Though books have always been my primary focus of interest, as a lover of storytelling in general, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I would also mingle in the art of filmography.
Though I was born in the 70s, grew up in the 80s, and lived most of my young adult life in the 90s, and having witnessed the phenomena of your Star Wars Trilogy, your Godfather, your Lord of The Rings, to name a few-spanning over 3 decades of filmmaking-ultimately my heart gravitated toward a different crop of movies. These are films that precede my lifetime and yet have had the most profound effect on me and keep doing so to this day. I’m all for movies that ‘just entertain’, we need those too, but surely not at the expense of using the medium for soul-impacting, life-changing experiences.
So my top 5 picks that we will discuss in the next weeks are not just what I consider to be GOOD movies, but masterpieces that have impacted my life to one degree or another. These are movies that I can revisit over and over again, and still discover something new, or notice little hidden details which speaks volume of their richness in content.
Some of them you may have heard of…but I doubt it!
Top 5 Movie Picks (newer to older):
Last Year at Marienbad (1961)
The Earrings of Madame de… (1953)
La Ronde (1950)
Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948)
The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)
Join us next week for our first movie review and conversation (don’t forget to leave comments!):
A British pursuit squadron suffers the attrition of air combat in WWI. Major Brand is in command, driven to drink and relentless stress by the young pilots he loses every day to enemy action. His “A Flight” Leader is Captain Courtney, who is a survivor and a skilled veteran pilot whose perspective will be forced to change before the movie is over.
Vintage:
This film was made in 1930. To put that in perspective, The Jazz Singer had been released just three years before. Audiences were no longer content with silent movies, and the Hollywood studios had been scrambling to adopt the new technology. This meant a new equipment needed to be installed in theaters, new recording equipment (capable of synching with cameras) needed to be acquired and used by every film crew, and a whole lot of expensive sound stages needed building on the studio lots.
“Talkies” were still in their infancy, but this one has got a better soundtrack than most.
Even though the entire industry now realized synchronized sound was the wave of the future, it still took a while for film makers to ditch certain practices that were no longer necessary.
Exhibit A: Intertitles. Dawn Patrol doesn’t have as many as a typical silent film–and none for dialog–but it’s got a few. The writers/directors evidently hadn’t figured out a way to give exposition without inserting text in between shots. Or they never even wondered about doing it some other way.
Exhibit B: Subtitles. They put one at the bottom of the frame whenever we see the villain in his cockpit.
Exhibit C: Acting. Some of the actors strike overly-dramatic poses, wear exaggerated expressions, and use jerky, exaggerated gestures. Many of them were veteran actors of the silent era and directors had conditioned them to emote that way. It must have been a tough habit to kick. It kind of grates, now. The film was remade in 1938 and I bet that one doesn’t suffer the same issues.
Exhibit D: Patience. This might not be directly related to silent movies or talkies. This film is just too methodical for the modern audience, in places. Folks back then were more easily entertained (not spoiled rotten with omnipresent entertainment) and had the attention span of a human being–not a gnat or a smartphone zombie.
Plot and Themes:
If you watch a lot of WWII movies, you’ll probably lose count of how many of them are built around certain tropes like individualists learning to do their part as a member of a team. This one thrums on “the loneliness of command” nine years before the invasion of Poland and 20-30 years before the trope became such a cliche` in war movies. For all I know, Dawn Patrol might be what set the precedent for several war movie tropes which are overly familiar today.
The audience is left to assume that the Germans don’t face the same problems as our heroes. The Allies have manpower problems and material shortages, whereas the Germans don’t. In reality, it was almost exactly the opposite.
In fact, this type of story would better represent the German side. The best German aces were given such a workload that they were completely used up by 1917 or so. The constant stress, exhaustion, and requirement to accomplish much with little dulled their abilities and wracked them with sickness. Even the legendary Red Baron could barely keep his eyes open on his last few missions. (His stand-in in this movie is “Von Richter.” What movie about WWI air combat does NOT feature a portrayal of Manfred Von Richtoffen and his Flying Circus, I wonder.)
But, I mean, they’re bloody barbaric Hun savages with no appreciation for the value of human life. So who cares what problems they faced, eh wott?
Production Values:
Howard Hawks directed this. He was a prolific director who made some very memorable films from the silent era right up until 1970. But this (his first talkie) feels like he’s just getting his sea legs.
(As a side note for the red pill and manosphere communities, his serious films depicted very masculine men and feminine women. However, in his comedies, he conformed to the mild gender confusion so popular in the postwar era that helped push our culture onto the slippery slope that led to the institutional gender insanity of today.)
The film probably had a pretty good budget. There are about three aerial combat sequences, including one in the opening scene. Aside from just a couple rear-screen projection shots, this was all real pilots in real planes doing this stuff. Considering that, some of the stunt flying is truly spectacular. I’ve watched my share of dogfight scenes in war movies, and this movie’s are better than most, and still hold up somewhat today.
