Category Archives: Reviews

Reviews of books, movies, what have you.

Movie Review: Jane and the Lost City (UK, 1987)

It’s 1940, and the British are in dire need of funds to keep their war effort going. Fortunately, they’ve just received a report of a “Lost City” somewhere in Africa that’s sitting on a fortune in diamonds. Unfortunately, they don’t have information on it’s exact location. Time to call in a crack team of adventurers to find it before the Nazis do!

The “crack team” consists of The Colonel (Robin Bailey), his butler / assistant Tombs (Graham Stark), and our titular heroine Jane (Kirsten Hughes). Opposing them at every step along the way is a team of Nazis, led by Lola Pagola (Maud Adams), with her “muscle” Carl (Ian Roberts), trained assassin Heinrich (Jasper Carrot), and expert on Africa Dr. Schell (John Rapley).

If this sounds like a mashup of Raiders of the Lost Ark and King Solomon’s Mines, you win. I don’t know what you win, but you win something….

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MOVIE REVIEW: The Big Clock (1948)

George Stroud (Ray Milland) is the editor-in-chief of “Crimeways”, essentially a print version of a “True Crime” podcast that’s earned a reputation (and its market share) for identifying the guilty before the police can. He’s trying to take a well-earned vacation with his wife, but his bully of a boss, Earl Janoth (Charles Laughton), pulls him back to take charge of a new story – a model who did some work with another magazine in Janoth’s publishing empire has been found dead in her apartment. George is tasked with finding the killer RIGHT AWAY before they have to call in the police.

What Stroud doesn’t know – but we viewers do – is that Janoth is the killer. The model was his mistress, and he killed her in a fit of anger when she broke up with him. What Stroud does know is that after he believed he got fired and missed his train to head out on vacation, he went out for a couple of drinks to drown his marital troubles – and wound up meeting the mistress, visited a few drinking establishments with her (and doing things that made him memorable), and then saw her back to her place before heading off to join his wife. And all the investigating he’s doing is making it more and more likely that he’s going to be nailed for the murder.

A rather interesting set up for an early “film noir”, isn’t it.

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BOOK REVIEW: Service Model

Service Model
Adrian Tchaikovsky
Tor Publishing Group
Copyright 2024 by Adrian Czajkowski

If Charles the Valet-Bot were programmed to feel boredom, he’d probably be bored out of his mind over the constant repetitiveness of his tasks. There’s never a single change in the daily routine; his misanthropic hermit of an owner is content to just sit around his estate watching TV all day.

Until one day when Charles starts finding unusual reddish stains everywhere. He slowly comes to the conclusion that his owner was murdered – and he’s the murderer. This means he must report to Central Processing to be reprogrammed, since one cannot have killer robots on the loose.

This starts “Uncharles” (as he now designates himself) on a picaresque odyssey across a post-collapse landscape, searching for another master to serve – and trying to make sense of all of this.

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BOOK REVIEW: The Great River

The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi
Boyce Upholt
W.W. Norton & Company
(c) 2024 by the author

The Mississippi River is one of the longest rivers in the world. Add its many tributaries to it – the Ohio, the Missouri, the Tennessee, the Arkansas, the Red – and you’ve got one of the greatest river systems on the planet. Upholt concentrates on the “Big Muddy” itself, giving a rough history of how people have used and tried to control it.

It’s not a perfectly linear history; like the river itself, he meanders quite a bit. A quick look at how people decided on what would be the source of the river gives way to the geological history of the river basin, which goes right in to its ‘discovery’ and exploration by Europeans. Then comes its role in the development and growth of the United States, complete with steamboats and river rafts. And then it’s back to the past as people start wondering about all those odd mounds that seem to pop up all around the river.

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MOVIE REVIEW: Frankenhooker (1990)

If you dig in the heap of “Awful Movies That Are Still Fun to Watch”, you will undoubtedly come across The Brain that Wouldn’t Die (1962). It’s about a doctor whose radical ideas on transplants has him on the outs with the medical establishment. He gets the chance to Show Them All! When his girlfriend is decapitated in an accident. Fortunately, he manages to keep her head alive – now all he needs is a body to graft it to.

Weird idea, but not one that’s unusual. In competent hands, and with some resources given to it, one just might be able to create a passable movie on that premise.

Frank Henenlotter wrote that he came up with the idea for Frankenhooker out of thin air when his pitch for another movie failed. But the similarities between the two movies are too strong for it to have been a mere coincidence. Perhaps he saw the older movie and vaguely remembered the plot, or perhaps he knew that “Brain” was in the public domain, so he was free to riff on it to his heart’s content.

Anyway…..

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Book Review: Cascade Failure

Cascade Failure
L.M. Sagas
Tor Publishing Group
Copyright 2024 by Morgan Stanfield

It’s almost like these Sci-Fi stories are coming from a Plot Generator:

1. A disgraced former officer
2. A down-on-their-luck small business owner
3. A ragtag crew on an equally ragtag ship

Stumbles on

1. A conspiracy to hide a mass killing
2. An alien race threatening to wipe out humanity (or at least a large portion of it in an interstellar war)
3. Some massive corruption scheme to make the rich richer, and the poor poorer.

