Australian Horror on Netflix: "The Reef," "Arctic Blast," and "Primal"

Posted on September 18, 2011 by williamjcobb

So I was at first excited by the streaming-video options of Netflix months ago, but the charm actually rather quickly wore off and I agree with some of the popular grouching about it—basically that Netflix has a rather limited list of titles, even if there are zillions of them. I find myself searching around for something weird and offbeat, and lately all those titles have been Austrialian horror/scifi movies. They’re surprisingly better than our similar B-movie offerings, the kind you can often find on the SyFy channel or Chiller: the Australian ones tend to have better acting and plots. They seem to take their cheese more seriously, and it pays off.
The last film I watched in this category was Arctic Blast, which should really be called Ozone Blast. The best part: when hundreds/thousands of people get flash-frozen because a dangerous hole in the ozone layer lets in some cold air (“Close that ozone hole, why don’tcha?”), the hero (a climate scientist) shrugs and says, “We did it to ourselves. We’ve polluted the planet.” (Or something like that.) He’s unflappable to the nth degree. They should have had this tag line for the movie poster: Arctic Blast—”It’s an eco-thriller The Fog without dead pirates!”
Primal is even more fun, for what happens to the sexed-up cutie on a camping trip. You can always tell who’s going to get eaten/stabbed/hacked/infected first in a horror film—the horniest one. But as this girl morphs into a snarling zombie/monster, her boyfriend doesn’t want to hurt her. “But she’s my girlfriend!” he cries (or something like that: I mean, I wasn’t taking notes), after she’s just eaten another person on their camping trip. (Her version of “glorp.”)
And the seriously good one of this trio is The Reef, which is like Open Water only better. It should really be called The Swim, but why quibble. Some holiday yuppies go for a boat ride, it hits a reef and capsizes, then several of them swim for an island far, far away. Guess what? A shark follows, picking off the slowest ones. The end is quite good. Like Arctic Blast, it also features a seriously stoic hero. That must be an Australian thing.

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"127 Hours" as Big-Budget "I Shouldn't Be Alive," With a Nod to the Great "Touching the Void"

Posted on September 17, 2011 by williamjcobb

So I finally got around to watching the much-acclaimed/suspect film of Aaron Ralston’s self-amputation, 127 Hours, and actually thought it was pretty good, even if my hotel owner/chef in Green River, Utah held a grudge against Ralston for not paying back the county/state money spent on searching for him. (See previous post months ago: I met the guy at his Riverside Terrace restaurant, which made a killer breakfast.) It’s really a big-budget version of one of my favorite AnimalPlanet TV shows, I Shouldn’t Be Alive, which reenacts true tales of harrowing outdoor horror, some of them quite good. My favorite: the guy who survived for over three months at sea, adrift in a small life raft. The great part of those shows is they feature the actual survivors reliving their stories, and providing some interesting commentary. Ralston only shows up at the end of 127 Hours, in a brief flash, with his wife, and seems likable enough, for that brief moment.
But Ralston’s story, harrowing as it is, pales in comparison to both the book and film of Touching the Void. This first appeared as a nonfiction book in 1988, about Joe Simpson and Simon Yates’s disaster while mountain climbing in Peru, in which Simpson fell and broke several bones, and then Yates tried to lower him down the mountain, only to be forced to cut the rope and let him fall into a crevasse, giving him up for dead. Only he didn’t die. He crawled out of the crevasse, and several miles over glaciers and rocks back to camp, to arrive just in time before Yates and another fellow were about to hike back to civilization. The book was amazing. The film, made in 2003, was excruciating to watch, and is still the greatest I Shouldn’t Be Alive episode ever told.

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Climate Change Coverage in the NY Times

Posted on September 8, 2011 by williamjcobb

So I have decidedly mixed feelings about most of our media, no matter how much I read or watch it, as I imagine most of us do. (I make a point to read CNN just to see the latest blather of the neconservative/supposedly liberal media at work. Fox News? I can’t stoop that low.) But this morning I’m heartened to notice the continued coverage of climate change in the NY Times, evidenced by these two articles. The first is about the Republican denial of climate change, here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/07/opinion/in-the-land-of-denial-on-climate-change.html?_r=1&src=ISMR_HP_LO_MST_FB
That’s an easy target to hit, but I’m glad to see them summing up the various candidates blatant conservative pandering/stupidity so well. And this morning they offer a more difficult pill to swallow, directed toward the believers like myself—and everyone, actually, here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/08/opinion/going-green-but-getting-nowhere.html?ref=opinion
These two opposing points of view illustrate the difficult choices we face. The Times is standing out as a pillar of intelligence in the dumbed-down world of mass media.

