Author of adventure/thriller and horror fiction

EX MACHINA (2015)

by Leave a Comment

ex machina

I put off watching EX MACHINA (2015) as I had it confused with AUTOMATA, another film about artificial intelligence and which I found pretty lackluster when I watched it as an advance screener. EX MACHINA is a great, simple film with numerous similarities to Shakespeare’s THE TEMPEST.

Caleb wins a technology company’s lottery to spend a week with the CEO at his remote home/laboratory complex. The only other occupants are Kyoko, a silent maid, and Ava, an android with artificial intelligence. The goal of the week is for Caleb to administer a Turing test to Ava to see if she’s indistinguishable from a human being.

Nathan, the CEO, makes a great “mad scientist,” seemingly far less feeling and empathetic than Ava reveals herself to be during her sessions with Caleb. Immediately, we sense that Nathan is orchestrating a larger game, while Ava knows if she doesn’t pass the test she will be deactivated. The resulting conflict is tense, engaging, and heavily spiced with smart dialogue about artificial intelligence, what separates biological humanity from the artificial kind, and the horrible consequences the singularity could have for our species.

So yeah, EX MACHINA is a great little science fiction movie, the kind of thoughtful movie of which I’d like to see more.

THE DISASTER ARTIST (2017)

by Leave a Comment

disaster artist

THE DISASTER ARTIST (2017), based on the book of the same name by Greg Sestero, is a biographical-comedy depicting the making of THE ROOM (2003), which many consider the king of crap movies. The film is produced and directed by James Franco and also stars him as Tommy Wiseau, the seriously weird dude who invested a reported $6 million of his personal fortune to make THE ROOM. The result is a hilarious take on the making of the movie that is also full of heart.

I remember catching the trailer of THE ROOM back in the day and thinking, WTF? I couldn’t believe how ridiculous it looked, and Tommy Wiseau, who starred in it, struck me as unintentionally hilarious. While I skipped it, being the kind of guy who doesn’t really believe that a movie can be “so bad it’s good,” many people didn’t, turning it into a cult classic after its disastrous release. THE DISASTER ARTIST tells the inside story from the perspective of Greg Sestero, Wiseau’s friend who played second lead in the film, from meeting Tommy in an acting class to moving to Los Angeles to trying and failing to score acting jobs to making THE ROOM.

Tommy is a fascinating character. Nobody really knows where he’s from, how old he is, where he got his money. His look and accent are naturally humorous. He’s ridiculous in many ways, and childish and cruel when he feels unappreciated. Still, he’s extremely likeable. He believes in himself, exhorts his friends to be the best they can be, and is so damn earnest and carefree you can’t help but love him. James Franco really wanted to do this movie, and it shows. His brother gives a great performance as Greg Sistero, but Franco shreds every scene as Tommy. From the first scene to the last, you can tell Franco didn’t want to ridicule Tommy, playing him with a ton of heart. I can’t believe he didn’t get an Oscar nomination for it.

Overall, it was a surprisingly fun and funny movie from beginning to end. While I’ll still never see THE ROOM, I loved this movie about the making of.

BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE

by Leave a Comment

superman

BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE got a lot of hate from critics when it came out. I was curious about it because of its themes, but not that much so as the majority of superhero movies fall flat for me. When it showed up on Netflix, I decided to give it a few minutes on a lark and ended up staying up far too late to finish it.

BATMAN V SUPERMAN begins with the epic battle between Superman and General Zod, which results in mass casualties in Gotham in an event that looks like 9/11 x 100. This event makes Batman and numerous other people question Superman as an existential threat, even as many others have begun viewing him as a messianic figure, a god. Superman, meanwhile, regards Batman as a violent vigilante who needs to obey the law like everybody else. The stage is set for conflict, provided by Lex Luthor, modeled after a young and eccentric dot-com mogul, who believes Superman’s existence negates human achievement (while also imposing a stern father figure he resents on a personal level), and therefore should be destroyed.

The result is actually a great movie that does justice to these powerful, often unexplored themes. We actually get to see Superman wrestle with the understanding that his actions, while saving the world, may ruin or cost thousands of lives in the process, and resulting wonder whether Earth would be better off without him. (I confess to agreeing with Lex Luthor for quite a bit of the film.) We get to see Batman justify not accidentally but purposefully killing numerous villains to save lives. As a guy raised on stories where superheroes always faced clear-cut choices between good and evil, with their actions having few ill side effects, the murky ethics explored in this movie combine to make a great theme. The rest of the growing DC movie franchise is woven into the plot fairly delicately, most prominently Wonder Woman.

