David Dubrow

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Book Review: The Mighty Jewmanberg’s Super Syndicate: When Heroes Divorce

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The Mighty Jewmanberg’s Super Syndicate: When Heroes Divorce contains two discrete stories: the title novella, involving superheroes, family, and a terrible drug called Shine; and a shorter story titled Sundown: Don’t Die Again, an urban fantasy piece.

Super Syndicate is very much a high-concept story, both funny and light-hearted.  Themes of separation and reconciliation are woven throughout the text, with mixed results.  Least effective was the subplot involving Gravnarr and Pulsana, a superhero couple feuding over an issue that happened off-camera and bolstered by the conceit that everyone from Grav and Pulse’s planet was born…emotional.  Introduced early, solved in the middle, and forgotten at the end, the narrative would’ve been better off without it.  Morris and Lisa’s story was a bit more poignant despite the light-hearted tone, and used a magic bracelet as a metaphor for a child caught in the middle of an acrimonious divorce.  The theme of family was handled well with Marco, captain of the Super Syndicate, and his brother Vincenzo, leader of the Empire Elite superhero team, and the interplay between characters as both rivals and family members was a joy to read.

At times witty, at other times subtle, the humor in the story put The Mighty Jewmanberg’s comedy chops on display.  He has a gift with dialogue, and some parts had me laughing aloud.  MJ also adopts a didactic style in his writing, explaining things to the reader like your dad telling you a bedtime story.  The light-hearted tone made it work.

Sundown: Don’t Die Again wasn’t as explanatory in style, though it maintained that lighter tone.  Unfortunately, while the concept was interesting, the execution needed work.  This was a story with dark themes, and MJ’s humorous style didn’t fit as well.  Feeling more like an introduction to a story than a complete narrative, I was left wanting more.  Hopefully in future works we’ll see Jack Mitchell again.

Overall, MJ has written a couple of stories worth your time, especially if you’re in the target audience: early-to-mid teens.  Four stars out of five.

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Analysis: Event Horizon

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On the heels of my analysis of Omen III: The Final Conflict, I have decided to write a little bit about another Sam Neill film: Event Horizon.

Despite it being 18 years old, the movie holds up well.  It uses gore, shocks, and a genuinely disturbing idea to produce a combination of good science fiction and great horror.  The defining theme of the film is perception, specifically sight, and uses a gothic palette to paint a gloomy, almost steampunk aesthetic.

What Philip Eisner the screenwriter didn’t count on was the direction modern culture took between 1997 and 2015, focusing inward rather than outward.  After the credits, the first words we see on the screen are: “2015 – First permanent colony established on Moon.”  We are nowhere near that now, and not likely to be there within the next several decades.  The drive toward risk and exploration is gone, unfortunately, and can only be found among a few wealthy entrepreneurs.  While this takes us out of the film a bit, it’s a temporary departure: we’re immediately thrown into Dr. Weir’s nightmare of the Event Horizon afterward.  Grim, derelict, with a floating, eyeless corpse.  The camera takes us through the corpse’s screaming mouth and into Weir’s eye.  In fact, it’s the first we see of Weir: an extreme close-up of his eye.

The Event Horizon itself has become possessed by Hell, literally, and everything we see of it shows how it’s been poisoned.  The viscera splattered about the interior from the bizarre orgy captured in bits and pieces by the ship’s log is disturbing, more so because nobody from the Lewis and Clark  bothers to clean it up or even mentions it.  From the ship’s cruciform shape to its head-shaped bridge, we’re meant to know that the Event Horizon’s possession represents the fall of both God and Man.

Spiked, opening and closing like a massive, fearsome eye, the heart of the Event Horizon is the gravity drive, a device that folds space.  It’s only accessible through a long hallway rigged with explosives and a shorter corridor that spins in a disorienting fashion.  Hell, literal Hell is in that gravity drive, waiting to be released.  From the spikes inside the chamber to the bizarre engraving on the drive itself, there’s no mistaking that this thing is evil incarnate, which is one of the film’s weaknesses: didn’t anyone take a look at this thing during the architecture phase of the FTL project and go, “Yeah, that’s messed up.”?  Are the humans of the future that blase?  The crew of the Lewis and Clark was appropriately disquieted, at least.

