Sunday, April 3, 2022

The Cineverse Podcasts: Breathless

For just over a month now, I had the pleasure of taking part in the weekly podcasts of the CineVerse film discussion group, run by Erik J. Martin who produces the superb Cineversary podcasts commemorating the anniversaries of major films that have had an impact on American and world cinema. I had been a guest on Erik's Cineversary podcasts before for the 50th anniversaries of "Easy Rider" and "The Last Picture Show." So I was definitely excited to join this group of film devotes to discuss an eclectic collection of films, both major blockbusters and small independent films, American films as well as films from around the world. I will be putting up a series of links to the various films we had analyzed recently.

In a bit of a backward order as I'm catching up on blogging, this is the link to our recent discussion of French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard's seminal 1960 film "Breathless," starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg. The film is recognized as one of the major works giving rise to the French New Wave movement.

Check out the discussion and by all means watch "Breathless." The film is definitely a unique experience, and one I recommend to people and film students to see how they react. Truth be told, it's not a film I greatly enjoy viewing, yet one that needs to be understood and appreciated as an interesting artifact of a certain time and culture. Volumes had been written about "Breathless" and Godard, so suffice it to say here that the film is an odd, intellectual experience. It's very raison d'être is to break cinematic rules, to defy conventions. To that end, the film is full of jarring editing techniques, dialogue, and plot twists and turns that are designed to confuse and confound its viewers. There are moments where the story rushes along at a hyper-paced clip, using a series of off-putting jump cuts, and then there is a very, very long and slow, plodding scene of the two main characters are stuck in an apartment, reciting dialogue that is often confusing and meandering. Overall, the film is forcing its audience to engage with it, to think about what it wants to say about cinematic conventions, and how so many of the conventions we take for granted in films, especially Hollywood films, are artificial constructs.

Again, it's an odd and confounding film, but perhaps one that we can appreciate in an age when Hollywood cranks out little more than mindless superhero epics or preachy virtue-signaling award-bait films that leave little to the imagination and personal interpretation. 

So listen to the podcast and give "Breathless" a try.

Tuesday, March 29, 2022

If I were to film and cast and score "Fatal Pose."

Whoa! Where did the time go? 

Well, life and the job and various other circumstances got in the way of updating the blog in a while, so I wanted to post this link to the latest interview I gave about FATAL POSE recently. Hermione Lee, the incredibly talented young author of the the young adult romantic fantasy IN THE NAME OF THE OTHERWORLD, recently interviewed me for her Facebook Blog, "Writers and Writing."

We discussed everything from my inspirations for the book to who I could see cast in the lead role if it would ever be made into a movie and what music would be ideal for the soundtrack.

The short answers are in the following order: the inverted mystery format from the classic TV detective show "Columbo," Henri Cavill in the lead role as Gunnar Marino, and classic Sammy Hagar-era music by Van Halen in the soundtrack.

So right now, you want to click on the link to Hermione's page. And right now you want to read FATAL POSE by going to its Amazon page. Just do it right here and now! 

Tuesday, December 28, 2021

Forget the losers who make fun of you for enjoying Hallmark Christmas movies!


Forgetting to Google myself often enough, I missed this article from October in Cosmopolitan where I was quoted on how people feel pressured to say the actually “hate” certain types of entertainment they usually consume. This pressure has given rise to a sort of oxymoron of a phrase called “hate watching,” or how people who watch a certain show regularly would then turn around and claim to watch just to reinforce their hatred of that show.

 

The term is quite foolish and the article correctly points this out. There is no such thing as “hate watching.” You enjoy watching something but you feel embarrassed to admit it when all your friends make fun of your favorite entertainment.

 

In my quote, I make the point that most often female-centric entertainment gets most of the disrespect and the pressure on their fans to justify themselves. Traditionally, women who enjoyed watching soap operas or reading romance novels got most of the grief. These days relationship-oriented reality shows like The Bachelor and The Bachelorette get piled upon as well.

 

Since we’re in middle of the holiday season as I write this, just between Christmas and New Year’s, it makes me think of all the people who enjoy piling on the Hallmark Channel’s Christmas movies. I wonder how many fans of those movies claim to be merely hate watching in order to “know how bad they really are.” What I would suggest to all those Hallmark Christmas movie fans—while Hallmark Christmas movies are not really my thing, I do enjoy watching Hallmark’s various cozy mystery series—is that they should first give all their critics the middle finger and then ask those very sophisticated and hip friends of theirs if they haven’t yet gotten sick of Batman and Spider-Man reboots. I mean, how many times can you really tell the same old story about how witnessing his parents’ deaths warped Bruce Wayne and created Batman? Or the significance of Uncle Ben’s death to Peter Parker’s psyche.

