Category Archives: Crime

Adventure, Crime, Music

An Alpha Male Hot-Rods Through SJW-World

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SJW=Social Justice Whiner.

I’ve never taken drugs but I understand that pushers often hand out the first fix for free in order to get somebody hooked. Cunning strategy, sez I.

So starting today, the E-Book of Shadow Hand Blues will be free on Amazon for a few days.

Deke Jones debuted in Fast Cars and Rock & Roll, where he learned some lessons about women, and people in general, while playing in a band and racing in a “One Lap of America”-style campaign.

This  time it is his private investigator creds which are put to the test.

The purchase of a vintage electric guitar leads Jones into a 40-year-old cold case murder mystery involving an enigmatic blues man, swindling record producers, hop-head disc jockeys, and dead prostitutes.

To dig through all that, Jones has to temporarily set up shop in a bizarre hippie town seemingly caught in a time warp. Meanwhile Deke encounters some of his old friends, a sweet country girl and an intriguing older woman…just to name a few.

Suffice it to say: there’s a lot more that comes to light than just clearing up the murder.

 

Crime, Sneak Peek/Sample Chapters, TEOTWAWKI

The Black Awakening Stirs

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 5

D MINUS 88

POTAWATTOMIE COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE

OKLAHOMA

Tommy Scarred Wolf finished reading the email from his niece and was organizing a reply in his mind when a knock on his office door roused him from his thoughts. He glanced up to see Deputy Janet Bailey leaning around through the doorway.

His door was usually open, but his people were polite enough to knock anyway.

“Have you got a minute, sir? Janet asked.

He had never got used to being called “sir,” preferring to be called by his first name. Janet knew that, so this was her way of telling him something serious was going on.

“Yeah,” Tommy said, nodding toward the vinyl sofa opposite his desk. His office was tidy and Spartan, with little in the way of decoration save for an American flag, a framed photo of all his deputies between two prowl cars, and some other cop stuff. He didn’t clutter his work area with family memorabilia.

Janet entered, followed by a girl who looked to be about 15. The girl glanced at Janet tentatively as if making sure it was okay to sit down. Janet shut the door behind them.

Tommy straightened in his chair. This was serious, alright.

The sheriff had a lean, sinewy build, a little below six feet in height, but tall for a full-blooded Shawnee. Shaving had never really been necessary for him, and it was a good thing since his red-bronze face was now full of more pits and other terrain features than ever. He still kept his black hair short, but not high-and-tight for a long time, now.

The young girl was mixed, like Janet. Maybe a quarter-breed or less. Her hair was brown with streaks of different colors. She wore a cumbersome volume of jewelry as so many in her generation did; stylishly torn jeans; a tank top showing off her pierced beer belly, and some of those retro-hi-top sneakers kids wore because they thought they made them look street savvy or something. Her fingers had nicotine stains and it was obvious she chewed on her fingernails.

“This is Diana,” Janet said, sitting beside her.

“Hello Diana,” Tommy said, trying to smile warmly to put her at ease.

“Diana,” Janet said, “I’m going to tell the sheriff what you told me, okay? Feel free to add anything new you remember.”

Janet, a mother of three, wasn’t great at police work, but she was a dynamite rape crisis counselor. Actually, in anything requiring the human touch, Janet was his go-to superstar. She faced Tommy as she spoke, with frequent glances at the young girl to coax nods of agreement and include her in the conversation.

“Diana found me at the gas station,” Janet explained. “She had just left the house of one of her teachers and ran about six blocks before she found me.”

“Is it normal for you to see your teachers on the weekend?” Tommy asked.

Diana nodded.

“She’s been visiting Ms. Greeley at her house for a few weeks,” Janet said. “Right?”

Diana nodded.

“What’s your relationship with Ms. Greeley?” Tommy asked.

“We’re friends,” Diana said, staring at the floor.

“She ran from the house because she was scared,” Janet went on. “There were things going on in the house that made her uncomfortable.”

“What kind of things, Diana?” Tommy asked. “I’d like to hear it from you, if you don’t mind.”