Most effectively, the film’s theme, sight, puts the viewer in the role of an honorary crewmember of the Lewis and Clark.  After all, what do you do with a movie except watch it?  The villains all had their eyes ripped out, from the doomed captain of the Event Horizon to Weir, who blinded himself.   Weir’s wife Claire, when we see her outside of flashbacks, is also missing her eyes.  Justin, who had been briefly swallowed up by the Hell beyond the gate, made an unsuccessful suicide attempt by jettisoning out into space without a suit and lost his eyes as a result (the blood squirting from his face in zero-gravity).  Peters falls to her death as a result of following a ghost that only she could see; her own vision killed her.  When Miller asks Weir, “What happened to your eyes, doctor?” Weir responds, “Where we’re going, we won’t need eyes to see.”  And at the end, when the possessed Weir has Miller at his mercy, he shows Miller horrible visions of grotesque brutality, all the while asking him, “Do you see?  Do you see?”  Perception, in Event Horizon, is reality.  The possessed ship can make you see what it wants you to, and when it’s finished with you, it takes away your eyes so that you’ll see nothing else except the appalling torment it has in store.

Obviously, the film isn’t perfect.  The Lewis and Clark suffers from the unimaginatively grungy look that many seem to think future spacecraft will invariably possess, and the characters play to type without developing in any way, shape, or form.  Nevertheless, it’s a great way to spend 96 minutes, and it’s currently available on Netflix.  Watch it (again).

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Movie Review: Snowpiercer

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The premise behind Snowpiercer is absurd: the world has ended in snow and ice, and the only survivors of humanity live aboard a massive train that somehow never stops moving.  The poor people, the dregs live at the back of the train, while the beautiful rich people live at the front.  It’s ludicrous.  It’s obvious social commentary class warfare BS tarted up in global warming-based science fiction silliness.

And yet…
And yet it works.  It works incredibly well.

The script rises above the subject matter, making it a smarter story that its underlying assumptions deserve.  Hints about terrible past events begin to make sense later on in the film, from strange hand gestures to the disturbing number of amputees among the tail section passengers.  The dialogue is tight, funny when it has to be and just philosophical enough to project ideas without bludgeoning the viewer.  Familiar tropes are used, but not overused, from the wisecracking sidekick to the sassy black woman to the assassin who just won’t die.

Chris Evans does a good job with what he’s been given.  As a bearded, reluctant leader of a violent revolution, he made a far better Curtis than he does Captain America.  Tilda Swinton was a scream, and Kang-ho Song as the security expert added depth and humor to a supporting role.  The only low spot was Ed Harris, who slept through his performance.

At times, the film made clever use of its absurdity, with a surreal scene in a sushi bar and an even more bizarre scene in a classroom full of young worshipers of Wilford, the inventor/engineer of the train.  Just as you’re lulled into accepting the movie’s strangeness, it manages to hit you with something out of left field that keeps you watching.

The visual style is arresting.  Fans of Chan-wook Park (The Vengeance Trilogy) and Kim Jee-woon (I Saw the Devil) will really appreciate Joon-ho Bong’s work here.  It just grabs you and you can’t help but watch the whole thing.

4 out of 5 stars.

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Five Book Reviews for the Price of One

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These are going to be short reviews, but they’re all you’ll need to determine if the books described are worth your time and money.

  • Brilliance by Marcus Sakey: Unfortunately, this book does not at all live up to the title.

     Bestselling author Lee Child described it as, “The kind of story you’ve never read before.”  That’s not true.  This kind of story has been done before, and a lot better (Wild Cards, for example).  The premise is that in 1980, a percentage of the population was born with uncanny abilities that go right up to the edge of supernatural, but don’t quite reach it (they’re called “abnorms”).  No psychokinesis or telepathy, but one guy manipulated the stock market to make himself a multi-multi-billionaire and ended up crashing it.  Some are just super-intelligent.  The main character, Nick Cooper, has the ability to read body language in such a way as to make him an unbeatable hand-to-hand fighter.  Some abnorms have become terrorists, so Nick, under the employ of the government, goes to stop them.  It’s an impossible mission.  There are many nonsensical plot twists; a standard Hollywood divorced-but-we’re-still-great-friends relationship; a new love interest who happens to be incredibly beautiful; a my-child-is-in-danger plot element; and a 9/11-style attack that was actually carried out by the U.S. government, Truther-style.  Sakey breaks up the action sequences by telling us how Cooper makes his unnaturally-quick combat decisions, which slows the pace down and destroys the scene’s excitement.  I really wanted to like this book, but couldn’t.  Two stars out of five.

