Cinemasterworks: Popcorn and Jesus

I started watching Person of Interest the other day. Cool show. A friend called it "Batman meets Minority Report with computers instead of psychics." Fair enough.

But I didn't come here to talk about that.

I came to talk about Jesus.

This one, specifically:

Because this guy who played Jesus in Passion of the Christ, Jim Caviezel, is also the lead actor in Person of Interest.

Look, I connected them!

Anyhoo, I was working at a now-demolished movie theater in 2004 when Passion of the Christ came out.

I was two years out of college and scooping popcorn for minimum wage. It happens.

And the only reason the theater hired me was because they needed extra help due to surprisingly high ticket sales for Passion. (Theaters normally don't hire a lot of staff during the non-blockbuster-y month of March.)

First things first: I saw the movie and didn't care for it. Not because it was rated R (Again- this). But because it took so many liberties with the story, it was less "story of Jesus" and more "Bible fan fiction."

Now there's nothing wrong with putting your own artistic spin on the life of Jesus- Last Temptation of Christ did a great job with that- but if you're presenting it as the true story of Christ, the barometer for honesty is a little higher.

Behold, this nonsense is presented as part of the story:

-A serpent crawls through the Garden of Gethsemane and bothers Jesus while he's busy with his agony in there. (Satan appears there and chit-chats with him, too.)

-Judas is attacked by a gaggle of morphing demon-faced boys who beat and kick him.

-Mary Magdalene is presented as the prostitute in Jesus' "He who is without sin throw the first stone" scene.
-A raven pecks out the eye of one of the thieves getting crucified next to Jesus.

-Satan (a bald-headed albino woman, btw) is holding a demon-baby that giggles at Jesus while he's being scourged.

So it wasn't my jam. (I dug Pasolini's Gospel According to St. Matthew, for the record.)

But I tell you what- our theater patrons sure liked it!

Sellout crowds on weekends AND weekdays. Church screenings. Non-church screenings. Youth groups. Adult groups.

And there I was at the concession counter, popping popcorn and jockeying the register as they walked in.

Customers couldn't QUITE evade the concession counter on the way in, whether they were heading to the theaters on the left or right side of the building. (Passion was playing on both sides.)

And like a good retail salesbot, I got their attention and asked if they wanted anything.

They always did.

And like they teach ya in concessionist training- I upsold. (You order a medium, I tell you it's only 25 cents more to make it a large.)

And also in accordance with my training- I did suggestive selling. (You order a popcorn and soda, I ask if you want a candy, too.)

The most valuable tool in the suggestive/up-selling toolbox was the combo. You get the large popcorn, large soda, and candy, and it's about $4 cheaper than if you bought them separately.

Good deal, right?

Well, it's not- the $6 popcorn cost the theater about 11 cents, the $5 soda cost about 6 cents, and the candy was likewise a few bucks cheaper for the theater to buy. (But concession sales are where theaters make all their money, so give 'em a break!)

The end result was that thanks to me, a whole lotta people walked into that movie armed with a popcorn/candy/soda combo (I set a record for combo sales, getting me promoted to the God-like $6.50/hour Assistant Manager position within weeks).

And then the movie started.

While my position was behind the counter, I still helped clean the theaters. So I saw the floors after the movie was over. And what did I see?

All the food I sold the customers.

Every large bucket of popcorn was almost full. And every soda had only a sip or two taken out of it. The box of candy was usually gone, but I'm guessing people just took it home.

I worked at a couple movie theaters before this one, mostly as an usher- taking tickets and cleaning theaters. And I'd never seen that much unfinished food on the floor before. Not even at Amistad or House of 1000 Corpses.

I'd always had pretty good luck finding coins and bills on the theater floor- more bills than you might guess- but Passion was the first movie where I saw people on the floor as the credits rolled.

On their knees. Praying fervently. Often in tears.

The cynic in me wondered if they were just gut-punched by the raw brutality of Passion and felt guilted into gratitude for Jesus' sacrifice. Did they experience the same kind of conversion people had when they saw Super Size Me and decided never to eat fast food again...and then ate it again a week later? Or the people who saw Requiem for a Dream and swore off all substance abuse forever...until the next time they were offered a drink?

I don't know. Maybe Passion did affect people on a deeper level. It sure killed their appetites.

Passion of the Christ was good for popcorn sales, maybe not so good for popcorn consumption.

-Phony McFakename

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TV Casualty: All the Shows

I shattered my leg and ankle last summer. I put the photo of my x-ray on the cover of Fast Breaks. I'm still recovering from it.

So while debilitated, I watched a lot of stuff. Probably more stuff than usual.

Also I watch stuff while I do my homework. Or while I do freelance work. Or while I'm lazy.

Read all about it!

Jane the Virgin

Hilarious and delightful goof on Mexican telenovelas that functions perfectly well as a telenovela itself. Inciting incident: at a gynecological checkup, Jane (a virgin) is accidentally artificially inseminated. And gets pregnant. With the child of someone she happened to love years ago. Creating a love triangle with him and her current lover! Plots within plots unravel from there! Bonus: the thick, booming narrator's goofy voice as he comments on all the madness as we go along.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

This series has already had infinite scholarly articles and books written on it so I have nothing original or new to add. Just this: solid, funny stuff. Love all the social commentary on high school and college life. Some episodes are genuinely scary. Especially the one with the silence demons. But the verbal banter is the real star here. The last couple seasons are a bit scatterbrained, but I don't regret a minute I spent watching this silly show.

