by a solid twenty years or more. Tanis, played by Jamie Lee Curtis (65) is in her late thirties or early forties at most in the game. Lilith is the game's cheesecake, smoking hot, done up in fan-boy anime style. She is the uber-hot siren; her character is literally called a siren. So a 55-year-old Cate Blanchette is a completely different character at a completely different stage of life. Moxie, the over-sexualized barmaid tech-wizard mother of Scooter and Ellie, is played by Gina Gershon who is 62. I was pleasantly surprised to say she made it work well. So even though Ms. Gershon can deliver a smoking-hot Moxie and make all sexagenarians proud, my point is that the vibe of the whole crew is severely aged. This is no youthful crew fighting the good fight, it's a bunch of hardened, tired, sexless grandparents just trying to survive. And, hey, if they made it work, I'd be noting how clever they were in their adaptation, not regaling you with tales of Gearbox incompetence. They decided to write this movie about the events before or concurrent with Borderlands 1. They rewrote a lot of backstory. Most significantly, they invented a prophecy that said only a 'daughter of Iridian' could open the vault. Why? So they had an excuse to throw Tiny Tina in the crew. Most action movies avoid dragging a 12-year-old girl through deadly gunfights, but Tiny Tina is the most popular character of the franchise, so they needed an excuse to throw her into this flick. While they were at it, they made her sane, removing all the fun from her character. In the games, Tina's parents were murdered in front of her, graphically, by a psycho named Fleshstick; that drove her insane and set her on the path of becoming a bomb maker. Explosives took one of her arms. So, in the movie, we have a mostly sweet young girl possessed of all her limbs and sanity with no role to play. Boring. And I get it, you didn't all play Borderlands and roughly couldn't give a crap about the fidelity of the movie to the game franchise. I don't exactly disagree, but my point isn't so much about fidelity to the franchise, but to point out how much they bent the characters in the name of commerce. Tina was, as Marcus would call her, "a little psychopath", brilliantly voiced by Ashly Burch. She was magic and they destroyed that magic in pursuit of commerce. Everyone loves Tina, so how can't you put her in the movie? Yeah, I agree, but put Tina in, not some milquetoast approximation of her who is nothing more than living luggage. Alright, they ruined Tina's character and aged everyone two or three decades, so what about the movie? It was meh, a linear heartless story that checked a lot of marketing boxes but didn't deliver anything evocative on screen. The story is that the Atlas CEO hires Lilith to find Tina. Turns out that, in movie logic, Tina is supposed to be required to open the vault because she is the only daughter of Iridian (produced as a clone from Iridian blood). So Lilith goes to Pandora, finds Tina, realizes she's on the wrong team and joins with Roland and Krieg to save Tina from Atlas. In an unfathomable twist of logic, they seek out the vault key (a thing in the game, but three things in the movie). It turns out Tanis is the only one who knows where it should be, so Tanis joins the team. That's the point where they explain that Lilith's mom programmed Claptrap to help Lilith. So, magic, Claptrap is on the team too. It's just these endless convenient contrivances to get the team together. They spent so much time trying to shoehorn together these characters into the same frame, that they forgot to film a proper movie. By the time they have the band together, the movie is just about done. They have one more battle wherein Lilith goes siren for the first time ever. They eventually open the vault and kill the Atlas CEO (Athena did that in the game). But hey, what's in the vault? Now that it's open, isn't it dangerous? Don't know the answer to any of that. The movie just cut to a big post-Deathstar Ewok-style party in Sanctuary. It's silly, on a lot of levels. What's on the screen is just one overlong battle after another, then the lights come up. They develop no interpersonal relationships, get to use any cool alien tech or do anything noteworthy. It's just a bunch of overlong Mad Max style gunfights. It's a mediocre movie, at best. If you care about the game, it's a travesty, barely watchable. My recommendation is that if you feel you need to watch it, stream it for free somewhere in a few years, and make sure you're plenty intoxicated so your brain will slide over all the stupid bits. The story occurs in the early 1600s, based roughly on the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate. At that point in history, Japan was emerging from self-imposed isolation. The Portuguese were the only European power with a presence there, and the main character, John Blackthorn is part of a privateering crew whose job it is to harry the Portuguese. He shipwrecks in Japan with many of the crew. As the only remaining officer, he is singled out for special attention.
