Some of My Unpopular Opinions

Posted on December 14th, 2016 by Adam-Troy Castro

Some Of My Unpopular Opinions:

* The death of Scarlett O’Hara’s daughter is the campiest scene in GONE WITH THE WIND, unintentionally hilarious as dramatized.

* And aside from a few effective set-pieces, the movie as a whole isn’t much better.

* Bob Dylan *is* great, but some of his more esoteric images that get debated endlessly are just a guy trying to find any shit that rhymed. The guy who walks around with a Siamese cat, in “Like a Rolling Stone?” Is only there to rhyme with “that.” And much of “Blowing In the Wind” is guilty of the same sin.

* Ditto Lennon and McCartney. In some of their more surreal songs, they were honestly throwing shit at the wall and hoping it stuck. It just did. (And the same is true of Harrison’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.”)

* Despite my adoration of Harlan Ellison’s work, and I can name any number of examples, the aired version of “City on the Edge of Forever” is better than his original teleplay, in multiple ways.

* Similarly, I am not a fan of “The Deathbird,” “The Region Between,” and a number of other stories of his that get excessive praise. (I am a fervent partisan of others that don’t get enough. I think “The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore” was brilliant.)

* People need to stop climbing Mt. Everest.

* Keanu Reeves and Ben Affleck can act. And Wil Ferrell has been known to be brilliant. Multiple times.

* The Geico Cavemen commercials presented some of the most incisive satire about the impact racism has on its targets, of modern times.

* H.P. Lovecraft was terrible. And in many ways he’s been bad for horror.

* In fiction, uncomplicated good guys are not always inherently less interesting than characters who dwell in darkness. Dick Tracy, for instance, is not less interesting than his gallery of villains.

* Except in spots, 2001: A Space Odyssey doesn’t hold up very well at all. A Clockwork Orange is a better movie…and so is Barry Lyndon.

* Woody Allen got better after ANNIE HALL.

* Pears taste better than apples.

* THE GIRL WHO LOVED TOM GORDON is one of Stephen King’s great books.

* THE MOSQUITO COAST is Harrison Ford’s best work.

* With only a couple of exceptions, Tim Burton is not very good at this moviemaking trick. Indeed, for the most part, he really sucks. He has some visual sense, but his storytelling is incoherent and often cloying.

* David Lynch’s best movie is not any of the ones that play with dream-like imagery, but his most conventional, THE STRAIGHT STORY.

* In both comics and movies, the Joker needs to go away and not come back for a long, long, long time. So does the Kingpin.

* The Penguin is a GREAT villain, as written by some.

* In the real world, Captain Bligh got a raw deal.

* Wyatt Earp is still a legendary figure because he lived long enough to make friends with movie people.

* Zombies are not only not hackneyed, but a rich literary and cinematic trope, of great potential that is only occasionally realized. And George Romero is wrong about THE WALKING DEAD “ruining” the device.

* I don’t want to see the Taj Mahal, nor do I want to go to Venice. I have been apprised of the *full* sensory experience, and no thank you.

* No, I don’t think the movie theatre is a place to see special effects extravaganzas, while reserving smaller and more personal movies for home. Similarly: I don’t think the opportunity to turn off my brain for two hours is a plus, when picking my entertainment. I want my brain and my feelings engaged. I am not depressed by sad movies, only by empty ones. I left the most recent STAR WARS movie feeling a little disgusted with myself for having seen it.

* Hamsters make terrible pets. Rats, however, are great.

Tags: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Bad Movies, Ben Affleck, Bob Dylan, Gone With The Wind, H.P. Lovecraft, Harlan Ellison, Keanu Reeves, Stephen King, The Beatles, Woody Allen | Category Comic Books, Commentary, Humor, Life Wisdom, Movies, Uncategorized

On Reviewing A Writer’s New Work By Panning 30-Year-Old Books

Posted on December 13th, 2016 by Adam-Troy Castro

If someone tells you online or in person that he’s just read a book by a given writer and pronounces it superior, you cannot win an argument about the quality of the writer by declaring that you gave up reading that writer’s works twenty years ago, and especially not if you hated one book that writer wrote from all those years ago.

