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Adventure On Film: Westworld

Adventure On Film: Westworld

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westworld-1How any adult, in this day and age, can approach Westworld (1973) in anything remotely close to the appropriate frame of mind is beyond me. To further complicate an open, honest viewing, the film could not possibly telegraph its intentions more bluntly. Will the tourists attending Western World, Roman World, and Medieval World have the time of their vacationing lives? Well, yes –– but in short order, they will be done in by their out-of-control hosts, robots one and all, semi-sentient machines understandably tired of living out their days getting gunned down by their rich and warm-blooded doppelgangers.

Pardon me if in the course of this review I don’t concern myself with spoilers.  If the DVD’s cover doesn’t give the game away, the first two minutes of the film surely will.

Leaving, then… what? A cautionary tale, in which we fragile mortals should learn to stop messing around with simulacrums? Or is it an adventure in which the stakes are high and the six-guns are fast?

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Adventure on Film: Why Hollywood Gets it Wrong

Adventure on Film: Why Hollywood Gets it Wrong

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star-trek-game-beams-up-in-april-2013.jpgAs I write this, April is just around the corner, and now that Hollywood’s best and brightest studios no longer know how to calculate the beginning of summer, I smell blockbuster season ripening fast on the vine. Just think, in mere weeks, we can all flock to see Star Trek: Into Darkness, Iron Man 3, Wolverine, Oblivion, Pacific Rim, Elysium, and Man of Steel.

What do nearly all of these movies have in common? I’ll tell you, spoiler-free: the fate of the world will hang in the balance.

Which is why I shall be staying home –– again –– for blockbuster season. If I have learned anything in all my forays into drama, it is this: cinema offers no more boring subject, no greater snoozefest, than global peril.

Heresy, I know.

But I’m right. Here’s why.

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Master of Shadows

Master of Shadows

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MoS 6As I mentioned last week, Red Sonja’s first series ended with issue fifteen. But cancellation often came quickly and without warning in the Bronze Age of Comics (look it up – it’s my favorite era). So there was already another Red Sonja story written and illustrated, no doubt ready for coloring, when the axe fell.

Well, nothing went to waste at the House of Ideas, so in October 1979, the story was published as a back-up feature in Savage Sword of Conan 45, in glorious black and white. Master of Shadows reads like a new direction for the series was seriously being considered before the whole thing got shut down. It’s one of the rare Red Sonja stories completely free of the supernatural and with a plot that’s far more coherent than what we’ve come to expect from the She-Devil with a Sword.

The new direction is likely due in large part to Roy Thomas being replaced as writer by Christy Marx. If that name sounds familiar, it might be because you heard an interview with her a couple months back. Maybe you’re a fan of her sword-and-sorcery limited series, Sisterhood of Steel. Maybe you’re following her current take on Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld in the pages of Sword of Sorcery.

But, more likely, you’ll remember her as the creator of Jem, the truly outrageous holographic pop singer from the 1980s. Jem would occasionally get transported back in time or shanghaied by yetis in her never-ending quest to keep the Starlight Home for Plot Device Girls open. So Marx certainly would seem to have the writing pedigree to follow-up giant clams and ancient green robots. But she instead chose a rather straight interpretation of the character.

Of course, there’s still room for fun in a straight version of Red Sonja. The story opens with our heroine trying to catch a nap in a public park. Draped out on a park bench in her chain mail bikini, she certainly draws her share of appreciative leers, but three men in particular decide to approach her with the standard “show you a good time” dialogue. Two of the three get tossed in a nearby pond, while the third, who only identifies himself as the Master of the House of Shadow, tells her that she was right to toss them, but now she should leave town as they’ll want revenge. It’s good advice, but Sonja won’t be driven off.

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Adventure on Film: Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey

Adventure on Film: Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey

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Under a fearsome black-and-white moon, a boy, perhaps twelve, enters a fever dream of navigator2orange-fired torches whirling down infinite chasms, of men clambering up a towering church steeple, of skies moving too quickly for thought. The boy’s careworn, grubby face melts into black and white rippling water, and the nightmare — if nightmare it is — comes to a sudden end.

