Cinemasterworks: Celebrating "Beyond Skyline"

It's so easy to be critical and cynical about everything.

So let's all take a deep breath, log in to Netflix, and savor something true and noble in this untrue, ignoble world...

Beyond Skyline.

I can't really say enough good things about this movie. But goodness knows I'll try.

It's a bizarre miracle that this bonkers alien invasion bonanza even exists.

First off, it's a sequel to Skyline. A film that didn't quite set the box office on fire, and no one seemed to like. I think I was the only one in the theater when I saw it in 2011. But I liked it okay and was proud to contribute financially to its box office take. (Full disclosure: I'm a sucker for alien movies and I loved the scenes of aliens vacuuming up every citizen in L.A. and I admire the scrappy micro-budget way it was put together. [Fuller disclosure: in retrospect, I think I was friends with the general manager of the Downtown Regal where it played and she let me in for free. So I didn't actually contribute to its box office.])

Still: Aliens. Vacuuming. L.A. Cleanin' up the town!

Q: So why on Earth did it get a sequel?

A: CHINA.

Skyline made bank in China, so the filmmakers got to take another swing. And hoo boy, did they swing for the fences.

The first Skyline was open-ended, so they clearly always intended it to be a franchise (Beyond Skyline is open-ended, too, and I'm already stoked for the next one and I hope they call it Waaay Beyond Skyline). Broad strokes: aliens invade L.A. and it's revealed at the end of the movie that they rip out our brains and use them to power their drone robot soldiers. Our hero gets nearly-abducted multiple times, which builds up his resistance to aliens controlling his ripped-out brain so in the LAST SCENE of the first film, his ripped-out brain achieves consciousness in his alien robot drone body and he saves his pregnant wife from the aliens. And he's about to rumble with some other alien drones and take on the alien Big Bads when - ROLL CREDITS.

Weird flick, weird ending. So yes, I was stoked to randomly discover they made a sequel.

Beyond Skyline runs parallel to the original for 15 minutes or so with different characters in a different section of L.A. Folks get sucked up, and there's a whole lotta alien fights with a variety of interesting creatures. And then a huge epic scene where the giant alien ship gets taken down, then reassembles itself, and more mayhem and monsters and shenanigans and you think, well, they just blew their budget. Looks like they already spent ten times as much as the original Skyline. There can't be more than that.

There is! You, you lucky viewer you, still get:

-An extended battle/chase/rescue scene on the alien ship where we meet back up with characters from the original Skyline, and

-A trip to Laos, where we meet up with an entirely new cast of colorful characters doing AWESOME martial arts work, and
-A kooky scientist in an underground bunker in an ancient architectural site, seeking to genetically engineer a solution for the alien virus involving a fast-growing half-alien kid that they got along the way, I forgot to mention her because there's SO MUCH AWESOME STUFF GOING ON, and
-A mega-stupendous showdown with all the robots and aliens you can possibly imagine going head-to-head with augmented humans doing super-duper martial arts and there's a ton of alien and human mayhem, and
-Then we flash forward and reveal the half-alien kid all grown up and leading a star fleet to take on the aliens in their home world with bang-kazoom lasers blazing, and -
-ROLL CREDITS!

Gah! Want more now!

Bonus feature: this movie cost a pittance to make. $20 million. It looks like it cost ten times as much. This is a miracle of low-budget film, a crazy-pills all-over-the-place all-stops-pulled cinematic extra-extravagant extravaganza.

Let us celebrate it with song.


-B.P. Kasik/Phony McFakename

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My Phony books are on Amazon here and my "legitimate" books are on Amazon here. I exist on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram.

Literateur: "Baby Brother" by Noire (and 50 Cent)

Oh, brother. Baby, it's time for Baby Brother.

Let's start by basking in the glory of the tagline on the rear cover: "STREET JUSTICE WASN'T HIS WAY. BUT FOR HIS OLDER BROTHERS, IT WAS THE ONLY WAY."

Sold. We're in for an intense literary urban drama here. Shakespeare in the streets. Very exciting.

First, let's put this work in context: Baby Brother is a "G-Unit" book. Series description from the cover: "A hot new series of hip-hop novellas that dare to tell the truth about The Life. The lovers, the haters, the guns, the money, the highs, the lows: The Street, for real." Alright, then!

Hip-hop artist 50 Cent decided to launch his "G-Unit" book line in 2007 (under the banner of MTV, published by Pocket Books, and I'm just now noticing "G-Unit" also spells "gun it," which is a cool subtle linguistic trick) after the success of his autobiography, From Pieces to Weight.

