Tag: r

Ride the River, by Louis L’Amour

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Literary rating: ★★★★½
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆

Goodreads characterizes this novel, set in 1840, as the fifth volume in the author’s Sackett series. The fictional Sackett family, in L’Amour’s writings, are descended from tough, larger-than-life Barnabas Sackett, who emigrated to America in the 1600s and settled on the frontier, and who laid down a law for his descendants that whenever a Sackett was in trouble, the rest were bound to lend their aid. This book is indeed about a Sackett, and no doubt chronologically the fifth in that sequence. But the sequence forms a multi-generational saga in which the individual books are generally about different people; though some knowledge of the family origins, as mentioned above, might be helpful (and is repeated in the text of this book, for readers who didn’t read the series opener), they can be read perfectly well as stand-alones. (I haven’t read any of the other Sackett novels.) L’Amour also wrote sequences of novels and stories about two other fictional families that bred adventurous pioneers, the Chantrys and the Talons, whose paths sometimes cross those of the Sacketts –and the paths of a couple of the Chantrys will bring them into this tale as well.

Sixteen-year old Echo Sackett, of the Tennessee Sacketts, lives in the mountains with her family. Her pa is recently dead; her brothers are on an extended trapping expedition further west, and her uncle is laid up from a bear attack. So when an unusual circumstance brings an ad in a peddler-borne Pennsylvania newspaper to light, seeking the youngest descendant of one Kin Sackett to claim an inheritance, it falls to Echo to undertake the long and somewhat dangerous round trip to Philadelphia to receive and bring back the money. Readers accustomed to judging teens by the most immature and irresponsible examples that 21st-century American entitlement culture can produce might well see this as a foredoomed exercise that should never have been contemplated. But Echo is a product of a very different kind of culture. A crack shot who packs a pair of Doune pistols (see this link: http://firearmshistory.blogspot.com/2010/12/pistols-highland-pistol.html ) and is accustomed to shooting game for the table without missing, self-reliant, mature and capable Echo is a formidable young woman, not a child. She might need her cool head and firearms skills (and her “Arkansas toothpick”) on this trip, because there are those who didn’t want that ad seen to start with, and who’d prefer to have that money in their own pockets, rather than hers.

One reviewer said he felt this novel was “gimmicky.” I’m not sure what he considered the “gimmick” –possibly the protagonist’s gender, or the Sackett family’s clannish ethos of sticking together and helping each other in the face of trouble, including attacks by outsiders. Personally, I didn’t consider either element a gimmick. For me, seeing competence and fighting skills on the distaff side of the equation is a strong plus; I don’t see those kinds of qualities as inconsistent with female nature in any way, and Echo has plausible reasons for her characteristics. The Sackett ethic strikes me as something all families could profit by internalizing, and as such a worthwhile message for contemporary society. L’Amour’s knowledge of his settings, from 1840s Appalachia to distant Philadelphia, and of relevant history, is clearly extensive; he brings his world to life well. The characters, especially Echo herself, are vividly drawn and evoke reactions from the reader. In much of his work, L’Amour’s plotting is often predictable, but he managed to take me by surprise with one key development here –in a good way! There’s no sex and very little bad language here, and respectful treatment of a black character. With plenty of effective action scenes, the book is a pretty quick read.

There’s also a element of low-key, but serious, romantic attraction that develops in the book. For some readers, this will be problematic because of Echo’s age; while the age difference per se isn’t excessive, at this time of her life, it happens to put her love interest above 18 while she’s below that age. This didn’t scandalize me, in context; as I said, Echo is a woman, not a child (and in her community, she’s considered to be of a normal marriageable age). I didn’t consider the mutual attraction to be in any sense pedophilic or abnormal.

My one criticism of the book is the slipshod writing/editing in several places. Echo serves as first-person narrator for most of the book; but for scenes to which she isn’t privy, or where he wants to give us a different perspective, L’Amour occasionally uses other viewpoint characters, in third person. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, and it even enhances the story at times. But at other times, L’Amour forgets which narrative thread he’s using, and is inconsistent with pronoun use in the same sentence or paragraph. That takes a reader out of the story, and is particularly frustrating when you’re reading this aloud (as I was, to my wife). Just for that reason, I deducted a half star.  But that didn’t keep me from really liking the book! Any read by L’Amour has always been a winner for me, and this one was no exception.

Author: Louis L’Amour
Publisher: Bantam, available through Amazon, both for Kindle and as a printed book.
A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.
Book 5 of 19 in the Sacketts series.

Red Sparrow

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★★★
“The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming!”

There was a while there, where Russia dropped out of the top spot as far as being cinematic villains were concerned. No longer the “Evil Empire” of the Reagan era, they had largely been replaced, in the post 9/11 landscape, by Islamic fundamentalism. But now, those pesky Russkies are back as the bad guys once again, following their interference in the sacrosanct and solemn process of Americans electing a president. [I really must figure out a sarcasm font for this site] While this is supposedly set in the present day – I say that, because at one point, cutting-edge computer software is delivered on a set of floppy disks! – this feels more like something born out of Peak Cold War.