“Well, there was me, Rose—Ms. Greeley I mean—Zack and Dave,” Diana said in a squeaky voice.

“Who are Zack and Dave?” Tommy asked.

“They go to my school. Zack is a junior; Dave’s a senior.”

“How about you?” Tommy asked.

“I’m a freshman,” the girl replied.

“So what do these boys do over at Ms. Greeley’s house?” Tommy asked.

“They…they’re lovers,” Diana said. “The three of them.”

Tommy had a poker face that came in handy at times like these.

“For the last few days,” Janet said, “they’ve been pressuring Diana into doing some things she doesn’t want to do.”

Tommy nodded. “Sexual things?”

Diana nodded.

“The boys are pressuring you?”

Janet cleared her throat. “The boys, yes. But mostly Ms. Greeley Right?”

Diana nodded.

“How old are you?” Tommy asked.

“I’m 14,” Diana said.

“Did they try to force you to have sex, Diana?” Tommy asked.

“Well, not exactly,” Diana said. “I mean, nobody got rough, I guess. But, Rose has been, like, pregnant…and, she’s all into some kind of, like, alternate religion…”

The girl seemed on the verge of breaking down. Janet picked up the narrative. “It sounds like the school teacher gave birth in her house. They took this newborn baby and performed some sort of ritual. At the end of the ritual, they took a knife…”

The girl lost it, wailing and blubbering, face wet with tears. “…Blood everywhere…it kept screaming…”

Janet put her arm around the teen and patted the back of her neck, turning to Tommy with tears in her own eyes.

Tommy ground his teeth and asked, “Can her parents come get her?”

“She lives with her mother, who’s at work today,” Janet said.

“She’s gonna have to leave work and come get her daughter,” Tommy said. “And we need the address of Ms. Greeley’s house.”

“Yes sir,” Janet said, wiping her eyes.

Tommy rose, opened a desk drawer and pulled out his shoulder rig, checking the magazine in his M1911 out of habit and clicking it back into place.

He threw his office door open and stalked down the hallway, pulling on his shoulder rig. He paused at the dispatcher’s desk. “Who do we have not busy right now?”

Laura brought up a window on her monitor and scanned the list. “Jeff and Kevin don’t have anything.”

“Get ’em,” Tommy said. “And if anyone else gets free in the next hour, send ’em to me, too. And get Judge Aragon on the phone. We need a warrant PDQ.”

“Yes sir,” Laura replied.

NORMAN, OKLAHOMA

Tommy and two deputies arrived at the Greeley house and checked all the exits before knocking. For most cops the girl’s tip by itself would suffice for probable cause, and judges would accept it in cases like this, when time was of the essence.

But Tommy had an arrangement with the judge to get warrants quickly, and so far he’d always had one when he intended to search somebody’s property.

A skinny teenage boy answered the door, with an oversize T-shirt and sagging pants, a toboggan on his head despite being indoors. “What is it? he asked, taking in the sight of his visitors, with hollow eyes.

Jeff gave him the spiel. The kid tried to stall, then his eyes came alive with hate when the uniformed men entered anyway.

As they drew closer to the door to the basement, the kid’s protests grew louder. Kevin stayed with the boy during the search, to make sure he didn’t try to run.

Kevin wasn’t expecting the kid to produce a knife and stab him just under his vest.

The kid screamed and came at Jeff with the knife. Jeff had his pistol out by now, and fired. The kid went down.

Jeff’s eyes went wide. He’d never had to shoot before, and this was a kid.

Tommy grabbed him by the shoulder, pointing at Kevin, who was also down, crying out and bleeding everywhere. “Put your weapon away and stay with Kevin. Use one hand to put direct pressure on the wound. With your other hand, call an ambulance, and for backup. Got it?”

Jeff nodded dazedly.

The basement door burst open. Another teenage boy emerged, taller and sturdier, slamming the door behind him. He wielded some kind of curved sword and by the way he moved it, it was obvious to Tommy he was comfortable using it.