 

Watch whatever you like and ignore the losers who give you a hard time for it!

Saturday, December 18, 2021

Some guy named Oliver is upset with declassified JFK documents…

Oh, yeah! Oliver Stone! Now I remember. He used to be big in the early 90s. Unfortunately—or, rather, fortunately—he hasn’t been relevant since. Nonetheless, as he was readying the November 22 premiere of his new Showtime documentary, “JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass,” about, you guessed it, explosive new “facts” that prove a vast Deep State conspiracy killed John F. Kennedy, he had been giving various interviews, basically handed the microphone  by the media to revisit conspiracy theories that have been long proven to be a pack of sensationalistic, absurd fabrications. The Hollywood Reporter gave him the opportunity to write this op-ed piece about his dissatisfaction with a newly released batch of recently declassified government documents about Kennedy’s murder. For Stone, not surprisingly, the documents are still incomplete and it still gives him reason to disbelieve the official version of events.

 

In his documentary, Stone now points the finger to Allen Dulles, one of the founders of the CIA, as the chief mastermind behind the assassination. Stone apparently has decided that Lyndon Johnson, his head conspirator in his 1991 film, “JFK,” was not really the grandmaster behind the conspiracy after all. And Stone must have decided that his insanely long list of conspirators, including FBI agents, J. Edgar Hoover, the Dallas police brass, members of every intelligence agency and high-ranking commanders in each of the armed forces, “the homosexual underworld,” New Orleans businessmen, and Texas oil tycoons was not quite long enough.

 

Why Stone is given the platform to make his new documentary now and treated to a great deal of favorable media coverage is puzzling. In the wake of Covid, anti-vaccination movements, and the age of QAnon, the media’s long-running romance with conspiracy theorists has thankfully cooled off. Oliver Stone, however, has turned up again and somehow he’s being given the benefit of the doubt by outlets like the Hollywood Reporter. Maybe they think this favorable treatment is okay since Stone’s films supposedly performed an important function of inspiring much needed skepticism in people when it comes to official government sources and organizations of power and influence.

 

Except Stone’s work has done nothing of the sort. “JFK,” his magnum opus, his impassioned call for truth and justice and taking back democracy from shadowy cabals that subvert the will of the people, is a piece of fraud. The film is a manipulative con job that created enough controversy to garner the film smash-hit box-office numbers at the time of its release and made Stone a lot of money. Luckily, not only have historians dismantled the film at the time of its release, but the in the years since, numerous publishers have bucked the conspiratorial trend and put forth several books challenging the JFK conspiracy mythology. Amidst the multimillion-dollar conspiracy industry the media had created over the decades, feeding the appetites of book readers, TV-viewers, and moviegoers wanting to believe in real life capers and shocking mysteries, more rational minds have prevailed and have thankfully debunked all the conspiratorial foolishness clouding John F. Kennedy’s memory. Among several books and documentaries on the subject, the best one is Vincent Bugliosi’s “Reclaiming History,” not only answering every conspiratorial argument but exposing Stone’s film in a chapter so long and so thorough as to let it stand alone as a book by itself.

 

While the exaggerations and manipulative slight of hand in Stone’s torturously long 3-hour movie can hardly be covered here—again, I highly recommend Bugliosi’s book just for its analysis of the film—I think it’s important to make the point that “JFK” is deliberate deception and not, as film critics and his fans always claimed, simple artistic license in order to create a coherent narrative. “JFK” is a carefully constructed set of distortions and misrepresentation of facts and people. The most egregious of these distortions is the presentation of where people sat in Kennedy’s limousine as it drove through Dealey Plaza. The lynchpin of the entire Kennedy conspiracy is the argument that the bullets that struck Kennedy and Texas governor John Connally could not have come from the direction of the Dallas School Book Depository and been fired by Lee Harvey Oswald. “JFK” attempts to demonstrate this in one of its courtroom scenes where Kevin Costner’s Jim Garrison character displays a drawing of the car, its seats, and the positions of the car’s occupants, proving beyond a doubt that bullets that struck Kennedy and Connally would have had to magically shift in mid air to cause the damage they did. The scene is a dramatization of conspiracy theorists’ “magic bullet argument” that also claims to prove that the wounding and killing shots could not have come from Oswald’s position on the sixth floor of the book depository. The problem of the scene, however, as is the case with the entire conspiracy theory it’s based on, is that the position of the seats and their occupants in the film is not accurate. Stone knowingly changed the position of the limousine’s occupants to make the “magic bullet” arguments of the conspiracy theorists look plausible. This is not creative license for the sake of dramatic impact. It’s a piece of deliberate deception. The entire  movie is flim flam, an elaborate lie intended to deceive people.