But even big budgets have their limits. I wonder if that’s why most of the film involves the lonely commander and other personnel at the airfield simply worrying while waiting for the squadron to return, to find out who survived and who didn’t. That’s another popular trope in the genre. No doubt some screenwriters used it because they wanted an intense drama. But, like the stark lighting in Film Noire, budget constraints might have necessitated it in the beginning–so directors took that lemon and made lemonade.
My Take:
Considering everything I’ve mentioned, overall, Dawn Patrol doesn’t hold up that well today. I appreciate the limitations it was made under, and that it was a pioneer film that established precedents for the genre. Few others will. And the crude sound, outdated conventions, hammy acting, etc., are not justified by the story, which seems hackneyed and formulaic despite the fact that it wasn’t back in 1930.
If you have an interest in WWI air combat, you might want to also read my review of The Red Baron.
I’ve mentioned before some of the reasons I took so long to finish the rough draft for Paradox. One interruption was what appeared to be an opportunity to write graphic novels:
For those who don’t know, I’m a novelist. I’ve had ideas for some comics & graphic novels for a long time—including many superhero stories which take place in a “world” I built as a boy and has evolved as I sporadically brainstormed about it in subsequent years.
My first creative efforts were pictures of superheroes, and later my own comics, panels drawn on whatever scrap paper I could find, plotting and character development handled on-the-fly, and assembled slapdash with staples, Elmer’s Glue, or whatever binding method I could improvise. My writing experience began as a necessary adjunct of those efforts.
My drawing was pretty good for somebody who was self-taught and seat-of-the-pants. I can honestly say I was a better freehand artist than anyone I ever met, until I went to college. I wasn’t in the same league as any comic artist from the Bronze Age on, but had I developed better habits and techniques, maybe I could have gotten there. I’ll probably elaborate in the future.
In my late teens, I drifted away from “kid stuff” (comic books) and began aspiring to more “serious” creative efforts (text-based fiction). I gradually quit drawing and began concentrating on writing–which, at the time, was a bigger challenge.
My shift to prose solidified over the years and the old sequential art ambitions collected layers of dust on the back shelf. Even so, the seeds of that superhero saga germinated in my mind and never completely faded away.
The old dream languished, increasingly resembling a pipe dream as the years stacked up and life took me further and further away from ever having the time to make a serious effort at that partially-developed idea on the shelf.
And then…
One day on Gab, a publisher who I’d never met or heard of (he was from Europe) DM’d me out of the blue. He said he liked my prose and asked if I’d ever considered writing a graphic novel before.
Little did he know the depth of my appreciation for the medium and my abandoned dream. The dream had never completely died, though my drawing ability had.
This would have been flattering, but at first I didn’t think the dude was serious; or I must have misunderstood him or something. But no: after exchanging messages for a while, it became clear he wanted me to write a graphic novel for him. He had published a couple (illustrated) based children’s books; which I checked out. Amazon banned one of them, which is a badge of honor in my view. I did buy and read one that survived.
Anyway, I dusted off another idea I’d been nursing for years (a sci-fi aviation adventure in another galaxy) and pounded out a rough draft. I had some experience writing screenplays, and comic scripts aren’t too terribly different.
The experience effectively gave me a jump-start. I got the bug to chase that old dream.
This type of story that is wildly popular with most of the male population in the West–especially the part of it which still reads comic books. There’s no reason why the eponymous character of this comic shouldn’t collect a lot of fans.
The female supremacy grrrrlboss tropes come in at least two flavors. One features the 105 pound Playboy-bunny lookalike who can easily defeat, in hand-to-hand combat, a marine battalion composed entirely of 220 pound MMA champions. Less ubiquitous is the grrrlboss with a more masculine build, bigger and more heavily muscled, who can easily defeat, in hand-to-hand combat, a marine battalion composed entirely of 220 pound MMA champions.
Just by looking at one of the many alternate covers for this comic, you know it is about a busty-yet-hypermuscular woman kicking ass.
What it’s about:
The plot is pretty much Escape from New York. The protagonist is basically Snake Plisskin with tits (but without the eye patch, though she needs one) and a penchant for addressing others with faux-affectionate (sardonic) terms like “sugar” and “honey.” Her name is Rogue, but she sometimes won’t admit it. As a standalone narrative, the confusion regarding her name felt unnecessary and poorly developed. But perhaps there is backstory in previous Rogue adventures that would cause this to make sense.
Still, she is invincible and doesn’t really need to hide from anybody by pretending to be somebody else. I would add, “Besides, how many busty-yet-hypermuscular grrrlbosses strutting through the postapocalyptic landscape, leaving a swathe of fresh destruction in their path, could there be?” But never mind that, because such is not all that uncommon in the setting of this story.
Another character referred to Rogue as a Boomer, and Rogue didn’t dispute that. Meaning Rogue is in her 60s, at the youngest–yet she’s still as agile as a squirrel in its prime. Maybe this was also explained in a previous comic.