Angel

The flipside of Buffy. Ironically, I hated the Angel character on Buffy (Soulful, brooding vampires are not my jam). But in this setting, he works perfectly and this series explores the darkness of life in L.A. both directly and allegorically. Buffy is a show about growing up. This is a show about being an adult and facing difficult adult responsibilities and decisions. Dark stuff, too. Some laughs, but mostly hard-hitting. Also very creative and unpredictable.

In fairness- gotta ding it for the Surprise Pregnancy in season three. And then they used the Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome trick to immediately turn the baby into an adolescent and shoe-horn him into the narrative (the same way Buffy awkwardly shoe-horned Dawn in there). Proving that even quality shows are vulnerable to Cousin Oliver Syndrome.

Dollhouse

Wild stuff! Basic concept: people go to a secret organization to rent out their bodies- as "dolls"- for a couple years. The dolls are programmable to be anything and know anything, so clients can use them for missions or to solve crimes or for pleasure. One doll goes super-rogue and another doll breaks the system. The show explores the abuses and ultimate nightmarish implications from this technology. They could have done a pretty lazy show with the premise with a mission-of-the-week, but they went bonkers and epic with it.

The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency

The first HBO show I've ever seen that your mom can watch. It could air uncut on network TV. Also it's a really good adaptation of the Alexander McCall Smith book series. Pleasant characters, well-written scripts, beautiful Botswana scenery, and lots of gentle laughs.

The West Wing

Aaron Sorkin's masterpiece. Almost every episode has enough material and concepts to sustain a film. And every character is interesting. Sorkin left after season four- having written an astonishing 85 of the 88 episodes- but his absence isn't really palpable until season seven. That one misfires in the first half when it focuses on new characters who just aren't as interesting as the ones we know and love. It recovers and closes strong, though.

Brooklyn Nine-Nine

I like a lot of Andy Samberg's digital shorts, but never thought much of him as an actor. And the pilot for this show did NOT grab me when it first aired. Seeing it now, though, in a world where we no longer have new episodes of Parks & Recreation...it's a pretty solid ensemble comedy! It takes a few episodes to get its groove- a qualification that normally kills my interest- but once it's going, every episode is laugh-out-loud funny. Even when it misses the mark, it does so cheerfully and moves on to the next gag.

House

He's bitter. But he's brilliant. But just so bitter. Still...so brilliant! I was in a lot of pain post-surgery while I watched this show, so House's anger and extreme leg pain made perfect sense. While in my right mind, however, I don't think I could roll with it.

Galavant

I don't like singing and I'm not crazy about fairy tale shows. This is a fairy tale show with non-stop singing. And it's MAGNIFICENT! Unapologetically goofy and dumb, with fantastic guest stars including Weird Al, John Stamos, and the dad from Downton Abbey. Two seasons of hilarious non-stop joy. They hold nothing back- every episode swings for the fences.

The Newsroom

Aaron Sorkin unleashed. Lots of people yelling at each other. Lots of cussing. Lots and lots of political/ social commentary, all very much in your face. The best scene in the entire series was when Jeff Bridges' character goes too far in interrogating a gay African-American Republican. What could have been played as a partisan political cheap shot came across as savagely emotional and honest. This here is the scene. Overall, not a bad show. I miss The West Wing.

Scream

It's less a slasher satire and more the kind of straightforward slasher that Scream was satirizing.(And heck, if you'd like an edgy slasher satire show, the bizarre, delirious, and NASTY show Scream Queens is probably more to your taste. Scream Queens is what I was expecting this show to be.) Scream screenwriter Kevin Williamson made a similar mistake when he scripted the generic slasher I Know What You Did Last Summer right after scripting a movie that made fun of generic slashers. This show is a teen drama about cyberbullying where someone gets stabbed now and then. There's a clever line here and there, but the tone is mostly morose.

The weight of teens dying is heavy on the characters. Which is good, really. It's honest. Hundreds of teens get wasted on Buffy and it never registers- school and the characters keep going on as normal. So I guess you can credit this show with taking a dean teenager story seriously.

It's okay, I guess. Bogs down in the middle. Would have made a better movie. And nice touch-they dedicated the final episode to Wes Craven, director of the film Scream and countless fantastic horror films, since he died right before the show aired.

Walking Dead, Season 5

It took five years, but this has finally become a halfway decent show. Started strong with season 1 and has been fumbling ever since. This bodes well for future seasons.

Supernatural, Season 10

Season 9 was just...okay. So I didn't bother with this season as it aired. Too many mediocre seasons in a row left me cold. Well, this one isn't bad! Or it could be that this show just works better when binged. Mucho monsters, mucho mayhem, mucho brotherly love. A great meta-episode, "Fan Fiction." Some of the gore and the violent opening scenes are just nasty. But it's a horror show, so hey.

Making a Murderer

Messed up. I saw Paradise Lost back when it first came on HBO in 1994 and have read a lot of true crime over the years, so I figured out pretty quick that our justice system is way scarier than any of the accused criminals it prosecutes.

Sad to say, nothing in this series surprised me. The state wasn't even pretending they had anything other than a coerced, inconsistent confession from a mentally-challenged minor elicited without a lawyer present, along with some blatantly planted evidence put there by people with a strong motive to frame the defendant. Also- at no point did I hear any believable reason for the defendant or his nephew to hurt the woman they were accused of murdering.

