Philip José Farmer: His Apocalyptic Life (AN ARCHIVE INTERVIEW FROM 1990)

Those who know me also probably know that my favorite author is the late Philip José Farmer. There are a number of reasons why. Among them are his many instances of deliberately playing with Jungian archetypes and pulp mythology. But also, there’s just such a mischievous charm to everything he wrote and eyes open to the absurdities of humanity. He was constantly challenging literary and genre expectations — "pushing the envelope", so to speak. Phil was also writing for himself first and the audience second. As a result, his work reflects him and his inner workings much more than many authors who are cynically driven to compose based on audience expectations. That’s not to say he did not pursue the almighty dollar, but he struck a fine balance of a working author (making money at it) and a broad-minded thinker and feeler who wrote first and foremost because he had stuff in his head that needed to get out.

Oddly, however, I had never even heard his name nor read any of his books or stories prior to 1990 until I read this interview I am about to share. It was a lengthy two-part interview with Phil in the now-defunct STARLOG magazine that got my attention. All the topics and points-of-view just sang to me that we were operating on a similar wavelength. When I was done with that article, I set out on a quest to find some of this man’s books. And at this point, I own and have read every novel he wrote (except his hard to find 1962 novel about race relations Fire and The Night) and probably most every short story (or at least all I could get my hands on).

It’s taken me a couple of years since I first thought about it, but I'm finally getting around to publishing this blog. The timing inspiration for it is that Phil Farmer was born on January 26, 1918 in Terra Haute, Indiana, and I wanted to make this available to existing fans, but also the uninitiated, during his birth month as my simple way of remembering him and his work. Since STARLOG is long out of print and this article ran so long ago (pre-Information Age), the ability to access this rather exhaustive glimpse into Phil’s mind at age 71 is not an easy task if you did not purchase these magazine issues off the newsstand at the time they came out. I did make an effort to contact the current owners of the STARLOG brand to see if they were interested in sashaying alongside with me on this endeavor but they never responded. I did, however, contact by email the author Will Murray, who actually conducted the interview with Phil to make sure that he had no issue with my reproducing the text in this venue.  Mr. Murray kindly granted whatever permission rights he might have as the writer, so under Fair Use for archival and research purposes only, I present Will Murray’s interview with Philip José Farmer from 1990, originally published in STARLOG magazine issues 155 and 156. I claim no copyright on the interview text and reserve all content rights to the respective rights holders.

*Stay tuned for a few notes by me at the end. For now, enjoy this time capsule of sorts.*

STARLOG #155 (June 1990)

 

PHILIP JOSÉ FARMER: HIS APOCALYPTIC LIFE

Part One

By WILL MURRAY

If Philip Jose Farmer had only written The Lovers, his place in science fiction would be secure. But after revolutionizing the field with his sexually explicit and psychologically sophisticated debut novella, he has since gone on to become one of the major creative forces in contemporary fiction and, some say, in 20th century popular literature. From his Riverworld books, in which immortal historical figures wend their way along a 10-million-mile river on a distant world, to his World of Tiers series with

its many "pocket universes" created by ruthless Lords, Farmer has demonstrated a creative energy more akin to coruscating stellar explosions than mere prose writing. Not content with his own series — which tumble from his seemingly inexhaustible imagination so rapidly that not all of them have been resolved — Farmer has also continued the careers of several of his childhood pulp heroes, in both pastiches and pastiche-like "biographies" — Tarzan Alive and Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life, written as if those characters were real — which Farmer claims, not always with tongue in cheek, is true.

STARLOG: You're contracted to write a new Doc Savage novel. How did that come about?

PHILIP JOSE FARMER: When I wrote Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life, I hoped I would be able to do an original Doc Savage some day. I already had the title — Escape from Loki, in which Doc at age 16 lied about his age to get into the US Air Service, and was captured by the Germans [during World War I]. His plane was shot down, and he was one of those incorrigible escapees. The Germans had a special camp called Camp Loki, situated in Bavaria, near Berchtesgaden, where they sent all these prisoners that they particularly had trouble with, sort of an escape-proof concentration camp. That's where Doc met his future aides. And they were prisoners for about two months. You know, I had it in the table of chronology, too.

STARLOG: So, you've been planning this a long time.

FARMER: I originally proposed it after I wrote Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life in 1973. But Bantam wouldn't do it because they said they still had too many Doc Savage books to reprint, so I waited until they were getting close to the end. Proposed it again, and the editor, Lou Aronica, agreed with the premise. So, I signed the contract. And that's the novel I'm starting to work on right now. It'll be the first one I've ever written on a word processor, by the way!

This excites me because when I was a youth, I knew I was going to be a writer. I always wanted to write a Tarzan novel, a Doc Savage novel, an Oz novel and a Phineas Fogg novel. This will mean I've fulfilled all my childhood fantasies, except for the Tarzan novel. And I have to wait for 1999, in which case I'll be what, 81 years old or something like that! [Laughs.] I pick 1999 because I think that's the date in which Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc. loses the rights, but I could write it maybe a couple of years from now and put it in the trunk.

STARLOG: When you were doing your Doc Caliban stories, you weren't merely doing pastiches. You were also doing Doc Savage as filtered through Philip José Farmer's imagination.

FARMER: Yes, giving the darker side that [Savage writer/creator] Lester Dent and the others couldn't put in the magazine. They had some taboos and restrictions because they were aimed at the stereotype of a 15-year-old youth.

STARLOG: So, will Escape from Loki slant more toward your psychological point-of-view or Dent's?

FARMER: There isn't going to be any sex in it, if that's what you're asking. I won't be trying to imitate the styles of any of the Doc Savage writers. I'll be using my own style — whatever that is, because I have a number of different styles.

STARLOG: So, it won't be as realistic in tone as Doc Caliban?

FARMER: It will be realistic in that I'll try to imagine Doc as he really was at age 16. He's pretty advanced in knowledge at that time, but of course he hasn't nearly completed his education and there is much he still doesn't know. I would also like to elaborate the characters of his aides more. There are some contradictions in the books that you must reconcile, so you have to figure that the earlier books probably tell the truth. For instance, in the first two Doc Savage books, he's not at all adverse to violence. He kills them right and left. In later ones, probably because of editorial dictates, Doc became very careful about killing anybody and wouldn't do it unless absolutely necessary. He usually set up traps. In effect, the villains killed themselves because they committed their evil actions.

 

 

STARLOG: Will Doc Savage's father be in this book?

FARMER: He'll be mentioned, but he won't be in it.

STARLOG: Recently, a writer used one of your Doc Savage ideas from Apocalyptic Life, apparently unaware that it wasn't part of the original pulp magazine series.

FARMER: I was making notes for Escape from Loki when a fan of mine, a French woman up in Canada who's also a Doc Savage fan, sent me a copy of the DC Comics Doc Savage Annual. It contained the section in which Doc Savage was captured and sent to this prison camp and met his aides.

And they had some things in there which I had originated and which were not in the books. It may have been due to ignorance. Or it may have been that they just didn't care. I don't know. Anyway, the point is they took all that from Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life, but when my novel comes out [currently scheduled for spring 1991], people will think that I lifted the idea and I don't want that!

STARLOG: What is it about these pulp characters that keeps you coming back to them? Is that the kid still inside you?

FARMER: Yeah. William Wordsworth said that the child is the father to the man, and I believe that. They talk about golden ages. Well, it's not when you retire, past 60. Usually, when you have a good childhood, it's when you were a child and starting to read all these fabulous works. It's an imprinting that affects particular children because they have a vivid imagination and love this stuff. You know the concept. When a duckling is hatched, it usually fastens onto its mother as the mother because that's the first object it sees. But if it doesn't see the mother, and somebody else comes walking by, it picks that as the mother. So, they call that imprinting. And I was imprinted by certain heroes of my earlier reading, like Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes, the Oz books in general. I was just 15 when I read the first Doc Savage when it came out and I was all aglow. And I used to imagine all these Doc Savage adventures which are quite separate from the ones in the books. I decided that someday I would like to continue the adventures of these people, but never really thought about it until after I had gotten my writing career started. I think it really started when Bantam began reprinting the first Doc Savage books [in 1964]. I know that seems peculiar to many people, but it stimulated me so much.

