Category Archives: Crime

Adventure, Crime, Historical, Music

Shadow Hand Blues

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In 1954 budding blues virtuoso Waymon “Tornado” Fuller is executed for the murder of a North Carolina woman. In 1994 nomadic hot-rodder, moonlighting private investigator and blues aficionado Deke Jones stumbles upon Fuller’s guitar, triggering a mudslide of buried truths. Fuller’s innocence is one revelation. Another is “Shadow Hand Blues”–the last song he recorded, which Jones has never heard of.

An impromptu search for the studio where the recording session took place leads Jones to a small hippie town seemingly still enjoying the Summer of Love, where the psychodelic atmosphere turns from surreal to hostile when he begins asking questions.

Vintage Fender Telecaster in one hand, steering wheel of his radical Cyclone Spoiler II in the other, Deke Jones launches a one-man crusade to exonerate the infamous musician and find the obscure recording. The blood trails are 40 years cold, but neither corrupt good ol’ boy cops, sex industry sadists, nor fanatical pyramid-schemers can throw Deacon Jones off this case.

This investigative pilgrimage propels Jones right into the bloodstained fingers of a clandestine power elite Tornado Fuller called the Shadow Hand.

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This is set four years after Fast Cars and Rock & Roll. While that book dealt with Deke Jones’ racing exploits, and playing in a band (some even call it “coming of age,” since he learns some lessons about women…and people in general), this one is a cold-case mystery.

A fusion of the hardboiled P.I. genre with whodunnit, Shadow Hand Blues also has a strong musical element. Deke Jones is now in a nomadic phase, and this story takes place in North Carolina—far from his Southwest stomping grounds.

Action, Crime, Reviews

Ludicrous Seven

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The Fast and the Furious franchise has been better known as “The Lame and the Ludicrous” from the very beginning by people who know anything at all about cars. The machinery on display has grown less and less lame, but the plots and stunts have grown more and more ludicrous.

Not that the audience at large seems to notice or care.

This latest instalment not only ramps up the stunts and special effects, but also the big name actors. Vin Diesel and the Rock are back, of course. Though Paul Walker died before completion, his brothers stood in for him in missing scenes and were digitally altered to fool the eye. And the cast grew with the addition of Jason Statham as the villain and Kurt Russel as a government agent.

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Here’s a plot summary of this film:

Bad guy shows up–angry brother of previous bad guy. He does ee-veel things.

The Rock needs Diesel to put together a crew to stop Statham’s ee-veel.

Race scenes; chase scenes. Diesel confronts Statham. They play chicken. Neither one chickens out. A beautiful car is destroyed. There is a desperate attempt at a memorable line of dialog.

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More chase scenes. Ludicrous stunts. More fine machines destroyed. Another desperate attempt at a memorable line.

The location changes. More chase scenes. Fight scenes. Even more ludicrous stunts. More fine machines destroyed. Another desperate attempt at a memorable line.

The location changes. More chase scenes. Fight scenes. Even more ludicrous stunts. More fine machines destroyed. Another desperate attempt at a memorable line.

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…And so on, until the bad guy is put in a Hulk-holding tank, and there’s a short tribute to Paul Walker.

Since the end of the first flick, it’s become increasingly in-your-face obvious that the normal Hollywood fetish for destroying fine automobiles is multiplied tenfold with the sickos behind this franchise. They destroy them in head-on collisions; they drive them over cliffs; they launch them out of skyscrapers; they throw them at helicopters; and of course, they destroy them in big fiery explosions.

I guess all those “memorable” lines make it worthwhile.

Crime, Reviews, Socio-Sexual Studies

Some Red Pill Truths in Gone Girl

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There’s no way to avoid spoilers in this post, so if you plan on watching Gone Girl but haven’t yet, read no further.

The author/screenwriter (same person, as I understand it) had fun messing with the audience’s mind. There is a series of revelations which has you, at first, liking the Ben Affleck character (Nick Dunne), then despising him, then sympathizing with him again. Feelings toward the character of his wife (Amy Dunne, played by Rosamund Pike) will be mirror-opposite at each stage.

So first of all, Nick uses alpha game to woo and seduce Amy. My damaged old ears didn’t catch all their witty banter, but apparently Nick taylored his game just right for her. He fell into the wonitus (“1-itus”) trap that so many men do, and after dating her for a couple years, married her.

