On Athletes and Celebrity Today: A Few Thoughts

Recently writing about Aces: Iron Eagle III I found myself thinking about the niche that athletes like Rachel McLish (the film's female lead) used to occupy pop culturally, and how these days it seems smaller than it used to be. That can seem a matter of the ever-intensifying pop cultural fragmentation we now take for granted--one aspect of which has been that all but the most popular spectator sports have seen their profiles fall greatly. ("What ever happened to tennis?" I wondered not so long ago. "What ever happened to anything but football, baseball, basketball?" I could have easily asked instead.)

Going along with that was the way in which certain aspects of the entertainment world where athletes could reach an audience extending beyond their sport's fan base have declined in visibility, or disappeared altogether. In the '90s, for instance, there was an abundance of fitness shows on ESPN, and American Gladiators on the air, while World Wrestling Entertainment was in its sensationally popular "Attitude Era" all of them helping make their names known to people who paid no attention whatsoever to their sports. (Even if one did not watch wrestling, they knew who the Rock was and what he was cooking.) More broadly television tended to the use of a 22-episode-a-season "standalone" episodic structure that was accommodating of the use of "special guests" who did not really have to be able to act to perk up interest, a bill that prominent sports figures could and did fit. (Thus did the Rock play his own father in an episode of That '70s Show in an early stage of his crossover to acting--and prophesy great things for his son.) This especially went for the more action-oriented shows, especially the kind that did not take themselves too seriously (like those syndicated action hours), where the physical presences and skills of, for instance, bodybuilders, were often a natural. (McLish's fellow Ms. Olympia Cory Everson was quite the regular here in those days, as in her recurring character of Atalanta on Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, and other spots on shows like Renegade, Tarzan: The Epic Adventures, Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, The Adventures of Brisco County Jr., and even Home Improvement, where she appeared as herself.*)

If bits of it remain that media world is gone now, without anything quite replacing it. One consequence is that, apart from it being harder to point to a latterday McLish (or Rock, or Cory Everson), one might notice how just as all this has meant that the actors of earlier years, like Tom Cruise or Harrison Ford, overshadow newer, younger performers with regard to public recognition (even movie stars aren't "movie stars" in the old way), so does it go with sports celebrities. Thus are they the spokespersons in commercials, with Shaquille O'Neal on the screen so often to be seen hawking everything from pizza to car insurance that one might scarcely realize that he retired back in 2011--precisely because a younger, more recent, player, whatever their ability or accomplishment, simply does not have the same opportunity to become as recognizable to the public, even in sports still as popular as basketball.

* McLish held the title in 1980 and 1982, Everson in 1984-1989.

The Drug War-as-Actual-War Craze of the '90s and Aces: Iron Eagle III

The use of the phrase "War on Drugs" not as a rhetorical expression of seriousness of intent on the part of the speaker or analogy between an un-war-like activity and war intended to convey the intensity of the effort to which they aspired (as with a "War on Poverty"), but somehow actually a war to be fought with conventional military means, was very much in the air in the late 1980s and early 1990s. And as may be expected, military techno-thrillers, in a moment where their books were still very strong sellers, but the longtime favored choice of enemy, the Soviet Union, was passing from the scene (and which was not a particularly likely group to examine such ideas critically), rushed to depict exactly that. Thus Tom Clancy's Clear and Present Danger had accounts of the same satellites with which the U.S. spied on the Soviets listening in on drug lords' cell phones, the Air Force using an F-15 to swat drug-runners' planes from the skies, the U.S. Navy mounting a strategic "Flight of the Intruder" against the drug cartels' leadership the way Coonts' Jake Grafton targeted the leadership of North Vietnam, and minigun-armed Pave Low helicopters infiltrating special forces into Colombia who end up fighting a not-so-small-unit action against hundreds of drug cartel soldiers. Dale Brown, making his Drug War more war-like still, equipped his drug-runners with MiGs and Mirages and anti-ship missiles to make a . . . well, make a Dale Brown novel out of it.

Hollywood, which on top of the problems faced by the novelists was trying to figure out ways to keep making their increasingly decadent-looking action movies bigger and better and hitting on incorporating lots of "heavy metal" military hardware to do it, was thinking along similar lines, with at least two major features coming out of the tendency, notably the "Top Gun for Army aviation," Fire Birds (1990)--and the second sequel to Iron Eagle, Aces: Iron Eagle III.

Neither film was any great success, the second film less so than the first.1 Iron Eagle III, coming out in June 1992 the week after the adaptation of Tom Clancy's Patriot Games, grossed about $1.4 million on its opening weekend. Not a typo, it was about a twelfth of what Patriot Games made in its second weekend of play ($16.1 million), which put Aces at #11 on the list of the highest-grossing films of the week. The next week Batman Returns went into wide release and broke records for an opening weekend take, while Aces did . . . even less well than it had the previous week, so that the $10 million+-budgeted movie ultimately finished up with $2.5 million grossed, which even then did not let it place among the top hundred highest-grossing movies of the year. (Among "in-year" releases it was actually #142 on the list.) Moreover, time has not been kind to it in respect of the public's attention. While the original Iron Eagle has lingered in the pop cultural consciousness (getting, for example, significant mention in Ready Player One author Ernest Cline's "sophomore effort" Armada), Aces was pretty much forgotten by all except the writers of Family Guy.2 Indeed, I myself only caught the film during a few airings on cable a couple of decades ago, since which time I have not noticed it there or on streaming (the straight-to-video follow-up, Iron Eagle IV, actually seeming easier to catch there).

