This is a brilliantly written episode. Kenneth Biller’s track record has been hit (“Jetrel,” “Initiations“) and miss (“Twisted,” “Maneuvers“), but he absolutely nails this one. It’s beautifully structured, reminding me favorably not just of Time’s Arrow, but also the Harold Pinter play Betrayal. But what’s particularly nifty about this is not just that Kes is moving backwards through her life, but she only remembers what happened to her “before,” which is always in the future for everyone around her. It’s wonderful to see Kes try to figure out what’s going on, based only on things that haven’t happened yet and with no memory of what happened before.
In 2013, I wrote a three-part Cassie Zukav novelette called “Cayo Hueso,” which I released as three eBooks in anticipation of the release of Ragnarok and Roll: Tales of Cassie Zukav, Weirdness Magnet. The three were then reprinted in that collection, and then collected as a single story as part of a Story Bundle in 2015. Now I do a reading of the whole story as a week-long KRAD COVID reading event, as I read the epic urban fantasy tale about ghosts, gods, and family reunions in five installments.
In this first bit, Cassie is reunited with her parents for the first time since she moved to Key West, and all three of them have a rather strange encounter with the ghost of Ernest Hemingway.
See me, Reese Hogan, Chaz Kemp, Rebecca Roanhorse, and Lauren C. Teffeau talking about mythology, folklore, fairy tales, and gods in fiction and their place in life and history.
The “Writing 101” panel at Buboni-Virtual-Con with me, Susan R. Matthews, Lauren C. Teffeau, Walter Jon Williams, and Connie Willis. Lots of really nifty advice for writers here…….
I read from A Furnace Sealed, as part of my duties as Author Co-Guest Of Honor at Buboni-Virtual-Con, the substitute for Bubonicon 52, which was postponed due to COVID-19. Check it out!
With all that, however, the heart and soul of this movie isn’t the guy whose movie it is, nor is it the “special guest star” who gets second billing. Yes, the Iron Man-Captain America fight is the spine of the film, but the theme is truly seen, not in Rogers or Stark, but in Prince T’Challa. Because in the end he sees that the endless cycle of vengeance accomplishes nothing except adding to the body count. It’s destroyed Zemo, it’s destroyed the Avengers, and he won’t let it destroy him. When it matters, T’Challa is a hero.
And then there are the bits in Wakanda, which continue beautifully from Black Panther—which had only just wrapped when this movie was filmed, so it involved a certain amount of retrofitting. But man, it works, from the Jabari war chant to Shuri completely owning Stark and Banner in science with one sentence to Okoye’s “why is everyone around me so stupid?” expression that Danai Gurira does so well to every single bit with T’Challa’s regal performance. I love that the defense on Earth is left to Wakanda, and I get fucking chills every single damn time I watch the “Yibambe!” sequence. Wakanda forever, goddammit.
Chadwick Boseman was the heart and soul of Civil War as T’Challa, and he’s even better here when given the lead. What’s especially nice is that he finally breaks the Marvel hero template, and it’s long overdue. While there are minor variations, pretty much every male Marvel protagonist is a snarky dude—TonyStark’ssnark is leavened by narcissistic arrogance, ditto StephenStrange’s, SteveRogers’s is leavened by earnestness, NickFury’s by badassitude, Peter Parker’s by youthful jibber-jabber, Scott Lang’s by his being totally out of his depth most of the time, Peter Quill’s and Rocket’s by the pain of their pasts, and so on.
But T’Challa isn’t snarky! He’s dignified and reserved and noble and it’s such a welcome fucking change. He’s not stiff, either—he lets his guard down with Shuri, as the pair of them devolve into sibling banter every time they’re together—but the snark is reserved for other characters for whom it’s a better fit.
Yesterday, Chadwick Boseman died at the far-too-young age of 43. He’d apparently been fighting colon cancer for years in stoic silence, and continued to work through it. His three best known roles are as T’Challa, son of T’Chaka, a.k.a. the Black Panther in four Marvel Cinematic Universe films; James Brown in Get On Up; and Jackie Robinson in 42. One of the things that made him so impressive is that all three of those roles are ones where he had to inhabit someone already established, whether in real life or in decades of fiction (Black Panther was created in 1965 and has been a regular presence in Marvel’s comic books ever since). I still haven’t seen Get On Up. I reviewed his MCU films as part of the great superhero movie rewatch on Tor.com and you can read what I said about Captain America: Civil War, Black Panther, Avengers: Infinity War, and Avengers: Endgame on that site. Below is the blog entry I wrote about 42 in June 2013.
Wrenn and I have been wanting to see 42 since it opened in April, and we finally got to it yesterday. It is not a great movie, but it’s a good one that we both enjoyed very much.
A lot of why it did work was the excellent acting. Chadwick Boseman played Jackie Robinson as a talented athlete who was frustrated by the racism he had to deal with, but who knew that he couldn’t fight back. Thankfully, the movie didn’t try to portray him as some kind of saint who nobly stood up to the racists, but as a person who struggled with the shit he had thrown at him all the time.
Harrison Ford gives one of the best performances of his career as Branch Rickey. First off, it’s a great impersonation of Rickey (check the video in this post as an example of the real Rickey), as he utterly loses himself in the personality of the guy they called “Mahatma.” And I especially like that Rickey is up-front about the prime motivation for putting Robinson (and other black players) on his team: they’re good athletes, they’ll help him win, and winning means money.
The heart of the movie, though, is the relationship between Jackie Robinson and his wife Rachel, played beautifully by Nicole Beharie. Their love is real and palpable, and you can tell that Rae is a big part of what enabled Jackie to endure what he endured.