Ballerina Dominika Egorova (Lawrence) suffers an accident on stage that ends her career. Living in a Bolshoi-provided apartment and with a sick mother, things look bleak until her uncle Ivan Egorov (Schoenaerts) steps in. He offers her a job as a “sparrow”, honey-potting foreigners in order to obtain intelligence from them. After some qualms, Dominika accepts, and undergoes training designed to remove all her inhibitions. Her first target is Nate Nash (Edgerton), a CIA operative now in Budapest. He had to leave Moscow after an incident involving him and a high-level Russian agent; that agent’s identity is what Dominika has to discover, in her guise as an embassy translator.

The most obvious recent touchstone is Atomic Blonde, which I found considerably more entertaining – even if it is, I would venture, considerably less realistic. This is dour stuff by comparison, almost unremittingly grim in the dehumanizing way the Russians use Dominika, Dominika uses Nate, and Nate uses Dominika. For it’s clear from the start that he is not taken in by her facade and sees the honey-pot for what it is – yet thinks she can still be a useful asset, who can be recruited and turned. Or is that actually part of Dominika’s game-plan, to appear as a potential defector? It’s only right at the end, by the time many wheels have turned, that we discover whose side she’s really on: not much of a spoiler to reveal that it’s her own.

One thing which is clear. is how the film has been misunderstood, reading reviews which say things like, “Red Sparrow is intended to be a sexy thriller.” No, it’s not, any more than Showgirls was. Both are often about sex; yet that doesn’t make them “sexy”, especially when the director depicts the ugly aspects as much as (if not more often than) the erotic. Here, the sexual encounters are weaponized, and are as much about power as anything. Nothing illustrates that better than Lawrence’s nude scene, during a very public training session as what she herself calls “whore school” A classmate who had previously tried to rape Dominika is ordered to have sex with her. But, partly in response to her taunting, he’s unable to perform. If you think it’s supposed to be “sexy”, you’re the problem, not the film.

The trailers may have somewhat betrayed it, making it look like a modern version of Atomic Blonde (or even an origin story for Black Widow!). It isn’t, and you should not expect anything with such gleeful abandon, or such a defiant sense of era and location. Sparrow could easily take place in any Eastern bloc city, at any time since the end of World War II. It’s no less brutal than Blonde, deserving its adult rating for violence and torture as much as the sexual content. The heroine is certainly not as active a participant, though it’s creepy as hell to see Dominika energetically wielding a tool usually reserved for carrying out skin grafts. But it is considerably more serious in intent, though the case could be made (and has been), that it’s ultimately less empowering and more exploitative.

Not sure I’d go that far: I know it’s a great deal less fun, and also which of the two is the only film I’ll have in my collection. This doesn’t necessarily make it a bad movie; especially if you can get past Lawrence’s accent, her performance is worth a look, and as an ice-cold tale of deep-frozen international intrigue, the 140 minutes go past quicker than I initially thought they might. The actress is re-teamed here with Hunger Games director (who is no relation), and I’m not sure he’s the best person for the task, seeming to rely heavily on trotting out tropes of the genre we’ve seen too often before. However, a bigger problem is likely Edgerton as the male lead, who has close to zero charisma, and even less chemistry with his co-star. That, however, may be intentional, since they’re both playing the other as a patsy, with the “real” emotions involved being questionable.

The rest of the supporting cast aren’t bad. Having recently seen Jeremy Irons being criminally wasted in Assassin’s Creed, I was much more pleased with his performance here, though both he and Charlotte Rampling (as a Nikita-esque head of the school for sparrows) have something of the same accent issue as Lawrence. It always seems odd: we are supposed to be able to accept the conceit of non-natives playing foreigners who speak English to each other… only if a fake local accent is applied on top? It’s about as necessary and convincing as the glasses on Clark Kent. Mary Louise Parker also shows up, as a US senator with a taste for booze, whom Dominika opportunistically swipes from another agent.

The makers deserve some credit for making a feature film that is clearly intended for a mature audience, something which we don’t see enough of out of Hollywood these days [why bother, when you can churn out sequels and comic-book movies to greater profit?]. But the result here, while well-crafted, is almost entirely cheerless. It’s hard to engage with a heroine whose initial action are altruistic, yet appears to become, by the end, amost as soulless and propelled by self-interest as the state who recruited her.

Dir: Francis Lawrence
Star: Jennifer Lawrence, Joel Edgerton, Matthias Schoenaerts, Jeremy Irons

Red Sparrow (alternate review)

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★★★½
“From Russia without love.”

So, I saw “Red Sparrow”. But I was hesitant. So hesitant, I actually pressed the button to get off the bus when I was still not so far away from my flat. But the door didn’t open; I interpreted that as force majeure and stayed until I reached the cinema.

First of all, this movie is not what it seems to be – or is marketed as. Which you could already sense; I mean, if you see a trailer for a 140 minute-movie and there is not the slightest indication of action, it could perhaps be guessed that it’s not really an action movie. And indeed, it’s not. If someone goes into the movie expecting a movie like Atomic Blonde, Unlocked, Salt or Haywire, he/she will likely be disappointed. The action early on is only with Joel Edgerton, not with Lawrence. And despite beating up a treacherous couple responsible for the end of her ballerina career, and an extended torture scene at the end that ends with a stabbing, Dominika is usually not involved.