Still, the film has its points of interest, not least a number of details of the premise making for at least some novelty. In an era before senior citizen action heroes became routine, that is what we got in the collection of older pilots who head off to face the enemy, with a little further interest derived from the group's diversity--with General Charles "Chappy" Sinclair joined by a Briton, a German and a Japanese pilot whose teaming together at once evokes and transcends the Second World War conflict of Allies and Axis (indeed, the choice to bring Anglosphere pilots together with a German and especially a Japanese aviator seems the more interesting given its implicit break with the Germanophobia, and especially Japanaphobia, in which so much pop culture was trafficking at the time). This is all the more the case in as they all fly into action in their countries' iconic World War II fighters. Chappy goes into battle in a P-38 Lightning, the Briton in a Spitfire, the German in a Messerschmitt-109, and the Japanese in a Zero--while the villain has vintage aircraft in his own collection, notably a rocket-powered Messerschmitt-263.

There is likewise interest in the unlikely-seeming cast and crew. Here Louis Gossett Jr. is joined by Horst Buckholz of The Magnificent Seven as the German pilot, and the late martial arts legend Sonny Chiba as the Japanese, while Christopher Cazenove (who played an RAF pilot cut out of the Battle of Britain by a car accident in The Eye of the Needle) gets his chance to fly a Spitfire into action, all of which together lends the team a bit of a proto-Expendables quality. Meanwhile Paul Freeman plays the villain (Renee Belloq in Raiders of the Lost Ark, this time he is an actual Nazi rather than just working for and with Nazis); while also appearing are Watergate figure, then-techno-thriller movie staple and later U.S. Senator and candidate for President of the United States Fred Thompson; the same Phill Lewis today known principally as the Mr. Moseby in the Disney Channel's sitcoms has his part in the events; and bodybuilding superstar Rachel McLish in her first major acting role.3 And helming the production was John Glen--Aces one of just three feature films he made after directing all five of the '80s-era Everything Or Nothing-produced James Bond films.4

None of this makes Iron Eagle III a masterpiece, of course. But my admittedly remote and hazy memory is that taken as the silly B-movie that it unashamedly is it works well enough, while its more novel features are quite adequate to make it at the very least interesting as a curiosity--and so give the film a place, however minor, in the history of the genre.

1. All box office data from Box Office Mojo.
2. Brian was writing a screenplay--and Lois informed him that the Iron Eagle movies had already used his premise, mentioning number three specifically.
3. Fred Thompson had previously appeared in The Hunt for Red October, and The Flight of the Intruder (in the latter, replacing Married . . . With Children's Ed O'Neill in a crucial scene). Bodybuilders, and athletes of McLish's stature, seem to have had more prominence pop culturally and more chances at acting careers then, even if their careers often happened to be short. McLish's principal other film (apart, of course, from the documentary Pumping Iron II) was the straight-to-video thriller Raven Hawk (1996).
4. The other two were Christopher Columbus: The Discovery, one of two much-hyped big-budget flops which aimed to capitalize on the 500th anniversary of the voyage in 1992 (the one with Marlon Brando as Torquemada, which came out just a couple of months after Aces); and, barring Glen's coming out of retirement, his last, 2001's Christopher Lambert thriller The Point Men.

Yogurt's Cave in Spaceballs--and Marvel's Profits

Considering Mel Brooks' more successful works one is likely to see most highly praised the two movies of his annus mirabilis of 1974, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, while 1968's The Producers is highly regarded.

Still, other films of his, if not enjoying that level of acclaim, still seem to have at least a decent-sized cult following. History of the World, Part I seems to fall into this category (enough so that the "Part II" promised at the movie's end seems to have finally materialized).*

So did it go with Spaceballs, which was popular with, at least, us Star Wars-loving '80s kids.

Interestingly, this was even though some of the jokes could not have had much significance to us. I do not mean by this anything particularly subtle or "adult," but rather the Yogurt's Cave parody satirizing the crassness of post-Star Wars filmmaking with its sequels and its merchandising. This generation--my generation--had never known any other type of cinematic world, and could not, did not, appreciate the revolution that Star Wars wrought in this way, something I only came to properly understand reading about film history in books.

Still, even if we take it for granted I think we often underestimate just how much it matters--certainly to a company like Disney. The Disney-Pixar film Cars was not the most celebrated such production--but the billions in merchandise it sold insured the sequels kept on coming.

Marvel has been at least as big that way--and anyone considering the Marvel Cinematic Universe's (MCU) likely longevity should remember that, not only do the MCU films remain big profit-makers even as far down as they have descended from their Phase Three peak, but that revenue stream is plenty of incentive to keep the movies coming even should their profits not look as great as they did before. That by no means guarantees the MCU another fifteen years of high-volume output of the kind we have been seeing since 2008--but it is a reminder that, if the trend has been downward it has a long way to go before reaching the kind of state that drove Warner Bros. to even reboot the DCEU, never mind shut up the shop.