Here’s where it gets kinda muddy from the red pill perspective, because she had the money, not him, which makes her the provider I guess. They do wind up living on her money; she makes him sign a pre-nup; and she buys a bar for Nick and his sister to run. What you learn about Amy over the course of the flick is, on top of being a diabolical psychotic mastermind, she’s also a domineering skank who likes to keep her man on a leash. This isn’t always obvious because the plot unfolds partially from her point of view…and she’s an accomplished, remorseless liar.

It seems Nick becomes a lot more beta once he’s married to Amy and, predictably, she grows to despise him because of it. There are other complications too, like losing jobs, a sick mother, and a relocation from New York to Missouri. After finding work as a teacher, Nick begins an affair with a former student. This is what kicks Amy’s twisted psyche into high gear.

Amy masterminds the faking of her own murder and framing Nick for the crime. And it works pretty well for most of the movie–both on the police and the audience. But Nick catches wise and there’s a bit of a cat-and-mouse dynamic for a while.

There are a couple especially noteworthy scenes for the manosphere.

In one, Amy admits privately to Nick that she became disgusted with him when he stopped using game; and when he demonstrated a form of game again (during a television interview), she just had to get him back, and so came out of hiding.

In another scene, we see that another woman (a detective) is the only one in law enforcement who sees right through Amy. But Amy’s got the white knight federal agents eating out of the palm of her hand, and they stifle the valid suspicions of the detective because V.

(V for Vagina; victim… take your pick. One equals the other to a white knight.)

I confess that, the way the movie ended, I felt like a rape victim myself. I have no intention of reading the novel it was based on. Nick resigns himself to staying in the clutches of this evil, murderous whore, and confessing on national TV to crimes he never committed (abusing her; money-grubbing; etc.) because, after faking a pregnancy earlier, it turns out she really is pregnant now.

It’s tempting to wonder if the author/screenwriter pulled all these themes right out of the manosphere.

And yet the author/screenwriter is a woman. Is this a warning, or what?

Crime, Reviews

When the Other Shoe Drops

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I’ve banished cable from my house and never did get the converter for over-the-air TV broadcasts, so the only thing coming into my living room is internet. Still, there’s a lot of movies and even TV shows you can watch via Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, etc.

While I usually avoid TV series like the plague, there’s one I began watching as part of bonding time with my young son.

Lincoln Heights is only a few years old, and is part cop show; part family drama. Some of the drama is really contrived, and the first two seasons had some typical TV stupidity (which originates at the writing stage, usually), but there were some positive aspects that made it worth the pain.

Eddy Sutton, the father/husband character, is the kind of cop I wish still existed. He doesn’t sit on his lard ass eating doughnuts at a speed trap, waiting to gouge taxpayers out of their hard-earned wages for not wearing seat belts or tinting their windows. He’s not on a power trip. He didn’t join the police so he could get stick time, taser people, have sex with prostitutes for free or get away with murder. Unlike real cops, he’d probably even give a damn when you’ve been robbed. He might even have fingerprints taken at the crime scene when the victim’s not a V.I.P.

Eddy Sutton wants to serve and protect the citizens who foot the bill for his paycheck. It might be a stretch, but you might even argue that he knows his job is to protect individual rights. In other words, a fictional cop. If not a fantasy cop. He’s a guy I would actually tell my son (or daughter, or wife) to run and find if I’m not around but some sort of threat is.

Jenny Sutton (his wife) is a nurse, a good woman and a good mother. The three children are written and acted realistically for their ages. Their screen time tends to be laden with melodramatic angst…which is a little too much reality for me but I think it’s what sucked my own child into the narrative.

Then we got to Season Three.

Episode One ramped up the stupidity, but everybody has bad days (especially writers and directors) so we hung in there.

Then in Episode Two or thereabouts, whoever calls the shots for Lincoln Heights jumped on the homosexual bandwagon. Somehow a TV show slipped through the cracks and for two whole seasons failed to display a sodomite character and ram a homophile message down our throats. In Homowood, Commiefornia that’s a reckless, inexcusable oversight.

And wouldn’t you know, the Sympathetic Gay Character is the child of the new preacher in town and his stereotypical phony hypocrite wife. Are TV writers still patting themselves on the back for stale bupkus like this or has it sunk in yet how hackneyed their plot devices are?

I don’t know why, but rather than just quit cold turkey, I skipped forward to get past the cut-and-paste sodomite soapbox. I noticed that, though they’re trying to be subtle about it, they’re also sneaking an anti-gun theme into the series. In Season Three the show goes downhill fast.

My best guess is, whoever wrote the first two seasons moved on to something else. A typical establishment hack took over and, as predictably as a bowel movement after prune juice, began tweaking every thread in the show to align it with every other show on the idiot box.