  • Fluency by Jennifer Foehner Wells: This is a first-contact science fiction novel about a group of present-day astronauts plus one incredibly-talented linguist who go to a derelict spacecraft to explore it.  The protagonist, Jane Holloway, is the linguist.  She also alternates between weepy-weak and stronger than combat-hardened military veterans.  Plagued by a past tragedy that doesn’t seem so bad, she needed a great deal of persuading from a borderline mentally defective engineer to join the space mission (as if the opportunity to meet extraterrestrial life wasn’t much of a draw).  The engineer happened to be the love interest.  Her fellow astronauts act like angry high schoolers with firearms (in one laughable scene, the captain tells the crew to put armor-piercing rounds into their handguns), the love interest is extremely incompetent at just about everything, and her supernatural ability to pick up languages faster than others can program a VCR enables her to communicate telepathically with the one surviving intelligent alien aboard the ship.  None of these characters were likable or acted in ways that made sense, the plot was a mishmash of alien politics and crew infighting, and the story seemed too much like a setup for future volumes rather than its own discrete narrative.  Two stars out of five.
  • The Wayward Pines trilogy by Blake Crouch: A sci-fi thriller that consists of Pines, Wayward, and The Last Town.  There were times when I was reading these books that I literally couldn’t put them down for love or money.  They were awesome.  Extremely well-written, accurate with weapons, complex in characterization, and exciting from start to finish.  The big secret to the town of Wayward Pines, revealed in Pines, was a bit disappointing and unbelievable, but overcame that anyway.  Wayward didn’t suffer from the middle-book slump that so many trilogies experience, and brought real tension to the overall story.  The Last Town had a disappointing ending, but it wasn’t a failure of writing.  I simply strongly disagreed with the choices the characters made at the end, though the epilogue gave it a final punch.  If you read nothing else in the thriller genre this year, at least pick up Wayward Pines.  Four out of five stars.
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Movie Review: Interstellar

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I don’t know if I’m a Christopher Nolan fan.  I really liked The Prestige and loved Inception.  His Batman trilogy was the best effort made yet to capture Batman on film, but I was never really into Batman, and the Eastern martial arts stuff seemed sort of lame.  Still, I had high hopes going into Interstellar.

It’s his best yet.  Terrible movies come out all the time and people like them.  Mediocre ones get lots of Oscar attention, even when few people outside of the Academy have seen them.  Interstellar reminds us that truly great films can and do get made.  You can click on the IMDB link to get a description of the plot and learn who the cast is, but really, if you have the time, just see it.  I’ll describe some of the more general aspects of the film, and then afterward discuss plot elements that give the story away.
  • Matthew McConaughey: He did extraordinary work in this film.  Across the board the acting was great to middling, but in McConaughey’s case, he simply was Cooper.  At no point in the film did you get the feeling that this was a man playing a role.  You simply witnessed the remarkable experiences of a brave man doing the best he could in unbelievably difficult circumstances.  How often do you see that in a film?  Especially a genre film?
  • Family Life: It’s easy to go high-concept and get the audience’s waterworks going when it comes to family themes in a movie.  As sophisticated moviegoers, we’ve seen it all before.  This was different.  There was a level of complexity and anguish brought to this story that’s rarely seen in science fiction; the concept of time-debt was used here very well and was reminiscent of Dan Simmons’ classic Hyperion novels.  It added tension to an already taut story.
  • Immersion: There is simply no illusion a talented special effects crew can’t create with current technology.  While the effects weren’t necessary for the plot, everything looked as though it belonged: spacecraft gliding through space, the lander on the water planet, the camp on the ice world.  It was all just there.  No imagining necessary.  It looked perfectly real.  Even the robots were awesome; a lot of work was put into them to make them characters but not mascots.  
  • Our Future: Near the beginning of the film was a moment that showed you very clearly that this was not only set in the future, but that the future is a bleak, even terrible place.  You’ll know it when you see it; it’s jaw-droppingly ugly.  The Earth’s peril is both existential and philosophical, which makes McConaughey’s journey that much more important.