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On a Novel Titled "The Bird Saviors"

Posted on September 6, 2011 by williamjcobb

So a few months ago I blogged about finishing my new novel ms., The Bird Saviors, & how the completion occurred by describing a rather simple detail—a man drinking a glass of water—that has greater implications and reverberations than one might usually think. Since then the novel went through the channels of agent, then editor, and is now bought (signed, sealed, delivered) and scheduled for publication in the spring. I’ve been writing on it for four years, which seems a lifetime.
It was actually a “Lost” novel, in that I wrote a first draft, kept neglecting to back up the document on my laptop, whose harddrive subsequently crashed, destroying the entire novel. A 300-page ms gone—no print-out, no nothing. I rewrote it from memory.

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Review of Justin Torres's novel(la) "We the Animals"

Posted on September 4, 2011 by williamjcobb

So my review of Justin Torres’s debut novel, We the Animals, appears today in the Dallas Morning News, here:
http://www.dallasnews.com/entertainment/books/20110902-book-review-we-the-animals-by-justin-torres.ece
It’s a good, short book. I point out that it’s closer to a novella than a full-figured novel, but that’s not a damning criticism, in my view: Short & punchy is greatly favored over long-winded & tedious. (I could name names here, but I won’t. But in the last year I reviewed two novels over 800 pages each, and both were twice as long as needed.)
I saw the review of this book today in the NY Times, and I noticed their reviewer avoided giving away the ending, same as I. It’s no big mystery, and I’d already guessed it before the moment it’s revealed. It’s a cultural thing, really, why we’re holding back. And we’re being fair to the writer/reader, not wanting to telegraph the book before people interested have a chance to judge for themselves.

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The Know Nothing Party Defies Gravity, Wins Elections?

Posted on September 1, 2011 by williamjcobb

So it’s driving me (slightly) crazy to read the idiocy coming out of Rick Perry’s mouth, echoed by a chorus of other Republican presidential contenders. Paul Krugman in the NY Times sums up their anti-science idiocy well here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/29/opinion/republicans-against-science.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
What strikes me most? These Republicans are only anti-science when it conflicts with their half-baked “business is God” dogma: Give them an iPad, a nuclear reactor, that Facebook account by which they’ll promote their campaigns, and they’re more than happy to use it, even to kick off “technology” funds to fill the pockets of their friends with profits of government subsidies and contracts, as Perry is noted for doing. But evolution and climate change are crackpot theories, according to them. Why? Because it would conflict with their conservative Christian voters (who I’d say are smarter than that, hopefully), and their business cronies.
What scares me, and what should scare the country, is that somehow the electorate doesn’t see their contradictions. We could well have a Republican president next term. I don’t see Obama as perfect. I agree with others that he should fight harder for environmental concerns, which right now is usually doomed because each choice we face, such as the Keystone XL pipeline, gets labeled as “anti-business” or “anti-jobs” if you oppose it. (Which we should.) So, yes, he needs more of a backbone. But he’s trying to do the right thing.
In Tim Flannery’s excellent new book of nonfiction, Here On Earth, he discusses the idea of Future Discount. Basically it’s how people will often discount or dismiss things we can foresee in the future, like climate change, for a variety of reasons. Often those encompass a Willing Suspension of Disbelief, to use Coleridge’s dictum about storytelling. We want to believe climate change won’t greatly harm the world, so in spite of all the evidence scientists are offering that it will, we ignore them. We shouldn’t. And here’s why: My daughter, Lili, will be 44 years old at mid-century, when many scientists claim our climate change problem will be irreversible. And all the other sons and daughters of the world.