It’s surprising that it took two seasons before this happened.

 

Crime, Reviews

The Arroyo

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Critics are people who get paid to spout off their opinions. Often they have college degrees. So you can’t really call me a critic since I don’t get paid to blog here. That distinction might help make sense of my next statement.

If critics hate a movie, I’m often tempted to watch it on the hunch that Hollywood sometimes hides the good ones under a pile of horrible reviews. Looks like critics hate this movie, so you might not have even learned it exists yet.

Let’s start with the “tangible” aspects:

Yes, it is low-budget, and indie. No multi-million-dollar special effects or big name actors. But no cheesey effects, either. The cinematography, sound work and editing were all competent.

The acting is a mixed bag. The major players were good…which is not to say photogenic. None of them will likely ever appear in People Magazine by virtue of their aesthetic appeal. Furthermore, the actor in the starring role has an unfortunate facial disposition which keeps his mouth in the shape of a smile even when he is clearly not smiling; yet his performance was solid.

The supporting actors performed at a level you would expect from friends, relatives and neighbors of an indie filmmaker. The screenwriter compensated for their inadequacies by not asking much of them. So they came off wooden, which is not as bad as grandiose. Underacting is preferable to overacting, I believe. So the supporting players weren’t good, but neither was it painful to watch them.

I saw real potential in the writing and directing. This was a movie with a message, and frankly, more was accomplished in the dialog than what many establishment directors can manage with an elite cast. I found a few clips on Youtube that, for all I know, report the story this film is based on.

The main character is a rancher in a border state. Every day illegal aliens swarm across the border through his property, leaving piles of garbage, vandalizing his fences, stealing from him and, far too often, leaving dead bodies.

The federal government refuses to do its job, and the local government (in the form of the sheriff) turns a blind eye as well. Gunmen for the drug cartels routinely trespass on the rancher’s property and occupy his deer stand. They are using illegals as “mules” to haul controlled substances into the country, and are also raping (or at least coercing sex from) the female illegals, then tying their panties to a “trophy tree.”

When the rancher and a friend decide to chase the cartel off his property, that’s when “shit gets real” in modern hood parlance. The cartel brings in a hit man  before long, and he’s about as slimy as they come. Yet he has the best lines in the film.

There is some action, some drama, and plenty of thought provocation Hollywood would never allow. I suspect that last item is the true reason critics hate the movie.

Action, Adventure, Crime, Reviews, Superhero

The Amazing Spider Mash-Up

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I’m going to break convention in this review and give you the good news first. This Spiderman flick has a few things going for it that make it worth a watch despite the bad news.

First and foremost, this one movie accomplishes something that Sam Raimi couldn’t pull off with an entire trilogy: it got the Spiderman character right. When this actor puts the costume on, he closely resembles the Spiderman of the comic books I remember: an incurable smartass; nerves of steel; bubbling over with cocksurity even when doom seems imminent; and a selfless hero in the truest sense of the word.

As Peter Parker, the character was somewhat less canonical…but I don’t mind that so much. (BTW, the Toby McGuire Peter was closer to the high school nerd of the earliest comics.) Frankly, Parker’s personal life in the comics was often so angst-ridden, disastrous and…real…as to be depressing. This Peter Parker is some kind of preppie-hip, though he certainly has his problems. Aunt May is different, too, and I guess that’s fine.

Another point in this movie’s favor is the film makers kept their mask removal fetish in check, for the most part. Spiderman only unmasked himself in public once or twice.

What’s truly amazing about this flick is that there’s not one amazon superninja in it. Maybe they just couldn’t figure out a way to stuff one into the plot. Still, I’m shocked that Gwen Stacy wasn’t revealed at any point to be some world-class master at hand-to-hand combat. In an age when pinkshirt white knight feminist tropes are obligatory, this is a major plus in the film’s favor.

There is one aspect of the film that was unfortunate because of its faithfulness to the source material, and that was the overuse of Spidey’s webs. Each web shooter–about the size of a Hot Wheels toy car, has an unlimited supply of the incredible web material (at least in the comics he occasionally ran out/had to reload), and he uses it for everything.  Maybe the film makers were just so pleased with the special effect that they had to show it off every chance they got. There’s one scene where Spiderman lands on a pipe, straddling it, and uses his spider-strength (nicely displayed earlier when he catches a police cruiser to keep it from crushing a cop) to rip it open. But rather than just grabbing it and tearing it open, he has to shoot his webs at it–from a range of about eight inches.

It’s a lot like Green Arrow’s tendency to shoot arrows (or threaten to do so) when he’s close enough to just clout the bad guys directly.

