Tag: American

Review: The View From Sunset Boulevard

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The View From Sunset Boulevard

Although published in 1979 and focusing on the year 1977, very little has changed about the subject matter of Ben Stein’s The View From Sunset Boulevard. Stein, though an infamous conservative, makes it clear he is not trying to grind an axe but rather sincerely identify how the Hollywood Blob (my words, not his) achieves its thought. One statement sets the tone.

“All of them, even the ones with millions of dollars, believed themselves to be part of a working class distinctly at odds with the exploiting classes – who, if the subject came up, were identified as the Rockefellers and multinational corporations. For an obscure reason, the name of Nixon was also thrown in frequently.”

The book has one terrible weakness: It identifies the breaks from reality that television (especially then) suffered, but doesn’t try to counterbalance by seeing how much of it was just done for the sake of dramatic effect (like having to wrap everything up in one episode as the most obvious). Yes, Stein makes it clear that much of what the TV writers choose to show (and most importantly, do not show/display), is what they believe. But he doesn’t quite go ‘how much isn’t. ‘

That said, it has better strengths. Stein makes some points even I didn’t think of before: Like how since the world of television writing is surprisingly lean without much direct experience with large bureaucracies, writers get frustrated with how problems can’t be instantly solved in real life. And many I have, like how the enemies are always businessmen. (This reached new depths in the 70s with the made for TV Captain America movies: Despite having the politically safest enemy ever in The Red Skull, Captain America’s opponent was…. an OC oil tycoon named Lou Brackett who wanted to detonate a neutron bomb for… reasons.)

The most interesting is how prone to from a distance ridiculous conspiracies so many TV screenwriters were. My favorite part was Stein describing how, since he worked for Nixon, people seriously asked him about inside info he must have had on the League Of Evil clearly ruling the world.

The bias of television writing is obvious. But this explains the similarity and banality, which in a different manifestation still exists now and then some.

Review: History, Force Structure, And Tactics of the Russian Airborne Troops

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The Russian Way of War: History, Force Structure, and Tactics of the Russian Airborne Troops.

Legendary Kremlinologists Lester Grau and Charles Bartles have a new free gargantuan book out on the Russian VDV. It’s hosted/sponsored by the Polish General Tadeusz Kościuszko Military University of Land Forces for pretty obvious reasons. While an excellent book, there’s a part I found extra amusing.

See, the OPFOR used to be as Soviet/Russian as possible. In the 21st Century, it slowly drifted away (even as high-intensity war took re-precedence post Iraq) from its roots understandably. Now Grau and Bartles are criticizing it (at least in terms of fidelity to Russian doctrine) for not being bearish enough. It’s just an amusing footnote.

Review: Downfall of a Revolutionary

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Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary

The book Trotsky: The Downfall of a Revolutionary is an excellent account of his final years in Mexico. Seeing the man increasingly decline physically and (arguably) in terms of influence just as much, it’s hard to avoid the impression that Stalin would have been better off letting him fade away instead of unleashing the mountain climbers axe (not an ice pick). Bertrand M. Patenaude tells a story full of tragedy, cruelty, and absurdity in equal measure.

We see the soap opera romance with Frida Kahlo, playing with fire given that her husband was the person most responsible for letting him into Mexico in the first place. Trotsky gets stir crazy being cooped up in an ever more restrictive lair. He gets involved in disputes with western communists who make it clear where Life of Brian got the idea.

The last part is where the book shines historically. Even the most sympathetic accounts of Trotsky have to come to terms with two facts. 1: He was not a liberal person (better than Stalin in that regard is like being better than the 2008 Detroit Lions), and any talk of greater social democracy came after his downfall for selfish reasons. 2: Trotsky was not a good politician and his downfall was near-inevitable because of that.

This is a very good history book that would be great for a movie adaptation ie The Death of Stalin.

Review: The Surge

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The Surge

After seeing the recommendation from Rocky Mountain Navy, I cracked open Adam Kovac’s The Surge. While realistic literary fiction is not normally my cup of tea, 1: The review was excellent, and 2: The book was short, so even if it wasn’t for me, it wouldn’t wear out its welcome.

Well, the book didn’t wear out its welcome. Nor did it really excite me as much as the gushing reviews said it would, I’m sorry to say. The descriptiveness is excellent, but it also acts as padding for what’s still a very short book that, for all its praise, held essentially no surprises, high points, or twists worth mentioning from my perspective.

I just don’t find narrow roman a clef fiction like this particularly interesting, whether at peace or war, so it was going uphill, but even from that baseline it never was more than middling for me.

A Thousand Words: Death Battle

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Everyone since the invention of fiction has wondered “who would win in a fight between ________ and __________ “? For over 15 years and 3 management changes, a web animation series called Death Battle has attempted to ‘answer’ just that. The characters are introduced, quantified, and then an animation plays depicting the fight. The outcome is then explained.