Note should also be made of some excellent supporting roles: Christopher Meloni as the ever-blunt-and-obnoxious Leo Durocher; a magnificent (and reportedly very difficult for the actor) turn by Alan Tudyk as Ben Chapman, the ultra-racist manager of the Phillies; a quiet but effective Lucas Black as Pee Wee Reese; and most especially John C. McGinley doing a letter-perfect Red Barber. It’s also amusing to see a couple of old favorites in small roles: Max Gail (best known as Wojo on Barney Miller) as Durocher’s replacement as Dodgers manager Burt Shotton and Peter Jurasik (Londo on Babylon 5, though to me he’ll always be Sid the Squid on Hill Street Blues) as a racist hotel manager in Philadelphia.
The movie is far from perfect. While it gets lots of details right — indeed, it’s one of the best movies I’ve seen at accurately re-creating the acts of people playing baseball (the only flaw, e.g., in the otherwise-great Bull Durham) — there are some annoying changes that seem to just be there to Hollywoodize a story that doesn’t need it. For starters, writer/director Brian Helgeland totally made up the scene where Robinson gets fed up with Chapman’s abuse and goes to the runway to scream and destroy a bat. It was probably intended to make Robinson look more human, but it just feels constructed. Robinson did not hit a homer in a game to give the Dodgers a pennant-clinching victory. He hit a homer against Fritz Ostermueller, yes, but the Dodgers lost that lead later only to come back to win, and actually clinched later in the same series. In an earlier scene, Ostermueller hits Robinson in the head prompting a bench-clearing brawl when in reality Ostermueller (who was left-handed, not right-handed) hit him in the wrist and there was no brawl.
It’s not like there was a shortage of real-life incidents to choose from, many of which the movie did well with, including the stuff with Chapman (all of which was completely accurate, down to the photo op of them holding a bat in which Chapman looks nauseated), the need to leave Sanford, Florida in the middle of the night to avoid a lynch mob of locals, and Enos Slaughter spiking Robinson on his calf.
Speaking of which, when Robinson’s getting his calf stitched up there’s another constructed scene, where Rickey has to give the “real” reason why he gave Robinson the chance — because we can’t have our Hollywood heroes only being concerned with money, can we? But Rickey was a visionary who looked for nontraditional solutions to making his teams better. The minor-league farm system as we know it today was pioneered by Rickey, and it was for the same reason why he broke the color barrier: it made his team better.
And finally, the music is just awful. Just the most clichéd swelling of strings and more yanking than pulling on heartstrings, like composer Mark Isham didn’t trust the audience to know how to respond to the drama unfolding. It’s the worst kind of see-Spot-run score that just makes me want to throw things, an intrusive annoying score.
A lot of things were simplified, but one can excuse that for the need to tell a story in a couple hours. Overall, it was a good movie, one I recommend for baseball fans and people who want to know the story of an American hero.
In 2017, Michael A. Ventrella & Jonathan Maberry invited me to contribute to Baker Street Irregulars, an anthology of alternate Sherlock Holmes stories. I hit on the idea of a modern version of Holmes and Watson, much as was done with the TV shows Sherlock and Elementary, but in this case featuring Shirley Holmes, a brilliant young grad student, and Jack Watson, an African-American medical student, in contemporary New York City. I’ve already read Shirley & Jack’s second adventure in this series, and now I read their first, which is also the first time the two of them meet. Herewith, “Identity: An Adventure of Shirley Holmes & Jack Watson.”
Bubonicon 52 was officially postponed to next year (like pretty much every other convention) thanks to COVID-19. I was to be one of the Guests of Honor at the con this year, but that has been moved to next year.
Here’s the full schedule, with my three items highlighted in bold, and all times Eastern Time:
12pm: Opening/Intro (prerecorded)
12.10pm: Author reading w/Keith R.A. DeCandido, plus I answer some questions (prerecorded)
12.45pm: Art demonstration w/Peri Charlifu, who will demo pottery throwing of a bottle (prerecorded)
1pm: Comics Workshop: “Perry Needs a New Pair of Shoes,” w/Jeff Benham & 7000 BC (live)
2.30pm: “Mythology and Gods in Fiction: When Deities Matter,” w/Keith R.A. DeCandido, Reese Hogan, Chaz Kemp, Rebecca Roanhorse, and Lauren C. Teffeau (live)
3.30pm: Author reading w/Connie Willis, plus she answers some questions (prerecorded)
4pm: “Writing 101: What to Think About Before You Start,” w/Keith R.A. DeCandido, Susan Mathews, Lauren C. Teffeau, Walter Jon Williams, and Connie Willis (prerecorded)
5pm: Author reading w/Becky Chambers, plus she answers some questions (prerecorded)
5.30pm: “A Style of Your Own: Developing Your Signature Art Style,” w/Jeff Benham, Betsy James, Chaz Kemp, Elizabeth Leggett, and Jon Sanchez (live)
7pm: “Artificial Intelligence: Will Computers Take Over the World?” w/Cathy S. Plesko, David Lee Summers, Ian Tregillis, and Courtney Willis (prerecorded)
8pm: “Creating Worlds: Fun with Flora & Fauna,” w/Becky Chambers, Kathy Kitts, Jane Lindskold, and S.M. Stirling (live)
9pm: The Green Slime Awards, presented by Slime Mistress Jessica Coyle and the Slime Time Puppet Players (prerecorded)
9.25pm: Closing words and thoughts (live)
Hope to see folks there — or, rather, on my computer screen…………………….
And the Taresians were so—I dunno, bland? They’re superficial arm candy and not much beyond that. I found myself actually longing for the more overt sexuality of the scantily clad Aryans in TNG’s “Justice,” and when you can’t even live up to the bottom-of-the-barrel standards of one of TNG’s lowest points, it’s not good.
KRAD's Inaccurate Guide to Life 