STARLOG: Yet you keep coming back to these childhood heroes, as if you're driven or haunted or motivated by these characters as much as your own.

FARMER: I really can't explain the psychological basis, except to say that in my own particular idiosyncratic personality, that stuff was all generated spontaneously. I never looked into its roots, but other people started wondering why. It seemed to me just a natural thing to do. The trouble is, there are many people interested in these heroes I write about, and they made a big thing out of it, sometimes to the detriment of my other work. My other work is getting recognized, but by a different type of people. But most of the publicity is about the pastiches I write.

STARLOG: Does that bother you?

FARMER: I don't care. Whatever they want.

STARLOG: Is it that you're trying to satisfy the mature reader in you by creating more plausible versions of these characters?

FARMER: Well, I think the idea was when I was young and read about these people, I accepted them on the terms that the authors presented them. As I got older, and had more experiences with people— I also did a tremendous amount of reading in all other fields including psychology— I started to extrapolate and deduce from my observations that Tarzan, Doc Savage and others probably had a darker side to their nature than the pulp writers could present.

STARLOG: What compels you to do that?

FARMER: It's just that I am a science fiction writer. I like to extrapolate, to pick up a certain premise or a certain person and develop that— figure out certain tendencies that may be present and what would result from them.

STARLOG: Once you chronicle Doc Savage's early days, would you then write a quintessential Doc novel, set in the '30s, without the psycho-sexual overtones of your Doc Caliban/Lord Grandrith pastiches like A Feast Unknown and The Mad Goblin/Lord of the Trees!

FARMER: Yeah, I would love to do it, but I don't know if I ever will, or if they'll allow me, as far as that goes. That would be fun. Even A Feast Unknown, which has been called pornographic — it's not; it's erotic — was a funny book. But none of the novels I wrote for Essex House turn people on. If anything, they might repulse people, shock 'em. A Feast Unknown actually was a funny book. I know some people, friends of mine, laughed when they read it. They knew I'd had my tongue in my cheek. And in The Image of the Beast, I was satirizing the Gothic novel, the horror novel and pornography itself. It stretched things out.

A Feast Unknown did allow me to extrapolate some of the harshness of if there had been a real Tarzan, what he would have gone through. For instance, during periods of famine when he couldn't find any food, he was reduced to eating animal excrement. He said elephant wasn't too bad, but lion was terrible because he was a meat-eater! I laughed when I wrote that, but it might have been actually what the real Tarzan did. He's not what we would call a noble savage. He wasn't even a savage. He was raised by these so-called Great Apes, and while he was born a human in his attitude — and [writer/creator Edgar Rice] Burroughs stresses this at times — he never would have been fully human. Tarzan would have looked at the world through the eyes of a higher animal, and would have done, in order to survive, things most people wouldn't be able to do. They would be repulsed.

STARLOG: What's the status of your next Doc Caliban novel, Some Unspeakable Threshold!

FARMER: Well, it would be better to use the word stasis instead of status. [Laughs.] It's an idea I had which I hope I'll live long enough to develop. Actually, it springs primarily from Up From Earth's Center, in which Doc Savage, we think — he wasn't sure either — met supernatural beings. He was at least in the suburbs of Hell for a while. So, since I wasn't allowed to write Doc Savage novels personally — that may change — in this pastiche, I was going to carry that idea out and have a sequel to it, but at the same time, it would be a development of the story that started in A Feast Unknown, with Doc Caliban disguised as an old man living in the skid row section of LA, still hiding from the Nine, and then have him go back to that place in New England.

STARLOG: If you get permission to write more Docs, would you consider turning Some Unspeakable Threshold into a Doc Savage novel?

FARMER: I really won't know unless I'm presented with it. This one Doc I want to write may be the only one, really. Although I'm bubbling over and fermenting with ideas and projects, time limits you. That might just be it, having accomplished my childhood fantasy.

STARLOG: Didn't you at one point write a Doc Savage screenplay?

FARMER: I was invited by George Pal to do a treatment, not a screenplay. I went out there and I met Ron Ely. I saw the movie before it was released. George Pal told me that the head of Warner Bros, at that time didn't like Doc Savage. I read the original script. It was much more complicated and costly than what he ended up with. One thing was the villain's yacht. He pressed the button, and it became a sailing vessel. You could disguise it. I had great hopes for the movie. Till I saw it! [Laughs.] Pal couldn't get anybody interested in a second one. So, the treatment went untreated!

STARLOG: Was it an original work, or an adaptation?

FARMER: You're going to have to excuse my memory. It was a story in which this new mechanism or death ray dissolves people, but their image is projected onto walls. I used that as the basis and used elements from other stories.

STARLOG: That was Murder Mirage. Why that one? It wasn't a Lester Dent novel. Laurence Donovan wrote it.

FARMER: It just happened to appeal to me. I don't care who it's by. It was a Doc Savage novel, a pretty typical one. It had some stimulating elements I could do something with. I wish they had made a movie out of it. Man, we had a great fight. Their laboratory headquarters was invaded. I thought up many devices that hadn't been in the Doc Savage books. It would have made a tremendous scene. I think the first movie destroyed all hopes. In essence, Pal treated as camp what was already camp.

STARLOG: If you do get around to writing a Tarzan novel, what kind of story would you do?

FARMER: I would take one of the undeveloped stories in the Burroughs Tarzan books. There's one where he is wandering across the desert and finds this skeleton still clad in 16th or 17th century armor with a parchment map. He went off in one direction, but I would have him going off another way. It would be sort of a compromise between Lord Grandrith in A Feast Unknown and Tarzan. Be pretty realistic. But if I do write it, and I probably never will because of lack of time, I would want to make this a definitive Tarzan novel.

STARLOG: Speaking of Tarzan, you started a series set in Burroughs' Opar some years ago, and promised two or three more novels. Will you ever do them?

FARMER: I'm determined to finish that sequel. It's a matter of getting to it. I got an Italian translation the other day with a magnificent cover. That renewed my desire to continue. It hadn't really gone away; it just stimulated me again. I had planned three more novels. I'm kind of superstitious. I think if you write a series, it should either be three or five or seven, odd numbers. It's well known that the best of Beethoven's symphonies are all odd numbers.

STARLOG: It has been speculated that one of the characters in your Opar books is the same as the unidentified hero of Time's Last Gift. Who is he?

FARMER: There's a mysterious character known as the God of Time and Bronze in my ancient Opar books. He taught them about fire and how to make bronze and all that. The curious thing— and I don't think I actually mentioned this— is that the use of the bow is taboo. It's against their religion. I got that because in Burroughs' Opar stories, the Oparians never had a bow. I figured it must have been some taboo. It's obvious to anybody who has read Time's Last Gift that this God is the time traveler who's back in that period because in Time's Last Gift, he went back to approximately 1200 BC and the Opar series takes place around 10,000 BC. He's supposed to have actually started the civilization. And that time traveler is Tarzan.

Next Issue: This apocalyptic interview continues as Philip Jose Farmer discusses the World of Tiers, "retiring" his novels and (yes) the scripts he wrote for Star Trek in 1966.

________________________________________________

STARLOG #156 (July 1990)

PHILIP JOSÉ FARMER: HIS APOCALYPTIC LIFE

Part Two

Philip José Farmer discussed in detail last issue his fascination with childhood heroes, pulp supermen like Tarzan and Doc Savage, what they mean to him, why they recur so often in his work, and how this fascination has led him to writing a new Doc Savage novel for Bantam Books.

In this concluding conversation, Farmer takes us on a tour of his "other" career as an important science fiction novelist from his troubled early days to his current plans to finish his many series, with brushes along the way with Star Trek, the film versions of Riverworld and Dayworld and the importance of dreaming creatively. And Farmer shares some surprising assessments of many of his most important novels.

STARLOG: What's your next project after the new Doc Savage novel Escape from Loki?

