Artsy Thoughts

Posts about movies, music, and other artsy things that aren’t books

On the Half-Life of Revenge

/ JD Byrne / Leave a comment

Revenge is a dish best served cold. – Klingon proverb

Revenge is an evergreen character motivation. Everybody, regardless of their station in life or what they do for a living, has gotten pissed off enough by someone to at least contemplate getting revenge. But how far can revenge get you in a story? Does there come a point where even the most righteous revenge starts to curdle?

I thought about this a lot while the wife and I were watching The Glory.

A South Korean drama from Netflix, it sprawls out over 16 hourish-long episodes (apparently originally released in two parts). The further on we got the less invested I was in the main character’s revenge arc – not because it wasn’t well founded, but because I had so much time to think about it.

The main character is Moon Deun-eun, who while in high school is constantly bullied by a group of classmates led by Park Yeon-jin. “Bully” here is really too tame of a term – they tortured the poor girl, which we see in fairly graphic detail (burning with a curling iron, for instance). They get away with it because their parents are rich and connected and Deun-eun is basically fending for herself (her father is absent, her mother worthless). After she drops out, Deun-eun struggles for a while until she dedicates her life to getting back at Yeon-jin and crew.

And she plays a long game. Over the course of years Deun-eun trains to become a teacher, eventually worming her way back into the lives of her tormentors by becoming a teacher in the school of Yeon-jin’s young daughter. From there she unwinds a pretty clever plot in which she does little herself to hurt anyone, but turns the others against one another in a way that leads to a fairly satisfying payoff. But it takes an awful long time to get there and, along the way, you start to wonder if revenge is really that great a deal, even if fully warranted.

To be fair, The Glory doesn’t let Deun-eun go quietly into the sunset when it’s all over. She’s basically stripped of her reason for living and only gets back on track by deciding to help her boyfriend get revenge on the man who killed his father. Nonetheless, your sympathies lie with Deun-eun only so far as the hot coals of revenge keep burning and I didn’t feel it at the end of 16 episodes.

Maybe it’s just the law-talking-guy in me but, in the broad view, revenge is bad. Bad for the soul, probably, but certainly bad for society. The law, in all its manifestations, is largely designed to replace systems of private justice – a.k.a. revenge. If your neighbor steals from you, you don’t break into his house and get your stuff back – you call the police or sue him. If someone kills your loved one, you don’t get to track down the offender and kill them yourself – that’s a job for the police, prosecutors, and the courts.

Emotionally revenge can be very satisfying, at least in fiction.

I mean, who couldn’t get on board with something like this:

On the other hand, being the better person just doesn’t have the same zip to it:

But for that very reason I think revenge works best in movies or a shorter series. There’s enough time to get you fired up and fully behind the main character’s scheme without giving you time to really think if they should be doing it in the first place. Revenge fiction works best when it harnesses that initial “this is bullshit!” reaction to learning about someone being wronged. The more time you have for that to ebb away, the less interesting the ultimate revenge is.

The quote at the top, of course, comes from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Critically, part of why that works so well is that the revenge seeker is the bad guy.

“Anora,” the New Kings, and the Absence of Consequences

/ JD Byrne / 2 Comments

One of the bulwarks of the criminal justice system is that the prosecution has to prove someone committed a crime beyond a reasonable doubt – a higher standard than those that apply in civil proceedings. One of the perversities of the criminal justice system is that courts generally will not, and in some jurisdictions are not allowed to, actually instruct jurors on what “reasonable doubt” is. It’s left to the parties to argue it out and the jurors to make the call.

Lawyers, searching for a common experience to which jurors can relate, try to analogize the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard to the kind of certainty you need to make a major life decision. Not where to go to dinner or what movie to watch, but, say, whether to buy a house or a car. The big one, of course, is whether to get married (and to whom). Even if a juror has never been married, they’re aware of what a monumental decision that is.

I was thinking about those arguments while watching Anora this past weekend.

The newly-minted Best Picture winner is about the titular Anora (Ani to her friends and customers), a stripper who embarks on a whirlwind paid-for-date/romance with Vanya, the son of a Russian oligarch. After a wild time in Vegas he proposes that they get married and they do, much to the displeasure of his parents who send their (largely ineffectual) goons to ensure that the marriage is annulled. In the end, when it comes time for Vanya to stand up to his parents and stand with his wife, he can’t do it. The interesting question is why.

The answer, I think, lies in how the film deals with class distinctions. Essentially, the characters are divided into three groups.

Vanya and his parents are the super-rich, the 1%, the “new kings.” They have “fuck you” money and an immense amount of power. They largely suffer no consequences for wrongdoing and, therefore, have little fear of doing it. This is particularly important for Vanya because, as portrayed in the movie, he’s never had to make a consequential decision in his life. Even someone who is only 21 years old, who has lived a normal life, has made decisions that had consequences, both foreseen and unforeseen.