The society in this postapocalyptic world could be described as a dystopian matriarchy. But the federal strong-arm goons are coed–that way you get to see plenty battles-of-the-sexes with the grrrlboss dominating multiple men. Straight men go down like tenpins hit by a busty-yet-hypermuscular bowling ball. The only characters who come close to giving our Womyn Warrior any challenge are other grrrlbosses, and a homosexual.
Character:
Despite all the sardonic terms of affection, Rogue’s machismo is laid on thick in the dialog. Her lines would be condemned as ridiculously over-the-top if spoken by the Rock or Jason Statham. But whatever.
The art strikes me as mostly hasty rough sketches, influenced by Manga. In most of the action sequences, I was confused about what was supposed to be happening.
Rogue: The American Dream is not my cup of tea. But if you like macho chick stories, you can probably forgive the artwork. The campaign is underway right now.
Now that “A.I.” seems to be a part of reality,* it is the source of much controversy. As an independent author who has commissioned artists for book covers, and some burgeoning graphic novel projects, I’m privy and intrigued by one facet of it: A.I. generated art.
Here are some of the arguments I’ve been observing go back and forth in my own social network, such as it is:
Stop, Thief!
Artist: Using A.I. to generate your art is abetting the theft of intellectual property.
Writer: It’s no more theft than an artist drawing or painting something after looking at other art, photos, or the live subject in the real world. Unless A.I. simply reproduced your art, line-for-line, stroke-for-stroke, your argument doesn’t hold water.
Have You No Decency?
Artist: Shame on you! You’re putting human artists out of work by using A.I. generated art. It is morally reprehensible to make money off work that includes elements not created by a human being.
Writer #1: That’s like saying it’s immoral for you to build a website, make a flier, or advertise your art in any other way unless you or another artist (who you pay) hand-create all the text, rather than using an available font from some computer.
Writer #2: Considering your price-gouging, and your undependability, you deserve to go out of business. If you weren’t so unreasonable and flaky, I might consider paying more for your human touch.
How would YOU like it?
Artist: What if A.I. writes a cheap knock-off of your novel and somebody else cut into your profits by selling it?
Writer: That’s already happening even without A.I. From the hacks selling their junk on the Amazon Slush Pile, to downright piracy on the warrez sites. It’s something we have to live with. Welcome to our world.
Artist: You won’t be so cavalier when people start buying A.I. generated books instead of yours. Then you’ll see.
Writer: We won’t like it, but that’s already happening, too. The lion’s share of the indie market is dominated by cheap, quick, formulaic, uninspired pap generated by mediocre writers who might as well be bots. Welcome to our world.
My Thoughts:
I’ve seen some really impressive A.I. generated art, but in my limited experience so far, it takes just as much time and effort to make A.I. give me what I want as it would to just draw or paint it myself. No doubt it will improve, but it might always have that “Uncanny Valley” effect.
I suspect A.I. generated prose will have an even stronger Uncanny Valley factor. Granted, most Amazon shoppers will ravenously consume it anyway. But if my creativity depended on profit margins, return-on-investment, or any financial metric, I would have given up on creative pursuits long ago in lieu of something much more consistently profitable like politics, real estate, or telemarketing.
What are your thoughts on the role of artificial intelligence in creativity? Let us know in the comments.
*I’ve heard some tech-savvy folks say what we’re witnessing is not true artificial intelligence, but merely complex computer programming. I tend to agree, based on its performance. I don’t think it will ever truly be intelligent without imagination and probably self-awareness.
THE WEIRD TALES OF SILAS FLINT (THE FLINT ANTHOLOGIES BOOK 1)
~ Review by
Here we are folks: once again we get to follow Knight Templar Captain Silas Flint and his associate Supernumerary Ricardo Navarro on yet another adventure! What’s ironic is that this was the perfect occasion for our heroes to finally take some time off as no cases needed particular attention. But of course that is not bound to happen!
When Flint receives a letter from Professor Johansson he decides to go visit Johansson at a newly found air force base from before the war that ended all civilization. Being a student of history himself, he decides to take Navarro and Ms. Fletcher (you might remember her from The Witch’s Repentance) along for the ride, all three looking forward to seeing an actual military base from the old world.
Without giving any spoilers, we quickly find out that evil forces lurk at the air force base, and our power trio (Fletcher included ) is tested to their limits!
Beckman once again treats us to a fun ride that has good pace and good characters that come off as likable and relatable. Particularly, Fletcher brings a breath of fresh air, being herself a former witch. She is not allowed to use magic but life and death situations will test her to the limit. Will she be able to refrain from using her magical powers and keep her word, even though she is tempted to use them for good? Pick up a copy of The Weird Tales of Silas Flint today and find out!
This tale is fun and suspenseful, and again, it’s a clear example that a writer doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel to write 5-star stories that we can all enjoy!
Join us in two weeks for the next tale: The Deepest Circle
🦀
Red-Blooded American Men Examine Pop-Culture and the World