In the cinematic Spiderman universe, everybody is connected to Oscorp somehow. In this film, suddenly Peter’s father Richard is introduced as a former Oscorp employee involved in intentionally genetically engineering the radioactive spider which would bite Peter years later, turning him into a superhero.

The Osbornes are back, too. And Harry is especially creepy in this movie. I don’t know why they keep going back to the Green Goblin when they have such a largely untapped rogue’s gallery to draw from (in fact, why does there have to be a minimum of two villains per superhero movie anymore?), but here he is again. And he’s actually played fairly well.

BTW, (being careful not to spoil here) there’s a recreation of a famous/infamous (to Spiderman afficionados) confrontation between Spidey and the Goblin, involving Gwen Stacy which plays out in a way that could probably only be pulled off on film, yet which accomplishes the same results. Nicely done.

The biggest negative in this film is what they did to Electro. In a nutshell, they took the Jim Carey Edward Nigma character from one of the awful ’90s Bat-flicks, threw him into a tank full of electric eels and had him come out as Dr. Manhattan from The Watchmen. Only they call him Electro.

The Electro that Spider-fans know was a villain who could shoot lightning out of his hands. That’s plenty dangerous all by itself, and more than a handful for the NYPD, and Spiderman, to deal with. But screenwriters these days evidently don’t have the imagination or talent to tell any kind of story that doesn’t require epic destruction to keep the moviegoers awake.

So rather than a power company lineman, they made him an electrical engineer for…who else? Oscorp. He has some kind of childish fixation on people noticing him. Spiderman saves his life early in the movie and Max (Jamie Foxx) worships him afterwards in a very icky pathetic scene. But his adoration is fickle to say the least–when Spiderman doesn’t behave the way Max thinks he should, love turns to hate.

Electro… Dr. Manhattan…what’s the diff? Nothing, if you know as little about the source material as the screenwriters.

And after the eel attack, “Electro” is telekinetic (his electric bolts don’t just zap people or objects, but can lift them up and move them around), he can levitate, and materialize and dematerialize anywhere he wants. He’s even bald and blue like Dr. Manhattan. I rolled my eyes when he quipped some line about becoming a god, because the Hollywood cookie-cutter had already made him one. They might as well have named him Zeus–though I’m pretty sure the Greek deity couldn’t do all the nifty tricks Jamie Foxx does.

Sometimes it takes a while for me to accept the obvious, but I’m thoroughly convinced now that Hollywood film makers, even when restraining the urge to ram their politics down our throat, are a bunch of shameless hacks incapable of an original idea…and/or have a tremendous contempt for the intelligence of their audience. Take away their special effects and they couldn’t tell a story about anything.

Action, Adventure, Crime, Reviews, Superhero

Iron Man Clanks to a Cinematic Halt

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Originally posted 2013

It’s a just about universally accepted rule of Hollywood that even the best movies have sequels that are full of suck. If you dodge the bullet on the second one, then the third is just about guaranteed to blow dog. And yet I kept an open mind when laying down a small fortune to treat my family to a theater viewing of the final chapter in the Iron Man trilogy.

Iron Man I and the Avengers, despite their faults, were thoroughly enjoyable and worth the small fortunes paid for those respective family nights.

Unfortunately, this flick followed the sequel rule. Don’t get me wrong—there’s plenty of explosions and other destruction; cool visuals and special effects; witty dialog, and even some character development on the part of Tony Stark. If that’s enough for most moviegoers (and it probably is), then it will go down a winner. Unfortunately, it’s also brimming over with a whole lot of stupid.

Tony Stark has created a whole lot of different Iron Man armor, including the new “Mark 42” prototype. Meanwhile, he is suffering panic attacks.

And a new slimy capitalist is on the scene, making overtures to Pepper Potts (who runs Stark International now, leaving Stark free to tinker). Turns out the slimy capitalist was a slimy visionary in 1999 whom Stark dissed, while enjoying a one-night stand with a chick who just happens to be a leading scientist making breakthroughs in the very same field being pioneered by the slimy visionary: cellular regeneration. (Wait a minute…didn’t Dr. Connors already pioneer the technology when he became the Lizard in both the comics and the Spiderman reboot movie?)

So after humiliating the seemingly innocuous weirdo (played by Guy Pierce), and forgetting about the one night stand, they’ve come back to haunt him. Kinda’ like how Jim Carey as Edward Nigma/the Riddler came back to haunt Bruce Wayne after a perceived slight in one of those awful Batman flicks.