Welcome to Fourteenth Century Cumbria, a snowy, monochromatic waste, all bare rock and snowdrifts and blackwater lakes. In a hardscrabble mining village, young Griffin, plagued by his apocalyptic visions, waits for his idol, Connor, to return from a visit to the wider world. But even before Connor’s return, all talk is of death, for the Plague is come, marching inexorably closer.  The villagers quickly convince themselves that only a holy quest can save them, and on the slimmest of evidence — Griffin’s disjointed prognostications — Connor, Griffin and four other men set off, bound for a mineshaft so deep (it is said) that it leads straight to the other side of the world. Griffin’s band brings a copper cross that they hope to mount to a titanic cathedral as an offering, a Cumbrian plea to stave off death itself.

Griffin finds the mineshaft right enough, together with a mechanical battering ram with which the men bore a hole to the far side of reality. And what do they find once there?  Twentieth century New Zealand.

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Adventure on Film: Mirror, Mirror

Adventure on Film: Mirror, Mirror

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Stand back, comrades, the gloves are off.mirror-mirror-440

I hate this movie.

Unfortunately — and somewhat confusingly — I also love it.

Help.  I’m so confused!

Riddle me this: why exactly did Mirror, Mirror’s good king have to marry the wicked stepmother queen? Perhaps it’s because she’s so smartly played by Julia Roberts, but no: the reason given, in a sassy prologue, is that the king discovered certain things (martial skills) that he could not teach his daughter. Therefore, he had to marry anew, his first wife having conveniently died giving birth to Snow White.

Let’s stop right there. This is an example of what we Black Gate critics call GLOSSING OVER. In certain circles, it’s also called DELIBERATE OBFUSCATION.

The information that the king must remarry is presented so fast, and with all the confidence of a logical fait accompli, that we are supposed to ignore its hypocrisy, stupidity, and outright vapidity and quickly move on.

Well. This lil’ critic ain’t fallin’ for it.

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Genre 2013: The John Pierce Experiment

Genre 2013: The John Pierce Experiment

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Unknown-1You remember John Pierce: his Bell Labs team invented the transistor, and he coined the term. But, like the rest of us, he had his little gaps. When in his eighties, he met up with author Dan Levitin, who was busy writing that complicated puzzler of a book, This Is Your Brain On Music. Much to Levitin’s dismay, Pierce revealed that he had never knowingly heard any rock music. Now, as to how one can live in a developed nation and achieve this, I don’t know, but once Levitin discovered this curious deficit, the two had a little heart-to-heart, and Pierce asked Levitin to provide six –– count ‘em, six –– prime examples of rock and roll from which he might form an opinion and make appropriate generalizations about the whole.

What does this have to do with Black Gate and fantasy literature? Trust me. Read on.

Levitin’s six tunes were as follows:

  • “Long Tall Sally” by Little Richard
  • “Roll Over Beethoven” by the Beatles
  • “All Along the Watchtower,” by Jimi Hendrix
  • “Wonderful Tonight,” by Eric Clapton
  • “Little Red Corvette,” by Prince
  • “Anarchy in the U.K.,” by the Sex Pistols

Scary choices, methinks, especially those last two. But regardless of my opinion (or yours), Pierce’s request poses two dilemmas.

First, if faced with this same conundrum, which songs would you choose?

Second, what if this situation were applied to fiction? Or better yet, to the ongoing divide in genre vs. literary fiction?

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Adventure on Film: Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather

Adventure on Film: Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather

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Hogfather DeathHaving been all but dared, following my rather critical summation of The Color Of Magic (2008), to view a subsequent Pratchett adaptation, Hogfather (2006, made for TV), I confess I embarked on this quest with great trepidation, especially when I learned the production team responsible was essentially identical to that assembled for Color.