Here's the thing, though: that book was non-fiction (supposedly meaning it has more truth than a fiction book, but that's rarely true) and those celebrity autobios are all ghost-written, anyway. So what was Mr. Cent thinking, jumping into the FICTION business?

Here's what I suspect he was thinking: "I'll get someone else to write these books and put my name on the cover above their names! Worked for James Patterson and Tom Clancy, why not me?"

(Well, Patterson and Clancy already had strong track records in fiction and had built their printed media brands to the point where their style was easy for ghostwriters to imitate. Also Mr. Cent's author bio inside the rear cover is mostly a list of his business ventures. I'm not sure what his bottled vitamin water, apparel, footwear, or watch companies have to do with his literary merits, but they take up about 90% of the space explaining why we should be impressed by him as an author. In fact, his previous BOOK only gets one tiny sentence of a mention amid a huge paragraph of text. In one of his BOOKS. But hey, who am I to nitpick? More power to him! You go, Mr. Cent! Build that brand! Expand thine empire! Manifest destiny!)

For Baby Brother, Mr. Cent's "co-author"... hahaha the quotation marks aren't enough, I can't type them with a straight face, let's be honest here, the REAL author is a cunning linguist named "Noire." Interestingly, I'm still not sure if Noire is male or female. I didn't do a Google to find out. But let's take a gander at Noire's author bio: "one of the hottest names in hip-hop urban erotica."

Ruh-roh. I think we just learned what kind of book we're REALLY about to read.

Let's investigate further: "Noire's bestselling, critically acclaimed fiction titles include Thug-a-Licious, Candy Licker, and G-Spot."

Oh, dear. This is gonna be like one of those innocent-looking, red-covered books you notice on your grandmother's coffee table, flip through out of curiosity and before you know it, get your eyeballs burned by descriptions of "moist clefts" and more climaxes than the film version of Return of the King, isn't it?

You'll find out! (SPOILER: yes.)

[Carefully open the book.]

In case you have any lingering doubts about this noble literary work's authorship, the very first printed page is a letter from 50 Cent explaining how he rounded up a bunch of authors to write these "G-Unit" books for him but still put his name as the main author on the cover (and spine). This one-page letter is probably the only thing in this book actually penned by Mr. Cent.

[Turn the page.]

Ah, the title page. Usually a pretty uneventful experience. Not this time! For behold, it reveals for the first time the book's full title.

Baby Brother: An Urban Erotic Appetizer.

Yep. Confirmed. This is one of your grandmother's filthy sex books.

[Turn the page again, with more trepidation this time.]

Ah, the Dedication page. Okay, this is pretty great: "Don't let the mean streets strangle you. Stay on the success grind and keep doin' the damn thang." Well, that's pleasant enough! Inspiring and well-said!

[Turn the page with increased confidence.]

Oo, the Acknowledgments! Right off the bat: "Father, thank you." Okay, the author is acknowledging their father. That bodes well. Maybe this won't be a graphic sex book, after all, but instead a fun romantic tale for the whole family! The Princess Bride in the hood, perhaps?

[Turn the page, ready for a rollicking good urban adventure full of good family fun.]

Okay, another title page. We already had one of those. But okay. Gotta pad your page count, goodness knows I've done that in my books...

[Turn the page again, slightly less jolly.]

Okay, a full page dedicated to the words "CHAPTER 1," with another blank page afterward. Bush league.

[Turn the page again, even less jolly.]

An all-italics prelude page. A paragraph describing a prisoner. Foreshadowing. One of our characters is gonna end up in jail, oh no!

[Turn the page, jolly again.]

Oh, look, the font size and margins look like a Scholastic book, this is gonna be pretty tame after all, I suspect. Let's settle in and...

WHAM! Graphic sex scene, in medias res. Multiple creative descriptions for the human vagina (including "wet yummy") on the first two pages. Also this gem: "Her juices smelled like Fruity Pebbles and it was just about breakfast time."

Tell Grandma we got a winner for her here. Let's order her a copy of Baby Brother for Christmas.

To my eternal discredit, I made it all the way through this terrible, terrible book. An innocent teen (with a gang-affiliated older brother) is about to escape the ghetto and go to college, but instead a couple of guys (who were up to no good) start to make trouble in his neighborhood and frame him for his girlfriend's murder (she was the one with the juices that smelled like Fruity Pebbles). He gets sent to Rikers Island prison, where he is promptly sexually assaulted and murdered by rival gang members seeking to antagonize his older brother. Shootouts in the street ensue. And there's a totally gratuitous, momentum-killing, and often quite disgusting graphic sex scene every few pages.

