James and the Cold Gun

How about that, I'm back.

This blog took a field trip into the big city last night to catch up with an old friend. Two, actually: a long-suffering editor and James Bond. The editor has all the familiar gripes, and Bond is still burning about stuff that happened two years ago in the last movie. The new one isn't a tenth as good as that one. The editing is terrible--everything shot in choppy close-ups--and there isn't even a pretension toward story. For instance, we don't get a flashback to the last film, so Bond just comes roaring out of the gate, shooting people for reasons you sort of get (but it clearly doesn't matter if you do). Judi Dench, meanwhile, is swell as M, but also does inexplicable things: Why is she helping Bond now? And why isn't she anymore?

The transitions between scenes are largely hilarious. At one point, we get two minutes of CSI gibberish about how the money in some dead guy's wallet had microfibers from some other guy who just cleared customs etc. etc. For Chrissakes, just say: Bond, go to Haiti, and get it over with. Nobody in the studio or the audience seems to care if you come up with something plausible, so why bother?

Some small touches were nice. The song is pretty good; I'd even say it's got the most street cred of any since Live and Let Die. It would've gotten bonus points for actually using the title. Even Duran Duran pulled off that one. The title sequence was also pretty fun. But both of those positives get undercut by one mystifying negative: The classic theme doesn't show up until the closing credits. I just don't get it. That two minutes of music is worth at least a half hour of audience goodwill, and you bury it till the end? You really think David Arnold is doing something better with his anonymous score?

Even the trailers were embarrassing. John Cleese has signed on to embarrass his geriatric ass in the new Pink Panther movie. Even worse, my life model has a bit part; is this the best he can get these days? The Bond people couldn't throw him a bone?

And the Star Trek preview just made me miserable. Yes, I'll be there opening day; I'm not made of stone. But the whole thing looks like Clone Wars, from the what-just-happened graphics to the cluttered story to the blank-eyed youngsters. Free advice: Reboots only work when the original stunk.

A Better Tomorrow

Speaking of first lines and Seventies sci-fi, I should also point to the copyright page of Isidore Haiblum's Interworld, which contains the following:

A portion of this work appeared in Swank magazine.

My Spaceship Knows Which Way to Go

This post is about one of the greatest first lines I've ever read. But first I'm going to bore you with some thoughts about Seventies sci-fi.

Our friends at Outside the Dome have an ongoing series about bargain-bin genre novels from the Me Decade. They've covered lots of the high points, but I want to suggest one stylistic tic that I think defines the genre: the hipster voice.

I haven't read enough of these novels to speak definitively, because frankly a lot of them really suck. But most of the ones I've picked up--both highly regarded ones and obscure trash--have a nasty, nihilistic tone that sounds something like Lenny Bruce doing a Mystery Science Theater act over an Asimov story. In other words, you've got many of the standard sci-fi tropes--Earth recovering from disaster; space crews exploring the unknown--except the narrator is sneering at them. The characters are inevitably nasty to each other, especially when it comes to race (every black guy is a Panther, every white is Archie Bunker). There are lots of offhand references to terrible things happening, with no weight given to them in the story or in the narrator's head. ("We lost Switzerland to the Garcia Plague last year.") Sex is pervasive and embarrassingly dated (TOPLESS STEWARDESSES!!!!!!). Even better is the language itself, full of radical slang that was out of fashion as soon as it hit the page.

At any rate, that's exactly what I got when I picked up a copy of Ron Goulart's A Talent for the Invisible at the book-exchange rack at my train station. Every single trope, down to the teleporter-hostess who asks our hero if he wants to have sex before he blips off to Portugal. So why am I determined to read this one to the end? Because of the very first line, one of the truly great specimens of the genre*:

Robots were chasing him.

For that, I'll put up with 144 pages of horseshit.

* The best ever, of course, leads off A Scanner Darkly. Look it up!

Celluloid Bikers Is Friday's Theme

Damnation Decade gets a nice review at Ain't It Cool News:

D20 Damnation Decade

Okay, I am NOT a fan of the d20 Modern system. Never have been. As much as I love the d20 system for all my fantasy needs – the modern version of the game always felt forced and required too much tweaking to feel anywhere near right. I’ve heard of some folks using it to create some cool Zombie survival horror RPGs, but I always shrugged since there are like 12 of those on shelves already. So when I say I found a reason to play d20 Modern…