So, it's a classic stranger in a strange land story. He's alone, isolated, and the only people he can even speak with consider him an enemy pirate and heretic. John Blackthorn might as well be on an alien planet, so wide is the culture gap between Japan and England. Blackthorn is used mostly as a camera for the Japanese battle for succession; the previous sovereign dies and his male heir is a toddler, so there's tons of palace intrigue and jockeying for position with all the attendant questions about who gets to speak for the young heir. Despite having no salient part of the larger power play, Blackthorn's life is engaging at first. We watch him struggle with language, culture, and Japanese Catholics who are prejudiced against Protestants like Blackthorn. They even manage to build a bit of a love story into it for John. I spent the entire show waiting for Blackthorn to evolve, to become…something. Despite being in Japan for a couple of years, his Japanese never really reaches a serviceable level. In the first few episodes, I held out hope, but he just never grew (which lovers of the novel will tell you is a crime). For most of the episodes, it doesn't matter because he's a camera and there's plenty to see through his eyes. But I got this growing sense of annoyance as the series went on and he remained stagnant while the political events of Japan evolved around him. It was odd. The one truly poignant scene they gave Blackthorn was in the final episode: a private memorial at sea in a row boat with a Japanese woman. His Japanese was so crappy that it just ruined the whole thing. They essentially have Blackthorn live down to a Japanese stereotype of a barbarian foreigner: passionate, clumsy, witless, slow to learn, rude, and stubborn. And that almost-great scene is the last one he has. As infuriating as that was, it got worse. In the final episode, we don't learn what happens to Blackthorn. Toranaga muses about what might happen to him, but nothing else. We don't learn what happens to Toranaga. Does he become shogun? They don't say. What happens to the Catholics at court? They don't say. What happens to any of the political operators that you might have built an interest in? They don't say. It was the most fundamentally flawed last episode of a TV series I've ever watched. I've seen canceled shows do hurried wrap-up final episodes that were more cogent than the way they ended this series. So, I would save you from all that annoyance. Don't watch the show. It does a lot of great setup with fantastic settings and period costumes and then proceeds to waste it all. Most people enjoyed the original Avatar: The Last Airbender, the anime. That's an understatement. It's deeply loved across most demographics, so there was a lot of pressure on this new production. The previous cinematic release of a live-action version was a train wreck, so most people were wary.
I watched all eight season-one episodes on Netflix. That's probably my only real complaint: eight episodes. For those of you old enough to remember the days of three networks, you'll remember that a standard TV season was 24 episodes. The cartoon version of this show had 20, 20, and 21 episodes in its three seasons. So, if Netflix continues the way it started, those 61 episodes of content will be crammed into a meager 24. The production is quite strong. The bending effects are rendered extremely well. The fantastic animals like Apa and Momo are likewise very well done. In what I'm guessing is a nod to its anime origins, the producers decided to over-saturate the color palette. It gives the show a sort of half-step to being a cartoon. The bright blues of the water tribe outfits are too blue. Ang's saffron robe's colors pop too much. I got used to it. The way they've structured the episodes is a combination of slavishly following the original on a micro-scale while rejiggering big swaths of the narrative to speed things up. So, you'll find some characters' lines occasionally match the original exactly even though the episode structure is completely different. The actors they've cast are a mixed bag. The guys playing Iroh and Zuko are fantastic. Sokka and Kitara are pretty strong performers. Ang is the worst. Seriously, the title character is played by a kid who is the worst performer in the cast. The farther from Ang you get, the stronger the performance you get. For instance, Suki's mom on Kyoshi Island has a tiny part, but she's excellent at it. The tone of the show is quite well done. The most campy aspects of the anime have been smoothed away. Jet's little band of radicals which came across as so cartoonish in the anime, now presents as wholly more realistic. The singers in the caves under Omashu are still goofy, but realistically so. Iroh has been transformed from a campy over-the-top Zuko fan club into a more realistic, avuncular figure. The producers have done an excellent job of sanding away the explicitly childish bits of the anime while preserving the ethos of the show. Overall I'm very pleased with it. It is a fantastic refutation of M. Night Shamlyan's abysmal oeuvre. I will be bingeing the other two seasons the second they are released. It had been three weeks since I had been to a movie. Normally, I go every weekend, but the last three weeks have been devoid of anything even plausible to watch. I'm pretty flexible when I get desperate for a movie to watch, but the only other thing remotely plausible was The Marvels, but the previews just looked so stupid. So, I was excited to see The Holdovers.