Meanwhile, a terrorist is bombing and killing indiscriminately, punctuating his reign of terror with video clips. He is called the Mandarin (based loosely on the Marvel villain of that name) and he doesn’t just use bombs—he turns human bodies into bombs.

Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau) is blasted into a coma by one of the Mandarin’s human bombs. Stark gets real mad. How mad? Try stupid mad. He threatens the Mandarin on national TV and gives out his home address, daring the terrorist to preempt his revenge. (Hey, joke’s on you, Stark: that’s not really Happy Hogan, but Daredevil/Matt Murdock’s buddy Foggy Nelson!)

Okay, there’s like this fetish with Hollywood film makers. I’m not talking about the sick sexual thrill they get from destroying fine automobiles for no reason. But this one’s pretty widespread, too. It has to do with revealing secret identities in superhero movies. Bruce Wayne was ready to tell Vicky Vale he was Batman after one flip in the sack. Now that must have been some hot sex! But he had cold feet about it, so Alfred game him a little nudge by just taking her down into the Batcave. I think at least one person per movie learned Gotham’s Dark Knight was Bruce Wayne up until R’as Al Ghul destroyed the Batcave the first time. Then in this latest Batfilm, Bane exposes Wayne’s secret underground Bat-labrinth for the entire population of Gotham City to find.

I lost count of how many times Spiderman lost or removed his mask on the big screen. Unmasking yourself in public is always a clever method for keeping your identity secret. So is confessing on camera, as Tony Stark did in the first Iron Man film.

So here he goes one better, broadcasting his home address as well. Of course said home is obliterated in a spectacular explosionfest during the chopper attack of the Mandarin’s invincible glowing human bomb henchmen. Ho-hum. I have no sympathy for an alleged genius capable of his unrepentant idiocy.

But did the supervillains of the world really need Tony Stark to tell them his home address on TV for them to figure it out? Why didn’t an attack like this take place right after the dumbass told them he was Iron Man in the first movie? Obviously his home defenses were inadequate to deal with a helicopter assault then or at any other time (not that a helicopter assault was needed to take his California cliff-dwelling, but it looks cool and is a good way to burn up millions of budget dollars renting choppers, shooting rockets, and blowing stuff to smithereens).

Big pretty fireballs everywhere, Pepper Potts almost dies, Stark barely escapes with his life, yada yada yada. Then through some contrived devices Stark winds up in Kentucky with his Mark 42 armor out of commission. But never fear: Stark breaks-and-enters a home to get out of the cold, and it just happens to house a boy genius and a suitable workshop in the basement.

Oh yeah: meanwhile, Rhodie’s moniker has been changed from War Machine to Iron Patriot and he loses his armor after stumbling into an ambush.

As we move toward the big climactic showdown, we find out that Stark’s Iron Man armor may have been destroyed in the attack on his house, but he had more armor stored away in a secret chamber underneath the secret chamber we knew about, and the suits can all act as flying robots when he’s not wearing them. That way the actor can show his purty face as he delivers wisecracks all during the epic fight scene.

I’ll leave the plot alone for now. It wasn’t monumentally stupid, relative to the genre. It was about par-for-the-formula for a superhero movie. Nothing impressive.

Be advised that I read Iron Man comic books well before any Marvel Comics character appeared on the big screen, and I have accepted, for the sake of entertainment, that a millionaire industrialist could build a flying suit of powered armor and, wearing it, fight bad guys and super-bad-guys. Unlikely, okay, but possible in theory. Some of what I’m about to point out, however, strains my suspension of disbelief beyond its tensile strength.

First off, Tony Stark built the Iron Man armor to fit his own body, and yet in this movie it comfortably fits anybody of any size and body shape. Rigid armor (such as the plate worn by the knights in the last days of chivalry) has to be custom made to the body of the person who will be wearing it, otherwise the pinching and scraping will become unbearable in no time, mobility will be severely limited and you might suffer serious injury. This might not threaten suspension of disbelief for most people, so I’ll move on.

Evidently, every piece of the new Mark 42 armor is equipped with rocket motors, invisible unlimited fuel supplies, and guidance systems which will home in on Tony Stark’s body no matter where he is, so that when he wants to become Iron Man, these items will fly through the air (sometimes from Kentucky) and clamp onto his appropriate body part. Oh, but be careful—they fly and clamp onto him really fast, sometimes smacking the hell out of anything that gets in their way.

Assuming such miracle technology were possible, once you cram each piece with the rocket motors, fuel, and electronics needed for this neat trick, where would you fit the circuitry, servos and other stuff you need to make the piece do what it’s supposed to do once it’s on Stark’s body?