This movie reminded me most of all of the American remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: long and drawn-out, but without the suspense. You have to have what we call in Germany “good seating-flesh” – you’re sitting a long time in the cinema! When the film ended, an old woman behind me who was there with her son and his wife whispered, “Schwere Kost, nicht wahr?”. That translates as “A heavy meal, wasn’t it?”, meaning it’s not easily digestible. I was also reminded of John LeCarré movies, where everything is all talk and no action at all. So it’s not an action-adventure, or a “girls with guns” movie. But I think that fans of Jennifer Lawrence (mainly in the USA, not really in Germany) and feminists won’t likely embrace or love this movie. It’s not really an “enjoyable” movie, that can serve a quasi-feminist agenda in the way Wonder Woman did.

No, the main theme of the movie is the constantly shifting sands underfoot, which could easily open up at any moment and swallow the main protagonist. Some characters die during the course of the story, and it’s not necessarily the guilty ones who catch a bullet. But it’s a problem that there are hardly any sympathetic characters in the movie. Even Dominika is a big question mark, as the Russian secret service tactics force her to play a game of deception and manipulation, exactly as she was trained for. It leaves you, even at the end, guessing on which side she is/was/may have been on, in shades of Atomic Blonde. Things constantly change…

It also reminded me of Child 44 with Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman, Noomi Rapace and – hey! – Joel Edgerton.  This was a serial killer story set in Stalin-era Soviet Union, in which you could constantly lose your head or fall victim to intrigue. The feeling of constant threat and danger was stronger there. But I note, “Soviet Union,” because confusingly, this movie seems to play in contemporary Russia. Which is…. quite strange: the “red sparrow” program did exist in the 1960s but may not even have survived that decade, never mind existing today. The movie adapts the first book in a trilogy by a former American agent so he presumably knows what he wrote about; it all appears very realistic.

But with modern Russia as the background? I find that a bit hard to believe. German reviewers tended to complain about old clichés, thicker than in classic James Bond movies. They may be partly right. When I saw Charlotte Rampling standing and explaining to Lawrence what her duty is, in front of the “school for whores”, I was very much reminded of Lotte Lenya as Rosa Klebb, setting Daniela Bianchini up to attract James Bond. And the Secret Service of Russia appears to come right out of the 50s/60s, not today. Much has also been made, mainly by American reviewers, about the sex/nude/violent scenes. While they are all part of the story, if you are looking at the whole of the movie – once again, 140 long minutes – it doesn’t feel as spectacular or scandalous as the articles made it. Strangely, even Lawrence seemed to play up the sex angle in interviews (also causing a minor outcry by puritans when she appeared at a premiere of the movie, showing some cleavage…). Yes, you see her nude in the movie but I can’t personally say a 3-second shot of one breast and 10 seconds on her butt would be worth the admission!

I mean. Jennifer, you know there exists something called internet pornography? You really think we men are so hormone-driven that a glimpse of your almost-naked body for a few seconds would make us buy a (not really that cheap) ticket for a 140 minute movie? Reeaalllllyyy? ;-) But then this may also be testament to a certain kind of desperation on the part of the studio: how else to sell this clunky piece of espionage fiction. What do you do when you have no big action scenes or robots from space?

There is a nasty but quick rape scene, but we saw worse in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo movies. It has to be said, this scene seemed stolen almost 1:1 from Stoker, with Mia Wasikowska and Nicole Kidman. There are some ugly torture scenes but they are similarly brief, except for the last one. And as I hardly sympathized or identified with any of the characters, they also failed to make an emotional impact on me. I really have to say: After having explored the “Giallo” genre, I can say these kinds of movies – done almost 50 years ago – were much more terrifying when it came to violence, and more daring with regard to nudity or sex. So, I have a problem when some articles seem to celebrate Jennifer Lawrence’ dedication for “revealing so much” and “daring”. Maybe it’s shocking for today’s (female?) American cinema-goers, I don’t know. By my standards and in my opinion, it’s quite tame in all aspects.

I do give credit to Lawrence, who never saw an acting school from the inside, and has matured – yes, even by my standards! – into a “real actress”. I personally find it very positive that a studio is willing to make a movie almost entirely focused on its story with a nice budget ($69 million) instead of the next action-SFX-extravaganza. But I have seen better. That said, for those willing to invest the time and money, the movie may actually provide something. The actors are all good – I have not mentioned Mary Louise Parker in surprise cameo in the middle of the movie), the production design is impressive (even if Film-Russia seems to have a preference for 1970’s interior design) and the James Newton Howard (Salt, btw.) score is solid as always, even though it mainly plays in the background.

The studio’s idea behind the green light for the movie may have been to create another successful franchise. The formula? Actress Jennifer Lawrence + director Francis Lawrence + adapt a successful bestseller. It worked with the Hunger Games movies – Lawrence directed the last three – but I fear won’t be the case here. While I can imagine that the book may have been a great read for those who love a good spy story, that alone does not necessarily recommend it to become a blockbuster movie, despite some admirable achievements by the team in front and behind the camera.