PHILIP JOSE FARMER: It's a novel called Red Orc's Rage, which I don't know if publishers will regard as mainstream or fantasy. I got a letter from a psychiatrist in Youngstown, Ohio. He treated a select group of troubled adolescents who suffered from low self-esteem and all sorts of emotional problems. He told them to take the five books from my World of Tiers series, read them, pick out a character to identify with and try to become these particular characters— acquire the good characteristics if they could. As the therapy proceeds, they were to try to come back to Earth in a sense, shed the particular character's bad characteristics and keep the good. He said he had an amazingly high success rate. Out of a group of 14, he had only two failures. This is very high for psychiatric care. He also had a small group of mild schizophrenics who did the same thing. When he told me, I thought, hey, that would be a great idea for a story. I can pick my own character — in the book — and put the stress on him. So, I wrote an outline and sent it out. The idea of an author writing a story based on real therapy which originated from his works intrigues me. There's that circular thing.

STARLOG: Why call it Red Orc's Rage!

FARMER: If you know the poet William Blake's works, one of the deities in it is Red Orc. That's the one my protagonist in this novel picks as a role. It's set up so you don't know if it was his vivid imagination or if he did go through these other Earths because these patients had various ways of getting through to the worlds. Now, one patient took all five books, taped them together and used them as his power pack. And then about two-thirds through the therapy, when starting to shed the characteristics, he would tear the covers off one day and a page here and there until finally it was all gone. But the curious thing about this therapy was once they had gotten through it, they didn't dare think about it because sometimes they would get flashbacks and they would be back at these imagined situations.

STARLOG: You were involved in the original Star Trek TV series, with a script called "The Shadow of Space," which you later turned into a short story.

FARMER: Yes. And one called "Sketches in the Ruins of My Mind." I was living in LA at the time. Gene Roddenberry was just starting Star Trek. It hadn't been broadcast on TV yet. I met him a number of times and talked, with him. I also did a 100-page guide for it, telling them what was feasible, what wasn't, what to avoid, and the potentialities. They paid me for it, but never used it. Wish I had a copy of it. Be a nice collector's item. Then, I presented two treatments. He said his criterion is what his little old maiden aunt in Iowa would understand, and he said, "She would not understand these." And they were too expensive. So, I went back to writing novels. I should have kept on sending other treatments because there were many other science fiction writers who did.

STARLOG: But for that, you might have become one of the major creative forces behind Star Trek.

FARMER: Well, looking back on it now, I can see that he was probably right— especially for TV. "Sketches in the Ruins of My Mind" originally involved a little idol that Captain Kirk had picked up in the ruins of a planet. It turns out to be a device that makes you lose memory two days in a row and you keep going backwards. Kirk wakes up and he thinks that it's two days before he woke up. He's completely confused and then his memory keeps dropping out day by day. So, every time he wakes up in the morning, it's two days [earlier], but eventually it's a year before, and he's in a new situation. I changed that when I turned it into a short story. I had this gigantic spaceship appear and the aliens were electromagnetically sucking out people's memories in order to store them for study. Everybody in the world woke up thinking it was the day before, and then you keep going back and back and back until your youth — and then back and back until you become a baby. The civilization had partly collapsed. They eventually blow this object up before they all become so young in mind that they're incapable of doing anything. It is a grim, horrible story.

And then the other one was basically "The Shadow of Space" except the crew was Star Trek. They said, "No, the audience wouldn't get it." I don't think they could put "Sketches" across in a full-length movie!

STARLOG: There has been talk of film and TV versions of Riverworld and Dayworld. Anything happening now?

FARMER: Actually, what they bought was the short story "The Sliced-Crosswise-Only-on-Tuesday World," which formed the basis of the Dayworld novels. But they have the rights to the novels. It was Castle Rock Productions. They were going to do Stephen King's Stand By Me then, so they put that[Dayworld] on the back burner. I thought the whole thing had died, but recently I heard that they had written a new script and were thinking of going ahead. I don't get excited about it because they might do it, and then again, they might not.

Now with Riverworld, it ended up they were going to do a TV mini-series. Two networks turned it down. The ABC president at that time took a look at the treatment presented and said OK. They did a script for the two-hour pilot. This was done by the same guy who wrote the script for Roots — I can't remember his name. I read it and it was pretty good, especially since it was written by somebody who didn't know science fiction. Except even then it seemed to me, if somebody came in at the middle, they wouldn't know what was going on. Not only that, one of the characters is named Peter Jairus Frigate — obviously based on myself— and they decided that had pornographic connotations, so they changed it to Quentin. They decided they wouldn't have any children resurrected because they were too difficult to deal with. And of course, being on TV, they weren't going to show them nude. They would all have towels. He did a really good job starting out, and I am curious how he would have finished it.

STARLOG: Is the project dead?

FARMER: Eventually, it just petered out. As far as I know, they still have the rights for a couple of years. But Riverworld would be extremely difficult to present on TV. I would rather see a motion picture made out of it, but even then, it would be difficult. Riverworld is such a big concept, I don't see how they can put it in a two-hour movie.

STARLOG: Have we seen the last of Riverworld?

FARMER: I originally planned only three, but I ended up with five novels. I might change my mind. But I doubt it. Too many things going on. Too many worlds in collision up inside my skull. I did actually plan a non-Riverworld story with the same people after they set out in a spaceship from the

Riverworld, but I'll never do it.

STARLOG: Are you getting a sense of time running out? You have many unfinished series and sequels you could write.

FARMER: Yes, I'm 71 now. I don't know how long I will live. I would like to go back and finish up some of the series I started earlier. I don't plan on starting any new series. I would like to finish the Doc Caliban/Lord Grandrith series. Actually, one time I counted them. Counting short story series, I have about 12 series going. Some of it I never did anything further. Too bad! [Laughs.]

STARLOG: How would you assess your writing career?

FARMER: I did the same thing in science fiction I had hoped to do when I became a mainstream writer. I was pretty naive. I was sending stories to The Saturday Evening Post and others with sexual content, now that I look back on it, that made it mandatory they reject it. I decided I wasn't getting anyplace. The trouble is when I started out writing mainstream, I really hadn't lived enough to be able to do it. Now I have and I want to write a novel set in the early '50s, after the GIs came back to college. Met the wildest group I ever met in my life— and I've worked in a lot of places— at Bradley University after the war was over. It's called Pearl Diving in Old Peoria. It's actually the story of a family, descended from the whiskey barons of Peoria that has fallen on bad times. At one time, Peoria had the biggest distillery in the world. The novel is much more involved than that.

STARLOG: If your eye doctor told you your sight was failing and you had only a year or two in which to write, which projects would you finish?

FARMER: I would write my mainstream novel, Pearl Diving in Old Peoria. Yeah. In a year, I would be lucky to get it done. It would take two years to write it! Really hard to decide what to do. I have many ideas. That Tarzan novel I was talking about [last issue]. Maybe! I don't like to be presented with these type of situations. Maybe I would launch into another science fiction novel. I had the germ of an idea for a novel that would include all the themes that are being used in science fiction now plus a couple of others that haven't been.

STARLOG: What do you think your impact upon science fiction has been?

FARMER: Originally, I think it was to open science fiction to a more mature treatment, a more realistic one. Since then, the impact has been on certain readers who reacted to my particular type. There are readers who don't like me, and there are others who are lukewarm, and there are others who are fanatic about it. I never really had a cult like Ray Bradbury or Frank Herbert did because I don't stick to one note. Bradbury, he had about three different themes, I think, and he repeats and repeats. But, of course, he's a great writer. I have done what I have wanted to for the moment and ranged all over the field, from adventure to deep psychology. I never made any effort to stick to one world or one set of characters. I wouldn't want a cult around me. I wouldn't have been happy. [It would have] been too confining.

STARLOG: Do the potentialities of SF still excite you as a writer?

FARMER: Oh, yeah. I get excited. I think nowadays many new ideas or new variations of old ideas are being written. I will continue to be excited because the human imagination, as far as I'm concerned, is basically boundless. If I don't get excited about a story, I don't want to write it.

STARLOG: If you had your life to live over again, how would you change the direction of your career?

FARMER: In the first place, I would have made a [much greater] effort to get a PhD in anthropology. I had a much-checkered college career, due to the Depression and the war. The furthest I got was halfway through a master's degree in English linguistics. But I would kind of like to be an archeologist or a layman.

STARLOG: You mean, you wouldn't write?