 

Furthermore, what ultimately makes “JFK” inexcusable and the “it’s only a movie” argument unacceptable is the fact that Stone had always staunchly claimed that his film was NOT “only a movie.” Upon its release, Stone claimed in interview after interview that the film is perfectly accurate in every one of its claims and the depiction of the assassination. He had, in fact, urged moviegoers to use his film as a tool for activism and reject the Warren Commission’s conclusions about Oswald acting alone. 

 

One can not ethically use deception as a tool to get people to take action. As I always discuss with my students in the media ethics course I teach, when you lie to someone, you are robbing them of their autonomy. You are no longer free when you make your decisions about how to act based on someone else’s deliberate deception. When someone is lying to you, they are leading you around by a leash. They have turned you into their slave, their puppet.

 

“But even if Oliver Stone distorted the facts in a movie, could there not be a greater good in inspiring people to question the government, be skeptical of the official version of events, and think for themselves?” Stone’s defenders usually ask. 

 

The answer is “no.” The conspiracy mythology propagated by “JFK” has not led to a world of skeptical critical thinkers. It has led to a world of QAnon, Flat Earthers, anti-vaxxers, and belief systems that deny any kind of consensus reality, science and logic. As Tim Weiner writes in his excellent Rolling Stone article about Oliver Stone and his conspiracist derangement: 

 

“I can tell you for a fact that our democracy is suffocating under an avalanche of disinformation. Trump won the 2020 election! Covid vaccines are seeded with microchips! Democrats are blood-sucking pedophile communists! 9/11 was an inside job! Our body politic is being poisoned by lies. They stalk the land like brain-eating zombies. And we can’t seem to kill them.

 

“We have a moral obligation to call bullshit when we see it. Especially when public figures promote lies for profit. Stone’s JFK films are fantasies. Conspiracy theories are not facts. They’re a kind of collective psychosis. And they’re driving our country down the road to hell.”

Saturday, December 4, 2021

How Books Are Made: With Patience...

Here's a story I ran across in the Saint Peter's school newspaper about my book signing event when FATAL POSE came out. It slipped my mind when the story ran and I wanted to share it here for an amusing example of how long certain books can gestate before finally finding publication. 

As I discuss in the article, FATAL POSE had originally started rattling around in my head way back...in college. So, that actually would be in the, well, let's say early 1990s. No, age is not making it slip my mind! But the point is that when you realize that the kernel of a good idea for a story exists, don't worry about needing to work with it, reshaping it, putting aside and coming back to it, or just taking it completely apart and rewriting it from word number one.

As I discuss in the article, I actually do outline all that I write very carefully and always know exactly where a story is supposed to end up. Except when the story is finished, I might realize that something - or a number of things - might still not work. Such was the case with FATAL POSE.

After a lot of life getting in the way, other books getting published, agents and editors coming and going, many of them passing on the book, FATAL POSE finally found life at World Castle Publishing.

So hang in there and keep punching away at that keyboard.


Friday, December 3, 2021

At the Recent Philcon Conference




It was almost remiss of me to not mention my participation in the recent Philcon conference of the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society in Cherry Hill, New Jersey (close enough to Philly). After last year’s all-online conference, it was exciting to be able to talk to a full conference hall of people rather than just stare at a computer screen, and it was great walking through the dealers’ room browsing books.
 

 

And, of course, doing readings and book signings or THE CEDAR VALLEY COVENANT and CONFIRMATION: INVESTIGATIONS OF THE UNEXPLAINED was outstanding. The interactions with one’s readers, the fan communities that frequent literary conferences, are an experience all authors should take part in. 

 

Those same fans also let me know they will keep me on my toes if I want to writefiction about conspiracy theories…no theory in any book they have read, they told me, is as demented as the “real” ones so many people swear they believe in these days.

 

Well, it’s a good thing my books critique conspiracy theories!


Friday, November 12, 2021

The Literary Titan Book Award for FATAL POSE


Very glad to have been recently given a Literary Titan Book Award for my bodybuilding murder mystery. With all the work and time that goes into producing a book, it's rewarding to receive an award "bestowed on books that expertly deliver complex characters, intricate worlds, and thought provoking themes."

I hope you check it out!