* In line with the tendency in the exploitation of those yesteryear hits not likely to make for big sci-fi action spectacles the sequel has taken the form of a streaming TV series on Hulu, rather than a movie.

Why the Wonder Woman Movie Hasn't Happened

Originally Posted on March 18, 2013.

After the more than decade-long boom of comic book superhero-based films, during which the release of several such movies a year has been routine; most of the best known superheroes have reached the big screen in one form or another (Superman, Batman, the Green Lantern, Spiderman, the Hulk, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, Iron Man, Captain America, etc.); some of these have already been rebooted (like the Hulk and Spiderman); and many much less recognized characters have received similar treatment (like the Ghost Rider and Jonah Hex); it has become routine for genre-watchers to wonder aloud about why those "household name" characters that have not yet had films of their own have not received them. And it seems that Wonder Woman is the subject of more of this kind of talk than any of the others.

On the face of it, the fact that not only has a Wonder Woman movie not been made, but that a green light for one remains a distant prospect, seems quite surprising. Nonetheless, it takes only a little consideration of the issue to come up with three not insignificant obstacles in the way of such a film.

DC Comics' Big Screen Track Record
It is a common observation that where film is concerned, Marvel's properties have gone from strength to strength, culminating in the recent success of The Avengers, while DC has typically disappointed. In fairness, Marvel too has had its letdowns (like 2003's Hulk), and DC its successes (Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy arguably the biggest all-around success story of the past decade among superhero films). However, there is no disputing that overall Marvel has done far better, several of its better-known characters turned into successful, long-running franchises (the X-Men, Spiderman, Iron Man), with many others doing well enough to get at least one sequel (Fantastic Four, Ghost Rider)--a track record which has made the studios bullish enough about Marvel properties to be relatively aggressive about rebooting the disappointments (like the Hulk and Punisher), as well as successes which appeared to have run their course (as with the X-Men and Spiderman). By contrast, the disappointments make up a much larger portion of DC's smaller total number of efforts, and include not just some of the most notorious flops of the past decade (like 2004's Catwoman), but many of its highest-profile figures (Superman, the Green Lantern). Unsurprisingly, most members of the Justice League (including core members like the Flash and Aquaman) have yet to appear in even a single feature film. In this regard, Wonder Woman has been the norm, not the exception.

The Artistic Challenges of Adaptation: Plausibility, Relatability, Quality
The superhero films that have done best in recent years have tended to be relatively grounded efforts rather than over-the-top in tone, let alone broad and jokey--Nolan's Batman films rather than Green Lantern or The Fantastic Four, for instance.1 A related aspect of this is that superheroes with a basis in even the most dubious of pseudo-science have had an easier time at the box office than their magic- and myth-based counterparts. All of this works to the disadvantage of a character like Wonder Woman, with her Themysciran roots and the involvement of Olympian deities and other figures out of Classical myth in the stories; her invisible plane and bracelets of victory and truth-extracting rope; and of course, her famous costume.2

The difficulty of "selling" a Wonder Woman movie, big enough given the aforementioned basics of the concept, may be compounded by the fact that the character is "above us and different from us" and so difficult to make relatable to audiences. Of course, one could say the same of Superman, but the difficulty may be greater in her case: even if Superman is from Krypton, he was raised in Smallville, Kansas, and has made a home for himself in the quasi-New York of Metropolis, connecting him to the everyday world in a way which has no counterpart in Wonder Woman's backstory.

On top of all this, many a critic of the franchise notes that the material is simply weak in crucial respects, a post at Topless Robot, for instance, pointing to such things as its cast of its supporting characters. The series has no iconic villains, which have typically been a key ingredient in successful superhero franchises. (Superman has Lex Luthor, Batman the Joker, and Wonder Woman--the Cheetah?3) Wonder Woman's friends have similarly failed to capture the public's imagination. (Superman has Lois Lane--while Wonder Woman has Steve Tyler, who seems to have about as many fans as the Cheetah does.)

All of this leaves would-be screenwriters that much more torn between using the material furnished by the comics (as those actually looking forward to a Wonder Woman film would wish, at least in theory), and being forced to create new material from scratch to make the concept more credible to a general audience, enlarging the distance between page and screen and rendering the project that much more risky.

Gender Politics--and Economics
Substantial as the aforementioned obstacles are, the aspect of such a project that has drawn the most attention has, all too predictably, been gender politics, and it seems pointless to deny that this is an issue here (even if it is equally erroneous to discuss it to the exclusion of all else, as many in the blogosphere seem prone to do). During the last decade Hollywood put an unprecedented number of female action heroes on screen, but it is worth remembering that after the failure of the sequels to Lara Croft and Charlie's Angels in the summer of 2003, studios have been much more inhibited about centering first-string blockbusters on female protagonists.4 When not part of a larger ensemble of characters, they more typically play the lead in somewhat lower-budgeted, less commercially ambitious films (like those of the Resident Evil or Underworld series', or even The Hunger Games).5 The tendency has naturally been reflected in the films of the especially costly superhero genre. The last big summer release centered on a major female comic book character was 2004's Catwoman, a notorious flop which cast a pall over other such attempts, with Elektra (2005) and Sucker Punch (2011) not much more encouraging.