I don’t want to talk in hints, but if you haven’t seen this film, I would hate to spoil it for you.  Just watch it like I did, with wide eyes.  Five out of five stars.

*SPOILERY BITS*
READ NO FURTHER IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN INTERSTELLAR
  • Matt Damon: Unfortunately for him, Matt Damon’s become such a star that he’s no longer a believable character any more, no matter who he plays (unless it’s Jason Bourne).  He did a good job, but he’s a little miscast, because he took me out of the film a little.  I knew he was squirrelly from the beginning: he talked way too much.  Also, anyone who tells you to NOT check or double-check something is a bad guy.  He had some of the best lines in the film, with his alternately pathetic apologizing and disturbing questions of the man he was trying to murder.
  • Bootstrapping: There’s a massive plot hole that the whole film is based on, and I can’t seem to get my head around it.  Everything that happens, from the wormhole appearing to Cooper saving himself via the tesseract is based on a recursive time loop.  If the future humans were the ones who sent the wormhole back in time to save us from a doomed Earth, how did those future humans survive to do it?  There should have been no future humans alive to save us.  The only way to explain it is to go into fifth-dimensional physics and play around with multiple universes, but if that’s the case, then why bother?  There’s an infinity of doomed Earth you’d have to save.
  • If B then A: It’s possible that the future humans sent the wormhole back in time not to save themselves, but to save Plan A humans.  The future humans could simply be the descendants of Plan B, who were going to survive anyway because Anne Hathaway unfroze their embryos on the new planet she’d found.  So what they did was save Earth’s population by sending the wormhole and tesseract back in time for Cooper to fly through and find.  
  • Me, Me, Me: I almost never geek out about movies, but I just dug this one.  Probably because I saw it with my brother; it was the first time we’d seen a movie in the theater together in over a decade.  He read the novelization and told me it was just a scene-by-scene novelization of the movie; no great revelations there.
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Movie Review: Jodorowsky’s Dune

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Jodorowsky’s Dune is a documentary on a failed attempt to bring Frank Herbert’s science fiction novel Dune to the silver screen in the 1970’s.  It’s a brilliant film, told in storyboards and extensive interviews.  Even if you’ve only seen David Lynch’s effort (or worse, the SyFy Channel miniseries) and not read the book(s), you really have to watch this movie.

Alejandro Jodorowsky is a Chilean filmmaker and writer, known best for his bizarre cult films El Topo, The Holy Mountain, and Santa Sangre.  He’s also hysterical to watch in this documentary: his enthusiasm for a project decades dead jumps out of the screen, as does his anger and dismay at what happened to it.  In amusing detail he described the hoops he had to jump through to cast Orson Welles as the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen and legendary artist Salvador Dali as the Emperor of the Known Universe, Shaddam IV, for example, as well as special effects wizard Dan O’Bannon and the awesomely talented artist Jean Giraud (known as Mœbius).

If Jodorowsky was brilliant, what stole the show were Mœbius’s storyboards.  Meticulously sketched, the Dune storyboard book is thicker than three Manhattan phone books stapled together.  What Jodorowsky had in mind for the visuals was incredible: it would have revolutionized cinema science fiction at least a year before Star Wars came out.  Legendary artist H.R. Giger‘s work for the visuals was also displayed, as was the art of science fiction illustrator Chris Foss.  Looking at the art for the unmade film is a terribly heartbreaking experience in imagining what could’ve been.

Nevertheless, if Jodorowsky’s vision of Dune had been made, it would have been a gigantic, artsy mess that had little to do with the original subject matter.  Fans of the book would have been horrified at what Jodorowsky had done to it (at one point in the film, Jodorowsky himself says that he would have raped the novel, like he was raping Frank Herbert himself).  At one point, he’d intended to make the movie about 12 hours long.  So it’s no wonder they weren’t able to get financial backing from the big studios: it would have been a massive money pit that everyone except the art house crowd would have loathed.

Even so, it made an awesome documentary after the fact.  Five out of five stars.

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