Category: Review

A Thousand Words: King Kong 1976

On By coilerxiiIn A Thousand Words, ReviewLeave a comment

King Kong 1976

The 1976 remake of King Kong is often regarded as a horribly dated piece of 1970s kitsch that pales in comparison to the classic 1933 original. And that is completely accurate. But what’s interesting is how, given that the plot structure is more or less the same.

First off, there’s the human cast. Jeff Bridges, who is just about as hairy as King Kong in the film, is the stereotypical Post-Nixon Rebellious Academic, who of course is completely right and accurate. There’s Charles Grodin as the evil human villain, and he does a good job. Finally, there’s Jessica Lange whose performance has to be judge by the fact that her character “Dwan” (real spelling) has to work with a script and direction that Thalia and Melpomene themselves couldn’t do well.

But for the real star of the show, it’s very weird. The various props depicting Kong himself are done as well as could reasonably be for the time period. However, the movie fails completely (and I mean completely ) at effectively integrating them. Enjoy hours of clunky green screen that’s terrible even by the standards of the time! Watch as the dinosaur fight is replaced with a “struggle” against a snake prop! Marvel at the giant gas pump in the finale!

Now while the overall plot is the same, this is a lot more obviously contrived than the original. It’s an oil expedition that, after not finding oil on Kong Island, grabs the ape as a consolation prize. Lange’s character is shipwrecked separately and rescued by the oil ship.

All this adds up to-a horribly dated piece of 1970s kitsch that pales in comparison to the original.

Review: After The Downfall

On By coilerxiiIn ReviewLeave a comment

After The Downfall

Harry Turtledove’s 2008 After The Downfall is not an alternate history per se. Rather it is an example of the dreaded “isekai” that started with Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court. A German soldier gets warped from the Battle of Berlin to a fantasy world and then stuff happens. A lot of stuff. A lot of predictable stuff.

This is not one of Turtledove’s better books. Take a ridiculously obvious and unsubtle plot/message, writing that can’t make up for it, and one of the fastest intro-to-sex-scene ratios I’ve ever read. And the “payoff” of that isn’t worth it, trust me.

The best I can say about this is that it’s a sincere attempt at something different and not a series installment stretched out over a long time to get more money. But that doesn’t make the actual book any better.

Review: Freezing Cold Takes

On By coilerxiiIn ReviewLeave a comment

Freezing Cold Takes: Football Media’s Most Inaccurate Predictions and the Fascinating Stories Behind Them

With both the college and pro football seasons having started, it’s time to look at Fred Segal’s Freezing Cold Takes, a compilation of football media predictions that ended up being extremely wrong as well as the context surrounding them. It’s not the deepest book, but it’s certainly deeper than the fired-off hot takes concerning sports that long predate the internet.

As a fun bit of NFL history, this book is worth a read. You’ll laugh and you just might learn something. While it shouldn’t be the last word, its good as a first one.

A Thousand Words: Under Siege

On By coilerxiiIn A Thousand Words, Review1 Comment

Under Siege

Steven Seagal has had a career trajectory that very few artists have duplicated. Imagine a one or two-hit wonder who, next thing you know, is making cheap grindhouse flicks on behalf of a dictator. Well, with Seagal you don’t have to imagine.

Anyway, the lone movie of his that many people like unironically is the cheap thriller Under Siege, AKA Die Hard On A Battleship. The plot is a very simple one and involves villains taking over the USS Missouri and Seagal being the one to stop them. Look, it’s not exactly a deep and intelligent movie, all right?

Thankfully, it is a fun movie. A very fun movie. It has Tommy Lee Jones and Gary Busey as delightfully crazy and corny supervillains, a chance to see a battleship in action, and takes full advantage of its setting. I think it goes without saying that a warship is one of the better places to set a Die Hard knockoff.

Review: The Show That Never Ends

On By coilerxiiIn ReviewLeave a comment

The Show That Never Ends

Political reporter (but the book is thankfully almost without mention to contemporary politics) David Weigel wrote The Show That Never Ends, a story of the heyday of progressive rock in the 1970s. It’s an interesting book. But it’s not a perfect one.

Weigel succeeds at putting prog rock, a genre many are embarassed to like (I’m not) into perspective. Its underappreciated just how big it was in its time due to the “punk not disco effect”, where films and shows set in the past will emphasize what was “cool” instead of what people actually listened to. Jethro Tull could make two silly concept albums and both were hugely successful.

The problem is that the book comes across as aimless and meandering. It has width at the expense of cohesion-much like prog rock itself. While not for everyone, music fans will enjoy this for what it is.

Review: Cataclysm

On By coilerxiiIn ReviewLeave a comment

Cataclysm: A Matt Sheridan Novel

Robert Cole’s Cataclysm is a story of post-apocalyptic survival as a man and his family struggle in the aftermath of a nuclear exchange-I mean, terrorist attack. I have to mention this “night of the war” (to use the Survivalist’s term). Because not since the beginning Fuldapocalyptic days of The Red Line have I seen a setup so contrived when it didn’t have to be. In fact, The Red Line can at least be excused as commercial editors wanting it to be contemporary for sales reasons.

This independent novel has no such justification. Anyway, might as well tell this. So nuclear weapons destroy many American major cities in a strike that’s more than Arc Light but less than a classic Strangelove/North Star wipeout. That’s not so bad and I’d even call it somewhat refreshing to have some semblance of a government left. Except it’s not the obvious normal nuclear war. No, its setup goes like this: Islamic terrorists snuck nuclear bombs into said cities and detonated them. In response, the American government launched an immediate retaliatory strike against the fifty largest Muslim-majority cities across the world before concentrating on licking its worlds.