There's a series of depositions where the people that framed the defendant back in the 80's are answering for their crimes. And in one of them, this evil-looking curly-haired lady is just flat-out smug and condescending. It could not be more clear that she's gleefully lying and unrepentant about railroading the defendant. She's proud of herself and she's giving that attitude ON-CAMERA. You can only imagine what these people do and say when there's NOT a camera on them.

SPOILER, but the missing piece in the defense was that they never presented a believable alternative killer. Avery killing the woman made no sense, but no one else had motive to kill her, either. I absolutely 100% believe the cops planted evidence at Avery's place. But I don't think even I am far enough gone to believe that the cops murdered that woman with the intention of setting Avery up. That's the only alternative I see, but that's dark even by my standards. They mentioned the woman's roommate briefly as a possible suspect- he was fishy, but that aspect wasn't explored. No motive for him to kill her was ever presented. Though this isn't really about finding the truth, it's about exploring how Avery's right to a fair trial was abused.

Narcos

I was totally on board for this Netflix show. The first episode was totally compelling, with great performances, intense action, lots of twists, and- amazingly- NO GRATUITOUS SEX! I was like "Wow! An adult Netflix drama that isn't trying to out-sex HBO!" So I settled in for episode two. Aaaaand there's four gratuitous sex scenes in a row. Peace out. I'm not the target audience here. Really lame of Netflix to wait until the second episode to let you know the show's actually cheap smut. Thanks, Obama.

Z Nation

It's okay. It's made by the schlockmeisters behind most of SyFy's giant monster movies, so it's a miracle that it's even watchable. It's basically a low-budget fast zombie movie with above average production values, stretched out over several episodes.

The Simpsons

I stopped watching Simpsons around 1997. Then a couple years ago, when we started using Hulu, I noticed the show was still on the air. WHA?!? So I started watching it and was surprised by how sharp and well-written it was. I understand it's fashionable to hate it now (If you're REALLY cool, you have to say it stopped being good in season four or something) but I really believe a lot of that comes from just taking the show for granted. It's been around so long, people don't appreciate how consistently solid it is. Coming at it after a 15-year hiatus the way I did, I was shocked by how good it was. Most recent episodes have been solid, too.

Helix

First season was a cool, messed-up The Thing-esque Arctic body horror thing. Second season just dropped on Netflix and hoo boy, there's some sick stuff here. It's got a wonderfully messed-up sense of humor. They're really embracing it now, probably because they knew they were getting canceled. I guess they figured they wanted to get some solid gross-out stuff in and some really cruel funny-music-playing-over-disturbing-scene gags. And the editing is so jagged and the tone shifts are so brutal. Neat show. SyFy is getting better at making stuff. Also- something happens at the halfway point in this season that's just jaw-droppingly horrifying and makes you wonder how this show made it on the air.

-Phony McFakename

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Legal disclaimer: Me am on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and even Pinterest if that's your thing. And me books am on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Kobo and probably some other places, too.

This is a Thing: VidAngel

This is a new segment for my blog called "This is a Thing." This ongoing series will cover...things.

This week's thing is VidAngel.

VidAngel is an online movie service that offers the option of filtering your movies.

Irony: their logo looks like an adult film company's,

Isn't This Censorship?

Yep. But it's voluntary. You can get movies from VidAngel and watch them totally uncut if you like. Or if you want to only delete the word "balls" and leave it uncut otherwise, you can do that, too. (But only if you have no balls.)

Companies in Utah have been trying to crack this market for years. Most notoriously, CleanFlicks was a video rental store that edited the movies themselves and re-burned them onto DVDs and rented them out to customers.

Problem: that was illegal duplication AND profiting off a product they weren't licensed to distribute AND the specific way they were editing was ruled illegal. For this and other reasons, CleanFlicks and the rest of the edited-video stores were wiped off the map under a deluge of lawsuits. (Video stores died shortly thereafter, so they probably would have disappeared, anyway.)

The whole saga was chronicled in the documentary Cleanflix, which took a dark third-act twist that I'm totally not gonna spoil here. But it's a doozy.

So How's It Work?

You start an account and set your filters to whatever you like. You want nudity gone? Click, gone. You want graphic violence gone? Click, gone. Then pick from a buffet of pottymouth and decide what words you don't want to hear.

Then you can use the website (or an app on your Roku/smart TV) to order whatever movie or show you like.

It will cost $20, as you're technically "buying" it.

Once you bought it, VidAngel will apply the filters you want and you can watch it on your computer or app or wherever.

And the next day you "sell it back" to VidAngel for $19. (You get $18 if it was an HD file.)

So the end result is: you paid $1 (SD) or $2 (HD) on a one-day movie rental. (Oh, and you can set it to automatically "sell back" the movie the next day so you don't have to worry about that step.)

This Can't Be Legal

It is. (Or not? See update at bottom of article.)

Now it seems like if you own a video file- in any format- you are free to manipulate it, remix it, censor it, do whatever you want to it. Kinda true, but it won't hold up in court. So this site doesn't manually edit films. It just "tags" parts of the movie that you can choose to have dropped after you buy it. It's an automatic process. Loophole!

End result: it's as legal as watching a DVD and hitting the "Mute" button when a character starts cussing. Or fast-forwarding through a sex scene.