Vanya hasn’t and, as a result, doesn’t even recognize them when they come around. So, when he proposes marriage to Ani I don’t think he’s either (1) simply lying to her in a way to make her do something useful for him or (2) a besotted dope who’s really deeply in love with this woman he’s known for a week. I think he sees the decision to get married as being as consequential as what club to go to or whether to jet off to Vegas. Whether he gets it wrong or not, he won’t really suffer any consequences. He is, quite literally, playing with house money.

The second group of characters include Toros and his brother, two of the goons who are tasked with keeping tabs on Vanya. Neither are remotely in the same class as Vanya and his parents, but they think they can have access to wealth and power if they just continue to make themselves useful. Not for nothing but when Vanya goes missing Toros’ entire motivation for finding him is to please Vanya’s parents and fix a problem. He doesn’t express any concern for this guy whose life he’s looked over for years. He doesn’t see him as a kind of son, worrying about his safety and wellbeing. So long as he finds Vanya and gets the marriage annulled all is right with his world.

The final group is Ani herself, along with another one of the goons, Igor. Only Ani doesn’t realize she’s in this group at first. She thinks she’s in one of the other two, on her way into the good life, achieving upward mobility. Igor, by contrast, knows better. He understands his spot in the hierarchy and that he’s fated to stay there. His bond with Ani comes largely from his empathy for her coming to the same realization as the movie plays out. I think the ending is her recognizing a fundamental similarity between them that she would never have had with Vanya (not for nothing is the scene in the car the only sex scene that appears to include a real connection between the people involved).

The movie, then, reflects more than a little of our current reality. Increasingly, we live in a country with an out-of-touch and untouchable moneyed elite who rarely suffer any consequences for their actions. Susan Collins famously said, during Trump’s impeachment, that she was going to vote against convicting him because he “has learned from this case” getting “a pretty big lesson.” She wasn’t wrong – he learned he faces essentially no consequences for his actions. Just like Vanya, which is why he so often says the first thing that comes to his mind without giving any real thought to what might happen after.

Sitting down to watch Anora I didn’t quite know what to expect. I certainly didn’t expect a pretty succinct analogy for this country’s current class inertia (as one report put it “wealth status is sticky” – there’s little chance you move up or down over the course of a lifetime), but that’s certainly in there. It’s definitely got more going on than the “hooker with a heart of gold” tag some detractors are given it after the Oscars. It does make you think.

What it makes me think is that sometimes the lack of consequences might be the most consequential thing of all.

Weekly Read – My Effin’ Life

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I hate thinking about who my “favorite” band is. It varies from day to day, depending on my mood and what speaks to me most at any particular time. That said, even if I couldn’t label them as my favorite right now, my first favorite band was, without a doubt, Rush. I think that was largely because when I was coming of musical age in the 1980s they were still kicking all kinds of ass when the big progressive rock bands of the 1970s were watering down their sound. There was no question I’d read Geddy Lee’s memoir when it came out.

The question is, if you’re not a Rush fan, or at least interested in the lives of musicians, is this book worth reading? Large parts of it probably aren’t. Rush was the biggest part of Lee’s life for decades and so the band’s rise and longevity is a big part of his story. Lots of the details along the way are fascinating, but even I’ll admit that the album-by-album pattern and scattering of stories from the road wore a little thin in the end. Part of that may be down to be being most interested in those details when I’m actually listening to the albums (hard to do when you’re listening to the audio version of the book!).

One fascinating episode that did stand out to me was the detailed story of how the band’s comeback album, Vapor Trails, wound up sounding so shitty. It started with some demos that the band was particularly happy with but weren’t recorded very well (with the intention that they’d never see the light of day). The more they relied on the original demos the more that compromised the ultimate mixing and mastering, resulting in an overly compressed sound. Interesting example of how something great in the very beginning of the creative process can lead to problems in the end (something to keep in mind).

Beyond the music stuff there are two, much heavier, areas where Lee’s book shines.

The first involves his family. Lee’s parents were Holocaust survivors from Poland who emigrated to Canada after the Second World War. He spends a lengthy chapter detailing their story (and those of other relations caught up in the Holocaust) and how he, personally, has dealt with their legacy during his life. One of the threads that runs through the book, then, is Lee’s commitment to his identity as a Jew even though, religiously, he’s an atheist (spurred by discovering his father sneaking off to eat bacon & eggs during a downtown shopping trip). It’s a fascinating dynamic well explored.

The other area is near the end of the book, when Lee deals with the unexpected (to the rest of the world) death of Rush drummer/lyricist Neal Peart. Peart had been the main force slowing down the band’s touring schedule in later years, partly due to wanting to spend more time with his family, having remarried after a pair of tragedies (his daughter and first wife died within months of each other), but also partly due to the physical toll of being a drummer. The band’s final tour was a little tense, with Peart easing toward retirement in a way that Lee, in particular, wasn’t really ready for (guitarist Alex Lifeson kind of fell in between). It was after the band’s last show that Peart learned he had a brain tumor and began deteriorating. Lee’s chronicle of this, of keeping the diagnosis a secret for the famously private Peart and watching as the band’s wordsmith began to slip up when speaking, is heartbreaking.

