Adam-Troy Castro

Writer of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, and Stories About Yams.

 

Joe Walsh Pushes Old Ladies Down The Stairs

Posted on May 4th, 2017 by Adam-Troy Castro

Joe Walsh is honestly the kind of guy who, upon seeing a doddering old lady fall down a flight of stairs, will say, “It’s her fault for not using the elevator.” And who upon being told that he owns the building and had the elevator removed after she moved in on the basis of handicapped acessibility, will then say that he was only acting according to his business interests. And upon being told that the local building code does require an elevator, will say that the law is what’s wrong with America. And upon hearing that the old lady was a decorated war hero, will sneer that this does not impress him. And who, upon being told that his own small children are playing at the top of the stairs, where the railing is most rickety, will shrug that this is not anything that concerns him. And upon being given a generous donation from investors in ball bearings, will agitate for a law that all stairways need to be covered with them. And upon being told that this will cause more old ladies to fall down the stairs, will deny the existence of gravity. And upon investing in the local emergency room, will push them.

Joe Walsh is the comic-opera caricature of a Republican, a guy you would call a detestable stereotype if some novelist bothered to invent him, a vapid, selfish, me-first white dude who sees public service not as a responsibility but as a scam, a way to increase his own stock at any cost to his own soul, an object as greasy and pitted as something you find in a spittoon. He’s a a man immune to conscience, devoid of knowledge, a used-car salesman with a punchable face and a priority list that consists of nothing but sentences that begin with the word “I.” In any disaster movie, he will be the guy who laughs off the reports that the swimming pool is filled with piranha, questions the manhood of the investigator who says, “No, seriously, look, there are the piranha, right there next to the skeleton of the cow,” who says that there are no such thing as piranha anyway and if there were they would be the fault of anyone who swam there, and who put up signs telling people to swim there; the guy who you hoped got bit in his raisin-sized dick by the third reel. Joe Walsh is life’s designated asshole.

Tags: , , | Category Humor, Politics

Pre-Review of a Movie I Haven’t Seen: ALIEN: COVENANT (2017)

Posted on May 4th, 2017 by Adam-Troy Castro

Declaring that a movie’s “gonna suck” before it’s been seen by anybody is a game of averages. Yes, maybe it will. But maybe it will surprise you. The oddest things have been instant classics.

So I am not writing off the upcoming ALIEN: COVENANT. Honestly, I am not. It may very well be a splendid, wholly effective and downright praiseworthy installment in its series.

However, it has this working against it from the start. We know the Xenomorph life cycle. We know about the egg, the face-hugger, the chest-burster, the dildo-head. We also know about the acid blood, the spring-loaded teeth, the desperate flights through narrow corridors. We know that human (or android) betrayal will play into the game of attrition of some point. We know about all that stuff, that has worked in the past, and we also know about the silly imbecile bullshit from PROMETHEUS, which may well play into this new story, at some level we cannot yet predict. This is all known, this is all set in stone, and part of the problem is that the movie is not only expected to hit the same notes, it is required and doomed to play the same notes.

No film, except the two filmed versions of the stage play with Johnny Lee Miller and Benedict Cumberbatch, ever captured the Frankenstein Monster of Mary Shelley’s novel, but the movie monster was a fine doomed character in his own right, and one of the great things THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN did as it spun off from the 1931 FRANKENSTEIN, was give him a fresh journey: self-awareness, self-determination, a quest for love, rejection at that, finally a despairing and almost noble suicidal impulse. He did new things, and things that took him to places where he had not been before. The sequels that followed were made by people who failed to respect him as anything but the rampaging Other, and so they became less continuations on his story and more empty repetitions of it, until he was ultimately reduced to being part of a menagerie. Still, there was that first sequel, and it was only possible in the first place because he was known to us; he had a soul.