Now- it would be illegal if you resold the movie with modified filters. Or duplicated it. But with VidAngel, you're not re-selling it or duplicating it. Just watching it.

It would also be illegal, probably, if the video company modified the movie while in their possession and sold it to you in a modified form. That's not happening here, though. The movie you "buy" comes to you complete and uncut. It's not modified by the filters you choose until after you already own it.

And they even found a way around being a rental service. The "buy/sellback" gag keeps them in seller terrain.

It's airtight. These guys found all the loopholes.

C'mon- This Is At Least a Spirit of the Law Violation

Yep.

They're totally renting movies to you under the guise of selling them and buying them back. No doubt, no diggity.

This loophole is like if a conservative Christian couple went to Las Vegas and got married, had lotsa sex, then got the marriage annulled to avoid any accusations of premarital sex.

But it's still legal.

How Are They Pulling This Off?

Good question, and I don't have the answer to that.

The filtering process is simple enough- they have a crowd-sourced army of folks that manually tag the movies for parts that you can choose to have removed.

But as far as getting the rights to the movies- I'm mystified.

This service sells Game of Thrones episodes. HBO doesn't even sell Game of Thrones episodes. You have to buy HBO- or HBO GO- to watch that show. (Consequently, it's the most pirated show in the world.)

But you can "buy/sellback" each episode here for $1 a pop. ($2 if you want HD.)

Hopefully VidAngel has the licensing rights to do this. If they don't, they're gonna get shut down faster than you can say "winter is coming."

But considering how legally savvy this company's been with finding the copyright and editing loopholes, it's extremely unlikely that they'd be dumb enough not to license the content they "sell."

But I haven't seen their business paperwork, so I can't confirm or deny.

Alright, Fine. How'd It Work for You?

Pretty good. We rented The Martian and the Game of Thrones pilot.

Pros:

-The HD image quality is perfect. This looks as good as anything on Netflix, if not better.

-Even SD image quality looks okay. Good choice if you wanna save $1, are watching on a small screen, or your vision is blurry anyway.

-The verbal filtering was mostly smooth, with audio dissolves and sometimes ambient sound left to cover the gap of silence.

-Decent selection. They have a bunch of brand new movies and a handful of classics. Lots of movies that aren't available on Netflix or Amazon.

-The VidAngel app on the Roku is great. Easy to navigate, really nice and smooth-looking.

-It has a "Inspiring" meter, which rates how inspiring the movie is on a scale of 1 to 100.

-It gives you a visual preview of how much you'll miss, audio-wise and video-wise, with your filters set on a movie, along with how much shorter the movie will be. Helpful for deciding if it's worth it.

Looks like the audio is more off than on for this one.

-GREAT PRICE. Even if you watch the movies unfiltered, $2 for an HD movie or $1 for an SD movie is a really good deal. Cheaper than Redbox.

Cons:

-When the verbal filtering didn't work, it was jarring and took you out of the movie. Sometimes they delete a whole sentence just to get rid of a word and that can be disorienting and annoying.

-The nudity filter is confusing. We set it on "Both Men and Women," thinking that would cover all nudity. Nope. That only filters out scenes where BOTH men and woman are naked. If it's just a woman or just Matt Damon's butt strolling through the scene, it leaves them in there. You have to manually click "Men" and "Women" if you want both gone.

-It offers a "Disturbing Images" filter. Who decides what's disturbing? And sometimes a scene being disturbing is the point.

Here's another review with more thoughts about the service, if you're interested. It's almost a year old, so most of the glitches mentioned in there have been fixed.

This is Troubling. What About Respecting the Filmmakers' Artistic Vision?

You have a point. Also VidAngel is a funny thing for me to review because I watch some pretty toxic stuff. (I don't hide it- I discuss this junk right here on this blog!) I became a horror junkie at a very young age and I have an encyclopedic knowledge of horror and weird cinema. I drift in and out of enthusiasm for the genre- I'm mighty sick of the jump-scare and torture-porn subgenres- but it's remained something I love throughout life.

And I also belong to a religion that conditions its youth to believe that a movie magically becomes immoral when the arbitrary label of "R" is applied to it. I joined this religion as an adult, so I probably see more gray than black and white on this issue. And I admit- my opinion on this issue may be wrong. Ask me next month or next year and my opinion might change. But the last word on this religion vs. ratings argument was dropped here. I can't say it any better. (Though I will say that the morality of Amazing Spider-Man 2 is way more troubling than anything in Shawshank Redemption.)

I mean- from a business perspective, this thing is great. I've been saying for years that Hollywood is stupidly leaving money on the table by not offering an online video rental service that lets you filter movies/shows however you like. They could expand their movies' audiences drastically if they let people watch their movies with the nastiest stuff gone. And VidAngel pulled it off.

But if you care about film- is an edited movie even worth watching? Is it better for people to look at a damaged work of art or to not look at that work of art at all?

It really depends. If integrity and vision are really important to you, this service is not for you (Unless- again- you'd like to ignore the filters and use it to rent movies on the cheap).

There's a longer debate to be had about censorship and respecting a filmmaker's intention. But the Cleanflix documentary already nailed this question pretty well. (Angry as the Hollywood directors in that documentary got about the notion of Cleanflicks editing their movies, I've never heard any of them complain about their movies getting censored and shown on airplanes or network TV or basic cable. What's the difference?)