I normally wouldn’t write about a 2 year old supplement, but when the AICN reader
who wrote the book asked me to take a look at it, his pitch got me pretty damned interested. He found a way to make the campy nature of the d20M system work in its favor. He made a campy game. Set at the end of the world…in the 1970’s. Inspired by the 1970’s that makes AICN what it is, the conventions here won’t sound foreign to any of you readers at all. Nazi clones from Brazil, UFOs, Sasquatch, Government spooks, Albino Zombie/Vampires, psychic demons, androids, mad doctors, an ass kicking Elvis, pissed off nature, the Russians and the devil himself Richard Nixon. If it appeared in 70’s genre films, it appears in this game. All thrown together into one crazy, mind-splintering universe. You play truck drivers, street-smart detectives, kung fu hipsters, roller skating hotties and rollerball players that end up uncovering these vast conspiracies and must fight to save the world from the brink of destruction again and again.

The thing is pretty damned fun, and I had a hell of a time just reading it cover to cover. You can play it dark like Omega Man or The Exorcist or light and fluffy like Paranoia without all the extra lives. If you play d20 Modern, or enjoy modern campaign settings, then as an AICN reader you pretty much owe it to yourself to at least thumb through this one at your FLGS. It’s got a three-page bibliography of the 70’s movies that inspired the book, which is almost entirely comprised of AICN essential viewing. Published by Green Ronin, it is also fully compatible with their TRUE 20 line.

I Wait All Night for Links Like These

At right, I've added a page for my article on The Nightfly.

So Sue Me

An RPG vet gives Damnation Decade a nice notice:

Wow. Just wow.

Damnation Decade has been on my "check it out" list for a while now, and I succumbed today. Ever since downloading it, I've been bothering all my friends with lots and lots of quotes.

Instead of writing up an actual review sort of thing, I'm going to do more of the same here.

"What the hell happened? Nobody who knows the truth is telling. But it all seemed to start two years ago—on August 9, 1974.

President Stanton Spobeck’s dirty tricks had finally caught up with him, and he was about to resign before he could get booted from office in disgrace. Then a once-in-an-epoch earthquake snapped off the West Coast of Americo and plunged it into the ocean. Spobeck stayed in office in the interest of national stability, promising to face the music once the crisis was over (wink wink).

But over the next two years things just kept getting worse. The environment tanked. The monsters (or whatever they are) came out of the closet. And Spobeck put the entire Southwest of Americo under martial law. He claimed the area had been contaminated and was facing dangerous aftershocks from the quake. But everybody knows he’s trying to keep something trapped in there. You can’t turn on the news without seeing elliptical reports of massacres and riots across the farm belt. Something big and hungry is on the hunt. But what woke it up? And what does it want?

Nobody is taking this well. Americo’s cold war enemies are striking while the country is distracted, sending invasion forces across their borders and gobbling up huge chunks of the free world. And of course, back at home, the nation is partying in deep denial, shaking their moneymakers in lavish BootyDome dance halls or cheering along to Omegaball, the blood sport that has become the fastest-growing pastime in the world. Others have taken refuge in secular cults promising everything from a peek at your past lives to a ticket on an ancient astronaut’s flying saucer.

Just about the only people who aren’t partying up a storm or making a power grab are you and your team of adventurous friends. Why? You know something everybody else doesn’t. According to the prophecies of an obscure sixteenth-century mystic named Abednego Trestle, the world as we know it is going to end at the stroke of midnight on December 31, 1979—unless someone does something to stop it.

That’s your job. Welcome to Damnation Decade. "

The only true creative innovation since the great quake has been the tabletop game Booty and Bugaboos. Created far from Fun City, in a small lakeside town in the Middle West, B&B was supposedly inspired by the waves of horrible nocturnal armies that regularly menace the region. Highbrow critics, bored senseless by mainstream corporate offerings, have gushed over the game’s “outsider” artwork and unpolished prose style, not to mention the avant-garde dynamic it fosters among players—something between group therapy and doing your taxes."

"Gordon Lightfoot: A cargo vessel lost under mysterious circumstances in the Great Inland Oceans. Memorialized in a hit song by Stanardian folk singer Edmund Fitzgerald."

"Lean and looming, with tar-black hair and a horsy face, Herman Purvis rose to fame portraying Tanko, the numinous alien counselor on the cult television series The Sand Puppies. Now Purvis has traded the blue pajamas of the Extra-Terran Expeditionary Force for a beige blazer, black turtleneck and tight checkered slacks—his uniform of choice for leading viewers Beyond the Barrier once a week. In a little under a season’s worth of shows, Purvis has given audiences a glimpse of lost continents, lake monsters and size twenty-five footprints. For a team of adventurers battling the unseen enemies of mankind, Purvis’s program is a solid—if not always reliable—roadmap to the unknown."