There are still passionate arguments over whether ALIENS was better than the original film or a diminution of it, but it worked as well as it did, however high you measure that, because it was able to expand on their life cycle and on their menace while simultaneously giving us a closer look at the qualities that drove the human protagonist, Ellen Ripley. It was a sequel that expanded on both the character, and the menace, and how rare is that? But Ripley is gone; there is no replacing her except with someone else, someone who may well be an echo of her, but had damn well better be a character of equivalent stature, and the woman Noomi Rapace played in PROMETHEUS was, however hard they tried and however game the actress was in the attempt, not it. We don’t yet know whether this new movie can manage the trick, but even if whoever we get is spectacular, we run into the other problem: namely, that the Xenomorphs are still ants in bondage gear. They’re known quantities. They can only be multiplied, as James Cameron did so successfully, or they can be placed in different contexts, as subsequent sequels and prequels attempted and, largely, failed. It is highly unlikely that you’ll get any further surprises from them.

I repeat. The movie may not be bad. It may indeed be great fun. But for these reasons I have precious little expectation of it being a thunderbolt.

Tags: , , , , , , , | Category Uncategorized

Today’s Canard : “Jack Nicholson Always Plays The Same Character”

Posted on May 3rd, 2017 by Adam-Troy Castro

Originally published on Facebook 3 May 2014.

Recently spoken to me, a canard I’ve heard before: “Jack Nicholson always plays the same character.”

This sounds good, but is only believed by people who have seen only a small number of his films.

The persona usually attributed to him, “Jack Nicholson,” the eyebrow-raising hell raiser who is simultaneously the angriest and most cynical person in the room, first appeared for about thirty seconds in the famous chicken-salad sandwich scene in FIVE EASY PIECES, and was so popular that it became his most requested character type, used to varying effect in films as good as ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST or as cartoonish as BATMAN or THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK. (Others would be THE SHINING, AS GOOD AS IT GETS, and yes, his turn as Jessop in A FEW GOOD MEN.)

This has led to a lot of folks who consider only his most famous films charging that he has the range the width of a playing card.

Two problems with this.

First, only a few movie stars are chameleons of the Daniel Day-Lewis type. Many, like Henry Fonda and Gary Cooper and Humphrey Bogart and Cary Grant, have traditionally brought the characters to them, and there’s a substantial range of character types they can play within the bounds of the easily identified mannerisms; it would be foolish to call any of them untalented actors, and to the extent that Jack Nicholson has often played “Jack Nicholson” in quotes, it is certainly not true of him either. After all, Bogart is clearly Bogart playing Sam Spade, Fred Dobbs, and Captain Queeg, and the characters are still so different that you wouldn’t mistake them for one another even in a dark room. I give Nicholson the same leeway.

Secondly, it has absolutely never been true that this is the only character he plays. In THE KING OF MARVIN GARDENS, he played a character utterly unlike the one he is known for, the quiet, emotionally constipated brother of a more demonstrative brother played by Bruce Dern. In PRIZZI’S HONOR, John Huston gave him one piece of direction, “Shut off your intelligence,” and Nicholson did just that, presenting us with a lug who was behind everybody else in the room. The “Jack Nicholson” light in his eyes didn’t flash once, throughout that film. In THE PLEDGE, he was a sad and driven retired cop who didn’t give us one, one, of Nicholson’s raised-eyebrow I’m-in-control moments. In ABOUT SCHMIDT, which I’ve always considered the geriatric companion piece to FIVE EASY PIECES — it even had a chicken-salad sandwich scene, unfortunately deleted, where he quietly acquiesced to the rude waitress’s dictates — “Nicholson” only pops his head up once, for only a few seconds. Nor is he “Jack Nicholson” in THE LAST DETAIL or THE PASSENGER.

He has played powerful men, powerless men, smart men, stupid men, men with incredible sexual magnetism and men who could not attract a five dollar hooker with the aid of a thousand dollar bill.

“Jack Nicholson,” I’d almost agree with you. Jack Nicholson, not so much.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | Category Movies

 
 
 

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