But if movies are just a diversion for you and you don't think about them too deeply, this is a perfectly legit way for you to watch movies without getting hit with objectionable content that makes it harder for you to enjoy the experience.

(Update 6/30/16: They got sued. Hard. Comes at an awkward time, as they just recently announced they're opening up for investments. I read the lawsuit paperwork and there's an awful lot of grey area in there. But the part that interests me: the studios claim Vidangel is illegally ripping movies from discs and using those as the files that they (wink-wink, nudge-nudge) "sell." I think VidAngel has a pretty solid defense on a lot of fronts, but I'm curious to see how they defend the illegal disc-ripping allegation. That smells like a "Gotcha.")

-Phony McFakename

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Legal disclaimer: Me am on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and even Pinterest if that's your thing. And me books am on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Kobo and probably some other places, too.

Literateur: Short Attention Span Reviews

I read a lot. Here's some bite-sized takes on some stuff I recently read for some reason.

The Frankenstein Papers by Fred Saberhagen

Saberhagen wrote a fun Dracula secret history book- reviewed HERE- so I had high hopes for this Frankenstein secret history book. But this is a misfire. Dracula works as a storyteller because he's charismatic and compelling. Frankenstein's monster is just not that interesting. This is more a sequel to Frankenstein than an alternate perspective. Highlight: the creature travels to the United States to meet with Ben Franklin and discuss electricity and stuff. That was a neat idea, but Frankenstein Unbound did a lot more neat things with this secret-life-of-Frankenstein concept a decade earlier.

Clownfellas: Tales of the Bozo Crime Family by Carlton Mellick III

One of the most amazing, creative, and funny books I've ever read. This is a very well-written, fast-paced, entertaining organized crime epic that just happens to be about clowns. There are explosive pies, cotton candy cigarettes, homicidal jugglers on unicycles, and guns with bullets that explode into giant pieces of popcorn on impact. And that's just a few of the things you'll find in the first story. And there are six stories in here. All interconnected and building on each other nicely. I was totally blindsided by this book, just shocked senseless at its quality and imagination level. And now I'm over-hyping it to you. Okay. Calm down. Don't get too excited. Temper your expectations, so you can read it and be totally blown away, too!

Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien

Re-reading it. Just noticed that right near the start, Gandalf tells Frodo "Oh crap! The word is out that one of you Hobbits has this ring! The forces of darkness are closing in on you to get it back!" And then he walks away and Frodo just chills for a few years. Because the only way to deal with this clear and present danger is to relax for a few years.

Reel Terror by Various Authors

I've had this book on my bookshelf forever. Us book people all have books like that. Books that lurk in the darkness that we never quite get around to. Glad I finally got around to it! It's a cool collection of short stories, many lesser-known, that were adapted into famous films. The basis for the films Total Recall, Freaks, Duel, The Golem, The Fly, you name it- they're all in here.

The Big Short by Michael Lewis

This is one of the most insane and frightening books ever written, full of dark humor and sad-but-true observations about human greed and ignorance. It explains the ridiculous things people were doing behind the scenes that led up to the 2008 financial meltdown. I had to re-read parts of this book multiple times because I couldn't believe it was actually saying what it was saying. But yep. It's saying what it's saying. People are nuts. Humans are doomed.

Takeaways: 
-Sometimes the person closest to a situation is the least reliable; they think they know everything about it, so they miss problems that are obvious to a casual observer. 
-Most financial transactions are zero-sum; someone is winning and losing and even if you win, there's usually a catch.
-Know that in the world of finance, you're gonna get screwed. Just figure out how and why they're gonna screw you and use that to decide if a transaction is still worth it.

Bethany's Sin by Robert R. McCammon

McCammon is a first-class writer. I mostly love him for his sprawling 1987 pre-, mid-, and post-nuclear holocaust supernatural epic, Swan Song. But his more mainstream thrillers, mysteries, and short stories are also awesome.

But he wasn't always a first-class writer. He openly admits that his first four books aren't very good- Bethany's Sin is his second- and he made the choice to let them go out of print because he didn't want inferior work tarnishing his name. Well- this ain't bad, for a disavowed early-career novel! Ancient savage Amazon women possess the ladies in a small Pennsylvania town and they attack all the menfolk. Rich with detail, cool enough story and thrills, and yeah- it's badly written. Pacing is off, things don't really come to life until halfway through, and the characters aren't very well-drawn. McCammon was learning to write in public with this one, but it's a fun read nonetheless.

I'd say the same thing for McCammon's likewise-disavowed early novel, the 1980 Night Boat. Voodoo Nazi zombies in a submarine taking over a tropical paradise? Nothing wrong with that.

Fundamental Accounting Principles by John Wild

This is the textbook for the accounting class I'm taking. It's a stunning work of art. I'm not surprised the author's name is "Wild" because he seems like a pretty WILD guy!!!

The Merciless by Danielle Vega

Easy summary: Mean Girls meets The Exorcist. A group of popular girls kidnap the local weirdo Goth girl and torture her and attempt to perform an exorcism to "get the demon out of her." But who is truly evil here? There are a couple plot twists late in the game that are unlikely to surprise anyone. I'd be surprised if they surprised you. Oddly- this has the sloppy writing and ridiculous characterizations of most YA supernatural lit, but it's loaded with cuss words and graphic violence. This book has no idea what it's doing.