For fans of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy or The Russia House, it may be worth the admission. Everyone else, can wait for the movie to become available as a rental or on TV. Honestly, I would prefer a sequel to Atomic Blonde or The Man From U.N.C.L.E. [The latter should have been so much more successful, but didn’t get the same advertising push as this new J-Law vehicle] While it’s no bad movie at all, people may be lured in based on wrong assumptions, such as thinking this is some kind of Black Widow origin story. They’ll leave disappointed, and I predict another flop in Lawrence’s career.

Dir: Francis Lawrence
Star: Jennifer Lawrence, Joel Edgerton, Matthias Schoenaerts, Jeremy Irons

Revenge

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★★★★½
“Women always have to put up a fucking fight.”

This French rape-revenge movie is the most blood-drenched GWG film I’ve seen since Kill Bill, Volume 1, and is not for the faint of heart. However, the good news is, it’s not the rape part of the equation which is hard to watch: this is depicted with admirable restraint, occurring mostly off-camera. The director has stressed that the story isn’t about the rape, and I’m delighted with that: it has always struck me as the least interesting element. It’s a plot device, to kick-off what matters. Focusing on it, as some films have done, seems to me like focusing on turning the ignition key, instead of driving the car. This, instead, offers a road-trip to remember.

The victim is Jen (Lutz), a young girl having a weekend in the Moroccan desert with her rich, married boyfriend, Richard (Janssens). He’s also there to do a spot of hunting with his pals, Stan and Dimitri (Colombe and Bouchède). They four have a night drinking and dancing, but the next morning, when Richard heads off to make travel arrangements, Stan rapes Jen. On Richard’s return, he tries to smooth things over. Jen is having none of it, and storms off. Knowing that any legal complaint would destroy his marriage, Richard fakes calling for transport out, then pushes Jen off a cliff. Her landing is… not a soft one. Convinced the problem is solved, the men leave disposing of the body until later. Except, Jen isn’t dead, and when the trio go back, she’s not there. Helped by some impressively strong peyote – in this case, the drugs clearly do work – she patches herself up, and turns the hunters into the hunted.

First, let me address the improbably-resilient elephant in the room. Yes, her survival and pursuit is implausible, with a couple of large holes. Literally: one of the film’s two highly cringe-inducing pieces of self-surgery shows Jen patching up a hole in her stomach. Yet there must, of necessity, be an even larger one in her back. What happened to that? To be honest, they didn’t need this aspect at all: simply surviving the fall would have been hardcore enough. She also goes barefoot through the entire film, without a whimper. In the Arizona summer, I can’t take the garbage out barefoot without leaving singed skin on the drive. One shot of her pulling the shoes off her first victim would have fixed that.

It’s a shame, albeit a minor one, because virtually everything else is perfect. The transition of Jen, from the stuff of Richard’s fantasies, to that of his nightmares – he’s the one who delivers the tagline above – is impeccably handled. Even her good looks transform. At the beginning, it’s a shallow and utterly conventional prettiness – which she has exploited into a weekend getaway to a luxury location. By the end, she has paid a terrible price for this. Yet even as she’s missing minor body parts, disfigured, drenched in blood (both hers and others) and covered in desert grime… she’s glowing. Her inner beauty shines through, increasingly illuminating the bad-ass bitch she has become over the course of proceedings.

For a film lauded for its supposed up-ending of the male gaze, this feels a bit odd, since it could be read as the sexual assault triggering Jen’s blossoming: rape as psychological therapy. She should thank her attackers! [The image of a rising phoenix branded into her skin, due to her impromptu first-aid, is not exactly subtle in its imagery. Then again, the entire film is not exactly subtle, and proudly defiant as such] If that reading is on shaky ground, it’s also amusing to note Revenge utterly fails the dreaded Bechdel Test, despite being brutally empowering, to a degree rarely seen. More evidence – as if it were really needed – of how shitty the Bechdel Test is at evaluating films.

The good thing is that the feature’s entertainment value in no way relies on any kind of Identity Politics 1.0.1. to work. It functions perfectly well as a stripped-down pursuit, which neither asks for, no offers, any kind of quarter on behalf of the participants – for their genders or any other reason. There’s a steady, relentless escalation to proceedings from the moment Jen takes flight, to a final confrontation which redefines “paint the walls blood-red”. That’s a jaw-dropping pursuit round the house where things began, and includes proof that cling film, like duct tape, has a thousand and one uses.

The director says the only previous example of the rape-revenge genre she watched was Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left. Though if true, the proximity of names for the heroine here and in the genre’s most infamous entry, I Spit On Your Grave, is a striking coincidence. That aside, it’s interesting to note that the only other female-directed entry, Baise-moi, was also from France. And in tone, this has almost as much in common with À l’interieur (Inside), which was just as blood-drenched, and similarly gave absolutely no fucks. Much credit to Fargeat for this “take no prisoners” attitude, and delivering a thoroughly uncompromising piece of cinema; kudos for all of her cast as well, in particular Lutz, who go all-in to no less a degree.