Along the same lines is the use of these suits as robots. The internals of a robot would be built differently than the internals of a suit which amplifies the strength of the one wearing it (which Iron Man’s armor has always done). First of all, how would there be room for a man inside a man-sized robot? Secondly, if Stark can control these robots remotely, or put them on bad-guy-fighting-autopilot as he does in the climax, why did he ever put himself inside one to begin with?

Toward the end of this movie, Stark undergoes an operation to remove the shrapnel pressing in on his heart. There’s been no mention of a new breakthrough in medical science, so I guess he’s avoided it up to now simply because he liked the rush of existing millimeters from death. And he likes having a nuclear electromagnet in his chest. Girls dig it. It’s a…wait for it…chick magnet.

The aforementioned slimy capitalist has developed cellular regeneration technology. No, wait, that’s wrong. He’s a capitalist, after all, guilty of trying to make a profit and other evil motives. He didn’t build that—someone else made that happen. So anyway, the technology allows him to turn his henchmen into invincible superninjas. Not only do limbs and organs grow back when wounded, but these guys can do neat glowing tricks. Not only can they glow, but if they glow red enough they can become human soldering irons…or human bombs.

Stark really needs to work the bugs out of his armor, by-the-way, because evidently it can be crippled by the touch of a glowing finger. The glowing finger doesn’t knock out communications, life support, the onboard computer or the super-neato undressing/dressing back up functions. It doesn’t prevent the robotic (?) neck from turning the head. It only prevents Iron Man and War Machine from fighting back. Until, that is, the tension and suspense of the scene has reached a certain level. Then the arms, legs, repulsors and boot jets magically become operative. For a few seconds. Until the hero is rendered helpless again.

As in all the Marvel movies, the acting was good. There were plenty of jokes and humorous dialog, delivered by Robert Downey Jr. with his usual aplomb. The cinematography was equally high-caliber. The special effects were abundant and visually striking.

Style. Flash. Attitude. It’s got it. And that’s enough for a lot of people. If that’s enough for you, you’ll enjoy this movie.

Crime, Reviews

The Glass Key

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Dashiell Hammett is credited with creating the hardboiled genre, along with Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane. Considering the time in which it was published, this novel is about as hardboiled as they come. Even compared to a film maker like Quentin Tarantino, who faces no limitations on how dark and crass a story he can tell (and is applauded when he finds a way to offend somebody in the audience), this story is hardcorps.

I developed an interest in Hammett because The Maltese Falcon is probably my favorite hardboiled detective movie, and definitely my favorite flick starring Humphrey Bogart. Of course Falcon is Hammett’s most famous work, compiled from Sam Spade adventures in the pulps. I also once saw a pseudo-biographical made-for-TV movie about Hammett which piqued my curiosity.

This review is not about the 1942 film, which altered the plot and combined characters.

The Glass Key is about Ned Beaumont, a “wise guy” in gangster lingo. Or, if feeling a bit less generous, you could call him a henchman. He works for a guy named Paul Madvig, who is sometimes referred to as a politician, but in reality is somebody who owns politicians. Keep in mind this was written during Prohibition, and it’s easy to imagine Madvig as a kinder, gentler Al Capone type.

A  murder takes place, and Beaumont is made a special investigator by the District Attorney (who is owned my Madvig). Like Phillip Marlowe and others who follow in hardboiled history, though, Ned Beaumont doesn’t really solve the mystery. He merely struggles to survive on the mean streets, busting heads and getting his own busted in return…and the killer just happens to get exposed before it’s all over.

Ironic, but while reading the book, this is the exact actor I pictured in the role of the sadistic enforcer. I guess the casting director in 1942 thought him perfect as well.

Beuamont is an interesting character–about as amoral as you could get away with publicly in the prewar era. Depending on your disposition, you might find him less likeable than Paul Madvig…or the villains. Hammett always refers to him by his full name. Only characters use his first name by itself.

Reading this vintage novel is a glimpse into history, if you lose track of that, you might not appreciate that when this yarn first came off the typewriter, a new trail was being blazed.

 

Action, Crime, Reviews, Superhero

Arrow Season 1

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Originally posted October 2013

As a child, I would have killed to be able to watch all the superhero TV shows that are available right now. I would have found a series about Green Arrow to be especially cool–I read a reprint of one of his Silver Age stories in the back of a Brave and the Bold once and really liked it. Of course that occurred before Speedy left his partner to join the Teen Titans and Green Arrow became an activist in tights.