The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson

This is pre-Lovecraft horror here. 1908. And gotta say- I like it more than most of Lovecraft's output. Pros: cool phantasmagoric imagery, neat pig-monsters, lucid writing, thick atmosphere, and- most unlike Lovecraft- a proactive protagonist who blasts the swine creatures with a shotgun rather than cowering in fear. Cons: weak story, weak characterization, and the found-book structure is unnecessary. Overall- a worthwhile horror classic.

Survivor by J.F. Gonzalez

The most disgusting and depressing thing I've ever read. And I have a rich history of reading disgusting and depressing things. It's about snuff movies. It's pretty badly-written, too. Clunky dialogue and repetitive descriptions.

Witch World by Andre Norton

A dude gets whisked away to the Witch World and finds himself caught between two warring tribes and he favors the noble savage one over the authoritarian one. Norton's books are starting to blur together for me. There's always a fish out of water getting involved in tribal warfare in the jungle on an exotic alien planet. Why do all Norton's alien planets have jungles and why do all Norton's aliens look like humans? The witch's magic is treated more like science and it's powered by their virginity. So I guess this is a pro-abstinence story? There are five gazillion sequels to this book. I think I'll pass. She's done some truly great books, but I'm probably gonna take a break from Norton for a while.

Fireworks by James A. Moore

This tale of alien invasion zeroes in on the part where the government arrives and takes control of the spaceship's crash site. The fact that an alien spacecraft lands becomes irrelevant pretty quickly, as the enemy becomes the townspeople turning on each other and the military getting reactionary and cracking down. But it's not didactic. It's very believable and for the most part, people respond to things the way you or I would respond to things.

Fast Breaks by Phony McFakename

An interesting, energetic, and flawed first work by an unknown author who I'm pretty sure is writing under a pseudonym. Full of jarring tonal shifts and spanning a variety of genres- horror, humor, fantasy, bizarro, literary fiction. Some of the jokes hit, some miss. It's okay, I guess. BUY IT NOW.

Tales of Known Space by Larry Niven

There's some winners and losers in these hard-SF tales. Props to Niven for building a complete and coherent cosmos, as mankind makes his first tentative moves into space and ends with massive evolution and everyday space travel 10,000 years later. Hate to get all SJW on this book, but Larry Niven has some troublesome views on women and sexual assault that may have been acceptable in the 70's, but come off as really poisonous now. He's very cavalier on those topics in "Cloak of Anarchy" and the ideas he expresses about women are downright despicable in Ringworld, to the point that they took me out of that book. This collection is fun overall, but anyone who thinks science fiction is/was a boy's club will not find anything to contradict them here.

Doctor Who Short Trips: Destination Prague by Various Writers

This is a collection of Doctor Who stories set in Prague. I love Doctor Who and I love Prague, so this could not possibly have been more my jam. They could have phoned this book in with no-name authors, but NOPE. One of my favorite horror writers, Brian Keene, has a story in here. James Moore's in here, too. He wrote Fireworks, a book that I reviewed a few paragraphs ago.

-Phony McFakename

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Legal disclaimer: Me am on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and even Pinterest if that's your thing. And me books am on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Kobo and probably some other places, too.

Cinemasterworks: "The Big Short" and My First Mortgage

The Big Short is a fantastic book and Adam McKay made a fantastic movie adaptation of it.

The basic premise: a few clever guys figured out that the mortgage securities market was due for a collapse so they bet millions against it and ended up making billions.

The movie does a great job explaining complex topics in a simple, accessible way. "Synthetic CDOs" were particularly well-explained as "betting on people making bets in a blackjack game in a casino."

I read the book this movie was based on and "synthetic CDOs" were the most horrifying, incomprehensible thing in the book. I had to re-read the section on it three times and even then, was like "THIS CAN'T BE RIGHT?!?" But nope- it really happened. They were real. Movie confirms it.

The whole thing is incredibly disturbing. Even more sad when you think about how the financial market has kept on going over the last few years. Nothing's changed. Market players are as crooked and awful as ever. 

Why? Because nobody was ever punished.

This movie was compared to Wolf of Wall Street, but the difference is that the sleazebag in that story actually got punished. He did time and he still has fines to pay. (UPDATE: a bank involved in these shenanigans actually was fined a few days ago. It's still nothing compared to the amount they were raking in, plus there have STILL been no individual prosecutions.)

The Big Short is particularly trenchant because its story involves a LOT of good everyday people losing their homes and getting their credit and financial lives ruined not because they were stupid or greedy, but just because they were naive and trusted that banks wouldn't lend them money unless they believed they could pay them back. 

But as this movie explains- there was a total disconnect between risk and responsibility there. The lenders had zero incentive to make sure they would be paid back, since they just passed the loans on to other banks before the ink on the mortgage paperwork was dry.

And this is where I break the fourth wall and tell you that I was part of this story.

I got my first home loan thanks to this financial madness. In 2004, my wife and I were making near-minimum wage. I was a movie theater assistant manager making about $6 an hour. She was a retail worker making about $7 an hour. Both of our retail jobs were part-time and we had no additional income sources.

Did we sound like a good bet for a 30-year mortgage?

Countrywide sure thought so!