I’ve been watching extreme films for thirty years or so, and let’s be honest, you get a bit desensitized to it all. We went to see this one at a local art cinema, and from their reactions, it was clear that most of the audience were, let’s say, not as “experienced” in the ways of savage cinema as Chris and I. Their responses merely added to the fun: I’d kinda forgotten how audience reaction can enhance a film (their goddamn rustling of snacks… not so much, but let’s move rapidly on). At the end, after all was said and done, one of the other attendees blurted out loud, “Best ten bucks I’ve ever spent.” I’m not inclined to disagree. Despite its flaws – which I acknowledge and embrace – if 2018 offers a film which packs a bigger punch, I can’t wait to see it.

Dir: Coralie Fargeat
Star: Matilda Lutz, Kevin Janssens, Vincent Colombe, Guillaume Bouchède

Rain Dance by D.N. Erikson

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Literary rating: ★★½
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆

The saying, “You only live twice,” is supposed to be a metaphor, but for Eden Hunter, it ends up being very much a statement of fact. She’s a former con-artist, dragged back from beyond the grave by vampire warlord, Aldric. He puts her to work on a hidden island as his personal soul-harvester, with a strict quota per week. It’s not great work, but it’s steady – at least until Eden’s beach-front house is attacked by a werewolf with murder on its furry mind. She then finds herself seen by the FBI as their prime suspect after an old partner in confidence tricks turns up dead on her doorstep. But, wait! There’s more! She has to deal with the rain goddess – presumably, the source of the title – to whom Eden is also in thrall, and whose rules she just broke. A gang involved in robbing her boss of millions in gold bullion. Her dead sister. A serial-killer politician. Oh, and a talking cat.

Overall, the main problem is that this feels like Book 2, rather than Book 1. Rather than starting off at what might be considered the more logical point of Eden’s first death, it joins her career as a reaper, already well in progress, opening with the werewolf attack. There is a fair amount of information – and quite important data, at that – which is not provided to the reader until some distance into the story. As the paragraph above suggests, there’s not exactly a shortage of plot threads either: as a result, some of them inevitably end up feeling under-developed. The goddess, for example, seems to show up at the end, purely to provide an adversary for the heroine’s boss, and I’m still not sure about the point of the politician. Conversely, some things feel under-explained. The island is supposedly hidden… yet the FBI know where it is? Who delivers – oh, I dunno – milk to it? It has an awkward sense of being something which looked a good idea at the time, only was never thought through properly.

It’s probably not the book’s fault, but there was a sense of deja vu too for me. Only a couple of months ago, I read Fugitive of Magic by Linsey Hall. It was also a story told in first-person perspective, about a paranormal heroine accused of a murder she didn’t commit, who has to find the real perpetrator in order to prove her innocence. Having recently read that story, I didn’t find a revised version of it especially interesting. The main positive is Eden herself, who made for a decent central character. There was a nice moral sense of grey about her choices, with her trying to do the right thing, even though those choices were frequently constrained by the unfortunate circumstances which she inhabited. If we’d been brought along with Eden on her resurrection, rather than being dumped into the middle of it, this would likely have been a more worthwhile story.

Author: D.N. Erikson
Publisher: Watchfire Press, available through Amazon as both a paperback and an e-book.
Book 1 of 3 (to date) in the Sunshine & Scythes series.

Run Coyote Run

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★
“Coyote ugly.”

runcoyoteI must have masochistic tendencies. For having seen Bryan’s Lady Streetfighter, which I described as “Legitimately terrible, among the worst films I’ve ever seen,” I inexplicably decided to watch this half-sequel, half-remake, from the same director. It was Sunday and I was bored. What can I say? This isn’t quite as awful. Emphasis on the “quite,” however, for it’s still very, very bad.

That lack of quality begins right from the thoroughly confusing concept, which has the same actress as in Streetfighter (Harmon), portraying psychic Interpol agent Anne Wellington, who is the sister of the character she played previously, Linda Wellington. Anne is looking into the mysterious death of Linda, and discovers that her sister was close to acquiring a highly-incriminating cassette, in which an organized crime source spills the beans, naming names. Needless to say, the local mob are keen for this tape not to fall into the hands of the authorities, and send a hitman biker priest (Neuhaus) after Anne.

The whole “psychic” angle appears largely an excuse to re-use scenes of Linda taken from Streetfighter, which Anne sees in her dreams. This is perhaps credibly economical, and fits in with the plot. But those more familiar with the director’s work than I ever want to be, report that Coyote also includes footage out of other, entirely unconnected Bryan films. Perhaps he’s relying on the idea that nobody would notice – which makes sense, since it would require someone to watch more than one of his movies. Guess he under-estimated the hardiness of true bad-movie fans.

For, make no mistake, this is every bit as bad, as you would almost inevitably expect a film to be which consists of scenes taken from multiple different features, spliced together with entirely new footage. [I added the word “almost”, having remembered the incredible Final Cut: Ladies & Gentlemen, which puts together clips from 450 movies into a story that’s not just coherent, but also emotionally engaging] It peaks early, with an opening gun-battle and resulting car-chase that borders on the competent, for Bryan’s strength seems to be when he is not having to handle dialogue.

Or plot. Or acting. For it then plunges downhill thereafter, to a finale where the bad guys get blown up because they spend their time banging on a closed door, rather than – oh, I dunno – snuffing out the fuse on the dynamite which is sitting on the table beside them. Harmon’s thick, middle-European accent returns, and at least they made the effort this time to give her an overseas back-story, Shame they didn’t also make her a cyborg psychic Interpol agent, which would have helped explain her monotone delivery. If this does anything positive, it’s re-calibrating my genre scale: it’s comforting to realize that, 14 years into this site, I can still identify the garbage which borders on unwatchable.