My Effin’ Life is definitely worth the read if you’re a fan of Rush or rock music in general. Lee is a thoughtful and observant guy, even if he’s not a sterling wordsmith (not for nothing that Peart wrote the lyrics, right?). If don’t fall into that category, I’d recommend starting with the documentary Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage, which covers the band’s history up to 2010 or so and really gives a sense of the bond Lee, Lifeson, and Peart forged over the years. Add in the early chapters of Lee’s book for the family stuff and the last few to cover the time since 2010 and you’re good to go.

Can’t let this pass without some tunes, of course . . .

As for the chicken – well, read the book!

Weekly Read – An Assassin In Utopia

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I’ve said before that book titles can be tricky, particularly for non-fiction, since they act as a kind of “promise, a declaration of what kind of book the reader is getting into). That said, Susan Wels’ An Assassin In Utopia: The True Story of a Nineteenth-Century Sex Cult and a President’s Murder makes a hell of a promise. Pity it doesn’t come close to fulfilling it.

The sex cult in question is the Oneida Community, initially founded in New York in 1848 and persisting, in various forms, for the next three decades. The dead president in question is James Garfield, who perished after being shot only six months after taking office in 1881. What purportedly brings these two things together is Garfield’s assassin, Charles Guiteau, who had a couple of brief stints as a member of the Oneida Community.

It’s a pretty slender thread to tie together a book and, to be fair, Wels doesn’t really try too hard. As I said, Guiteau spent some time at Oneida, but given his particular mental quirks and psychopathy you can’t say what he learned there caused him to shoot Garfield (he couldn’t even get laid in a commune devoted to an early version of “free love”!). Rather, she collects stray historical anecdotes that cover several decades while Oneida was in operation and Garfield found his way to the White House. Many of them are interesting in their own right, but they don’t feel cohesive.

Which is a shame, because I would have loved more detail on the Oneida Community itself. Born from forward-thinking social ideas, and eventually infused with ideals of political socialism, Oneida was one of the first of many utopian communities that popped up in the United States in that period. That is descended into a typical sex cult, where a few leaders (old men all) decided who slept with who and, of course, who slept with them. Minors are raped, too, in the name of whatever ideals the leaders dreamed up, a pattern that echoes down through the succeeding generations.

Indeed, Oneida disappears entirely from the narrative once the focus turns to Garfield’s election (and surprise nomination in the first place) and assassination. Wels covers that briskly, but the shooting, and Garfield’s lingering as doctors probed his wounds until he died, is covered more thoroughly (and interestingly) in Candice Millard’s The Destiny of the Republic: A Tale Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President. As I said way back when:

While Millard spends a great amount of time (particularly in the book’s second half) on Garfield’s lingering death, the first half of the book is spent setting up not only the lives of Garfield and Guiteau up to that point, but the world in which they lived. It’s a fascinating snapshot, showing both how different the United States of the 1870s-1880s is compared to today, and how disappointingly similar the two eras are.

***

In the end, where the book really shines is in the contrast of Garfield and Guiteau, two men swept into their fatal confrontation by things beyond their control. It’s ironic that Garfield, who never really wanted to be president, is the kind of person who we should want to become president – educated and inquisitive, a voracious reader, and apparently a genuinely decent guy. And yet, even as part of a very select club of assassinated presidents, he’s pretty much forgotten these days. Of course, Guiteau is not exactly a household name, either.

If you’ve never dived into this period of American history, or the Garfield assassination, this book is a reasonable start. Beyond that, The Destiny of the Republic does better on the assassination itself and there’s probably a more thorough treatment of the Oneida Community out there, too (which I might have to seek out).

Sing us out, Charlie . . .

Weekly Watch – Quick Hits

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Sometimes the weekend passes in a string of movies – not even very good ones. That was the case this past weekend as the wife and I fell down a Netflix rabbit hole (so to speak – around these we also consumed the final season of Disenchanted, of which I’ll have more to say later). I suppose a 1 out of 3 average isn’t bad from a baseball stat point of view, even if the one is more of a bloop single than anything more impressive.

Spoilers ahoy! Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Run Rabbit Run (2023)

Sarah Snook (Shiv Roy of Succession fame – who knew she was Australian?) stars as a mother, Sarah, struggling with a troubled daughter, Mia, in the overlong, but often creepy, horror flick. In the wake of Sarah’s father’s death, Mia starts to behave strangely, insisting on meeting her grandmother she’s never seen before, and referring to herself by a different name – Alice, the name of Sarah’s long “lost” sister. Things proceed from there, usually because Sarah makes the worst possible decision at any given opportunity until she and Mia are holed up in a rural farmhouse where bad things continue to happen.