It feels gratuitous, and even for me a little insulting a setup. Like you could have just had say, Iran go nuclear, get several ICBMs, and have a “normal” exchange with them and no one would bat an eye.

Anyway, the book itself has a lot of exposition about every single slightly relevant thing. It also has constant references to the author’s protagonist’s “past wargames”, which makes this turn into the Survivalist-Kirov (this is not a bad thing).

The next arc is terrorist weaponized mega-smallpox, because one cheap thriller cliche wasn’t enough and Cole had to include another one. All he needed was VX gas for the Cheap Thriller WMD Triple Crown. But he goes for the second-best thing, and a tried and true literary device: When in doubt, have your characters fight a bunch of crazy bikers. In fact, such a super-biker gang becomes the main antagonists, a delightful change from the terrorists I was expecting.

The literary and action fundamentals are adequate. This sounds like passive-aggressiveness, but it’s not. Thankfully, the whole leaning so much into “Postapocalyptic Kirov” and huge expositions come across as endearing and not annoying. I had a lot of fun reading this book, and that’s what matters.

Review: Inheriting the Bomb

On By coilerxiiIn ReviewLeave a comment

Inheriting The Bomb: The Collapse of the USSR and the Nuclear Disarmament of Ukraine

I’ve looked forward to few nonfiction books as much as I anticipated reading Marina Budjeryn’s Inheriting The Bomb, about how nuclear weapons were removed from Ukraine after the USSR’s breakup (the word choice is deliberate). I was not disappointed. This is an amazing book that can for all intents and purposes clear up the “could Ukraine have kept its nukes” confusion.

I’ve already posted about WMDs and the non-Russian SSRs. Short answer is “They never had control or the necessary pieces to maintain the arsenal of nuclear weapons on their territory, but they nonetheless had the raw technical ability to make an arsenal”. Raw technical ability but little else. Budjeryn doesn’t go into that much detail on counterfactuals (though she does wisely defer to credible experts in that regard and cites them).

She does go into lots and lots of detail on the political twists and turns and not just for Ukraine itself. Yet it was far more reticent than Belarus or Kazakhstan were and viewed itself as a legitimate holder of the weapons. Factors from the fact that Russia was threatening Ukraine almost literally from day one (and by Yeltsin officials and not Zhirinovsky-ist fireeaters) to the desire to preserve jobs in the giant Dnepropetrovsk missile plant are mentioned. This is a great, indispensable book about a very important topic, and I cannot recommend it enough.

A Thousand Words: Fat Man And Little Boy

On By coilerxiiIn A Thousand Words, ReviewLeave a comment

Fat Man And Little Boy

Before there was Oppenheimer, there was 1989’s Fat Man and Little Boy, a far less well received movie about the development of the nuclear bomb starring Paul Newman as Leslie Groves and Dwight Schultz as Robert Oppenheimer. Knowing its reputation and knowing my interest in the subject matter, I felt I had to check it out.

Most of the critiques are accurate. The movie does treat the making of the nuclear bomb as a hokey war movie with Newman and Schultz as the cliche general and scientist right out of central casting. The movie is VERY clear on what side its makers are taking in the debate about nuclear weapons (it’s uh, not that of Curtis Lemay) and is not subtle in its points. And yes, it’s historically inaccurate in many ways.

Yet it’s still better than I thought it would be. For all those legitimate issues, it’s a technically well made movie. It may be a hokey war movie, but its direction and (especially) sets are solid. Even the final scene when the bomb finally detonates (spoiler) is interesting in that the filmakers obviously knew they couldn’t do the explosion justice with the effects of the time so they chose an indirect vision that’s surprisingly effective.

It’s not the best film ever, but it doesn’t quite deserve the scorn its gotten. Plus Ennio Morricone’s score is typically amazing.

Review: Crimson Snow

On By coilerxiiIn Review1 Comment

(Warning: This review contains many uses of the words ‘tanks exploding’. It’s a sort of contest to see how often I can fit that phrase in. So let the tanks explode!)

Ryan Aslesen’s Crimson Snow is a science fiction novel about tank battles. It is nothing but tanks exploding. And the occasional cliched angst, but mostly tanks exploding. When tanks are not exploding, the book is not very good. When tanks are exploding, it is mostly adequate. There are actually so many scenes of tanks exploding that they kind of blend in, and the scenes in between the tanks exploding (including one bizarre played-straight scene where the main heroine uses a ‘pleasure bot’), do nothing to add to the coherence.

Because of this, this book depends on whether or not you like tanks exploding enough to look past its flaws. If you really, really like tanks exploding, go ahead and read it. If you don’t, there are better books out there featuring tanks exploding.

(Final “Tanks Exploding” count: 8, not including this sentence)

Review: Grant’s War

On By coilerxiiIn ReviewLeave a comment

Grant’s War

Eric Meyer is one of those authors who just writes a ton and ton of ultra-cheap thrillers. I’ll even admit that I had to check to see if he was a real person and not just an obvious pen name shared by multiple actual writers (the answer is “yes, he is a real person as far as I can tell”, by the way). This is the kind of book I’m dealing with when I read Grant’s War.

The premise is simple. It’s a war novel where protagonist Jack Grant, after being (mostly) falsely convicted, faces the stereotypical “army or jail” choice. He chooses the army just in time for 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan. And he gets there just in time for a scene where he grabs a red-hot AK by the barrel and throws it aside before dispatching its wielder in a fistfight. So, in other words a lot more Jon Land than Jon Le Carre.

While this book is not exactly one that contains deep characterization or excellent literary fundamentals, it’s nonetheless good by the standards of the assembly-line slop that makes up its genre. And that alone is enough for me to recommend it.