Dir: James Bryan
Star: Renee Harmon, Frank Neuhaus, Timothy De Haas, William A. Luce

Revengeful Swordswoman

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★★½
“Can’t argue with the title, certainly.”

There’s no hanging around here. Virtually as we meet our heroine, Hsiang Ying (Lee), she’s getting tossed off a cliff by her kung-fu teacher, into a pack of wolves. Having survived that and made her way back – perhaps assuming this was all some terrible misunderstanding – her master then disavows her, announces he was the man responsible for killing her father, and locks her up in a cage. This all happens within, literally, three minutes of the film starting. Fortunately, a passing stranger sees fit to free her from the cage, and the ‘Heartless Lady’, as she becomes known, can go on her way, with the eventual aim of being exactly what the title suggests: revengeful.

Not much in the way of surprises either, although there’s no shortage of action, some of which might possibly be quite good. I am, unfortunately, not able to speak with authority, as there does not appear to be any version of this available which comes close to approximating the correct aspect ratio. This is “pan and scan” at its most annoying – and making matters worse, there’s no panning. You simply get the middle chunk of the screen, regardless of relevance. Which leads to a surreal moment later on, where there’s a discussion between two characters, both of whom have managed to be cropped out of the picture, leaving an entirely unoccupied frame. Antique still life: Chinese room, with conversation.

I might be inclined to give the film the benefit of the doubt, except for the hideous attempts at “comedy” – and, please, take the quotes there as necessary. For some reason, the script decides to give Hsiang a buffoon for a side-kick: he’s named “Clown” in the English dub, more in hope than an accurate reflection of any amusement gained from his presence. For virtually any scene in which he appears, will have you wishing the cropping of the print had been even more extreme. This reaches the pits in a scene at a brothel, where he and Hsiang are seeking information about their target, and is so painfully unfunny as to be borderline offensive. When one aspect of a film sucks so badly, it’s harder to believe it’s good anywhere else.

Yet, there are occasional moments – maybe no more than three or four consecutive seconds, when Lee is shot from far enough way that she fits completely on the screen – which are almost impressive enough to make you go. “I should try and track a good-quality copy of this.” Lee is fluid and graceful in motion, not dissimilar from her Hong Kong contemporary, Angela Mao, although the supporting cast here is more knock-off, and fails to make anything of an impression. In the end, this is all just too generic, from the title through the environment to, pretty much, the entire plot. As noted elsewhere, I watched this the same day as another film made in approximately the same time and place: the two have already merged into one Taiwanese blob of fu.

Dir: Artis Chow
Star: Judy Lee, Wen Chiang-lung, Man Kong Lung, Li Tung

Red Heroine

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★★½
“The more things change…”

Tied somewhat to our March feature on the earliest action heroines in cinema, is this Chinese film, It’s not just the oldest surviving action heroine film from that country, it’s the oldest martial-arts film of any kind. This silent feature dates from all the way back in 1929 – I had to keep reminding myself that the “red” in the title was not a Communism reference, this being from well before such things. It’s most likely an attempt to cash in on The Burning of the Red Lotus Temple, a now-lost film series whose highly successful release had begun the previous year.

Heroine, like Temple, was a serial, in this case consisting of 13 feature-length episodes. This was #6, and I’m not sure quite how it fitted into things – it stands on its own perfectly well. The heroine is Yun Ko (Van – for all character names and credits, I’m using the names given in the intertitles), whose village is threatened by the approach of an invading army, under General Chiny Che Mang (San). While trying to flee, her blind grandmother is killed and Yun Ko captured.

She’s just on the edge of being forced to become one of the General’s scantily-clad harem – an aspect which seems very racy for the twenties! – when she is rescued by a Daoist monk, the White Monkey (Juh). He had met Yun Ko’s cousin (Wen), who informed Monkey of her plight. After being taken to her grandmother’s grave, she vows that those responsible will pay, and becomes a pupil of the monk. Three years later, with the invaders now in full control, the General is still up to his lascivious tricks, arresting a girl’s father on trumped-up charges, to get her to accept his sordid demands. It’s time for White Monkey and Yun Ko finally to strike.

In some ways, it’s most impressive how little has changed in the almost 90 years since this was released. The most standard of all martial-arts movie plots – “You killed my (insert family member), and you must pay” – is clearly in play, as is the student who must learn from a master in order to take that revenge. I also note that crappy subtitling was there, right at the birth of the genre. On the other hand, I’m quite impressed a print with any English-language content survived at all, even if it’s at the level of this exchange between Yun Ko and White Monkey:

“Are you not care to revenge?”
“As I am so weak, how could I to revenge?”
“Don’t kill yourself. I’ll teach you my military skill.”

The first third of this is very solid, with Van making for a good heroine. She has the extraordinarily expressive eyes essential to a silent star, putting across the horror of what has befallen her, and the “worse than death” fate yet to come. However, once she teams up with her kung-fu guru, they both vanish from the film until the very end: clearly the concept of the “training montage” had still to be invented. What replaces them – the General’s conniving against a completely different target – is far less interesting, little more than silent soap-opera, draining the film of almost all its energy.