The deep mystery here is what happened to Alice, who appears to be possessing Mia. We’re never given any even implausible mechanism for this to happen, by the way. We know Sarah had some part in what happened to Alice because she’s haunted by guilt. Eventually we find out why – she pushed her sister off a cliff. Not by accident, not in a fit of passing rage. Nope, she just flat out murdered her sister. This is an odd narrative choice as is zaps any sympathy we have for Sarah, to the point that when we see Alice walking Mia toward the cliff you almost think justice might be done.

As I said, the movie is about a half hour too long. To its credit, it does maintain creepy vibes the whole time and the actress playing Mia does a good job of making her stand out in a film world flooded with odd, creepy children (although she’s not the best of the weekend – which is saying something). Snook is good, too, but the whole thing really doesn’t amount to much in the end.

As an aside, Sarah’s ex-husband (and Mia’s father) is played by Damon Herriman who will forever in my head by Dewey Crowe from Justified and manages to turn up in just about everything Australian I see these days.

In the Shadow of the Moon (2019)

I thought this flick had a pretty decent idea behind it – a cop tracks a serial killer over decades because they only strike every nine years. Cool! What I didn’t realize until we actually started watching this is that less than a detective story this was a half-baked fantasy story (the “science” nodded at is too silly to really call it sci-fi) with some appalling ethics at the core of it.

All that would go down better if the actual stuff on screen was actually better. Nothing particularly works, from the setup (why start the main character off as a beat cop who wouldn’t have anything to do with detective work and the, just as quickly, kick him off the force?) to the writing to the acting (Boyd Holbrook was much better in Justified: City Primeval, even if he was overshadowed by the return of Boyd Crowder in the last ten minutes) to the laughable explanation for all this (it involves time travel and the moon – seriously).

With all that said, it could have been kind of a fun lark if it hadn’t trampled all over one of the classic historical “what if?”s – if you could go back and strangle the infant Hitler in his crib, would you? It’s a thorny ethical dilemma, since at that point infant Hitler is completely innocent and hasn’t done anything to anybody – doesn’t that make it straight up murder (maybe Sarah could push him off a cliff?)? And even if you did it, would it make a difference, or were the forces at work in Weimar Germany of a sort that the Nazis would have seized power anyway?

This movie jettisons all those thorny ethical issues in favor of brute force – in order to prevent a right-wing militia group from bombing Philadelphia in 2024 and starting a new civil war, the killer is travelling back in time (to 1988, at least) to kill the bombers as children. Wait, no, that might make some sense. Rather, the killer is going back and murdering everybody on the mailing list of the predecessor organization of the group who committed the bombing. Not only have they not actually done anything when killed, they had decades in which to recognize the error of their ways!

It’s as if you took Minority Report and stripped out of it any issues of free will, determinism and whether we can punish people for something they might do. It’s just dumb, on multiple levels.

Vivarium (2019)

Well, at least Vivarium was interesting, if not particularly successful in the end.

A couple (Imogen Poots & Jesse Eisenberg) looking to buy a home is shown to a weirdo mono-chrome suburb that looks like something out of a Wes Anderson movie that’s seen better day by completely off-putting real estate agent. While they’re looking at the house, purely out of formal obligation, the agent slips away, leaving them stuck in the place. Why can’t they leave? Probably the same reason the dinner guests can’t leave in The Exterminating Angel – it’s surrealism, baby!

After their failed escape attempt (the couple always returns to the same house, number 9 – subtle Beatles reference, perhaps?), the couple settles into a weird routine that’s punctuated by boxes full of “food” and other supplies showing up in the street. One day the box contains what looks like an infant human child, but it’s quickly clear that it isn’t. It grows rapidly, screeches horrifically when it’s hungry, and can mimic the voices of its “parents” in completely unsettling ways (if this kid ever hooks up with Mia we are all fucked).

Ennui and horror ensue from there, but without any particular payoff. Poots takes on the unwilling role as mother to the child-beast, while Eisenberg starts digging a hole in the yard, returning to it day after day for fruitless labor. In the end they die, the child-beast grows up, and winds up replacing the original real estate agent in luring in a new pair of victims. Apparently this is all a sci-fi (they’re aliens?) riff on brood parasitism, in which species rely on others to raise their young. OK, I guess, but that gloss kind of ruins the ability of the film to actually be about anything larger regarding the human condition (I don’t think the standard “suburbia sucks and destroys your soul” angle really works, given that the couple didn’t choose to remain and weren’t seduced into it – they were just trapped).

Last week I talked about art that made me just go “what the fuck?” as having value. At least Vivarium gave me that. It’ll stick in my head for a while in a way that the other two won’t. Doesn’t mean I’d recommend it, but at least it’s weirdly interesting in its own way.

Keep in mind – taste is personal, your mileage may vary, etc.