"Muscle Cars: These powerhouses have big, thirsty engines and exhaust systems that can wake the dead. Popular favorites include the Turbonado, the Jackalope, the Pro Forma, the Nuevo, the Fontanelle and the El Topo. They come in two-door and four-door models; both are two squares wide and four squares long.

Squaresville: The archetypal family sedan, the Squaresville is four doors of dull but sensible car. It is two squares wide and four squares long.

Vandingo: A large van, often equipped with a kitchenette and bed and decorated on the outside with inspirational scenes from the mythic unconscious. It is two squares wide and four squares long. If the Vandingo’s rocking, don’t come knocking."

And finally, from the inspirations:

"Quintet
(Robert Altman, 1979)
If you see only one Altman movie about Paul Newman hunting seals and playing oddball board games after the apocalypse, this is the one to go with.

Star Wars
(George Lucas, 1977)
A cult hit that got buried by The Goodbye Girl at the box office. Hard to find on DVD, but it occasionally makes the rounds on the midnight-movie circuit."

This is a work of genius. It seems to hit every note in its target: Nixonian paranoia, Howard Hughes paranoia, lurking Nazis paranoia, cryptozoological paranoia, UFO paranoia, everything is here.

I hope I get to run it.

Dork Calling Orson

I've been on a Welles kick lately, after reading a book of interviews. (Obligatory trivia: Orson, like Hitchcock, was raised a Catholic. God loves fatsos.) Sadly, most of his movies just don't hold up--he either didn't have the money to finish them, or he didn't have the final cut, so you end up with bastardized mishmashes. "Mr. Arkadin," for instance, has lots of great flourishes but ultimately just comes off as disjointed and silly.

"Citizen Kane," of course, was the one time he had total control, the one time a movie looked exactly the way he wanted it to. And it shows. It's not a perfect movie by any stretch, but damn if it's not a singular vision, top to bottom. The look, the acting, the vibe, even the credits--it's a genre all to itself. (At least until David Lynch came along. This is probably obvious to all the film geeks in the audience [Mom?], but there are so many influences there, from the weird cuts and camera angles to abrupt changes in tone...amazing.)

Watching "Kane" again, for the first time in years, I had a Deep Thought. The going interpretation seems to be that Rosebud stands for Kane's lost childhood. But I wonder if it actually stands for his lost son. The movie tells us, as a quick aside in newsreel footage, that Kane's first wife and son died in a car crash just after the divorce. There's no scene where Kane gets the news, or reflects on the deaths, or otherwise mourns. I wonder if "Rosebud" represents a delayed reaction to the news. Coming to the end of his own life, Kane flashes back to his childhood and all the happiness he lost--and then realizes his own kid lost everything.

Any takers out there?

Just a Little Savage

Longtime readers (Mom?) know that I've been complaining about the state of sci-fi forever--it's too serious, it's too dark, it doesn't have the oomph of the old cheeseball stuff. Last week, I put my money where my blog was and bought some Doc Savage reprints--and returned them after about thirty pages.

There's cheese and then there's cheese. Lovecraft stories are practically wheels of brie, but he knew how to craft language and deliver genuine scares, even seventy years on. He also find a way to stuff huge ideas into his stories without making them unworkable messes.

With the good doctor, there is absolutely nothing going on under the surface: The story is exactly as dimwitted and hamfisted as it sounds. Plus you never have the sense that Lester Dent is in control of his prose. Every last paragraph has an awkward construction or overwritten line that takes you out of the moment--the kind of stuff we used to pass around for laughs at the high-school magazine. Plus the characters all sound the same, plus the stuff about autogyros and lantern-jawed heroes is much funnier in theory, plus plus plus.

I can see why this stuff was revolutionary, and why it's such a great template for everything from the Fantastic Four to Buckaroo Banzai. But it just doesn't hold up. For literary thrills, you'd get more out of Mack Bolan.

Last Call for Lunatic Liberals

Mr. Right

R.I.P. I actually have a William Buckley story.

He was godfather to someone at my high school, so he showed up to give our commencement address. Little did we know we were in for an Andy Kaufman routine. Nobody could understand his accent--which sounded like Thurston Howell moments after a stroke--and the few things we could pick up were incomprehensible. (I still refuse to believe, after all these years, that he actually opened his spiel with a joke that hinged on the word "Shithead.") I have no clue how long he spoke but when he was done he got a standing ovation out of sheer relief. We all felt like the guy in the wheelchair who finishes the marathon a week after it's over.