If this is an "Urban Erotic Appetizer," I'd hate to read the main course.

In other news, the final page notifies us that author Noire has another book coming out soon (probably available by now, as this was published in 2007). Title: Thong on Fire.

Better order Grandma a copy of that one, too.


-B.P. Kasik/Phony McFakename

* * *

My Phony books are on Amazon here and my "legitimate" books are on Amazon here. I exist on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram.

Favorite Quotes: May 2018

“This is not good...not good to the max!”

-Eerie, Indiana: The Other Dimension

“You can’t be a successful Dictator and design women’s underclothing.”

“No, sir.”

“One or the other. Not both.”

“Precisely, sir.”

-P.G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters

“...I'm getting tired of female protagonists who don't fit the social mold of the times - instead they are BRAZEN and SMART and PRAGMATIC. Just...give me a girl who likes to knit sometimes, y'know?”

-Devo Glass

“My brain is a smoking wreckage and I’m looking for the black box!”

-New Girl

“I think you’re a HEEL.”

“So I’m a heel. What of it?”

“Well, maybe I’m a guy who hates heels!”

“Well, maybe I'm a guy who hates guys who hate heels!”

“Well, maybe I’m a guy who hates guys who hates guys who hate heels!”

-Crimewave

“Your love is scaring me.”

-The Neighbourhood

“Hey, somebody ripped off the thing I ripped off! Man!”

-Cheech and Chong’s Next Movie

“Some people prefer to make their homes so neat that there is no evidence of life anywhere at all.”

“The reading area was a beautifully crafted trap set by the librarians, but it was too perfect. Even the dumbest book lover—and anyone who would regularly choose to come in contact with books could not be a bright bulb, Jackie thought—wouldn’t fall for this.”

“Nothing there but a distant airplane crawling across the sky, red blinking lights, vulnerable in the vast empty, faint red beacons flashing the message HELLO. A SMALL ISLAND OF LIFE UP HERE, VERY CLOSE TO SPACE. PRAY FOR US. PRAY FOR US.”

“Most people in Night Vale get by with a cobbled-together framework of lies and assumptions and conspiracy theories.”

“Get out to Lenny’s for their big grand opening sale. Find eight government secrets and get a free kidnapping and personality reassignment so that you’ll forget you found them!”

“Josie produced a glass of water, through practiced manipulation of cupboards and valves and municipal plumbing. Neither she nor Jackie was impressed with the human miracle represented by how easily the glass of water was produced.”

“The City Council ended the conference by devouring a raw potato in quick, small bites of their sharp teeth and rough tongues. No follow-up questions were asked, although there were a few follow-up screams.”

“Pepsi: Drink Coke.”

-Joseph Fink, Welcome to Night Vale

“Your stupid face is putting me off my breakfast.”

-Voices from Beyond

-B.P. Kasik/Phony McFakename

* * *

My Phony books are on Amazon here and my "legitimate" books are on Amazon here. I exist on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram.

"Dragon Mormon" by B.P. Kasik

This is it.

This is the one.

I finally wrote a book called Dragon Mormon.  

It's real.

Herb is just an ordinary dragon, working a 9-5 job in a world of humans still a bit nervous around his type ever since the Dragonpocolypse nearly destroyed the world. 

But Herb starts to wonder if there's more to life than the day-to-day grind... 

When he opens himself up to prayer, he discovers a weird church that doesn't mind his weirdness. 

Will Herb have the faith to get baptized? Will Herb be able to prevent his restless dragon brethren from another attempt at a Dragonpocolypse? Will the Mormons be able to even FIT Herb into their chapel? 

Find out...

In the book I was just telling you about. Dragon Mormon.

Really, it's fun. Read and enjoy.


-B.P. Kasik/Phony McFakename

* * *

My Phony books are on Amazon here and my "legitimate" books are on Amazon here. I exist on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram.

"Avengers: Infinity War"

I saw it.

But no one else did.

:-(

I just wish more people would give these outside-the-box, quirky, individualistic films a chance. All art suffers when we don't embrace the voice of the outsider.


-B.P. Kasik/Phony McFakename

* * *

I exist on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. My Phony books are on Amazon here and my "legitimate" books are on Amazon here.