Weekly Watch: Star Trek – Strange New Worlds (Season Two)

/ JD Byrne / 1 Comment

Seeing as how the second season of Star Trek – Strange New Worlds just wrapped up, I thought I’d follow up on my review of the first season. If you’ll recall, I was pleasantly surprised and looking forward to a second season:

I’m cautiously optimistic about the second season. Given results thus far, I’m willing to give everyone the benefit of the doubt that we won’t be overwhelmed by Kirks (Jim’s brother is on this ship, too, for some reason) and we’ll be introduced to more strange new worlds.

What gave me pause about the first season was the need of the writers to try and keep looping SNW back into the wider series mythology rather than do some really new stuff. Did we really need Kirks? Did we really need the security chief to be related (however distantly) to one of Trek’s greatest villains? Why weren’t the Gorn anything other than, you know, the Gorn we all knew?

I wish I could say all my concerns were alleviated, but the truth is that in season two SNW leaned into some of the things that I most disliked about the first season. That said, it was still damned entertaining and, maybe through sheer repetition, I’m starting to be worn down on those concerns.

Let’s start with the Kirks. James Kirk showed up in one episode of the first season, a nifty retelling of a classic episode from the original Trek. It made sense, but I worried where it would lead. Where it led was that Kirk appearing in three episodes this season, getting major screen time without any great effect. Simply put, there’s no reason that his role in those episodes couldn’t have be filled by a wholly new character. Kirk has now had multiple encounters, including a fairly personal one, with a person named “Noonien-Singh” and yet said nothing about that when Khan first showed up in the show. It’s a minor nit, but one that bugs me over and over – what’s gained by tying this into the established Trek mythos?

Likewise, the series appears to be doubling down on making the Gorn the Borg of this series. I’m not against creepy space monsters, but wasn’t part of what made the initial appearance of the Gorn in original Trek work so well is nobody knew anything about them? Why not create an entirely new beastie to menace this version of the Enterprise? Maybe my feelings here are partially colored by the fact that war Trek is my least favorite Trek variant and that seems to be the role of the Gorn moving forward.

That being said, I still really enjoyed this season for the most part. A big part of that is that, while at the same time grasping for connections to prior Trek lore, the SNW creative crew is also willing to really push the limits of what a Trek show can be. That came through loud and clear in two episodes from this season.

The first was a crossover episode with the animated Lower Decks series, in which two of the characters from that show travel back in time (and into live action) and interact with the Enterprise crew. I’ll admit that I don’t get Lower Decks – it’s too fast and hyper to be funny to me – but I thought this episode was really great, from the animated opening credit sequence to the animated outro with the Enterprise crew getting ripped on some sort of booze. And I appreciated the two Lower Decks characters, in a rare moment alone, making a joke about how slowly everybody talked. Good humored timey-wimey fun.

The second was the big musical episode. I’m not a huge fan of musicals and I found the actual music here pretty samey and dull (exception being the acapella version of the theme music in the opening credits, which was great) and the idea, that some outside entity is forcing the crew to sing their true feelings, is straight out of the better-executed Buffy musical episode, but, still, it’s hard not to like the curveball this episode was. And without it we’d never have gotten Klingons as the galaxy’s scariest boy band, a sight I wouldn’t want to miss.

My favorite episodes were a couple that dealt with characters grappling with their pasts. “Among the Lotus Eaters” took a quick line from the original Trek pilot about one of Pike’s regrets and fleshed that story out (a pretty good example of raiding the lore for story ideas) and spun it into an interesting meditation on memory and forgetting. “Under the Cloak of War” dove into Dr. M’Benga’s history and that of a Klingon war criminal and how they were struggling to come to grips with their pasts. I’m not a big fan of M’Benga’s ability to eat space spinach and go berserker on numerous Klingons, but I like the general idea of a healer growing out of a warrior. The Uhura-focused episode, “Lost In Translation,” was also pretty good.

All in all I found the second season of SNW a lot like the first – really good most of the time, with some choices that I wish had gone differently. It is by far my favorite of the nu Trek stuff. And, if anything, I’d like for a few more episodes per season to let things breathe a bit (the Spock/Chapel situation flamed out way too quickly). But mostly, I hope going forward they’ll heed the call to explore “strange new worlds” and give us more of that and less backward-looking connections to Trek lore.

I’ll be watching, regardless.

Weekly Read: Legends & Lattes

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My wife is a voracious reader and introduced me to the concept of “cozy” genres. Her big one is cozy mysteries, in which the murder takes place bloodlessly off screen and the cookie recipes in the back are more important than the whodunnit. I stumbled into one of those that crossed into fantasy a while back, The Accidental Alchemist, which was fun enough, but not quite my thing. Would a second go on cozy fantasy change my mind? Not yet, at any rate.

The setup for Legends & Lattes is pretty slick – Viv, an orc who’s spent her life adventuring and killing in a typical fantasy world, decides to get out of the business and settle down. Her new line of work? Running a coffee shop in a town that’s never heard of the stuff (in-world it’s an invention of dwarves, IIRC). “High fantasy and low stakes,” claims the cover, which certainly suggests a light, frothy outing.