The barest overview of the debate over why this is the case (the demographics of the audience for this type of film, the conflicts between the stuff of popular entertainment and "political correctness," etc.) would require a piece much longer than the format of this post can accommodate, but that this is the case seems nearly indisputable, and that does make the prospect of a $150 million-plus movie about a comic book superheroine a long shot. The problem is in this case compounded by the heroine's iconic status among quite different groups for quite different reasons, and the character's well-known idiosyncrasies (the famous outfit, the implications of her coming from an Amazon culture, the questions about her sexuality), all of which may seem to guarantee that the results of any plausible effort will alienate groups the studio cares about, and perhaps please no one who does matter to it. (The poor reaction to what people have seen of the unaired David E. Kelley pilot for a new Wonder Woman TV series has only proven the point.)

Any one of these factors might have been problematic in themselves, but the combination of them--which confronts a would-be producer with the decision to shoot a really big-budget film about the over-the-top adventures of a DC Comics-based superheroine carrying heavy artistic and political baggage00actually makes it seem little wonder that Wonder Woman has yet to grace the big screen. Indeed, it actually seems to me that a Wonder Woman film may not actually be the best way to launch such a franchise, but rather that long-beleaguered Justice League film, which would naturally include Wonder Woman (who, being one member of the group, would not make or break the film herself). If the portrayal ends up being well-received, it could be a logical springboard for a Wonder Woman film (and for that matter, films about other neglected members of DC's pantheon). This is, of course, the opposite of the approach Marvel took successfully with The Avengers, to which it built by establishing multiple franchises first, but given the way these efforts have gone for DC so far this approach looks to me a lot safer and more plausible--at least, assuming that we have not all had our fill of superhero-based films by the time a film like that can be put together.

1. The Avengers may seem an exception, but it remains to be seen that this will actually mean a new trend in superhero-themed films. Indeed, director Joss Whedon already seems intent on going in a different direction with this very franchise.
2. Megan Fox, as usual too frank for the health of her career, dismissed the character as "lame" when the rumors of her being considered for this role came up in an interview. Much as her remarks have been criticized, this does seem rather a common sentiment.
3. Of course, the first two Iron Man films were resounding successes despite their lack of such villains, but again this seems an exception.
4. Those failures were, for instance, a factor in the decision to terminate the project to spin off a Jinx film series from the Bond film Die Another Day.
5. The Hunger Games did go on to become a $400 million hit at the U.S. box office, but as an $80 million budgeted March release it did represent a comparatively limited investment.

Man of Steel Part 2, Wonder Woman Part 0?

Originally Posted on December 16, 2013.

Last March I considered some of the factors that have kept the long-anticipated Wonder Woman film in development hell[REPLACE OLD LINK WITH CURRENT WHEN GOES UP]. D.C.'s troubled track record with adaptations (in the past decade, only Batman really an unqualified success); the perceived hokiness and flatness of the material ("silly" super powers, a lack of interesting villains and other supporting players, the "unrelatability" of Golden Age heroes like the Justice League Big Three, etc.); and the complicated gender dynamics of the female-centered action movie (particularly acute here, because of Wonder Woman's costuming, background on Paradise Island and so on); have overdetermined this outcome.

My thought, accordingly, was that the surest road to a DC movie starring Wonder Woman--and for that matter, viable movies about other major DC characters like Aquaman--would be the reverse of Marvel's course with the Avengers. Instead of creating multiple franchises and then bringing them together in one film, it seemed that DC might do best to start with a Justice League film, from which it would spin off new franchises. The highly publicized inclusion of Batman in Man of Steel 2 hinted at a step in this direction. Now the casting of Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman in the same movie suggests the next Superman will be a "backdoor" Justice League movie.

It seems an intelligent move, but it is not without its risks. The first Man of Steel movie, after all, made a fair amount of money, but left a lot of viewers unsatisfied, making audience enthusiasm shaky. At the same time the field seems likely to grow ever more crowded with superhero movies. If, as is possible, the sequel performs badly as a result, this could do that much more to set back the cinematic prospects of Wonder Woman and other League characters.

The alternative, however, is that the inclusion of these other characters will make those who didn't warm to the first film give the franchise another shot, boosting the new Superman series while building up a platform for the launch of a slew of other DC superhero films.

For the time being, the latter seems somewhat more likely than the former.

Review: Angels & Demons, by Dan Brown

New York: Pocket Star, 2001, pp. 608. Originally Posted September 29, 2010.

I didn't think I'd bother to read another of Dan Brown's novels after suffering through the lousy Deception Point four years ago. Not only was the prose painfully bad (yes, painfully), and the characters one-dimensional, but the real draw--the plot--was ludicrous. (Yes, there certainly is the enmity of many "space cadets" to NASA, but an American presidential election hinging on the fate of the space program? In 1998? And oh, the lameness of his D.C. hijinks . . .)