The first thing to note is that it is a period piece. It starts in 1970. As a guy born before then, it had some nostalgia value for me. The second thing to note is that I wasn't annoyed at the writing. As a guy who writes and critiques fiction every day, I can't turn off my editor brain. Any bullshit writing that surfaces immediately pulls me out of a movie, so I'm happy to report that I found the writing to be quite strong. I was impressed that they dodged a lot of the tropes. This was clearly one talented person's vision, not the Hollywood focus-grouped-to-death crap that usually gets the big distribution deal. The previews tell the outline of the story. It's Christmas at boarding school and some of the kids have nowhere to go. Someone's got to supervise them, so let's assign Paul Giamati's character. The movie is a character study of him. Fortunately, they layer in two other robust characters played by Dominic Sessa and DaVine Randolph who deliver standout performances. Subtlety is what I loved about this script. The student-on-student hatred wasn't some over-the-top Carrie at the prom crap, just modestly hurtful and funny stuff. The school politics are just the right amount of cruel. Everyone and everything is written with nuance. I didn't always agree with the choices, but that was part of what made it interesting to me. The movie is shot quite quietly. There are no soaring musical cues, just some period music. There isn't a thrilling pace, just a functional gait to the end of the Christmas break. In fact, it's so quiet that there isn't even an epilogue. The ending is a little harsh and upends our characters, and they don't wrap it up for us with any kind of evocative epilogue. It's a risk. Some people want it all spelled out. Some people like to fill the ambiguity with their preferences. I think it works well. What makes this movie is Paul Giamatti. He plays this tragic-comic faux academic to perfection. His character is an irascible ass most of the time, but hilarious. As he and the kid navigate Christmas break, they layer in a few adventures that organically dip into both of their backstories which are quite evocative. So it's sort of tragic-comic as they lurch through the movie. One great surprise was DaVine Randolph. Narratologically, she is a writer's trap in this woke world: a black woman, a cook, very fat, and wise. She's perilously close to the "Mammy" trope. Fortunately, her character is written engagingly enough that all those labels are irrelevant. She functions like the moral conscience of the movie. Ms. Randolph does a superb job and plays off Giamatti excellently. In the end, it's a strong production well performed. I found the movie to be finely balanced between comedy and tragedy. They didn't milk the pathos. They didn't go for cheap laughs. It's thoughtful and nuanced. I recommend it to everyone.. Do you remember broadcast TV? I mean literally pulled out of the air by an antenna? Those of you under thirty years old probably don't. Personally, I didn't get cable TV until after college when I lived on my own. My father was too cheap to pay for it. This was all back when TV was on the NTSC standard.
These days I'm the maximum cord cutter. I buy internet service and stream several services through apps on streaming devices to cobble together a collection of I don't know how many channels. That's not even getting to all the on-demand content those streaming services provide. Anyway, recently Comcast/Xfinity had an outage in my area that lasted about 21 hours. It was the longest I'd experienced in my life. I'm not so weak that I can't live without TV, but I wanted to be able to get the news and weather. Days after the outage, I had forgotten about it. My girlfriend, however, had not. She was determined that we have an alternative. So she bought an HDTV antenna. That was new to me. In college, I started in electrical engineering, so I understood the idea. There weren't a lot of powered antennas when I grew up. So I thought it was going to be crappy reception of a handful of channels. I was shockingly wrong. I hooked this thing up, told my TV to scan for channels, and damned if it didn't find 28 HD channels (No one broadcasts NTSC/analog TV anymore). And the picture quality was astonishingly crisp. There was no static snow, no vertical/horizontal hold weirdness, just really good picture and sound. So, yeah, yay team, but practically speaking, who cares? Well, in the ever-changing streaming landscape, one of the hiccups I have run into is local channels. Everyone will sell you the marquee networks, but if you want local channels, it gets ugly and sometimes expensive. You typically pay extra to get access to local channels. Another hiccup I hit sometimes is Spanish content. I've been studying Spanish informally for years and like to listen to Spanish TV to keep up with it. I love to have it on in the background while I'm working in my basement shop. So, the Spanish package from your cable provider? Usually another pile of money, but not anymore. I get Telemundo, Univision, Unimas, and LATV over the air for free. Though, part of the bounty of Spanish TV is because I live in Pueblo Colorado. Other than sharing my astonishment at being so ignorant of what so-called HD TV was, I was encouraged by the potential cost savings. Now I can get my local channels and a good deal of Spanish over the air for free. The only thing is that over-the-air channels don't come with digital DVRs. But people still buy DVR boxes--standalone DVR units (remember Tivo?). Cue the SouthPark 'Member Berries. I feel old. I was looking forward to Asteroid City for months. I know better. Every time I build a movie up in my mind, it's almost impossible to meet those expectations. I didn't much enjoy this movie. I'll also spoil the snot out of it, so if that sort of thing annoys you, stop reading now.