Our revengeful duo finally return, sailing briefly through the air in an early and extremely primitive version of flying fantasy or wuxia. Equally primitive are the fight scenes, which certainly remind the modern viewer we’re still four or more decades before Bruce Lee showed up. This is still a somewhat interesting watch, for anyone with an interest in martial arts films. However, it’s really only of note for being the first of its kind, and this aspect is purely a result of circumstance, rather than its own inherent merits.

Dir: Wen Yeh Ming
Star: Van Shih Bong, San Kwan Wu, Juh Yih Fong, Wen Yih Ming
a.k.a. Hongxia

Ro’s Handle, by Dave Lager

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Literary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆

Although I didn’t set out to, in roughly the past year, I’ve read no less than three novels, and one short e-story, that feature female cops as protagonists: this one, “The Academy” (the short e-story that’s the teaser for Robert Dugoni’s Tracy Crosswhite series), Tami Hoag’s A Thin Dark Line, and Justin W. M. Roberts’ The Policewoman. It occurred to me that an instructive way to open this review might be to compare and contrast the four works.

Like Tracy Crosswhite, Lager’s Rowan (everybody calls her “Ro”) Delahanty is a state champion in pistol shooting, who goes into law enforcement as a career. (Ro also has a black belt in judo.) And like Hoag’s Annie Broussard, she becomes a sheriff’s deputy. (Her milieu is a county dominated by a mid-sized city, sort of a median between Tracy’s Seattle and Annie’s backwoods south Louisiana parish.) The principal difference here is that both Tracy and Annie started their careers with ambitions to become detectives, and they’re protagonists of mystery series. This book has no mystery elements as such, and Ro’s vocational interest is strictly being a uniformed beat cop. She’s also younger than Tracy, and had already decided to become a cop as a fifth grade kid (whereas Tracy switched careers after teaching high school chemistry for several years), and she doesn’t carry the emotional baggage of a sibling who was murdered and a parent who committed suicide. (Instead, the Delahanty family is impeccably wholesome and normal.) So Ro’s definitely her own person, not a Tracey Crosswhite clone. And where “The Academy” focuses on the theme of sexism and sexual harassment as a challenge female cops have to face, those elements are very limited in this book, only show up near the end, and manifest themselves only in comments that aren’t made to Ro’s face.

Both Roberts’ Sarah and Ro are basically gun wizards (who, of course, have to put in a lot of training and practice to get and keep that level of skill, in addition to their natural talent!) formidable in combat, and drawn in such a way that some readers will view them each as something of a “Mary Sue” –that is, a heroine who’s too perfect to be realistic– though I didn’t see them that way. But although I classified both this novel and The Policewoman as action-adventure, the action elements in the latter are a LOT more prominent than they are here. This one has only one action scene, and that starts only in Chapter 22 of a 29-chapter book. Some readers (though I wasn’t in that number) of Robert’s book took issue with the first four chapters of character introduction/development and stage setting as being supposedly too slow-moving and boring. Those readers would really have an issue with the first 21 chapters here. And the shooting itself is actually over very quickly, as it would be in real life. Fans who have to have unremitting slam-bang action and a high body count will find this aspect limited and tame here. (Again, I’m not in that number myself, and I actually found that aspect of the book very well done.)

All three of the novels compared here provide the heroine with a “love interest” and have some “romantic” elements, including some unmarried sex. But (though I won’t include any spoilers) the overall handling of the “romantic” aspect here was, for me, highly unsatisfactory and off-putting, and would not, IMO, generally appeal to “romance” fans either. It should also be noted that the relationship escalates to sexual intercourse on the first date (which is the third time the couple have seen each other!), so has very marked insta-love issues. And Ro’s lover here is a divorced dad 13 years her senior, who has a 15-year-old daughter (Ro’s only 21).

You might ask, if this isn’t a mystery, a full-blown action novel, or a real romance, what IS its appeal? What sort of novel is it? I’d describe it as very much an intensive character study of Ro, and a very realistic “slice of contemporary life” novel describing the world of a rookie female cop. Lager obviously has a practically exhaustive knowledge of police equipment, organization and procedure, which gives the work a great deal of authority. Ro is a round, three-dimensional protagonist with a lot of depth to her development, and does exhibit some admirable, heroic qualities. (Frank is developed well too.) As his fascinating blog entries indicate, Lager has a mental picture of Ro’s entire life history from childhood on and a comprehensive understanding of all her characteristics as a person. He doesn’t feed us ALL that information here (the novel only covers the time beginning with her winning the Iowa state shooting championship in April 2003, shortly before joining the sheriff’s department, to September 2003, when she earns her “handle,” or nickname for radio identification purposes, and sort of becomes one of the guys -she’s currently the only female deputy). But we get a lot of it, including a thorough introduction to her family, a few glimpses of her childhood, her orientation week, her habits, life and dislikes, stuffed toy panda, etc. By the time this is over, we know her like a real person (and probably like her –I did, and do!)