FARMER: Oh yeah, I would write. But I would have supported myself in other ways — working in a steel mill or in a dairy or as a tech writer. The idea is I would have a good profession, but at the same time, I would write just as I did when I worked in the steel mill. Evenings, weekdays and holidays, I was writing then.

If I had become a professor of anthropology, I probably would have worked on mainstream more. I have a natural tendency toward anthropology. I do an immense amount of reading on it. If I had gone in another direction, that's the direction. Strange customs and trying to reconstruct the past instead of the future.

 

STARLOG: That is the reverse of what you do. In Stations of Nightmare, you wrote, "People get the kind of science fiction writer they deserve." What did you mean and do you consider Philip José Farmer the kind of science fiction writer people deserve?

FARMER: I don't know. Maybe no one deserves that! [Laughs.] I had forgotten that quote. It was just one of these things I made up, didn't mean anything, except maybe to me. People's moods vary. Sometimes I'm pretty optimistic, sometimes pessimistic, even cynical. I recently read a book by Gary Wolfe, who's a teacher and one of the foremost science fiction literary critics. He pointed out something that I was probably subconsciously aware of, but didn't really know until he mentioned it. And that is the structuring effect that fans have on the science fiction writer because they expect certain types of science fiction. They reject anything outside that. That's probably the basis of that statement, which I made a long time before I ever read that and must have known unconsciously.

STARLOG: Do you still subscribe to that quote?

FARMER: Well, I think I broke free when I parted with Putnam's. At one point, my editors suggested it would be a good idea to dumb down my books. They were making the suggestion to other people. The present readers, they felt — they might not have been talking about the core fandom, but about the vast body of readers that we actually depend upon for a living — they felt they were illiterate and didn't catch the references to history or art. And I think that's true, too, because before they ever said that, if I made a literary reference, I would explain it. I really think that for the majority of my readers, it's necessary that I tell them what I'm talking about.

STARLOG: If they were going to burn every copy of your books, which ones would you rescue from the flames?

FARMER: I would stand there full of indecision and finally cast myself on the fire.

STARLOG: That's a great answer, but it doesn't satisfy the question.

FARMER: No, because it can't be satisfied. I just couldn't do it. I would burn myself up and solve the problem that way.

STARLOG: Well, let's turn the question around. Which ones would you happily burn?

FARMER: You mean my minor ones I might want to retire, which I'm actually trying to do right now? When they go out of print, I'm just going to keep them out.

STARLOG: Which ones are those? Why?

FARMER: Well, the ones that are not my best. They might be entertaining, like The Stone God Awakens and Cache From Outer Space, which I had entitled The Long Trail and [editor/publisher] Don Wollheim renamed Love Song, even though I still think that had some good psychological stuff in it. There are some others. I've written so many I can't remember them all. But I'm in the process, as they come out of print, of retiring them.

STARLOG: What's the point of that? If your readers want to read them, who are you to say that they aren't good books?

FARMER: Well, that's a good point. But I'm going to do it anyway! [Laughs.] I'll think about it.

STARLOG: Let's look back on some of your books. What do you think of them now? Let's start with Fire in the Night.

FARMER: On rereading it, I still think it was a good book. It was ahead of its time in regards to black-white relations. It was actually set in a steel mill based on the one I worked in Peoria. I've made a few proposals to get it reprinted, but now they say it has been done. But it hasn't. I have steeled myself to face the fact that it won't be reprinted.

STARLOG: Timestop?

FARMER: That's one of the books I was going to retire. Just didn't think it was up to my others. But like you say, who am I to judge? [Laughs.]

STARLOG: Dare!

FARMER: I kind of liked that when I first wrote it, but I don't know. I might retire that, too. It needs a sequel, but I'm not going to write it. I like the idea. The development was crude. I haven't read it in years.

STARLOG: Is it strange rereading your old work?

FARMER: Yeah, I read my earlier books and wish I had written them a little differently, more polished, more smooth. I see things I missed that I could have done.

STARLOG: If you could rewrite one book, which would it be?

FARMER: I can think of a number of them. [Laughs.] I guess people still like The Green Odyssey. I was thinking of retiring that, but I don't think I could, because I had so much fun writing it. And [Astounding editor] John Campbell turned it down for one of his own idiosyncratic reasons. He said, "Well, you portrayed essentially medieval people as dirty, uncivilized and barbaric, but you don't give them any credit for what they did in architecture and art." Well, that wasn't the book's point. So, I sent it to Ballantine and they took it. I had the satisfaction of holding a copy of it and walking past Campbell once, but he probably didn't remember! [Laughs.] It was a fun book and I liked the concept of the ship on wheels.

STARLOG: Let's continue. Flesh!

FARMER: I had fun writing it. That was the only one of the Galaxy Beacon stories that [editor] H.L. Gold felt compelled to censor. He cut out some parts. I'm lazy. I never got around to putting them back in. Maybe because I lost them.

STARLOG: Traitor to the Living!

FARMER: I would retire that. It was wide open for a sequel, but I'll never do it. Our hero ended up in a woman's body. Since then, others have taken up that theme.

STARLOG: Wind Whales of Ishmael?

FARMER: Drop that, too.

STARLOG: Many of your readers will be very unhappy. What about Night of Light!

FARMER: I would keep that. That's one of my favorites, especially the early part. The first section originally appeared as a magazine story. That's another series I never finished. I left Father John Carmody hanging up there in outer space with an egg growing from his chest. Planned at least two more stories. I have the idea for the next one, but never got around to it.

 

STARLOG: Jesus on Mars!

FARMER: I would like to see that reprinted. As a matter of fact, I would like to see it get some distribution. I can't get the rights back because it's hung up in the bankruptcy case with Pinnacle [which published it].

STARLOG: Have you retired The Mad Goblin/Lord of the Trees?

FARMER: No. That's the publishing world. I didn't want to retire that. I loved writing it. I want to finish the series.

STARLOG: What about Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life!

FARMER: It's retired right now. I want to revise it and correct some mistakes. The timing is perfect. I'll propose it, then we'll see.

STARLOG: Venus on the Half-Shell?

FARMER: I definitely want to keep that in print. I wrote it in six weeks and never had so much fun in all my life, except for The Adventure of the Peerless Peer. There are philosophical implications in there that are quite serious. Again, it's because I had so much fun writing it.

STARLOG: Many people still don't know you wrote Venus on the Half-Shell, which appeared under Kilgore Trout's name.

 

FARMER: It's really a Farmerian book. If Kurt Vonnegut had refused to let me write it as Kilgore Trout, I would have written it anyway under my own name because it did not really depend on Kilgore Trout. I just wrote it as I thought Kilgore Trout would have — minus the bad grammar and spelling mistakes! [Laughs.]

STARLOG: What prompted you to pastiche a living writer like Vonnegut?

FARMER: At that time, I was a great admirer of Vonnegut's works— and I still am of his earlier stuff — but there was a scene in his God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, where the shyster is at this airport stand and he picks up one of Trout’s books, and it was the only one that didn’t explain the plot. It had a blurb on the back page from the text, a picture of the author and one passage, a couple of paragraphs. And I got to thinking, most people would think Trout is entirely fictional. Now wouldn’t it blow their minds if a novel by him appeared, one that was already named in one of Vonnegut’s books? It took me a year to convince Vonnegut, and then I wrote it. Then, he got pissed off because so many people thought he had written it. Some people said it was Vonnegut. Some people said it was Philip Dick. Some people thought it was Barry Malzberg because in the beginning, the hero and the girl friend are having sex and not enjoying it, and that’s typical of Marlzberg! [Laughs.] [Since this interview—prompted by interviewer Will Murray’s evident horror at Farmer’s plan to “retire” certain books—Farmer has changed his mind. He informed STARLOG shortly before presstime that he’s going to keep as many novels available as possible, letting readers decide if they’re as good as other Farmer books.]

STARLOG: If you were asked to make up a suggested Philip José Farmer reading list of, say, six titles, which would you select?