Nonetheless, I ended up picking up the book he published right after that (incidentally, I didn't happen to catch last year's film), and so here I am. In this one Brown's recurring protagonist, symbologist Robert Langdon (in this his first appearance) is enlisted by the director of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), Maximillian Kohler, to assist an investigation into a brutal murder at the lab's headquarters that may be the work of the Illuminati (on which Langdon is an expert). This leads Langdon into an elaborate plot by the secret society to strike back at the Catholic Church in retaliation for its persecution of science, centered on a quantity of antimatter stolen from CERN. Compounding the mess, this is all happening at the very moment of the Conclave, the college of cardinals' meeting in which they select the next Pope.

It goes without saying that the treatment of antimatter seen here has no relationship with reality, but one may be willing to suspend disbelief on that one point, given its admitted symbolic value. And anyway, unlike his previous two, more technologically-oriented books, this is really a historical mystery more than a technological thriller. However, for a story founded on an intricate historical mystery, it gets a lot of easy (and often, unnecessary) bits wrong--as in its claim that Copernicus was murdered by the Church (he had a stroke, and so far as I have been able to determine foul play has never even been alleged), or that Winston Churchill was a "lifelong Catholic" (a description that not only Churchill, but no PM in British history, fits), or the labeling of the "Rio Plata" as an Old World river (when it's actually in South America). It is all too telling that Brown, who boasts of having taught Shakespeare at Exeter, repeatedly confuses a couplet with an iamb (a mistake made, incidentally, at a crucial point in the unfolding of the mystery)--an error which would be embarrassing for anyone who has ever studied literature, let alone taught it at an "elite" institution.

Given how many others have taken Brown to task for his scientific, historical, geographical and other errors (many of which will immediately jump out at the culturally literate), it's not worth my while to go on about this much more, and in any case, one could be forgiving toward these (in spite of Brown's considerable, financially profitable pretensions to factuality) if his storytelling proved up to par.1 And silly as his premise sounds, with its preposterous implication of scientists skulking around in dark rooms for centuries planning a catastrophic attack on the Vatican in retaliation for old grievances, it did indeed have some potential for excitement.

Now, I admit that Brown has a knack for the kind of pacing that keeps a reader turning the pages--assuming they also turn off their brains. (And while the prose of Angels & Demons is certainly not graceful, elegant, stylish or anything else of the kind, but it isn't painfully bad in the way of Deception Point.) Still, there's a good deal here that jars. In his hands, the conventions creak, and the demands he makes on our willing suspension of disbelief are not only frequent and large, but unsupported by the kind of talent that compels a reader to take incredible coincidences in stride--to knowingly enjoy how over the top the situations are rather than scoff at them (though admittedly Brown's aforementioned pretensions make this much harder).

This is the case from the opening chapters on. I get that Brown wanted to impress us with the sheer high-tech, futuristic feel of the world Langdon steps into when he gets involved with CERN, and perhaps to offer a contrast between that world and the Baroque-era Rome in which most of the story is set. However, the bit with the space plane that ferries Langdon from Massachusetts to Switzerland (sent by CERN's director at his own discretion, on a moment's notice, just because Langdon's was the name he found when he did an Internet search about the Illuminati) was a wildly implausible bit of overkill. There were much easier and more plausible ways of getting Langdon to Europe in time to get him involved in the intrigue. (He could, for instance, have been in Switzerland or a neighboring country on a fellowship or a research grant.)

Brown's characterizations are also just as atrocious as they were in Deception Point, even if he lavishes more ink on them. His protagonist Langdon, whose Harris tweed is referenced at least fifteen times in the novel, isn't a real, believable character who happens to be a professor, but the tweedy cliché that people who have never actually been to college (or perhaps spent their whole time there never going to class) imagine college professors to be. The kind we so often see in bad movies and bad TV shows magisterially addressing a darkened lecture hall, invariably attended wherever he goes by the kind of Prestigious School Name-Dropping hacks use to awe the unsophisticated. (Langdon teaches at--where else?--Harvard, and never lets us forget it. I counted no fewer than eighteen separate references to this little factoid.)

The rest of the dramatis personae aren't much better drawn (Brown seems incapable of thinking in anything but such clichés, a failing evident in the dismaying shallowness and triteness of the dialogue where his dramatis personae discuss Big Ideas), while the villainous hit man would seem particularly worthy of mention. I didn't see what was gained by making him a Hashashin, except to throw the name of yet another secret society (this one even deader than the rest) into the mix, but Brown does absolutely nothing with it. (Indeed, I wonder if Brown wasn't exploiting popular prejudice as a way of lending this particularly flat character an additional touch of menace.)

Perhaps worst of all where this novel is concerned as a thriller pure and simple the mystery seemed diminished considerably after the revelation of a crucial twist in the last act (which makes the whole thing seem even sillier), and diminished further still by the cover-up in which Langdon and Vittoria Vetra become complicit. That could have been a bold move on the writer's part at the end of a dramatic moment of decision, but it doesn't play that way here. The character drama, the political teeth that could make this work--they just aren't there. It seems like a cop-out, and a significant missed possibility--at the end of a long train of them. Brown's themes--the clash between science and religion, the misuse and abuse of power by religious institutions--are worthwhile, but he was simply not up to their challenge. Unfortunately, given his success, it seems that no writer who actually is that will be able to command attention comparable to that which he receives.