So overall, I liked it quite a bit. It was a cut above the usual superhero stuff, far more thoughtful, dark, and filled with great action.

UNDERGROUND RAILROAD by Colson Whitehead

by Leave a Comment

railroadColson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD is a remarkable work of literary speculative fiction, a bold re-imagining of America’s Underground Railroad. It’s beautifully written, heartbreaking, compelling, and richly detailed.

I first read Whitehead when I picked up his massive literary zombie book, ZONE ONE, which I found frustrating and annoying in the reading but appreciated as a whole after finished. A strange thing for this reader, and the only time it’s ever happened for me that way. I felt like this celebrated literary author was showing off how well he could put a sentence together and break the rules of narrative. Still, I’d heard good things about THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD and decided to give it a shot.

In history, the Underground Railroad was a network of routes and safe houses set up in the 1800s to help slaves escape to the free states and Canada with the help of abolitionists. Whitehead re-imagines the railroad as a very real thing, built by mysterious agency, a series of tracks and stations carved into the earth. At first, this threw me, as the novel’s opening is so real and grounded, but I went with it, and it ended up working for me and led the way to an alternate-history America.

The novel focuses on Cora, a slave on a Georgia plantation. Life is horrible enough until the master dies, and his cruel brother takes over the plantation. She escapes into the underground railroad. Her trek takes her into other states, also re-imagined, each taking a different path in dealing with the “slave question,” what to do about slavery in general and the existence of African-Americans specifically. In each state, the answer is always cruelty, whether dressed up or naked, following the maxim, “All men are created equal, unless they decide you are not a man.” A ruthless slave catcher, Ridgeway, relentlessly pursues her. The novel lost steam for me between the second and the third act, but picked up again nicely toward the end.

There’s a lot one could interpret in this novel about race, the legacy of slavery, and the savagery America was founded on, but I’ll leave that to the scholars. For me, THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD is a beautifully written, very compelling story about slavery that made me think about and feel something for a period of history that previously felt abstract, as well as race in general. I’d seen movies depicting American slavery before, but nothing as brutal as this, based on actual slave accounts collected in a project funded during the FDR administration. In its stark portrayal of brutality and hopelessness and hope, it reminded me of Howard Fast’s SPARTACUS. And it made me thankful Americans went to war to end this cruel and horrifying institution.

AstraDaemon’s Lair Reviews CHILDREN OF GOD

by Leave a Comment

CHILDREN OF GOD by Craig DiLouieAstraDaemon’s Lair, a horror review site, recently reviewed CHILDREN OF GOD, calling it an “astounding collaboration between Craig DiLouie and Jonathan Moon, featuring a fictional literary collection written by cult members coping with PTSD through writing … The diversity, both in form and tone, of each entry is exquisitely crafted…intense, dramatic and heart-wrenching. Not to mention, the great detail and research put into the introduction of this masterpiece.”

Thank you, AstraDaemon! Click here to read the review.

KILL CREEK by Scott Thomas

by Leave a Comment

kill creekIn KILL CREEK by Scott Thomas (Inkshares, 2017), four of the nation’s bestselling horror authors are invited to spend the night in a haunted house as part of an online media event, with horrible consequences. The result is one of the best horror novels I’ve read in a long time, even more remarkable for the fact it’s Thomas’s first novel.

The idea is solid high concept, but I often find high concept boring, which was why I shied away from the book at first. I kept hearing good things about it, though, and when I was offered a free copy from the publisher supporting the book’s nomination for a Stoker Award, I gave it a shot.

So glad I did. Execution is far more important than high concept, and Thomas delivers.

The novel introduces us to four very different horror authors, each a terrific character you can root for, who spend the night in a house that is powerful, horrifying, and wants them all for a very specific purpose. The writing flows, Thomas’s voice is confident and his own, and the pacing is almost perfect, with the narrative almost never really flagging. As a writer, I found the characterization a bit of a feast, as the main characters talk about why they write horror, write it very differently, and both admire and loathe each other as competitors. It was also fun to try to guess if Thomas had anybody particular in mind when building them–is Moore based roughly on Clive Barker? Is Sam based partly on Stephen King?

My only criticism is about the ending–both the climax and denouement–which left me a bit incredulous, but who cares? It’s a great read, and I’m happy to recommend it. I’m hoping to read more of this new author in the future.