FARMER: Let me see. For humor, Venus on the Half-Shell. That represents one range. Lord Tyger. Let’s exclude the two biographies. You know, I’ve written 65 books! [Chuckles.] Of course, many of them are collections of short stories. The collection called Riverworld and Other Stories or The Book of Philip José Farmer. I don’t know. Or maybe The Grand Adventure from Byron Preiss. Probably The Unreasoning Mask, which didn’t seem to do well, even though many critics thought it was one of my best. It was one of my favorites. It's hard to think of a lot of them. Damn! Even I can't remember all of my books! [Chuckles.] Either one of the first two Riverworlds — probably To Your Scattered Bodies Go. It's too bad The Fabulous Riverboat wasn't printed with it in one volume, because I like that, too. I hate to eliminate any of the World of Tiers. I might, on reconsideration, change [the list].

STARLOG: What happened to your planned novelization of Fantastic Voyage II!

FARMER: That deal was the one that fell through and almost wrecked my career again. NAL was going to put up about a million bucks. Isaac Asimov didn't want to do it, so I was suggested. I thought it would be a great idea. I wrote the novel, did a vast amount of research in anatomy and physiology for it. The basic idea was provided by Jerome Bixby who wrote a treatment for a screenplay. I was supposed to more or less follow that. It became obvious after I had written it that NAL was getting cold feet. They still had me do a rewrite. I was halfway through that when I talked with the editor who was very cold and distant. I felt something was going on, but I had to finish it. And they rejected it. They didn't want anything more to do with the deal or anybody. So, I think they were sinking too much money into it. Anyway, the movie company was going to get another publisher. This went on for a long time and we went through some agonizing things. I would have made a lot of money on it. I did it as a writer for hire, not on my own. I took an initial advance, but that was it. And as far as I know, that novel may never be published. Doubleday and the movie company both have the rights and they're thinking about not publishing it, or using it for the movie's basis. Ike Asimov [who wrote another sequel Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain] read it and said, "Great. Go ahead and publish it." So, it's hung up.

STARLOG: There isn't some way you could rewrite it and salvage it?

FARMER: No. There are some ideas I would like to use as short stories, but my agent said, "No, don't do it," because legally, they have the rights to everything in it. I lost two years and went through a lot of spiritual and emotional agony. It plunged me into a depression and gave me a lack of confidence, even though logically, I know it shouldn't. Authors, writers, painters are funny people. Temperamentally unstable. This was so big and reminded me of that Korshak deal. They weren't trying to cheat me, they just wanted to cancel. I put a lot of time in there, writing and rewriting. It reminded me of the Korshak deal because he had me writing and rewriting a book that didn't need to be rewritten, wasn't supposed to be rewritten.

STARLOG: Korshak?

FARMER: This was the Shasta International Fantasy Award Contest, back in '52, right after The Lovers came out.

STARLOG: Oh, right. Your prototype Riverworld novel won and was going to be published by Shasta, except they went bankrupt. There was a sort of lost period in your career due to that debacle.

FARMER: I had become a fulltime writer and I couldn't write anything else because he had me rewriting this thing. I wasn't getting any money. Finally, when it all broke loose, I still continued to be a fulltime writer. But we were too far behind with debts. So, even though I wrote some stories before I went back to work, it wasn't enough.

STARLOG: That must have been tough, since you thought you had put the working world behind you.

FARMER: Yeah, especially after 13 years in the steel mill! [Laughs.] I worked as a common laborer in a milk dairy. Then, I was able to get a job as a tech writer up in Syracuse, New York, with GE. On the basis that I was a college graduate and I wrote science fiction, they assumed I knew a lot about electronics. I studied while I was working and kept one step ahead of the job. By the time I quit tech writing, I knew a lot!

STARLOG: You have one of the most boundless and unfettered imaginations in the field. Where does it come from?

FARMER: Well, it's difficult to explain. I think that some people are born with more extensive, wilder imaginations than others. I just happen to be born with it. None of my brothers or sisters have it.

STARLOG: I understand you get many of your ideas from dreams.

FARMER: Well, "Sail On! Sail On!" was originally from a dream I had in '52 in which I saw a caravel of Prince John the Navigator sailing along. On the poop deck was a radio shack with a man in a monk's robe with earphones. He had a crystal set, a gap transmitter, and he was tapping out a message. I got to thinking about that dream, and so I wrote "Sail On, Sail On!" only I changed it so that it was Columbus' fleet that was setting out and the radio operator was a monk of the order of St. Francis and he was transmitting a call for help. In the story, they actually sailed over the edge of the Earth because it was flat.

STARLOG: What other stories or novels derive from dreams?

 

FARMER: For Dayworld, the original of the short story that formed the series' basis is very funny. It didn't seem to have any connection to my ideas later. I was pushing through the mists — in many of my dreams, I start out in a mist or fog and emerge into the open— and I emerged into a jungle and there was a little native village there. And in the doorway of each of these round bamboo huts were these tall, thin, gaunt blue-skinned natives. They all looked like they were dead, but they were still moving. Then, I woke up. Somehow, my mind leaped to the idea for ''The Sliced-Crosswise-Only-on-Tuesday World" where population and pollution problems are solved by dividing the world into sevenths. On one day, say Monday, the population which had been in suspended animation, would come to life and live that day. Close to midnight they would go back, and Tuesday would take over. That was the basis for that idea, but it's hard to see the connection. Except they were standing in the doorway, which may correspond to the cylinders in the story, and they were dead but they could move.

STARLOG: Did the World of Tiers series come out of a dream?

FARMER: I'm glad you asked that. I thought of the original idea when I was still going to high school. Never did anything with it then. It was an artificial pocket universe in which there was one Babylonian-shaped planet. I don't know whether I thought it up and wrote it down or had a dream about it. Anyway, the hero, Kickaha, was originally an American Indian, and he was going along the edge of the world there. He had all sorts of adventures which I wrote down in a notebook, which I don't have anymore. But I never forgot the idea. So, many, many years later, I incorporated it into The Makers of Universes, only this time, Kickaha was an American youth who came back from World War II, a Hoosier, same initials as mine. Paul Janus Finnegan, or Kickaha, is what I would like to be, but am not. Riverworld's Peter Jairus Frigate is more like I am, although I'm somewhere between the two. More closer to Frigate than Finnegan, unfortunately. [Laughs.] The whole idea derives from something I had written in '35 or '36.

I finally decided I would write the story, and I did. It wasn't until the third novel, A Private Cosmos, that I got the idea of incorporating it into William Blake's didactic and symbolic work. I never said anything about the connection, but people who knew these works, and there aren't too many, could tell from the names of some of the Lords that they were derived from Blake. Then, I started shaping the connections between them, which will be revealed in the last World of Tiers series, which is also mentioned in Red Orc's Rage.

STARLOG: How many further World of Tiers novels are planned?

FARMER: In a sense, this mainstream novel, Red Orc's Rage, is a World of Tiers novel. But I plan one or two more. If I can finish it up in the next one, OK. If not, two more. I will tackle that first chance I get. I get more mail on the Worlds of Tiers series than on Riverworld.

STARLOG: What will the final World of Tiers novel be called?

FARMER: It originally was The Garden of Evil, though I may write one before that. I think the next one will be Kickaha's World, and then The Garden of Evil. Unless I decide to incorporate them and make one novel and just finish it.

STARLOG: Are you under contract to do either of those?

FARMER: No. I haven't proposed them yet. I'll probably have to write Red Orc's Rage if I get a contract for that. But I first have got to write the Doc Savage novel. Maybe I can finish something in my life! [Laughs.] ✩

 

THE IDENTICAL Film Review

THE IDENTICAL
★★ out of ★★★★★

I walked into this one blissfully unaware of anything other than that it was a movie about an identical twin of an Elvis knock-off.  What I got was one of those rare gems of a movie so awful but just ever so clumsily earnest that it deserves to be seen by those with an ironic sense of humor.  I could almost call it an instant ironic cult classic.  Now it’s primary target audience, which is clearly supposed to be the same Christian audience who church out en masse to any movie marketed as “faith-based”, but those who are going to appreciate the true entertainment value are going to be those of us who can humorously appreciate a serious effort by the clueless.