About a year ago Arrow spun off from Smallville, with a different actor in the lead role, but the creative thrust of the series is a faithful extension of what the Smallville writers began. Elements of the original Green Arrow mythos survive in this umpteenth reboot of the character: he develops his archery skills while marooned on a small island, for instance. Oliver Queen was also born wealthy and privileged. But unlike his counterpart over in Gotham, Bruce Wayne, Queen’s father was not an altruistic philanthropist, but a shady, ruthless elitist. Shortly before a murder/suicide which leaves Oliver the sole beneficiary of their meager resources after being shipwrecked, Dad urges his son to right the wrongs he’s done. While on the island Oliver finds a booklet which, conveniently, contains the names of all Dad’s co-conspirators in some nebulous plot to molest “Starling City.”

Dad was crooked, but his crimefighting son is straight as an…well, you know.

Once this castaway is rescued, and returns to civilization after five years have passed, his first mission is somewhat more intense than returning a lost FedEx package to its intended recipient. He sets out to bring his father’s co-conspirators to ruin, and takes them down financially, the old-fashioned superhero way (delivering them to the police), or by a much more realistic way that surprised me–simply shooting a projectile into their vital organs. This Green Arrow is not afraid to deal death…at least in the pilot and maybe another episode or two early on. Obviously the writers have been encouraged to tone the violence down, though. He still might occasionally break the neck of a henchman, but he’s now morally opposed to dealing out the same justice to their bosses.

If this sounds like an Occupy Wall Street fantasy pastiche of Robin Hood stealing from the rich and giving to the poor…it should. This is pretty much confirmed when the Evil Capitalist Cabal are referred to as “One-Percenters.”

Oliver Queen still has some stereotype One-Percenter attitudes, at least when it comes to wasting arrows.

Oliver Queen working out.
The series diligently shows the Arrow training to keep in peak condition for his crusade, which also offers up plenty of beefcake shots for the much-coveted female audience.

One aspect of the series “bible” I approve of is a commitment to showing Arrow working out–both in strength training and martial arts. For anyone whose job it is to be ready for combat at a moment’s notice, constant training is imperative. Not every writer understands or remembers this.

That said, after taking pains to show us Arrow’s fighting ability (by Hollywood standards), they have him do stuff like shoot arrows at a guy from three feet away for the sake of intimidation. Sheez, why not just smack him around a bit? You never see more than about six arrows in his quiver, yet he shoots about twice that many in quick succession during the first minute or so of any given confrontation with bad guys. And most of those are intentionally wasted shots. Queen also doesn’t believe in target tips, evidently. Even during target practice he uses razor-sharp hunting heads, routinely sinking them into concrete, steel, or other material that would utterly destroy an arrowhead anywhere but Hollywood.

For somebody with his spray-and-pray tactical discipline, he really should be armed with a select-fire rifle. But this is Hollywood, folks: firearms are eeeeeeeeee-veel. Puncturing a vital organ with an arrow is heroic. Puncturing the same vital organ with a bullet is dastardly.

The obligatory amazon superninjas are already coming out of the woodwork in Season One. See, in order to be an invincible fighting machine in pop culture, one of two prerequisites must be met. You either have to undergo years of intense training (in this case, an extreme survival-of-the-fittest regimen on a desert island where you must track, hunt, fight and perform impressive acrobatics for every scrap of food for five years), forging your mind and body into a weapon…

…Or you merely need to be female.

The Huntress
Arrow provides another character reboot during the first season–in this case an origin story for the Huntress.

Picking up where Smallville left off, this show is introducing more super characters from the DC pantheon. The Barry Allen Flash is rumored to be scheduled for a reboot in this series (I’m only eight episodes into the first season, so I don’t know if this has happened yet). But so far we’ve seen the Huntress; an ex-girlfriend of Queen’s who is strikingly similar to Black Canary (though her name is different from what I remember); supervillaness China White…and Oliver’s little sister Thea has been referred to by the nickname “Speedy”–so don’t be surprised if she turns out to be a superhuman master of archery and unarmed combat (all 81 pounds of her) and becomes a crimefighting partner in future episodes.

(This knee-jerk feminist fantasy is so universal that it is more obligatory than a sympathetic homosexual character in big-screen comedies. In comic books the two obsessions have merged seamlessly in characters like the Silver Age (Earth II) Batwoman, who the DC creative drones reinvented as a superdyke. So proud of themselves over stuff like that, they then scrambled to find more super-characters to sodomize. The Golden Age (Earth II) Green Lantern is now a posterboy for the Rainbow Revolution, too. Even Archie has jumped on the bandwagon–not with a crimefighting buttboy but a limp-wristed “war hero.”)