“Hold your fire!” Tommy shouted, in case Jeff decided to counteract this new threat, or if Sanford came in the back way after hearing the shot.

The boy glared at Tommy and bellowed something that was neither English, Spanish, or Shawandasse. Then in a guttural voice in English he said, “I’m going to carve you up and drink your blood!”

The kid definitely had the edge in speed and energy–Tommy could tell by the way he moved. His T-shirt said something about ROTC and leadership. He reminded Tommy a little of himself as a boy—maybe what some of Tommy’s buddies might have looked and dressed like when young men.

“You need to put down the weapon, young man,” Tommy said.

Light glinted off the blade as the boy twirled it in a figure-eight pattern while advancing.

Tommy didn’t want to shoot him; but he also didn’t want to be sliced open by that blade. Without warning he dropped into a deep crouch and used his leg to sweep the kid’s feet out from under him. The kid fell and Tommy, springing up from his crouch, landed on his wrist, kicking the sword away.

Tommy squatted, pinning the boys arms against the floor. From here he paused to decide how he would wrestle the kid around onto his stomach, to get the cuffs on.

With strength no teenage boy of his size should have, the boy bent up from flat on his back, rising like Dracula from a coffin, lifting Tommy up with him. Tommy shoved his unbelief to the back of his mind and drove an open hand strike into the boy’s jaw.

Tommy knew how to knock a person out. He could do much more than that with his bare hands, in fact. But the boy was barely even stunned.

Tommy hit him again, and again. He rained down blows that would send a mature man twice the kid’s size to the hospital, but his lights wouldn’t go out. Ideas occurred to Tommy in those few seconds: Maybe the kid was on cocaine, or PCP. But where was his disproportionate strength coming from? It wasn’t like Tommy hadn’t known people who were stronger than they looked. In fact, Tommy himself was one of those people.

This was something different.

In desperation, Tommy reached for a weapon on his belt he’d never used before. He drew the stun gun, poked it against the kid and pushed the button. It jolted the kid’s body, but didn’t stop him. Tommy sent charge after charge into the boy, who was still full of fight. But it slowed his body down enough for Tommy to roll him over and slap the cuffs on.

In amazement, he straightened and watched the kid flail around, straining with spastic desperation as if trying to break the cuffs. For some reason Tommy feared he might be able to. “Keep your eye on him,” he told Jeff. “I don’t know what he’s on, but if you have to, taze him.”

Jeff nodded, hand clamped on Kevin’s wound.

Tommy opened the basement door again and stepped through. His nostrils were assaulted immediately. The air was heavy with strong incense–and something foul underneath that smell.

He descended the stairs, preferring to let his eyes adjust to the dark rather than use a flashlight. Strangely shaped objects hung from the rafters. As his eyes focused in the dim light, it became obvious why there’d been such an epidemic of pets reported missing in town. And what had happened to the pigs reported stolen by a local farmer was also explained.

The floor and walls were decorated with strange symbols and pictures. Tommy remembered Diana had mentioned some kind of alternate religion. Then he noticed something that looked like a stool, or perhaps a small end table, made of brass. Upon this platform was what appeared to be the corpse of a human baby.

Something about a collection of pillows on the floor didn’t look right, Tommy studied it. A mattress lay on the floor–no bed frame, no box spring. One of the large pillows stirred, then took on the form of a naked woman. Early-to-mid forties, attractive…probably quite a hottie once upon a time. From her lower lip, trailing down her chin and neck were dark streaks. Tommy was afraid to guess what those streaks were composed of.

“You should leave,” the woman said. “Forget you ever came here. You don’t know what you’re messing with.”

###

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

###

We don’t normally post on Wednesdays but the Kindle version of False Flag goes on sale for 99 cents at some point today. After that it will likely jump to a price point that is $4+.

The paperback will probably stay at its current price for a long time. As long as the novel is, it can’t really sell for less and be profitable.

###

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.

SHBebook

 

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.

raceflagger

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.

dieselblower

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.

dieselcharger

…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.