Sam Raimi's World War 3 and the History of Science Fiction

Originally posted on March 5, 2016.

Recently I wrote about the possibility that science fiction--real, hardcore, idea-based science fiction, science fiction as H.G. Wells and Hugo Gernsback and John Campbell knew it, rather than science fiction as just some fuzzy category containing anything that smells even slightly speculative--was in decline, and that this was in part because its place in contemporary culture was being taken up by other things that performed the task as well--or in respects, even better.

These included pop science, pop technology and of course pop futurology. The last of these seems of particular importance. Today someone looking to speculate about the future, to provide a scenario in which the world is different, not only has the option of doing so by way of nonfiction (one not around when, for example, Edward Bellamy was writing, or Wells was starting out, and still comparatively limited in Campbell's heyday), but can perhaps do so more fully and effectively in that way than if they were obliged to work their ideas into a work of fiction. They can devote their full attention to working out what tomorrow might be like, in the large and the small, and how it came to be that way, rather than their trying to force it all into the background of some character's narrative (and being scorned by ever more literature-minded critics for the extent to which they raised such non-Jamesian matters at all).

That a director of Sam Raimi's stature has thought it commercially viable to take a work of futurology and make a major feature film out of it--in this case, George Friedman's The Next 100 Years (reviewed here)--would seem to be suggestive of the long-running trend. The actual film, of course, can be expected to be a work of fiction, with characters and so on, but the point is that rather than taking some novel and adapting that, the starting point has been a work of futurology.

Sam Raimi's World War 3: Thoughts on the Source Material

Originally Posted on March 5, 2016.

I was surprised by the recent news that Sam Raimi will be directing a movie titled World War 3, based on George Friedman's book The Next 100 Years.

This was all the more so because I have followed Friedman's work for a very long time, even reviewing his last two books--The Next Decade, and of course, The Next 100 Years.

You can also check my revisitation of Friedman's predictions back in July (here).

Personally I have to admit to being underwhelmed by the work. Friedman's forecast is of obvious interest precisely because it is a detailed book-length forecast full of surprising predictions. However, as I noted in my reviews of his work, it also seemed to me to be based on some faulty assumptions.

By and large they are a grab-bag of biases common among strategic thinkers of a particular political persuasion.

In Friedman's vision the world economy will go on chugging along much as it has with neoliberalism somehow not a barrier to the development of "emerging markets," Russia and China will simply fail, Europe is always decadent or hostile or both, and neither global warming nor energy scarcities will exist as a meaningful factor for decades to come.

Oh, and somehow large-scale great power can be counted on not to escalate to the nuclear level.

In some cases, he even seems to be trying to salvage bad predictions from past decades, such as that communicated by the title of his 1991 The Coming War With Japan.

Indeed, after writing my review I found myself writing my own vision of the next hundred years (also reposted here), while today some of his newer guesses already seem as badly dated as that one. (Already in The Next Decade he was backing away slightly from his optimism about fossil fuels.)

At a time when events are unfolding along a far less conventional path than Friedman imagines--and perhaps of more immediate concern international, great power war is seeming an ever more plausible and frightening possibility--the idea of making this very questionable conception of the future a movie seems to me . . . well, very questionable.

John Gardner's James Bond and the Bestseller List

Originally Posted on May 3, 2017.

During the 1980s, John Gardner's James Bond continuation novels, while not enjoying the sales of Ian Fleming at his peak, were still regulars on the New York Times' hardcover fiction bestseller list. The second book, For Special Services, was the stand-out in that respect, staying on the list for fifteen weeks, during which it rose as high as the #6 position. However, during the '80s each release lasted at least four weeks, and most broke the top ten.

By contrast, Gardner's books stopped making the list in the 1990s. To be fair, the list does show a general declining trend, the later books lasting for shorter periods, and peaking at lower ranks.1 In the view of many (myself included) this reflected his contributions' weakening as the years progressed, with Gardner either repeating himself or serving up less compelling new ideas, and the handling generally becoming more anemic. However, in fairness, lots and lots and lots of bestselling authors survive all that. Moreover, the abruptness of the drop-off, and the fact that not even the novelty of a new author (Raymond Benson) raised enough interest to put the books back on it for so much as a single week, suggests that it was not just the weakness of the later entries that was responsible.

It was also a matter of the changing times--the sharp drop in the sales of novels about spies and international affairs generally after the Cold War's end.2 Thrillers remained popular, but fans instead favored tales of ordinary domestic crime --legal thrillers (Scott Turow and John Grisham), forensic thrillers (Patricia Cornwell), psych-profiling serial killer thrillers (Thomas Harris and James Patterson). Indeed, looking back a quarter of a century later it can seem like an era had come to end.