Can they overcome incredible odds to defeat the baddie and save the day? And perhaps

1. Make a nice profit
2. Find love
3. Resolve whatever problems were keeping them “on the outs” in the first place

along the way?

There’s actually nothing wrong with using such a Plot Generator Device; it’s been fairly common in creative writing workshops. The trick is making a good story out of the proposed plot.

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Book Review: In Our Stars

In Our Stars: The Doomed Earth (Part 1)
Jack Campbell
Ace Books
Copyright 2024 by John G. Henry

The Earth Guard is tasked with protecting the space lanes in the inner Solar System. Intercepting ne’er-do-wells, clearing debris that might interfere with travel, and generally convincing people that it’s safe to travel between the planets. But the Guard is corrupt. Not in the way that everyone’s on the take (though that certainly happens at the highest levels); they are corrupt in that, at the command level, they are lazy. Anything that significantly disrupts the normal routine is A Problem. Anything that makes extra work is A Problem. And Problems are to be dealt with as quickly and easily as possible, before they become even bigger Problems.

So when the Vigilant, on a very routine patrol, comes across a HUGE hunk of debris from a spacecraft of unknown design, that’s A Problem. And when Lt. Kayl Owen, leading the team checking it out finds a survivor, that’s also A Problem. When the survivor says she’s Lt. Selene Genji of the Unified Fleet and claims to come from forty years in the future, well, that’s a Much Bigger Problem. And when she says she knows about the aliens who have just arrived in the Solar System, partly because she’s got some of their genetic material in her, well, that’s A Serious Problem that calls for a Solution with Extreme Prejudice. And if that troublemaker Kayl Owen, who believes her story and has take a liking to her, can be dealt with at the same time, well….

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Book Review: Book and Dagger

Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II
Elyse Graham
Ecco Books
Copyright 2024 by the author

You could, if you want, blame Secretary of State Henry Stimson. In 1929, he’s alleged to have stuck his nose in the air and said “Gentlemen don’t read each other’s mail”, and then shut down most of the United States’ foreign intelligence apparatus. So we were caught flat-footed when the Japanese attacked twelve years later.

Now it was up to William Donovan, the newly appointed head of the OSS, to put together his agency from scratch. The “Research and Development” side would be easy – just get a bunch of technical people to design and build all the secret devices of spycraft. But for the “Research and Analysis” department, which would collect and study the mountains of data needed by the US Military, you needed people with highly specialized training.

So that’s why a Yale English professor found himself at a “secure location”, learning how to silently kill someone with a knife, and how to deal with being interrogated by the enemy. Oh, by the way, you’d only need to hold up under capture and interrogation for 48 hours. Not because by that time they’d be done with you, or that you could expect to be rescued by then, but because that’s how long it should take for your contacts to forget they ever knew you and “vanish”….

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Book Review: Every Living Thing

Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life
Jason Roberts
Random House
Copyright 2024 by the author

The Scientific Revolution kept rolling on. The Copernican Revolution changed how we look at the universe. Isaac Newton crystallized several lines of inquiry into modern physics. Now it was time to tackle the life sciences.

Two geniuses would set things in motion by taking on the huge task of organizing and classifying living things. In Sweden, Carl Linnaeus was set on becoming a doctor, but he found the field of botany more fascinating. In France, Georges-Louis Leclerc, the self-styled Comte de Buffon, used a lucky inheritance to indulge his passion for “natural history”. A brief work in statistics (“Buffon’s Needle”) got him noticed, and soon he was picked to be the “superintendent” of the Royal Garden* in Paris, where he was given the task of cataloging the massive collections.

Roberts treats these two contemporaries with a dual biography, showing how they approached the matter of the abundance and variety of life from two different directions.

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BOOK REVIEW: FTL, Y’All!

FTL, Y’All!: Tales From the Age of the $200 Warp Drive
Edited by C. Spike Trotman and Amanda Lafrenais
Iron Circus Comics
Copyright 2018 by Iron Circus Comics

As an “Old Fogey”, I remember when comic books were something you found in the checkout lines at the supermarket, or perhaps in a bookstore or newsstand. They were just “there”; I never had the inclination (or money, or time) to care about them. And that was pretty much what most people thought of them. Sure, we all knew about Superman and Batman (and Archie), but that was thanks to TV. No one ever took them seriously.

Then Art Spiegelman published Maus, and showed quite convincingly that the format could indeed produce works of real merit. Rather suddenly, all the comic geeks demanded to be heard, because there really was some good stuff being done in the medium. Though I have to differ with the term “graphic novel”; most of the works aren’t long enough to be called a novel – “illustrated short story” is better.

I still didn’t get into them, though. Same reasons – didn’t care to. Then a chance pickup of a little sample flyer from Iron Circus Comics piqued my interest, so I thought I’d give their website a look.

FTL, Y’All! is an anthology of stories based on a simple premise. In the near future, plans for a faster-than-light drive appear online. And the parts are all readily available for the cost of around $200, and can be easily assembled without any special skill.

What happens then, when pretty much everyone who wants to can build their own starship?

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