There’s so much about this, that I don’t even know where to start other than a quick synopsis.  THE IDENTICAL is essentially a “what if?” story that asks “What if Elvis Presley’s twin brother had not actually died as an infant but rather been given away and raised by another family?” However, in this movie, the pastiche of Elvis (The King) Presley is “Drexell (The Dream) Hemsley”  and his secret twin brother is “Ryan (The Identical) Wade.”  Both Drexell and Ryan are portrayed by Elvis impersonator Ryan Pelton now relaunching himself with this film as a Christian singer named Blake Rayne.   As a work of speculative fiction, this actually has the potential for a really good story.  This film is not it, but it does have its own charm, which I will get into in a bit.

The beginning of the film is set during the Great Depression when a young couple, the Hemsleys, give birth to twins.  They cannot afford to feed four mouths and at a Tent Revival, the father believes God to be telling him to give one of his sons to the childless traveling Evangelist and his barren wife.  This way he knows his son, Dexter Ryan, will be raised by Godly parents.  Reverend Wade promises not to tell Ryan he was adopted until both his birth parents have passed away and he dedicates the boy to God. Fast forward to Ryan’s childhood and you see the Reverend believing and pushing Ryan towards the ministry but Ryan clearly does not have the knack for it, but he certainly has a knack for singing and tapping his feet to the beat.  Fast forward to Ryan’s teens and the good-hearted, but slightly rebellious son keeps slipping out to the rhythm and blues “honky tonks” on the wrong side of the tracks where he is drawn to the music but doesn’t know why.  In all this though, he never drinks alcohol or smokes cigarettes.  See? He’s rebellious but not bad.  He’s rebellious because his call is to music but his dad keeps pushing him to follow in his steps as a minister.

Over the course of the rest of the film, it tracks along with Drexell’s career and Ryan’s purposeless and meandering adult life as he tries to just plug on through but cannot seem to nail down what he’s supposed to do.  And, of course, it doesn’t help that everyone is always carrying on about how much he looks like Drexell Hemsley.  It is Ryan’s wife who knows that the only fulfillment her husband will feel is going to be on stage and creating music and she encourages him to try out for a Drexell look-alike/sound-alike contest, which, of course, he wins.  And from there he builds his own career as a Drexell knock-off, which has its own ups and downs.  In the end, the resolution revolves around him accepting himself for who he is and just doing what he loves to do, not for the money or the fame but because it’s what he is supposed to do.  He finds his purpose and place and happiness finally in the end.

On the positive side, the movie has a good heart to it.  It has a nice message, although it gets convoluted.  The guy playing Ryan is about as good an actor as Elvis was, so there’s almost a point where you think it’s an intentionally meta thing.   But it’s not.  He’s just not an actor, but he has to carry the whole film.  Thankfully, he is kind of likeable – in a schlubby kind of way and there are times where he looks uncannily like Elvis.  He does a decent singing impression too.  The odd thing about that is that…IT’S NOT ELVIS.   Since it’s not Elvis, why make the character sound like him to such an extent?  I had almost bought into the idea that this is an alternate universe type of thing and that would explain it, but then they tossed in a throw-away line referencing Elvis and the Beatles and that brought the entire Drexell Hemsley concept crashing down.  That was a huge mistake.  Drexell and Elvis could not co-exist like that and be believable, and that’s when my strained commitment to the story started totally unraveling.

At that point I was there primarily for Ray Liotta who gives a fantastic and moving performance throughout the entire film.  His Reverend Wade grounds the film in his emotional reality and helps you forget the other nonsense because every time they cut back to him, he is authentically in the moment emotionally and you buy into the reality.  Ashley Judd is one-note, but nice, as Liotta’s wife and Ryan’s mom.  Joe Pantoliano slums it here as a car mechanic, mentor, and friend to Ryan.  And I don’t know what the hell Seth Green is in this movie for!  He plays a childhood friend of Ryan’s and really just…I just don’t know.  The rest of the film is populated with oddly out of place and amateurish actors – most notably the guy with the pompadour who plays Ryan’s manager.  He is laughably awful and needs more work.  He should star in SHARKNADO 3 but I suspect he doesn’t realize he’s bad.  He came off like he thinks he is a master thespian.  Yeah. One of those.

There are also some truly odd things just tossed into the film blender that had absolutely no bearing to the story.  There’s some bizarre Zionist bent that’s like pro-Israel bumper stickers on a car.  I’m not against bringing in the idea that Ryan’s birth parents were a Christian father and a Jewish mother.  It just seems like there should be an explanation of why that matters rather than just making the statement as if it has some great meaning.  As well, a character points out that both Drexell and Ryan wear a Jewish “Chai” symbol as a pendant necklace.  However, there’s no explanation for the fact that the “Chai” symbol means “life”.  I had to look that up afterwards.   And I’m still not exactly sure of the significance to the story but the characters acted like it meant something.  And most inexplicable was that during the 60s montage, they completely skipped over…oh…the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy’s assassination, Viet-Nam, MLK’s assassination, but stopped the movie completely to focus on news reports about the 6-Day War in Israel and even cut to Reverend Wade giving an impassioned sermon calling for another Hannukah miracle for Israel.

It was all quite bizarre.

Another amusing tidbit that finally drove home to me the reality that all I was watching was an extended promotional peace for “something” was the scene where Ryan finally has written, recorded, and pressed his own original album of songs under his own name.  He takes it to a record company called “City of Peace Productions” and has an exchange there where the white-haired producer tells him his song “City Lights” (imagine it in the style of the “In the Ghetto” era for Elvis) is a guaranteed hit and offers him lots of cash to buy the song so that Drexell Hemsley can record it.  Then I remembered that when the movie started and they flashed the logo for the production company that made the movie, it was called “City of Peace” replete with another Hebrew symbol (I don't think it's the "Chai" as it looks different from the pendant) prominently displayed.  Then afterwards when I went online I discovered that, yes, City of Peace is producing “Blake Rayne” as a recording artist and they are planning to release “City of Lights” as a single.

It’s an awful movie, to be sure, but there’s something actually charming in its awfulness and in its deliberately crass attempt at marketing and pushing some vague Messianic-Jewish agenda.  For at least the first half of the movie I thought it was self-aware in the way it was replicating the naïve low-brow charm of the early Elvis movies, but as it went on I realized it was clear that the director simply doesn’t seem to really understand the difference between those films and reality.  So, it’s a different type of naiveté and there’s an amateurish charm to that.

One last thing, by removing Elvis and his songs from the equation, they also remove all the sexual implications and naughtiness of those early rock-n-roll songs and give us these cleaned up knock-offs like “Boogie Woogie Rock-N-Roll” and “Bee-Boppin’ Baby,” neither of which would have likely gotten much air play back in the day.  At the same time that they are attempting to market the entire film and music off of completely ripping off Elvis and his music, they fail to achieve anything substantively successful by their utter lack of charismatic energy and understanding of what made Elvis, well, “The King.”

And that should really tell you just about all you need to know.

CHEF and MALEFICENT Reviews!

CHEF
★★★★1/2 out of ★★★★★

Very succinctly, this is the most charming and legitimately funny comedy so far this year.

I don't want to say too much about this one because I just want everyone to go see it and enjoy it like I did. This movie is so perfectly put together that watching it is like sitting down to a full course dinner topped with a nice after-dinner wine.

Chef Carl Caspar has spent the last 10 years of his career subjugating his own dreams and desires to the over-controlling owner of a posh Los Angeles restaurant. In this metaphor for everyone else's mid-life crises, we watch his career (and self-confidence) implode as he is pushed to rediscover his passion and his true self. His path to fullness is paralleled in a food truck trek across the country with his son, who he had previously been at best an absentee dad after his divorce.

Along the way we are inundated with real belly laughs that arise out of honest circumstances and true character moments. Damaged relationships are repaired and the path to happiness is restored as a hard truth takes hold: Happiness and satisfaction will always elude those who never pursue their dreams.

Also, there is absolutely no way to walk out of this movie without a craving for a Cubano sandwich. Thankfully, we have an excellent foot truck in Austin, Texas that serves Cubanos.

One other note, I went to see this film at a local theater in Austin and I wish that director and star Jon Favreau could've been in there because the audience was enthralled. They were interactive and reactive through out the entire film and especially when the road trip made its way into Austin and the truck pulled up to Austin's famous Franklin's Barbeque (voted best barbeque in the entire country by The Foodist at Bon Appetit). There were cheers and whoops of enthusiasm throughout the entire Austin segment.