1. 1983's Icebreaker did less well than For Special, 1984's Role of Honor less well than that--managing just four weeks, in which it failed to break the top ten. Nobody Lives Forever and No Deals, Mr. Bond each did a bit better--making the #9 position, with No Deals lasting seven weeks altogether. Still, after that 1988's Scorpio lasted just six weeks, 1989's Win, Lose or Die just four, and neither got past the #11 spot.
2. I've been going over the New York Times and Publisher's Weekly lists systematically for an upcoming book, and it looks like, save for Tom Clancy, who also did less well after the '80s, just about everyone involved really suffered, commercial giants like le Carre and Ludlum knocked out of the top spots, and newcomers appearing only rarely and briefly--Daniel Silva's sales, a far cry from what earlier newcomers scored, about as good as this seemed to get during that decade.

John Gardner's James Bond Novels

Originally Posted on October 11, 2015.

By and large, the continuations of the James Bond series written by Ian Fleming's successors get very short shrift, often rating no more than a few pages in studies of the series--like those by Jeremy Black, or Simon Winder.

And some writers get shorter shrift than others, John Gardner in particular seeming neglected, relative to his contributions.

This is partly a matter of timing. Gardner was neither the first (like Kingsley Amis), nor, of course, has he been the last (in the nineteen years since Gardner's last, five different writers have tackled the series, often in sharply different ways), which by itself makes him more easily forgotten.1

Additionally, in contrast with the prestige some of those authors enjoyed due to their more "literary" work (Amis in particular), Gardner was seen as principally a genre writer.

However, some of this has to do with more than timing and bias. Gardner's enthusiasm for the books has been open to question. His career as a novelist began with a self-described "piss-take" on Bond in the very funny parody Boysie Oakes novel The Liquidator, and he later admitted in an interview that he never really cared much for the character. And those cognizant of his other work may be all the more dismayed when comparing even his better Bond books with the sheer verve Gardner displayed in writing a book like The Liquidator, or what were by his admission his favorite novels, the books of the Moriarty series (in which he displayed more verve continuing an entirely different character).

It does not help that it was not a case of a writer growing into a task and going out strong, but rather the reverse. (Licence Renewed, for example, was at its best a deft blend of Ian Fleming with the cinematic Bond, which made for one of the overall series' most satisfying action-adventures--but he went in other directions with later installments, and the last entries show clear signs of exhaustion.)

Still, if the overall quality of the output was not all that might have been hoped for, many entries did have their pleasures, and even those books that drew more ambivalent responses enjoy the interest of novelty--like the Bond-meets-Top Gun of Win, Lose or Die. And even if they are apocrypha rather than canon, sheer mass lends them an additional significance. No one, not even Fleming himself, spent more time on the series or produced as many books in it as Gardner, who in sixteen years published fourteen original novels (and two novelizations of Bond films, those of Licence to Kill and Goldeneye respectively).

A really complete appreciation of the series requires that one take all this into account, and indeed, in my two recent books--The Forgotten James Bond and James Bond's Evolution--I have made a point of doing just that.

Raymond Benson's the Union Saga (Extended James Bond Series)

Originally Posted on December 11, 2016.

When I first read Raymond Benson's Bond novels I actually found them rather more to my taste than the Fleming originals. They were more accessibly written--Benson not writing Bond as if he were writing Emma Bovary. (The "indirect glance," as Umberto called it, the nonlinearity that made the books rougher going than I expected, are absent here.) Benson's novels also--for the most part--dispensed with the less appealing bits of the characterization. (Bond is getting on in years--but much less the grouchy old Edwardian Tory civil servant overdue for a trip to Shrublands.)

The books were, I might add, more cinematic in their pacing (the overlong mah jongg game in Zero Minus Ten apart), and in their action. (Rarely on a par with the Clive Cussler novels that then set the standard for me, but satisfying nonetheless--with Never Dream of Dying almost everything one can ask for on that score.)

For much the same reason, I also preferred Benson to John Gardner.

Of course, in the years since I have become more appreciative of Fleming's strengths (and Gardner's)--and of the weaknesses of the Benson novels (apart from the obvious purists' complaint that they are just not like Fleming's, as they could not have been in a different age and market).

Still, the Benson novels have their pleasures. And of course, they are a significant part of the franchise. This is partly a question of sheer volume--there being six of them, plus three movie tie-in novels (of the last three Pierce Brosnan films).

They are interesting, too, because of their being the last literary expression of the franchise before the much-touted 2006 reboot of the Bond films in Casino Royale. Since that time the franchise has had its successes (not least the billion-dollar gross of Skyfall), but the series has been less prolific, and in its identity much less stable. In fourteen years we have had just four Bond novels--as compared with the years when Bond novels came along annually--with the series zigzagging wildly in respect of setting, premise, tone. So far no author has written more than one, while each did wildly different things with their books--Faulks and Boyd trying to pick things up just where Fleming left off in the '60s; Horowitz retreating even farther into the '50s to write a Goldfinger sequel; and Deaver attempting a radical update.

The result is that Benson offers the last real continuity with the older books, and the older conception.

And it might be added, the books are interesting for having been written by a man who came to the series out of its fandom--Benson's first public association with the franchise his authorship of the James Bond Bedside Companion.

All this makes his contributions well worth a look. To that end I review the three novels of Benson's "Union" trilogy depicting Bond's battle with a new, SPECTRE-like criminal organization--High Time to Kill, DoubleShot and Never Dream of Dying.