While vs. debaters online can take themselves way too seriously, Death Battle does not. Besides the good and growing quality of the animations, the best part is that the showrunners view it as entertainment and not a “how many Saiyans can dance on the head of a pin” philosophical argument.

If I had to list one current weakness of Death Battle, it’s becoming a victim of its own success. Because it’s gone through most of the obvious pop culture clashes, they either have to do fanservice-y repeats or increasingly obscure characters. The quantification has also gone from “Blastoise’s Hydro Pump is the equivalent of an industrial water cutter in terms of PSI” to a physics lecture. That said, even 2-3 weeks I look forward to seeing each episode.

Review: Fireworks

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Fireworks

Legendary gun instructor and writer Jeff Cooper wrote (or rather complied, as most he had published before) Fireworks in the late 1970s. Cooper politically was the kind of person who made Jesse Helms seem like a hippie, but the more interesting part is that he was one of the most pretentious writers ever to write. The sympathetic version is that if you’re actually teaching pistol shooting, you have to be very to the point, so writing gave him a chance to stretch his mental legs.

The not so sympathetic version is that Cooper was a perfect example of the kind of person who thinks he is far more intelligent and profound than he actually is. Combine this with being very easily impressed and you have a cross between Hemingway at his worst and your uncle who’s enthralled by this thing called “television”.

This book is entertaining, albeit likely not in the way its author intended.

Review: T-10 Heavy Tank

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T-10 Heavy Tank

Stephen Sewell’s deep dive into one of the Cold War’s most enigmatic tracked cryptids was a book I knew I had to get. I was not disappointed. Now you have to be interested in tanks to read a very long book about a tank that was only deployed in anger once (the Prague Spring). Thankfully, I’m very interested in tanks.

What makes this fascinating besides the detail is how it represents the end of the road for specialized “heavy” tanks. Yes, MBTs grew to outweigh the heavy tanks, but we see the unified end to one intentional design path taken as far as it went, with quirks like how the T-10 had a heavy instead of medium machine gun for a coax.

I love tanks. I love obscure tanks. So it’s no surprise I love this book.

A Thousand Words: Friday The 13th Part 5

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Friday The 13th Part 5

Friday The 13th Part 5 is a very strange horror movie mixed amidst the conventional genre-making slashers that proceeded and followed it. See, Jason Voorhees had died in the previous film, subtitled “The Final Chapter.” So this was subbed “A New Beginning” and it tried to keep him dead.

The movie takes place at a group home for troubled youth, one of whom, a loser named Joey Burns is murdered by an especially troubled youth. This makes Joey’s father Roy, a paramedic, snap and become a Jason copycat, cementing his ‘fame’ as the Dimitri Medvedev of horror movies.

As far as the actual film itself goes, it’s a delightful mess. The director only knew “DO THE THING” so there’s one scene of murder or sleaze (or both of course) at a very fast pace. It’s not very technically good, but you probably weren’t expecting Citizen Kane from the 5th installment of a horror franchise anyway.

A Thousand Words: Death By Lightning

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Death By Lightning

The Netflix historical drama Death by Lightning is a four-part look at the presidency of James Garfield. An obscure piece of national history that’s even referenced in the intro when workers nearly a hundred years later find Charles Guiteau’s brain and don’t know who it was, this depiction is an excellent melodramatic epic.

First off, there are numerous inaccuracies and dramatic exaggerations here. One must adhere to the maxim of Death of Stalin director Armando Iannuci: “It’s not a documentary”. That said, the characters judged in their own right are largely excellent. Largely. Garfield himself is a shallow, too-good plaster saint and his wife Lucretia is a little anachronistic “serious woman played by serious actress”, although in her case it’s made up for by one spectacular scene in the finale. Everyone else from brutish Chester A. Arthur to Clay Davis before Clay Davis Roscoe Conkling to, especially, Guiteau himself is wonderful. (Guiteau’s actor played a supervillain in a past role and it showed).

The series is very smooth flowing, and although most of the time it’s a madcap retelling of events, there’s some possibly unintended depth. Arthur’s recognition of himself as an underqualified person who fell upwards into power is a yin-yang contrast from Guiteau’s insane belief of himself as a transcendental genius. It doesn’t hurt that antagonists Conkling and Guiteau both fall into one of my favorite character archetypes: Schemers who are a lot less intelligent than they think they are.

So yes, don’t expect much realism, but this is an amazing show.

A Thousand Words: Backyard Wrestling

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Of no relation to the Backyard Sports baseball/soccer/etc… games, Backyard Wrestling: Don’t Try This At Home, and its sequel There Goes The Neighborhood is the distilled nadir of human culture in the most vile time of mankind’s cultural output: The early-mid 2000s. (Don’t argue this with me, I grew up then).

It’s a video game that awkwardly tries to shift traditional wrestling games, Tekken-style 3D fighters, and Smash Bros style “environmental fighters”. All while doing none of it very well and reeking of nu-metal. This is a time capsule. A very very bad time capsule.