Indifference - short stories by no one in particular had been updated and price lowered!

 

 I recently updated the design and re-arranged the stories in my first book of short stories. I cut one and added a new one and also added illustrations for those that didn't have them the first time out. The story "The Face in the Glass" was a head scratcher in terms of what sort of image to make and I ultimately deiced something "punk-ish" might be good. Originally I was going to do a mohawk only from the side. I decided instead to really simply and stylize a photo of me from the 80s. So not sure it counts as a real self portrait or not. I wasn't really going for resemblance as much as I was going for a certain look - much like I was going for for myself in that era! It would have been cool to colour the make-up but the book is printed in black & white so greyscale had to suffice. 

The book is for sale on Amazon as a printed book and a Kindle book.

The new price is 5.99$ (CAD) and the print version should be updated in the next few days, but the Kindle version is ready now. 

Varan the Unbelievable (1958) Directed by Ishirō Honda

 

There might be several versions of this film but the one I saw was about 1 hour 7 minutes, making it about 40 minutes too long. The film was meant to be a USA/Toho joint production but that fell apart and the resulting English and Japanese filmed parts never mesh together. The Japanese sections don't even have subtitles. 

Some military guy and his wife are doing some sort experiments on a remote lake that will poison the water. The locals think a monster lives there who will destroy the world if the lake is threatened. Most of this film is the military guy trying to evacuate the residents while being as sexist as possible to his far too subservient wife who wants the villages to be able to stay in their homes. There is a ton and I mean a ton of expositional dialogue that makes the film drag and the clichéd plot doesn't help it much. I expected more with Honda as director. There are many references to Godzilla, including his theme song being snuck in at one point. 

Turns out there is a monster andit goes on a  rampage. Who would have thought? The wife blames herself because she wanted the villagers to stay and her brilliant husband states "this was no one's fault". Ummm... it was HIS fault 100%! He was poisoning the water and displacing an entire village for... reasons? 

The monster itself is a highlight. Not too badly designed and it moves well on all fours. The effects overall are pretty good for a film of this kind, era and budget but they can't save the tedium between shots of the giant creature destroying stuff. 

SHAZAM! (2019) Directed by David F. Sandberg

 I know it seemed impossible but this a very good DC superhero movie. Wonder Woman was great but faltered towards the end by going for spectacle over what could have been a perfect introduction to that character. SHAZAM! though lighter and filled with clichés of its own manages to own those clichés and give us something entertaining with good performances pulled out of what could have been bland characters. I do have questions as to what age this film is aimed at... it's funny and seems like an ideal children's film but the violence and killing in it, though not bloody is too intense for kids. I mean, a guy shows his brother out the windows of a high rise while a demon bites the head off someone else... not family friendly exactly.  So let's say teenagers were demographic. 

It's a rare comic book film where the characters motivations, including the villains, are so clear. It knows not to pull at the heartstrings too hard and brings the source material into today's world and what I would have to describe as a side-car film in the DC hero universe. It's too light and fun to fit into the other films and knows to not take itself so seriously, which is why it works. The plot points seemed earned, even the battle at the end is tapped down to a certain extent and comes from the events in the story and doesn't feel like a marketing excuse for a 100 million CGI battle. The movie gets into the action right away and doesn't waste time with a prolonged prologue. There is an end credits scene, of course, but for once I feel like... Yeah, I might go see that next one. 

The Midnight Sky (2020) Directed by George Clooney

Maybe it's just the result of the pandemic the world has been living through and how it has effected me, but I found this to be a little gem of a film. I like the slow pace some critics held against it and some of the plot elements are tropes but I thought they were well integrated and well done. 

After what appears to be nuclear Holocaust that is hinted started from a mistake, one man (Clooney) who is dying of an unnamed illness decided to be left behind at an Arctic station while everyone else is evacuated, knowing he will die there alone. While there he discovers he is not alone and a little girl had hidden herself away and he must deal with her. There seems to be literally no one on earth who can come and get her and her fate is as sealed as his in the long run. At the same time, a ship is returning back to earth from a  habitable moon the Clooney's character discovered as almost a second chance for earth. They do not know what happened but as they get closer to home with no contact, they are faced with a mystery of what could be going on. they get in touch with Clooney and he tells them to turn back and has calculated a route for them to take so they can start again on the moon. 

Since this is new and I really don't won't give away some of the plot turns, I won't say more. It's true at least of two of them are a little to coincidental for me but it still works. It's not hard sci-fi but it has the look and feel. It benefits greatly by not trying to explain too much. The holocaust, his sickness and the tech that takes them to another planet are all taken as fact without having needless exposition. I will say setting it in 2049 is a bad move, too soon and usually a bad idea to "date" a sci-fi film. Nice performances, nice effects and only what I would describe as a "soft" feel to the whole thing. A welcome change from movies that feel they need to overstimulate the viewer from start to finish giving no time to breathe.