Also just reviewed is the follow-up, and final Benson novel, which continued one of Never's plot threads, The Man with the Red Tattoo.

After Spectre: A Prediction

Originally posted on December 18, 2015.

As I noted in a previous post, Spectre has not been the triumph hoped for by the producers or the fans--but, as it adds to an already $800 million global gross, it is also no flop.

Of course, neither was Die Another Day, or Moonraker, or Quantum of Solace a flop for that matter. But in each of those cases a decision was taken to follow a very different path with the next Bond movie, and it does not seem impossible that this will be the case here.

What direction might that be? Nothing so radical as the retro approach that the various novelists Glidrose has commissioned to write new James Bond novels (which reached a new peak with Horowitz's '50s-era Trigger Mortis, set just after the events of Goldfinger).

Rather I think that we will see the filmmakers back off to some extent from the course they established in Skyfall, and continued in Spectre--a more "mythic" approach to Bond, which not incidentally makes much more of his personal history. I suspect also that, just as happened after Quantum of Solace, they will hesitate to go with a political plot (which, somehow, always leads to exaggerated criticisms in big, popular movies). Instead we are apt to get a shorter, brisker Bond movie, with less aspiration to be epic, but more emphasis on simple fun--which will also leave the filmmakers more hard-pressed to make the twenty-fifth installment in the series headed our way in the next few years somehow feel like more than just "another" Bond movie, itself now just another example of the would-be blockbusters that have come to saturate the multiplex year-round.

Bond and America and Spectre

Originally Posted on November 10, 2015.

It does not seem to have just been my imagination that when American reviewers got their two cents in and suddenly the criticism of the series appeared a whole lot more brutal. The Australian took notice of the tendency too.

The article is mostly a round-up of the less complimentary things American critics have said, but it does offer a reminder that the United States has always been a less friendly market for the franchise than its native Britain--because of factors ranging from the U.S. being disinclined to import its pop culture (and especially its action heroes), a sneering attitude toward the films as bespeaking a perceived British "self-importance" (i.e. Britain still being a "world power" when this has long ceased to be the case), or the frankly unflattering things Ian Fleming often had to say about the country (especially in his later books).

One result is that they may be less forgiving of the weaknesses that pretty much everyone admits on both sides of the ocean.

Spectre's North American Opening

Originally Posted on November 8, 2015.

It's Sunday afternoon, which means the estimates are in regarding Spectre's opening weekend performance.

Alas, no big surprises. The take was $73 million, close to the high end of the range of estimates given out, which was about what most people (myself included) expected it to be.

Especially given that, as the weaker reviews hint, there is less likely to be the kind of good word-of-mouth that keeps people coming in over the following weeks--it seems that reviews of the film keep getting more critical ("worst Bond movie in years" the one from Vox says in its title)--it's hard to picture the movie doing much more than tripling its take. Again, my guess is that we will see it finish up in the $200-250 million range in America, while improvements in earnings elsewhere will offset its weaker earnings in this market.

Still, I suspect that, where the success of Skyfall encouraged the producers to continue in the same direction, the darker spots in the film's international performance, and the sense that the shine is off the reboot, the nearly certain fifth Daniel Craig Bond film is likely to see yet another round of modifications to the character.

Spectre: A Box Office Prediction

Originally Posted on November 5, 2015.

The release of Spectre is finally upon us in the U.S..

Thus far critics have (predictably) been more ambivalent about the latest Bond film than its predecessor. To go by my decidedly unscientific sampling of the published reviews, praise for the action sequences seems universal, while the visual style more generally has been remarked. However, the film has (unsurprisingly given the Sony leaks from last year) been criticized for its plotting, which to go by the more caustic, has been loose and illogical even by Bondian standards. The movie's length and "crowdedness" seem to be taking their toll, with the backstory especially falling flat. And as a whole, the novelty of the reboot seems to be fading.

None of this prevented Spectre from enjoying a sensational first week at the British box office, during which it earned a record $67 million. Of course, more screens and IMAX did their part as Deadline's Nancy Tartaglione notes--and so, one might imagine, did inflation--but all the same, given how big Skyfall was, topping its debut on just about any terms bodes very well for it. Spectre also seems to have done the same in the Netherlands, and across Scandinavia.

Still, other markets are tougher, not least that of the United States, where nothing like a record weekend is expected. Indeed, Spectre is expected to pull in some $65-75 million in its first three days, healthy for a movie of this kind, but a far cry from the $200 million openings enjoyed by Jurassic World and Avengers earlier this year, or even the $90 million that Skyfall scored three years ago. And there is little reason to think the movie will have exceptional legs at the American box office.

That still leaves a North American gross of $250 million plausible, and anything under $200 million unlikely/. Admittedly that makes the drop from last time's $304 million take too large to overlook. Still, it is easy to see any diminution of the movie's American earnings being offset by the higher revenue already coming in from elsewhere, and also likely to come in the weeks ahead--like China, where Spectre's significantly bettering the $59 million take Skyfall enjoyed in that country is easily pictured. Consequently, when the last receipts have been counted, I expect that even if the new movie misses the billion-dollar mark, it will not be by much.