Which it is! I’ve seen a lot of people rave about this book for being like a big hug or warm blanket, super comfy and cozy and I won’t disagree. I wish it had something more to it, however, to make it more than just a bit of literary comfort food (adept as it is when it comes to that).

It could, for example, have been really funny. There are a couple of chuckles here and there, but it’s not what I’d call a comedy. The basic idea sounds like it could have come out of a Discworld novel, but Pratchett always had a more cutting edge and could write amazing jokes. There’s nothing like that here.

I’ve seen some people complain that the book has “no plot,” but that’s not true. Things happen! What is really lacking is conflict, in any meaningful sense. For instance, Viv and the crew she assembles around her have to get the business off the ground and running. Every innovation they think of – offering iced coffee in addition to hot, adding baked goods (sumptuously described, it has to be said) to the menu, etc. – works like a charm. There’s even a local protection racket that Viv has to deal with, but it’s wrapped up easily with a conversation (and Viv paying protection, oddly).

That isn’t to say there isn’t a bad guy. A member of Viv’s old crew shows up about two-thirds of the way through and commits what appears to be a heinous crime – so much so that it’s completely out of place with the warm fuzziness of the rest of the book – but it’s barely a hiccup in the end.

Without any real conflict I need something more. Could have been humor, but, like I said, that’s not really what the book was going for. It could have been a more thorough exploration of Viv’s new home town. I particularly thought the protection racket stuff would give her a chance to interact with other people in her neighborhood, either to rally them or find out that resistance was futile. It could have been a cool way to see other species at work, add some additional color. Alas, the book sometimes feels like a TV show allegedly set in a big city that’s clearly shot on a soundstage that never moves from the single corner it regularly depicts.

I don’t want to come down too harshly on Legends & Lattes. It’s a quick, fun read, even if it leaves you feeling a little “so what?” when it’s over. But I’m clearly in the minority in not finding it completely charming and wonderful (it’s nominated for an Nebula and Hugo awards, after all). Which means, ultimately, that I just don’t think the “cozy fantasy” thing is really my cuppa, so to speak. And that’s OK.

I’d really like one of them cinnamon rolls, though. Hold the icing.

Weekly Watches & Reads – UK History Edition

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In May, my wife and I took a much delayed (thanks COVID!) vacation to the United Kingdom, hitting London, the Scottish Highlands and Isle of Skye, and Edinburgh over the course of a couple of weeks.

As is my wont, the trip inspired me to come home and read/listen/watch various things about that part of the world. Here are some quick thoughts.

Wellington Memorial, London
White Tower, Tower of London
Dunvegan Castle, Isle of Skye
Walter Scott Memorial, Edinburgh

The whole of the UK is steeped in history and it occurred while I was there that I knew precious little of it, particularly when it came to Scotland. I remedied that by digesting the entirety of Scotland: A History from Earliest Times, by Alistair Moffat.

Never was a book so aptly named, given that it spends a good hunk of its epic runtime (23+ hours in audiobook format) covering the geological history of Scotland before human beings even enter into it. Honestly, I wish the book would have condensed that considerably, since Moffat then covers basically all of Scottish human history (my other criticism is that he goes too close to current, lapsing from history to journalism in the end). As a result, it has a kind of bird’s eye view of things, without a whole lot of detail, but for someone like me who didn’t have a great idea of Scottish history, it was just about perfect. Particularly interesting to me was how Sir Walter Scott (who has a huge memorial in Edinburgh, pictured above) essentially created the modern conception of being “Scottish,” drawing on Highland things that had mostly been suppressed previously.

One of this historical things about which I knew nothing at all before we hit Scotland were the Jacobite Risings that happened there in the 17th & 18th Centuries. The last, started in 1745, was particularly prominent, in spite of the fact that it ended in bloody defeat for the rebels at the Battle of Culloden. We visited the battlefield and I wanted to get a better sense of the battle, so I read/listened to a book with the title Culloden, by Trevor Royle, which you’d think would do the trick.

Except that the full title is Culloden: Scotland’s Last Battle and the Forging of the British Empire. The Culloden part is, maybe, one third of the book, although perhaps it doesn’t need much more than that (it took place on wide open terrain and was over in about an hour – Gettysburg it was not). The rest is about how many of the officers and men at Culloden went on to fight Britain’s imperial wars around the world, with a decent focus on North America. It was interesting, in its own way, but not quite what I was looking for.

My thought was Culloden would be a good subject for a movie, so I was surprised that there weren’t many out there dealing with it directly (as opposed to using it as some kind of background). I finally found one called Chasing the Deer that I was able to watch on YouTube.

I was drawn to this partly because one of the actors is Fish, original lead singer of Marillion and successful solo artist in his own right. I knew he’d done a little bit of acting (this was his only feature film) so that made certain I had to check it out. It was well done in terms of tone and accuracy, but the small budget came through and the script wasn’t great (neither, sad to say, was Fish, although he was about par for the course with the rest of the cast). It did give you some idea of what the actual battle was like, however, so that counts for something.