The good news is that there is a lot of fun stuff in it, scenes I mean. Asteroid City is where this tiny metallic meteorite fell to Earth. It's a tourist attraction but also the site of a science competition. So we get a mixture of tourists and competitors with their families staying in a collection of tiny bungalows. They are forced to stay together because the government quarantines the place. In true Wes Anderson style, each character is severely quirky, so when they are forced to interact, you get the fun stuff he is famous for. That is, there is a bunch of fun, quirky characters who are pretty entertaining, scene by scene. The problem I had is that those scenes aren't stitched into anything resembling a coherent narrative. And, yes, I've seen other Wes Anderson movies that have similarly weird characters that very obliquely meander their way through a plot. So, I didn't expect much of a pace, or plot, really. But Asteroid City is incoherent, both for the lack of a salient plot, and the structure. Structure? Yes, structure. There are two movies in this movie. One was filmed in the desert in a washed-out pastel palette, and the other is a black-and-white flick set in a city theater. Constantly throughout the movie, they cut to Bryan Cranston doing stuff in this theater company. I can't say I parsed much of it because it was so disjointed, but it appeared to me that the black-and-white stuff was talking about developing a play for the stage, the story of which was the color footage interwoven into the film. So everything gets a bit meta, so to speak. The black-and-white stuff seemed to inform the color stuff. Pardon my vagueness, but I was not interested in trying to parse out some clever mote of wit from the pile of crap dumped on the screen. If there was something there, it took more effort to ferret out than I cared to put out. One big problem is that the cast is too large. They can't service everyone. Margot Robbie appears in one single throwaway scene. Jeff Goldblum has maybe five seconds, sitting in a space alien rubber suit. Matt Dillon gets a little more screen time playing the auto mechanic, and on and on. It felt to me like Wes had to rotate through each of the big-name actors to fill a quota or something. Bizarrely, there is actually a brief glimpse, blurry, on a dirty mirror, of Scarlet Johanson fully nude--maybe half a second. Why? That's one of a thousand questions I had bouncing through my head as I watched this thing. By the end of the movie, I was bemused. A good portion of my brain wondered if there was something wrong with me. Perhaps there is. The movie stopped more than ended. I don't know if anything was resolved. There certainly wasn't any emotion to it. It ended. I walked out. In the future I will likely skip Wes Anderson movies until someone convinces me he produced something worth watching. As failures (for me) go, this is an interesting one, but I hope to never see it again. I encourage anyone who feels they have to watch it, to not do so sober. I suspect this movie would be much more enjoyable in an altered state of mind. I had little faith in this movie going in. Cocaine Bear was such a disappointment that I was gunshy about trying another farcical comedy. The only reason I went was because I really like to see a movie in the theater every weekend and there were slim pickings this weekend. I certainly wasn’t going to throw my money at another insipid Fast & Furious episode.
Happily, The Machine is everything I hoped it would be. It's a tribute to the movie makers that they took such a brainless pretext and built a very strong comedy around it. The setup is in the previews: Bert's misadventures in Russia during college comes back to haunt him thirty years later. There's this crime boss who simply must have his precious watch that Bert and friends stole from him thirty years previously. All his miscreant kids want to find it to secure their position as his successor. Stupid as that setup is, they make it work brilliantly. It's about the tone. They manage to keep it ridiculous without going over the top. They manage to kill a lot of people and have you laughing about it. They infuse all the side characters with quirky personalities that the performers managed to get on film. They cast it perfectly. Speaking of casting, Mark Hamil does a stunningly good job playing Bert's father. As a guy who grew up watching his teenage mug torturing lines in Star Wars, I'd convinced myself that his best work was as the voice of Fire Lord Ozai in Avatar the Last Air Bender. I'm happy to report that I had him wrong. Somewhere in the last 40+ years, he became a very strong performer. There is a bit of a nostalgia bias in this flick. Because Bert is middle-aged, they have callbacks to pop references from his younger days that might not land with anyone born this century. Other than that, this movie is very entertaining. It's also very re-watchable because so much of what works is in the performances rather than the plot. Go watch it. I'll be surprised if you don't like it at least a little. Most of you will love it. It's an instant classic in the vein of The Hangover. |
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