Countrywide was the worst offender for signing poor people up for ballooning-rate mortgages that could never be paid back. My mortgage was one of millions that was bundled together with other high-risk mortgages and sold as a mortgage bond. (And then possibly converted to a CDO, and then possibly a synthetic CDO on top of that...)

And thanks to these idiotic crooks, we got approved for a home loan that was like five times our yearly income. 

Countrywide was one of the first places to implode when the housing market disintegrated. We ended up writing our monthly checks to a half-dozen other banks and mortgage companies amidst this chaos as our mortgage was thrown around like a hot potato.

But here's the thing: despite our limited finances, we never defaulted. We never even missed a payment. Because we were fiscally responsible. We didn't make a lot, but we had no student loans, credit card debt, or car payments. So- not that it mattered to our lenders- we were actually a good risk. 

We got our second loan for our second house through Countrywide, too. Again- it was for more than we had any business borrowing. And again- they didn't care. And we could handle it.

But an average person with our economic credentials really really really shouldn't have been borrowing that much. It was surreal.

Now it wasn't all just evil banks being evil. There were people that refinanced their mortgages and took out money against the value of their home. It wouldn't be unfair to call those choices greedy and/or stupid. (I did the opposite- I've refinanced my home three times, but used my savings to PAY DOWN the mortgage balance and get a better rate each time. I've ultimately reduced my monthly payments by $400. I'm the only person I know who has done this. I recommend it.)

Thankfully, I wasn't one of the people who suffered as a result of the events in The Big Short. But I came darned close. 

Almost no one who suffered because of the collapse didn't deserve to suffer. And almost all of the people at the top who actually deserved to suffer didn't suffer at all.

If you don't laugh, you'll cry.

-Phony McFakename

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Legal disclaimer: Me am on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and even Pinterest if that's your thing. And me books am on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Kobo and probably some other places, too.

The Best Words: January 2016

As a public service once a month, I share a few of my favorite things. In quote form. If you also want to see what I think was funny on Twitter, here's the link. And here us goes!

“From the first moment I laid eyes on you, I have always, always loved...your money.”

-House on Haunted Hill

  

"They're starving to death. They're dying of disease to death."

-The West Wing

“I keep thinking about our great dueling Jesus pictures, The Last Temptation of Christ and The Passion of The Christ. Both look to the suffering of Jesus for meaning, but the two films approach that suffering from totally different ways. For Scorsese the suffering of Christ wasn't being nailed to the cross (although that did suck for him), it was being shown the life he could have if he just gave up the mantle of Messiah. The suffering of Willem DaFoe's Christ is an emotional one, and it's a suffering that makes Christ all the more human, as we can truly relate to the idea of giving up our dreams for something bigger or more important. We've all known what it's like to put duty before happiness. In The Passion of the Christ Jim Caviezel's Christly suffering is almost purely physical; while I can get that on a gut level (just as I can recoil at all slasher and splatter pictures) I can't truly relate to being relentlessly flogged. Emotional torture I get. Physical torture is distant.”

-Devin Faraci

“Off to the movies we will go

Where we learn everything that we know

Because the movies teach us

What our parents don’t have time to say!”

-South Park

“Two hundred years ago, we had great-great-greats who lived in the dark, without much in the way of healthcare, commerce or opportunity.

“Today, we complain that the MRI was chilly, or that the wifi on the transatlantic plane wasn't fast enough or that there's nothing new going on at the mall.

“It's human nature to recalibrate. But maybe it's worth fighting that off, for an hour or even a day.

“The world around us is uneven, unfair and yes, absolutely, over-the-top amazing.

“Boring is an attitude, not the truth.”

-Seth Godin

“Double dumbass on you!”

-Star Trek IV

“He had an almost freakish ability to identify shadowy motives. If you had just donated $20 million to your alma mater, say, and were feeling the glow of selfless devotion to a cause greater than yourself, Lippman would be the first to ask, ‘So you gave twenty mission because that’s the minimum to get your name on a building, right?’”

“In Bakersfield, California, a Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 and no English was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for $724,000.”

“Charlie and Jamie had always sort of assumed that there was some grown-up in charge of the financial system whom they had never met; now, they saw there was not.”

“The CDO was, in effect, a credit laundering service for the residents of Lower Middle Class America. For Wall Street it was a machine that turned lead into gold.”

“That was the problem with money: What people did with it had consequences, but they were so remote from the original action that the mind never connected the one with the other.”

Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

“I was once in New York, and I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons – a huge growth industry in America. The prison industry needs to plan its future growth – how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be, 15 years from now? And they found they could predict it very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based on asking what percentage of 10 and 11-year-olds couldn’t read.”

-Neil Gaiman

”You always have to bring that up, don’t you?”

“You put dynamite in the oven, Wayne.”

“Gotta hide a gift where nobody’ll look for it.”

Brandon Sanderson, Shadows of Self

"It's almost impossible to persuade someone that he's wrong. Almost impossible to make your argument louder and sharper and have the other person say, 'I was wrong and I will change my mind.' Far more effective: Help someone make a new decision, based on new alternatives and a new story."

-Seth Godin

“Dreams are a dime a dozen...it’s their execution that counts.”

-Theodore Roosevelt

“Success is 99 percent failure.”

-Soichiro Honda

“If you lend money, you make a secret enemy; if you refuse, an open one.”

-Voltaire

“[I would say] ‘Hang, on. Explain to me, what is a dysfunctional family?’ And people would explain, and after a while, I realized that what Americans called a ‘dysfunctional family’ is what we in England call ‘a family,’ having never encountered any of these functional ones.”