My final bit of reading when I got home was Devil-Land: England Under Siege 1588-1688, by Clare Jackson.

We were in Westminster Abbey and I saw Oliver Cromwell’s tomb (well, slab of tile under which he’s buried) and realized I’d never really dug into Cromwell or the English Civil Wars. This book looked like just the thing to fill that gap. It’s just as long as Scotland, but only focused on about 100 years, after all. Still, I was disappointed that this was also pretty high-level history, without a lot of detail about life on the ground. In addition, the Civil Wars didn’t get any singular treatment and were just events along the way that happened to involve the royals that were really the focus of the book. There was no discussion of any political philosophy underlying the Republicans or Royalists. What is clear to me, however, is that this period was hugely influential on the American Founding Fathers, as you can pick precise parts of the Constitution that seem designed to prevent atrocities and injustices that happened during this era.

Speaking of Westminster Abbey, part of what we took in there were the tombs of Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots. Somewhere along the way I found out there was a fairly recent movie about the pair, cleverly titled Mary Queen of Scots, with Saoirse Ronan in the title role and Margot Robbie as Elizabeth.

As the title suggests this is a Mary-forward portrayal of events and does give you a sense of the era (the claims of historical inaccuracy, based on my reading, are mostly down to interpretation rather than outright incorrectness). That said, it’s fairly dull for the most part, skipping large periods of time in order to cover all of Mary’s time in Scotland, but precious little of her time as a prisoner in England. And as much as I love David Tennant, one of John Knox’s rants on how wicked women are was enough. Nice bit of synergy, though – I started Devil-Land just after we saw this and it starts with the execution of Mary, so it was a nice transition.

Much less period, and not at all historical, but definitely getting points for Highland isolation is Calibre, from 2018.

Calibre is the story of two buddies, one of whom is getting ready to become a father, who jaunt into the Scottish wilderness for a hunting trip. They wind up in a very small town filled with very creepy people who are full of unheeded warnings. A tragic accident happens and the guys get stuck in town without an easy way out. The movies deals in tropes, to be sure (the “small town creepy hick” cliche transcends oceans), but the atmosphere is really well maintained and the acting is quite good. Like I said, nothing historical, but does give you a sense of what it’s like in the middle of nowhere Scotland (see also “Loch Henry,” one of the episodes of the new season of Black Mirror).

Spending a few days in a foreign land is hardly enough time to get a sense of the place. What it can do, at least for me, is spark a deeper interest in the area’s history and culture, such that it will always be something that captures my interest. I figure British history is a rabbit hole I’m going to plumet down into for a good long while to come.

Weekly Watch: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

/ JD Byrne / Leave a comment

Sometimes the ideas the animate a movie are better than the movie itself.

As with many films of the 1930s-1960s I’ve seen recently, I stumbled into The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance on Turner Classic Movies.

Not only that, it was part of a slate of movies programmed by Steven Spielberg, so there was a little intro discussion between he and Ben Mankiewicz about the film. It was the last of the great westerns directed by John Ford (a huge influence on Spielberg, among others) and they talked about how it confronted issues about the transition of the West as a conflict between an older regime built on violence and self-sufficiency to a new order based on the rule of law. As a lawyer, and someone with a degree in history, that sounded like something I should just eat up. Damned if the actual movie didn’t get in the way of that.

The “old” West is represented by none other than John Wayne, whose performance here spawned a million impressions punctuated by the word “pilgrim.” He plays a rancher, Tom Doniphon, who has made a hardscrabble living out of the land and thinks everyone needs to be capable of using a gun to protect themselves (he is, naturally, a crack shot). The “new” West is represented by Jimmy Stewart as Ransom Stoddard, a lawyer from the east who believes in bringing civilization to the West. They go back and forth about the best way to handle the titular Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin), a local brigand who furthers the interests of big cattle ranchers who don’t want the unnamed territory to become a state.

That setup is fine so far as it goes, but Ford doesn’t really do a lot with it in the end. Stoddard’s stagecoach is robbed on its way into town by Valance. When Stoddard complains to the town marshal about it he dodges responsibility by pointing out that it occurred outside of town and therefore outside of his jurisdiction. But we later see Valance do all sorts of criminal things right in the middle of town and not only does the marshal do nothing, Stoddard never demands that he do so. Stoddard never tries to take the job and be the law. Hell, we never actually see him practicing any kind of law in the movie (he does some school teaching, though). No, what does Stoddard do? He pretty quickly gets himself a gun and starts practicing how to shoot.