This is not, of course, the stuff of high drama. Some readers will feel that the plotting and development of the story is way too slow-moving. The heavy accumulation of detail and description, including things like the menus for people’s breakfasts, description of Ro’s underwear, the specifics of what she and other characters are wearing, etc., contributes to that impression. Related to this, there tends to be a lack of meaningful conflict in the story-line until towards the end. (For instance, both Ro and Tracy Crosswhite are champion competitive shooters, and we see them both in competitive settings. But where Tracy is being scored on her pistol shooting in “The Academy,” it’s at the climactic moment of the tale, and the outcome is in doubt until the end, making for genuine suspense and tension. In Ro’s championship competition, on the other hand, I never really felt any element of suspense or tension, and her win is almost anti-climactic.) Only near the end is there a situation where Ro is in real danger and engaged in actual combat; only near the end is there any real sense of possible conflicts in her relationships with other deputies, and only near the end is there any real question about the nature of her relationship with Frank. Most of the story is pretty much a matter of day-to-day life (with the exception of starting a dating relationship). As might be expected from a college speech teacher, Lager’s technical mastery of prose style is quite professional; there are just a very few places where minor editing would have helped.

For me, this book was difficult to rate, because there are aspects I really like and aspects that I really dislike. I didn’t mind the slow-paced build-up quite as much as some readers probably will, because I was interested in learning about Ro and what makes her tick, and about the workings of a modern sheriff’s department (I learned much that I didn’t previously know, and I think most readers would). IMO, the action scene was good, the handling of the psychological aspects of the aftermath struck me as true to life, and the ending worked very well for me. The Ro-Frank aspect of the plot ultimately proved to be a major liability in my estimation, which dragged down the rating. If the book were written with no “romantic” element at all, just as a straight police-life and action story, I’d probably have given it five stars. As it was, the romantic-erotic parts earned one star. Overall, I decided to split the difference and give the book three, since I liked much of it. (And yes, I will read the sequel!)

I was gifted by the author with a review copy of this book, but no guarantees that I’d like it were offered or expected. Nor did World Castle Publishing (which also publishes my novel) put any pressure on me to write a favorable review (and I would have canceled my contract with them if they had!).

Note: This novel has only one explicit sex scene, but it occupies a very prominent position in the strictly-linear story arc, and it’s extremely, graphically detailed, with a “you are THERE!” immediacy. There is a certain amount of bad language, including f-words, religious profanity, the c-word to describe part of the female anatomy, etc. (Some, though not all, of this reflects real-life cop culture.)

Author: Dave Lager
Publisher: World Castle Publishing, available through Amazon, both for Kindle and as a printed book.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

Rogue Warrior: Robot Fighter

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★★
“Barb Wire… In space!”

Actually, if only this had been that, it would likely have been a great deal more entertaining. The most obvious point of comparison is lead Birdsall: as the poster on the right shows, she bears more than a passing resemblance to Pamela Anderson. The setting is also dystopian SF, though even more so than in Barb Wire. This takes place after a decade-long apocalypse, which pitted mankind against the artificial intelligences we had created, they having decided we were more a problem than a solution [coughSkynetcough] What remains of the human race, is now struggling to survive in the blasted landscape which remains.

Among them is Sienna (Birdsall), who hears of a planet which contains weapons that can fry the AI circuits, before they can carry out their nefarious plan to download all of humanity’s consciousness into the Matrix. She puts together a plucky team of stock cliches – the geek (McGrath), the muscle-bound fighter (Crawford, clearly the low-rent Vin Diesel. Seriously, he used to be on the British version of Gladiators, and his character was literally called “Diesel”), the robot with a line of snappy repartee – and flies off in a spaceship to find the bombs which are humanity’s last chance. On the way, they meet up with another robot – this one a pleasure model (Park) – and learn some rather disturbing revelations about Sienna’s own past [coughTyrellCorporationcough].

These revelations do, admittedly, explain her stylistic choices – and, cynics might suggest, her approach to acting. In between a fair amount of futuristic chit-chat of varying interest value, there’s a lot of running around deserts, pretending to fire laser weapons at robotic enemies that, very obviously, aren’t there at all. The physical look of the film isn’t actually too bad; the cinematography has a fairly epic scope to it. The main problem from a visual standpoint, is the CGI has been meshed very badly with the real footage: you never escape the knowledge that the former has been pasted on top of the latter. If your script is going to span the galaxy and feature multiple human vs. robot confrontations, you need to be able to deliver. It has been twenty years since Starship Troopers came out, and its CGI still kicks this film’s ass from here to Klendathu.

While not entirely devoid of pleasures, the ones to be found here are mostly minor. Birdsall does actually have some screen presence, and certainly looks the part, in a Barbarella-esque kind of way. There’s a nice scene at the beginning, where she’s trying to escape in a car which has an auto-pilot, and it refuses to leave until it has gone through its entire checklist of new driver items. That kind of self-effacing humour is something the film needed in greater quantities, and would have helped defray the woeful inadequacy of the technical elements, for wit is cheap. Though on the evidence of this, not as cheap as the visual effects software used here. If that isn’t good enough to let the audience take your film seriously, you probably shouldn’t either.

Dir: Neil Johnson
Star: Tracey Birdsall, Tim McGrath, Daz Crawford, Ashley Park