This movie exemplifies so much of what is missing from so many Hollywood-based comedies. There is a renaissance of independent film happening right now and if you aren't seeking out gems like this you are missing out. You want more? How about Dustin Hoffman, Scarlett Johansson, John Lequizamo, and Robert Downey Jr.? If that doesn't get you in the door then I dunno what else to say.

‪#‎chef‬

MEMORIAL DAY 7-FILM MINI-REVIEW ROUND-UP!

 

MEMORIAL DAY 7-FILM MINI-REVIEW ROUND-UP:

X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST

★★★★ out of ★★★★★

The first fully-realized X-Men movie that finally takes its cues from the successful Marvel Studios AVENGERS franchise and successfully adapts a clas...sic storyline from the comics. Surprisingly smart and deftly shifts in tone and pacing between the decades. Best of all, director Bryan Singer did something that the directing of Amazing Spider-Man 2 should take a cue from -- he lets the character moments breathe and allows the actors to do their thing. When you surround the story with actors of the caliber miraculously assembled for this film, you better damn well let them act.

The heart of the film is the younger version of Xavier, who has lost his sense of purpose at that point in his life. Most interesting of all was the emphasis on Mystique/Raven who becomes the singular most important mutant on Earth and whose actions lead to the dystopian deadly future (10 years from now) the X-Men are trying to prevent from coming into being by sending Wolverine's mind back in time to his younger body.

Much has been made about the "reset switch" ending, but even without spoilering the details on that, I have to admit that I am completely okay with it. I have always enjoyed the X-Men films but they have suffered from a lack of cohesion and long-term vision. The benefit this film has is that now Marvel Studios has demonstrated that you can approach these super-hero franchise films with an eye towards building a larger universe and with longterm planning. It does not completely remove the other films from continuity for without them occurring, then the events that happened to rewrite history would never have happened. So, they are important pieces of a future that will never happen now (or will be different).

FIRST CLASS plus this film set up a future successful franchise with a closer adherence to the spirit of the comics themselves and I am glad to see it. This was a movie that was a hell of a lot better than it had any right to be.

#xmendaysoffuturepast

THE GERMAN DOCTOR

★★★★ out of ★★★★★
 

A chilling Argentinian film (with subtitles) about the infamous psychopathic Nazi "Angel of Death" Josef Mengele after he escaped to Argentina after World War 2. The story itself is fictional but it is wrapped up in actual history, specifically about a female Nazi hunter working for the Mossad who tracked Mengele down to Argentina around 1960 and was found dead after Mengele escaped capture.

The film is about a young family who open up a lodging home in the mountains so that the artisan father can focus on his baby doll design work. Their oldest daughter is a teenager who has a genetic disorder preventing her from progressing into puberty at a normal pace. A mysterious, but charming, German Doctor comes to stay at their lodge and becomes interested in her and her family. As he over-involves himself in their lives he becomes somewhat obsessed while crafting a co-dependency between all of them.

What makes this film so chilling is the charismatically charming performance of Àlex Brendemühl as Mengele. He captures the mind of a true psychopath replete with the magnetism and cold, but not dangerous demeanor. When things fall apart and his self-control begins to slip so we catch glimpses of the evil in him it is both fascinating and repulsive. We hate ourselves for liking him and getting drawn into his web.

An excellent film that just flows smoothly like a well-written novel.

 #thegermandoctor

NEIGHBORS

★ out of ★★★★★
 

There is nothing redeeming in this film. It only earns 1 star because there are a couple of laugh-out-loud slapstick moments. The movie assumes that every person on the planet is just a huge pile of excrement with no value, no morals, and no character.

The two worst parents on the planet suffer the indignity of having the worst fraternity on the planet move next door. What follows is just a series of patently unfunny bullshit in which I wanted to call CPS on them after the third or fourth time that their baby was simply left at home alone in her crib all night.

Revolting.
#neighbors

ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE

★★★1/2 out of ★★★★★
 

Fascinating vampire movie by director Jim Jarmusch and starring Tom Hiddleston, Tilda Swinton, and John Hurt. Really, that pedigree is enough to justify going to see this one.

It's slow-moving and eccentric. It felt less like a vampire movie and more like one of those odd little short stories you get in the occasional vampire anthology book. It really is not about vampires but is using vampires as a plot device to comment on the human condition. It's no mistake that Hiddleston's character is holed up a decaying brick home in the abandoned urban Detroit area. The modern decay is reflective of his own spiritual decay.

The movie is not "beautiful", but there is dark beauty in it. It is mostly absurdly funny in the blackest of black comedic ways. I enjoyed the love between Adam (Hiddleston) and Eve (Swinton) and it was interesting to see how they were stronger together than apart.

This film is not going to set the world on fire, but it is definitely worth your investment of time if you get a chance.

#onlyloversleftalive

THE RETRIEVAL

★★★★★ out of ★★★★★
 

One of the best films of the year. It's a gut-wrenching film set during the Civil War with a young black boy who is used by a white Bounty Hunter gang to retrieve escaped slaves and bring them back for a fee.

He gets sent, with his unscrupulous uncle, to retrieve a freed slave for a huge retrieval fee but over the course of long trek back they bond together and the boy is put in an excruciatingly difficult position.

The directing and the acting in this movie are fantastic and emotionally real. It is painful to watch at times but only because you, as the viewer, are so caught up in the boy Will (Ashton Sanders) and his youthful guilt and shame. He is being forced to grow up faster than his heart and mind can keep up.

Highly recommended.

#theretrieval

PARTICLE FEVER

★★★★ out of ★★★★★
 

Very simply the best documentary about the launch of the Large Hadron Collider you'll probably ever see.

For a science nerd like me, I couldn't really ask for more. The film follows the lengthy years-long process of getting the Collider built, and the key scientists involved in it. Before long, and through some quite clever opportunities for explanations to us lay-people, we find ourselves emotionally caught up in the moment when they finally discovered the almost mythical Higgs boson (or God Particle).

If you just said to yourself "What's the Higgs boson?" then I suggest you should be required to watch this movie. You can thank me later.

#particlefever

TRANSCENDENCE

★ out of ★★★★★
 

One of the worst films I've seen this year. It makes the fatal flaw of being relentlessly boring and just plain stupid.

This emotionally overwrought sci-fi flick just makes poor story choices after poor story choices after poor story choices in an attempt to engage us in its cautionary tale of the Singularity -- when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence. In this case, it starts with the death of a visionary scientist played by Johnny Depp whose brain patterns were captured and incorporated into a computer program.

As he evolves, all manner of stupid stuff happens. The movie also stars Paul Bettany, Amy Adams, and Morgan Freeman but they're all wasted on a ridiculous script saying obscenely stupid dialogue. Really, don't waste your time on this one unless you need something to help you battle insomnia.

#transcendence

GODZILLA Review

GODZILLA

Giant monsters tearing up Japan, Hawaii, and San Francisco with crazy good special effects.  That's about all you need to know in this reboot of the GODZILLA franchise for the American stage.

Apparently there is a huge Godzilla fan community locally because when we went to see this movie Thursday night the theater was a sell-out crowd (98% male) full of vocal Godzilla fans.  They gave a lot of loud "in the know" vocal reactions to the basically familiar Godzilla tropes that appeared in film including the use of a silly acronym like M.U.T.O. (massive unidentified terrestrial organism) to give us a name for the new monsters that battle the massive behemoth.
They also erupted into a huge round of applause at the end.

That definitely made for an...interesting movie-going experience.  My background with Godzilla is really just that I used to watch the movies on TV when I was a kid and I've gone to see GODZILLA 1995, GODZILLA (1998), and GODZILLA 2000 in the theaters.  Essentially, the basic set up for most of them (in my memory) is that (a) in 1954 Godzilla tore up Japan then disappeared (b) new monster(s) appear and start tearing things up (c) the humans somehow pull Godzilla into the mix to kill the other monster(s) (d) in the end, the grateful humans look on as Godzilla disappears into the deep waters of the Pacific Ocean.