It’s no great spoiler that Valance winds up on the wrong end of a gun (it’s right there in the title, people), although it’s a little unclear precisely who “the man who shot Liberty Valance” is, in the end. Both Doniphon (from the shadows, we later learn) and Stoddard shot AT him, but it’s unclear who hits him and which shot is the fatal one. Regardless, what is beyond clear is that Stoddard fully joins in the game of dealing with Valance through violence, leaving any real pretense of the law behind. And it’s Stoddard who gets the honor of being that man, even if he doesn’t really want it (which is a really interesting conflict that could have been explored more deeply).

So the movie kind of fizzles in its portray of the “old” versus “new” West, but how is it otherwise? Well, it’s a tale of two movies.

The first, which focuses on the leads – Wayne, Stewart, Marvin, and Vera Miles as the love interest – is pretty good. All those performances are good and the have good scenes together. Marvin, in particular, is really menacing as Valance (and has a young Lee Van Cleef as a sidekick). The love triangle between Stoddard, Doniphon, and Miles’ character is underbaked (Doniphon is building an addition onto his house for her, but she doesn’t have any apparent desire to move in), but, hey.

The other movie is the weirdest feast of overacting I’ve ever seen. There are multiple characters – the Cowardly-Lion-esque town marshal, the drunk town doctor, the (also drunk) newspaper publisher – who perform so broadly that had they wandered off this set onto the one for Blazing Saddles Mel Brooks would have told them to tone it down. If you’ve seen the episode of Futurama where Zoidberg’s uncle directs a “serious” movie but demands that the background actors run around throwing pies at each other, you’ve got the picture. Big ideas can be great drivers of a story, and fiction can be a fantastic way to explore how people grapple with those big ideas. But the idea is not the story. The story is the characters in it, what they do, and why they do it. The biggest and most important idea can be felled by a poorly executed story. That’s what’s the most frightening for us creative types – the big ideas are the easy part, but there’s so much left to do once you’ve hit on one.

Weekly Watch: “Night of the Living Dead”

/ JD Byrne / Leave a comment

At the recent DualCon in Charleston, through sheer serendipity, my table wound up being next to that of John Russo, co-writer (along with director George Romero) of Night of the Living Dead, the horror film from which essentially the entire modern zombie genre sprang. After hearing him talk about the movie on a panel we did it occurred to me that I’d never actually seen the flick. Naturally, the wife and I remedied that situation that very evening.

The story of Night of the Living Dead is even more amazing than the movie itself, although it holds up pretty well after all these years. Made for about $100,000 by first-time film makers (Romero, Russo and others had a production company that made commercials and other short pieces in and around Pittsburgh – Romero even directed some segments of Mr. Rogers!) it grossed about $30 million worldwide, making it one of the most profitable movies ever made.

The movie itself takes a fairly common setup and ramps the dread up to 11. As Russo explained during our panel, he thought of Night of the Living Dead as the 1939 movie Stagecoach, “but with zombies instead of Indians” and that seems right. You take a group of disparate people with few prior ties to each other, put them in a stressful situation, and see whether they pull together and triumph or splinter and fail.

If the movie is not just that story, but a metaphor for society at large as it faces existential threats then we, in the words of Thinking Plague, “are so fucked.” Once the group is gathered in an isolated house while the zombie horde (sorry, “ghouls” – the movie never uses the Z word) approaches, the battle lines are draw over whether to remain on the main floor or barricade themselves in the basement. The arguments both ways are the kind that can never be right or wrong – the main level has multiple points of entry for the ghouls, but also multiple ways out; the basement is more secure, but if they break through that door you’re dead.

My first thought upon viewing was that Ben, the main character and the prime supporter of the main level argument, was proven wrong, because he winds up in the basement when the horde overwhelms the house, anyway. The more I think about it, though, I don’t think that’s the case. Less important than where they make their stand is that they make it together, is what I’m thinking now. That even he is killed, in the end, and not by the ghouls, makes for a very bleak viewing experience and comment on human nature.

Aside from the side effects of its low budget (beyond its role in launching the modern zombie genre, Night of the Living Dead is one of the foundational films of the modern independent film scene) it doesn’t feel “cheap” (this is not a Zappa-esque “Cheepnis” situation). The script uses radio and TV news reports, often playing in the background, to broaden the story without losing the focus on our characters and their locale. That also helps setup the very end, too. I also enjoyed the soundtrack, which is typical orchestral bombast, save for when the zombies are the focus, when is switches to a very cutting edge soundscape of synthesized throbs and scratches.

But my final takeaway from Night of the Living Dead is irony. My first novel, Moore Hollow, is a kind of zombie story. The backdrop is that a crooked West Virginia politician around the turn of the 20th century actually tried to raise the dead so they would vote for him. In the novel, a disgraced English journalist with family ties to the West Virginia coal fields comes to track down the mystery. The zombies aren’t monsters, but more a problem to be dealt with and, perhaps, damned souls who need protection. I gave him the last name “Potter” completely oblivious to the Harry Potter connection.

His first name? “Ben.” Just like the main character in pop culture’s foundational zombie text. Sometimes the creative mind really does some wild things.