-Neil Gaiman

“Nothing changes on New Year’s Day.”

-U2

-Phony McFakename

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Legal disclaimer: Me am on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and even Pinterest if that's your thing. And me books am on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Kobo and probably some other places, too.

Cinemasterworks: George Lucas Hates You

(Full Disclosure: I loved the original Star Wars films as a kid. I can be objective and see their flaws now as an adult, but they still have a place in my heart.)

Okay, most of us liked The Force Awakens. We saw it, we were like "Cool," and we got on with our lives.

But not so fast!

We are currently experiencing the backlash and it's a tidal wave. Everyone's pissing all over Force Awakens now. Honeymoon's over.

I saw this coming. Everyone was TOO excited about this movie. Everyone set their expectations TOO high. Everyone seemed to forget that we've been smacked with THREE nearly-unwatchable Star Wars films in a row.

Disaster was imminent. People were setting themselves up for the biggest letdown in history that they were gonna kvetch about endlessly on Facebook.

But then the movie came out. And it seemed I was wrong.

Everyone was being positive about it. The warmth and nostalgia were palpable in the air. Almost no one spoiled the ending online. The Internet- a toxic place full of complaints and nitpicks about everything- somehow seemed to be giving this movie a pass. It was surreal.

I saw it a week after it came out- to avoid the crowds- and had fun with it. Enjoyed it the same way I enjoyed the last few Fast and/or Furious movies. It was brain candy, transparently giving the audience what it wanted. And that was fine. 

I stand behind this opinion. Credits rolled, I was smiling, and I was content never to see it again.

But I've noticed that some of my friends who really liked it at first seem to be hating it the most now. And almost every new negative online analysis has a tone of wounded betrayal. People are seriously angry at this movie for manipulating them and tricking them into thinking it was good. Of all the things to be angry about in this world, they're raging against a movie that just tried to entertain them and make them happy for a couple hours.

And here's an interesting historical fact for you- Phantom Menace was actually pretty positively received before the backlash hit and it became violently hated.

Force Awakens seems to be going the same way.

Force Awakens is a flawed film. But oddly, it's flawed in the same way as the original Star Wars. Both films have the same generic Hero's Journey plot. Both have the same basic characters. Both have the same story beats. Both are big dumb effects-driven blockbusters. Both tap into primal mythology. And both are engineered to manipulate fans.

And that brings me to the difference between A New Hope and Force Awakens.

The difference is that J.J. Abrams doesn't hate the material. He loves it. He wants you to enjoy the ride. George Lucas did not feel the same way about the Star Wars films he made. Messed up as it is, Abrams cares more about Star Wars than the man who invented it.

This may sound inflammatory- especially in light of his recent interview where he sounded fiercely protective about his creation- but George Lucas has been overtly and covertly expressing his contempt for the galaxy-far-far-away saga right from the start.

And I'm not even talking about his endless second-guessing or digital tweaking of the original trilogy. And I'm not talking about the legacy-tarnishing impact of his prequels. I'm talking about his attitude toward the films right from the start.

Reliable sources who knew Lucas back in the day said he made Star Wars sarcastically. According to the book Harlan Ellison's Watching, Ellison heard Lucas admit in 1977 that he was deliberately making a dumb film. Lucas'  primary goal with Star Wars was to prove how easy it is to manipulate audiences.

And he was right! We were manipulated! Still are! The movie resonates, despite its flaws. It works on a deep mythological level, because Lucas understands mythology.

But make no mistake- Lucas made Star Wars with contempt for his audience. Even after the success of American Graffiti, he was still bitter that his most personal film- the hard-hitting THX-1138- was unsuccessful.

He never got over this, either. Lucas did an interview in 2005 where he made his feelings on the Star Wars saga pretty transparent. He felt trapped by it. He says what he really wanted to make were experimental films like THX-1138 and was angry that no one was interested in them.

(Since Lucas finished Revenge of the Sith over a decade ago, it would be tempting to do a Stewie-style taunt and ask how his new experimental films are coming along, but that would be mean. So let's not.)

But let's be honest in our assessment of Lucas' work. He did a pretty solid job with a very limited budget and limited control on the first Star Wars and he wisely stepped back and let other people take  more creative control on his next two films.

And when Lucas was given unlimited money and unlimited creative control, he made...Phantom Menace. That tells you everything you need to know about the man. He had nothing to prove and he didn't care about giving the audience what they wanted there...and he dropped a turd on us.

People are still puzzling and experiencing cognitive dissonance over that film. But it makes perfect sense- Lucas assumed that since Star Wars was dumb, all of its fans must be dumb, so he made a super-dumb film. He just miscalculated how dumb the fans truly were.

The emperor has no clothes.

No matter how much you love Star Wars, Lucas simply doesn't feel the same way. He sees it as an economic asset that purchased him an amazing life. He's grateful for what it's done for him- and he understands that it's his legacy- but he doesn't respect it at all.

So if/when you trash-talk Force Awakens, be aware that you're hating on a movie made by people that care about you and care about Star Wars more than George Lucas ever cared about you or any of his Star Wars films.

-Phony McFakename

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Legal disclaimer: Me am on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and even Pinterest if that's your thing. And me books am on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Kobo and probably some other places, too.