So, essentially this is every other Godzilla movie ever made but with substantially better structure and effects (and star power) than ever before.  However, they still did that one thing that drives me crazy about every giant monster movie these days (JURRASIC PARK to PACIFIC RIM and every monster flick in between) is that they couch much of the monster f/x in the middle of a rainstorm.  Time for that cliche' to be done.  But make no mistake, I thought the monster f/x was incredibly well-done.  Godzilla has never looked better and the Mutos were outstanding as well.  The idea of a radioactively mutated bug species that consumes radiation and defensively set loose a pwerful EMP (electromagnetic pulse) worked quite well in updating the idea of monsters for 2014.

The opening sequence, set 15 years ago, with Bryan Cranston and his wife, Juliette Binoche, effectively established an emotional connection to the monster dramatics that kicked of the movie quite well.  In fact, the film might be criticized for it's over-emphasis on the human drama to the point of downplaying the Godzilla stuff a bit.  However, the biggest fault for this film in doing that was refocusing the film's narrative off of Cranston when it shifts to the modern day and onto Aaron Taylor Johnson who plays Cranston's now grown son.  I wonder if the filmmakers' choice of "Brody" as their surname was an insider's nod to Sheriff Brody of JAWS fame. 

There was something emotionally lacking in Johnson's performance, which prevents the emotional resonance of Cranston's obsessively emotional overload.  A balance between the two of them would have been better for the film, which is interesting considering the approach to the monster they have chosen for this reboot.

In this version of Godzilla, he is a force of nature.  He exists merely to rise up when needed and in a predatory way chase, confront, and battle whatever new monster(s) that appears and upsets the natural balance of co-existence.  The King of the Monsters is apparently the only monster the earth can support. 

It's all quite absurd and full of entirely preposterous coincidences to make sure that Johnson's character is always right there with the action.  In a film like this, that's just part of my expectations going in.  Ken Watanabe's scientist character, Dr. Serizawa, is completely wasted in what could have, and should have been, an integral role in dealing with these monsters.  Maybe it was the filmmakers' way of making sure we understood quite clearly that this is going to be an American franchise. I don't know.  It's not a dealbreaker, but it was disappointing.

Overall though, I would say (as a friend well-described it) this is an A-version of a B-movie.  It really is, for me, the "greatest" GODZILLA movie ever. That doesn't make it a great movie but it certainly makes it the greatest of the GODZILLA movies.

★★★1/2 out of ★★★★★

#godzilla

THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2 Film Review

THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2

I laughed; I cried; I cringed.  AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2 is a mixed bag that I mostly enjoyed a lot.  The biggest stumbling block to reaching it's goal lay in absolutely everything in it relating to the primary villain, Electro.  Before I talk about what they did right, I'm going to talk about Electro because Electro is so awful that had they not gotten Spider-Man so absolutely perfectly this film might have killed the entire franchise like Schwartzenegger's turn as Mr. Freeze in BATMAN AND ROBIN.

There was not one thing that worked with Electro, even the special effects stank on ice.  While the cgi Spidey was indistinguishable from the live-action Spidey, everytime Electro was cgi it was on par with a sub-standard video game.  But that's not the least of the problems with Electro.  As established early on in the film, electrical engineer Max Dillon (Jamie Foxx) is a clown.  He smacks of the caricaturish performance of Jim Carrey as The Riddler in BATMAN FOREVER.  In fact, it almost seemed like it was an ill-conceived homage.

Max's life is saved by Spider-Man and, reacting like some mentally defective man-child, he convinces himself he's Spidey's best friend and has imaginary conversations with him in his apartment.  All the while slapstickey musical cues play every time he's on screen.  Max claims to have invented the entire power grid system for New York City; the power grid being a product of his employer OsCorp, of course.  However, there is no way that we can believe that this cartoonish imbecile could have done that, and especially not within the context in which nobody at OsCorp even knows he exists.  There is such a thing as being a cog in the corporate machine, but there is no way the person we have met has ever been given that sort of position.  In fact, he is treated more like a janitor than an engineer.  It all really makes no sense.  And the circumstances that lead to his accident giving him electrical powers also makes no sense. 

This film, and this particular series, makes such efforts to lend some level of scientific believability to the fantastic.  In fact, the underlying subplot of Peter Parker's father's scientific experiments are deliberately laid out for us over this and the previous film so we believe it is entirely possible for a man to have gained the powers of a spider.  The same goes for the Lizard in the first film and the Goblin and the Rhino in this film.  But for Max becoming Electro, there is no logical basis for it.  An introverted nerd gets massively electrocuted and then falls into a vat of electric eels who shock and bite him.  And the powers he gains aren't the powers of eels. He gains the power to drain all electricity and power himself up like a battery.  He gains the ability to turn completely into electricity and then miraculously reform into a solid body -- and retain his clothes.  Even in the world of super-heroes, this becomes a stretch when, again, there is such an effort to attach a rational basis for buying into the fantastic.

The biggest problem beyond all the illogic and absurdity is the wholesale personality change in the character.  They hint that there's some sort of rage enhancing aspect to his powers, but that does not explain his total loss of inhibition, his sudden rise in the ability to communicate coherently, and most of all his intelligence.  Whereas before the accident he claimed to be smart but conducted himself like an idiot who hero-worshipped Spider-Man, now he is conducting himself like a super-smart villain who wants to kill Spider-Man for, y'know, taking him down after he destroyed Times Square. 
Oh yeah, they also added some goofy distortion to Electro's voice which made him sound ridiculous and hard to understand.  Put him in a room with Bane and you'd need subtitles to figure out what they were saying to each other.  Also, after Max turns into Electro they shift from his slapstick musical cues to some odd urban gangsta sound along with what sounded like Max muttering to himself inside his head.  However, once again, it was so muddled I couldn't really understand much of it.  Dr. Kafka, who tortures Max at the Ravencroft Institute for the Criminally Insane is also a ridiculous over-the-top cartoon better suited for a MAD Magazine parody than a serious film.
So, bottom line, Electro sucks and he sucks bad.  And that's unfortunate for the film because he's in it for a good portion.

HOWEVER....

There has never been a more perfect presentation of Spider-Man himself onscreen ever before.  You will absolutely believe a man can websling.  I loved his bantering and joking.  His attitude is perfectly in the spirit of the character.  Spidey's interactions with the police and especially the people on the streets is flawless.  Both the Batman and Superman franchises could learn a lot from this film's efforts at showing the lengths a true super-hero will go to save even one innocent life.
The movie picks up with Peter and Gwen's graduation from high school and the events of the film play out over the summer, and thankfully, it looks like a mild summer for NYC.  The soap opera aspect of Pete and Gwen's relationship felt real.  At times, it was overwrought, but we are talking about 18 year-olds.  They tend to have these dramatic bents to their relationships.  I believed it.  I also believed in them as two young adults deeply in love with one another but caught in an untenable set of circumstances.  "It's complicated" is an understatement.

There's mystery and intrigue with a flashback sequence with Pete's parents where we do find out what happened after they disappeared (as shown in the first film).  There's a reunion and trauma surrounding the return of Pete's childhood buddy, Harry Osborn.  The relationship with Harry might have benefited, emotionally for the viewer, if it had been allowed to have been developed over 2 films rather than crammed into one, but it mostly works.  Paul Giamatti's "Rhino" character serves mostly a purpose at giving us a glimpse of the future path of the films. Since Sony recently announced a "Sinister Six" spin-off film on the horizon, this is no surprise.  We get a tease of J. Jonah Jameson at the Daily Bugle and will surely see him in all his glory in the next film.  Suck it up guys and get J.K. Simmons back for that.

For me, Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone are the heart of the film and their struggles and pains are what I feel -- especially Pete's.  We are rooting for them to succeed and when they don't, it hurts.  We are privy to what the world around Pete does not see.  They see Spider-Man and assign all their confidence and hope in him.  Behind the mask we see a young man struggling to do what's right and figure out how to love and be vulnerable to the possibility of hurt.  "How can I love?" may be the second most common story theme after "Who am I?"  So, it makes sense to follow up the first film's theme with that.  The set-up is there for the next film and beyond and I am ready to see what happens next.

Unfortunately, Electro will forever be a pockmark on an otherwise excellent film.

★★★1/2 out of ★★★★★

#amazingspiderman2