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On Tom Perrotta's New Novel, With a Warning About the Last

Posted on August 27, 2011 by williamjcobb

So in today’s New York Times Book Review Stephen King reviews Tom Perrotta’s new novel, The Leftovers, and has this to say:
“Perrotta began his exploration of the stress points between religion and secular American life in his previous novel, “The Abstinence Teacher.” “The Leftovers” feels like a logical, if extreme, extension of those concerns. Not every character and motivation rings perfectly true (Laurie’s conversion to the Guilty Remnant is especially troubling, since she is one of the fortunate Mapletonians not to have lost a family member), but the slow, sad drift of this suburban world into various forms of cultic extremism as a response to upheaval feels spot on.”
Perrotta wrote the novel Little Children (2004) that was made into the good film starring Kate Winslet, which I thought was terrific—the film; I bought the book and then decided not to bother reading it. Why? Believing Perrotta’s fiction must be good based on that film (a mistake), I assigned The Abstinence Teacher (2007), which was his new book at the time, to a writing class, before having read it. (I like to be up-to-date in my readings, and sometimes this backfires.) It proceeded to be something of a disaster. The students hated it. It was so bad I had to apologize for assigning it—the first and only time that’s happened, I think. It was a strange experience.

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On the Rise of the Fabulous Nothing Class, or As Some Have Phrased It, "Our Royal Wedding"

Posted on August 25, 2011 by williamjcobb

So I see this Kim Kardashian person mentioned (too often) in the news and do my best to ignore her, and see her best as the butt (pun intended) of jokes from the wry Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm (it was a kindly joke, too). But I just read a headline that seems to sum up a national—scratch that, international—21st century malaise: The Rise of the Fabulous Nothing Class. The headline was something to the effect of Kim Kardashian’s (most likely short lived) wedding/hookup being “Our Royal Wedding.” Which we might dismiss as absurd, which it is, but then again, all the hype about Kate & Pippa and that ridiculous, over-the-top, sham monarchy wedding in the U.K. is absurd as well. The cloud of fame and celebrity hangs over the world and seems to blot out the sun of rational thought. Too many people (it seems) ignore the dire state of climate change, economic collapse, and political stagnation, instead focusing on what a hideous troll called Snooki does on Jersey Shore. I’m sure there have been mindless entertainments just as bad as our latest crop of reality TV, only they were in times past, and this is now.

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On Finishing Tim Flannery's "Here on Earth," in Contrast to Justin Torres's "We the Animals"

Posted on August 18, 2011 by williamjcobb

So last night I reached the end of Tim Flannery’s new excellent book of nonfiction, Here on Earth: A Natural History of the Planet, which I rate as one of the best books of nonfiction I’ve read since Timothy Egan’s (two Tims?) The Big Burn (2009), and comparable to Jared Diamond’s Collapse (2004). In some ways it deals with climate change, but overall it deals with the dangerous state of our planet in a broader sense, with multiple threats to stability and sustainability. Much of it revolves around the question Are we a Gaian or a Medean species? Or put another way (the Gaian/Medean makes much sense when reading the book), are we going to save and nurture our environment, or are we going to destroy it, and in so doing, destroy ourselves? He has several scenarios, and overall is hopeful. He doesn’t play the doomsday games common in James Howard Kunstler’s books, for example. It’s an intelligent, lively, and even cerebral book.
At the same time I was reading Here on Earth I reviewed Justin Torres’s new novel(la), We the Animals, which is completely opposite. It’s a short but good novel about some mixed-race kids growing up in New York State, and one of them ends up being gay. It’s raw, emotional, and plucks the heartstrings. Tim Flannery plucks the mind-strings. Both are worth reading.

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Sing, O Muse, of the Dougherty Gang

Posted on August 13, 2011 by williamjcobb

So there’s something kind of classical about the Dougherty Gang’s story—classically tacky, Florida-style. I probably wouldn’t love their tale as much if they had not been apprehended near my Colorado home base of Custer County. Here’s a good ole-fashioned yellow journalism piece about them via the UK’s Daily Mail, with amusing photos:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2025304/Lee-Grace-Dougherty-Gang-stripper-smiling-loving-limelight-court.html
And here’s another “news” story that ends in a lie:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44103086/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts/
Here’s the lie, at the end of the article: “A Rocky Mountain escape made sense to a handful of locals gathered for pizza and beer at Viktorio’s after the chase. Asked why they thought the fugitives fled here, some just pointed toward snowcapped peaks just to the west. ‘It’s as good a place as any to disappear, I guess,’ Garcia said.”
Snowcapped peaks? Sounds nice, but it ain’t true. We’re in a drought out there, and the snow is long gone. That’s just wishful thinking, reporter-style.
But it is a good place to disappear. I do it every summer. Without firing a shot.

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