Some of you think you can, but you cannot.

The writer from twenty years ago is the one you have knowledge of; you have no idea how much he grew in the intervening years, where his muse may have taken him.

And while you have the right to continue your personal boycott, it does not mean that your pre-emptive opinion of the current work has any validity in the current discussion. It’s just you saying that your ignorance is better than someone’s else’s immediate and current knowledge.

This is applicable in more fields than science fiction. If in 1967 you were willing to declare of the Beatles that they were just a one-note band that couldn’t write lyrics more sophisticated than, “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah,” you were an ignoramus. Similarly, 1970 Harlan Ellison was not 1956 Harlan Ellison; the Joe R. Lansdale who wrote PARADISE SKY is not the Lansdale who wrote the unimpressive debut novel ACT OF LOVE; and you’re really an idiot if I tell you that I loved Robert R. McCammon ‘s THE FIVE and you start bitching about hating him forever because of the similarities a couple of his early novels had to Stephen King works, thirty years ago.

Nobody’s saying that you can’t behave like the cat once burned by a stove who stays out of the kitchen from that day on, but that’s not expertise, not when subsequent cats find the kitchen a profitable place to cadge treats when dinner’s being made.

All I’m saying is, “I read X decades ago, and therefore I can contradict you when you say the latest book is good,” is a genuinely asinine thing to say

Tags: Books, Harlan Ellison, Joe R. Lansdale, Life Wisdom, Robert R. McCammon, Stephen King, The Beatles, writing | Category Books, Commentary, Life Wisdom, Science Fiction, Writing

A Reply To the Troll Who Just Advised Me to Get A Life

Posted on November 20th, 2016 by Adam-Troy Castro

So among the submitted comments on my latest post, the one about HAMILTON, was one from someone named Clyde treloar saying, “get a life adam.”

I would like to note among other things that I print his name exactly as he does, without capitalizing his last name or the initial letter in his sentence.

I would also like to note that this is the entirety of what he said.

As this was one of a number of posts I have done critical of Donald Trump, I assume with no other evidence that Mr. treloar (again, see, no capital), is a Trump voter, which is his right; certainly he provided no other argument beyond his suggestion that I get a life.

It is a safe assumption. I know that others of that orientation have done and said worse.

But even if his comment was politically neutral, a random gob of phlegm flung into a cold and uncaring universe, I would like to point out that it contained no argument, no clarity, no actual thesis beyond a general expression of antagonism; certainly, it invented nothing, content with iterating a simple three-word phrase that other antagonists invented long ago. It was the phenomenon of a phrase being plucked off a shelf of prefabricated rejoinders, by an individual who apparently hath not the capacity to produce any more articulate phrase by himself.

I would very much like to inquire just what he expected me to do, upon reading his comment.

Was I supposed to act like Sir Laurence Olivier did, in the Neil Diamond version of THE JAZZ SINGER, in which he responded to a perceived betrayal by tearing at his own clothing and shouting, “I haff no son?” Was I supposed to be sufficiently devastated by Mr. lower-case treloar’s missive to sit upright, declare that, you know what, he’s right, I’m wrong, and that I must now turn my back on a life of expressing my convictions and retire into silence?

Does he not know that I have spent decades contending in correspondence and in person with some of the most articulate, educated voices of our time, including a number of them capable of capitalizing their own names and inserting a comma into a sentence of four words? Does he not get that I handle words for a living, that I produce thousands a day and that these little blog rants are just me warming up? Does he think “get a life adam” is more than I can handle, in vocabulary or concept?

Does he know that even if I get knocked down there are others behind me?

I have a life, Mr. treloar. I also have an education, a rational mind, and a set of convictions. I have just enough irritation on other life-issues, tonight, to spend more time on you than you deserve, a span of time that ordinarily would be shorter than the firing of a neuron.

I honestly don’t have even the slightest clue what you have.

And this, my friends, is why you don’t pick word fights with writers.

I establish one last thing, by the way. None of this was written in anger. This was a two-finger exercise, the literary equivalent of putting away the dishes.

Warming up, for the chapter I’m writing next.

You’re worth no more effort than that, sir.

And now  I’m done.

Tags: Assholes | Category Humor