However, I am happy to report that Hogfather is a much superior effort. First, the comedy is spot on. Second, the concept of assassinating Santa Claus (or whatever) is fine dramatic fodder. Third, the film continually asks questions that we (the viewers) really want answered.

Questions such as, who is this Susan woman who looks like Keira Knightley (but turns out to be Downton Abbey‘s Michelle Dockery), and why exactly is she posing as a monster-fighting governess, when it’s perfectly clear she’s some sort of extremely powerful something or other –– and when do we get to find out what?

Great art has been made from less.

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Adventure on Film: The Duellists

Adventure on Film: The Duellists

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duellists2One of the oddest, most esoteric regrets in my life is that I long ago gave away my collection of the now defunct American Film magazine. Most of these, purchased primarily from sidewalk vendors in Manhattan, I do not care to recover; but I would give a great deal to have again the October issue from 1986. It contains a dialogue with film producer David Puttnam, and one small paragraph in that interview taught me more about collaboration than any other single event I know.

More on that in a moment. In the meantime, let me introduce one of Hollywood’s really fine on-screen adventures, The Duellists.

Now, I admit up front that as with The Horseman On the Roof, a title I explored a few weeks back, The Duellists contains no overt fantasy element; but what it lacks in sorcery, it more than makes up for in swords. Right out of the gate, Lieutenant D’Hubert (Keith Carradine, one of my very favorite actors) is ordered by a busy general to round up fellow cavalry man Feraud (Harvey Keitel) and escort him to the brig; it seems that Feraud has been dueling, illegally, with the mayor’s nephew. Feraud takes offense first to D’Hubert’s assignment and then to D’Hubert himself; he challenges him on the spot to a duel, an event D’Hubert, a reasonable man, ultimately cannot prevent.

Thus the wheel of this most simple of plots grinds into implacable motion: D’Hubert cannot ever contrive to avoid Feraud, and neither, in repeated duels, each instigated by Feraud, can ever quite kill off the other. Over the course of the Napoleonic wars, these two clash again and again in a battle both particular and symbolic. D’Hubert’s enlightened rationalism must stave off Feraud’s chivalric single-mindedness, and both, to D’Hubert’s dismay, must contend with the expectations of the times: that their differences constitute a “point of honor” (indeed, such was the title of the story on its U.S. publication), and that to settle this point, one of them must die.

But wait, you cry! What about David Puttnam and all those moldering magazines?

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Apex Magazine #44

Apex Magazine #44

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Apex Magazine 44-smallEugie Foster portrays a god of vengeance in “Trixie and the Pandas of Dread,” Lettie Prell writes about “The Performance Artist” and Tansy Rayner Roberts provides something of a romance in “The Patrician.”

Sarah Kuhn’s column explores the phenomenon of well-known genre figureheads making ill-conceived statements about women genre participants and fans, Maggie Slater interviews Eugie Foster, and editor Lynne M. Thomas’s regular “Blood on the Vellum” column rounds out the 44th edition of this e-magazine.

The issue is available for download from:

Buy issue 44 from Apex
Buy issue 44 from Amazon

The issue can also be read for free online at www.apex-magazine.com.

Adventure on Film: Could Holy Grail be the Funniest Film Ever?

Adventure on Film: Could Holy Grail be the Funniest Film Ever?

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arthur-kingJust as an older generation recalls with perfect clarity where they were when they heard of Kennedy’s assassination, I know precisely where I first saw Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975): perched on the floral-print sofa in my parent’s house, watching the film on a poor, weather-impacted PBS broadcast. I also remember falling right off that sub-par couch in paroxysms of laughter when the animator saved King Arthur’s band by conveniently suffering a heart attack.

I’d never seen anything like it.

And you know what? I’ve never seen anything like it since –– except perhaps Brian’s rollercoaster romp aboard a purple-people-eater’s spaceship in another Python outing, Life of Brian. (That one I saw in a theater, with my church-going mother sitting next to me. She laughed her head off.)

What I didn’t know back when I fell of that couch, as I’m fairly sure I do now, is that comedy is little more than tragedy plus time.

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