Even the acting and direction carry over from Smallville–and not just in the pilot episode. One of the methods that would not grate on me so much if it hadn’t already been so overused goes like this: Lex Luthor or somebody like him converses with the hero or some other character. They stand about three-to-five feet apart. Then when the time comes for the self-consciously memorable line in the exchange of dialog, the heavy steps toward the camera to deliver it with what I assume is supposed to be a menacing (yet understated) gleam in the eye and lowering of the voice.

Maybe this is an especially intimidating technique in real life. I doubt it, but my instincts keep me from trying it out. Stepping so close to deliver a threat or insulting one-liner would put me within easy range to get popped in the face.

The series has been amusing so far, but I can already see seeds of idiocy being planted in the first season storyline. For now it’s not a bad distraction while you’re on the exercise bike or the weight machine.

Crime, Reviews, Sports

Paul Bishop’s Felony Fists

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After Paul Bishop read Mel Odom’s retro-boxing novel Smoker, he found Odom’s website and looked up his contact info.

“We hit it off immediately,” says Bish. “We had a ton in common including a shared love of the fight pulps.”

During their first phone conversation, the brainstorming began for a new sports fiction series. The series is called Fight Card. It is a throwback to the boxing pulps of yesteryear.

Felony Fists was the first Fight Card instalment by “Jack Tunney.” For you armchair fight historians out there, that nome de plume is exactly what you suspect it is–a fusion between Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney, though the series takes place in the ’50s, not the ’20s (when those two were heavyweight champs). Several different authors in the Fight Card stable are writing under that amalgamated name.

The Fight Card series consists of monthly 25,000 word novelettes, designed to be read in one or two sittings. The stories and stylings are inspired by the fight pulps of the ’30s and ’40s – such as Fight Stories Magazine – and Robert E. Howard’s two-fisted boxing tales featuring Sailor Steve Costigan. – Paul Bishop

Patrick “Felony” Flynn is an LA beat cop who is also possibly the world’s most seasoned amateur middleweight. He’s offered a spot on the detective squad if he’ll help knock gangster Mickey Cohen out of boxing. That means he has to move up in weight to light-heavy, turn pro, and arrest Cohen’s fighter Solomon King’s ascent toward a title shot against Archie Moore. A middleweight moving up to fight a badass light-heavyweight is a monumental chore all by itself, but in case the reader doesn’t appreciate that, the pressure is heaped upon Felony Flynn increasingly right up until the last chapter.

During all this time, Flynn becomes partners with another rookie detective, Tombstone. A black detective on an historically/notoriously bigoted force like the LAPD must be exceptional, and Tombstone is. This subplot, a counterfeiting subplot, and the fight plot all come together and are tied off nicely. The writer set out to tell a retro-style pulp boxing yarn and I’d say he did a good job.

For my taste, Cohen’s tactic to get Flynn to throw the fight was overkill. The stakes were plenty high already, as were the odds against Flynn in the fight. For Cohen to be so scared of an Irish brawler with one professional fight (against an over-rated has-been) presenting a threat to a contender who consumes talented pros for breakfast (and who Archie Moore is worried about) was just too much. In Flynn’s other fights, he never was 100% on. He was either distracted, or careless…something to put the outcome in doubt. I really would have liked to see Flynn go to war from Round One in the climactic fight, and let the tension come from the fact that he’s overmatched, and making it through 15 rounds with Solomon King requires a superhuman effort. Plenty of tension that way and far more realistic.

Speaking of realism, I just have to provide the following advisory about boxing technicalities:

In boxing, a right-handed fighter does not have a right jab or a right hook. He jabs and hooks with the left. He throws straight rights or a right cross. (Everything I’m saying is mirror-opposite for a southpaw, of course.) What some people call a right hook from a right-hander is actually either an angled right uppercut or a roundhouse right–an ill-advised punch 99% of the time, though I did see Lennox Lewis score a knockout with one.

I don’t know how many other readers would notice or care about getting these fundamental details right, but for me it was an annoyance in what otherwise was an enjoyable read. To be fair, a LOT of authors who write about boxing make these kind of mistakes. (One exception is this book from the Fight Card series.)

Paul Bishop retired from the LAPD, so he knows a thing or two about the crime angle. That and his hard-hitting, fast moving prose in Felony Fists makes this a great read, and one of many highly entertaining Fight Card books.

P.S: Check out this trailer for Fight Card: Front Page Palooka below!