TV Review: The Man in the High Castle Season 1 (2015)

The Man in the High Castle Season 1 (2015) developed by Frank Spotnitz from the novel by Philip K. Dick

The year is 1962. The place is America. The history is all wrong. The Axis Powers won World War II and have divided the defeated United States between them. Japan governs the country west of the Rocky Mountains. German governs the country east of the Rockies. A Neutral Zone lies between. All hope is not lost. Resistance movements exist in the Japanese Pacific States and the Greater Nazi Reich. Both sides have been sending contraband films into the Neutral Zone, delivering them to the enigmatic Man in the High Castle through a series of contacts. One such film comes from New York City just as the Nazis are busting in on a resistance cell. Joe Blake drives a truck out of the city with a film hidden underneath. Meanwhile, Trudy Crain in the west coast resistance plans to take a copy of the same film from San Francisco to Canon City in the Neutral Zone. She is caught and shot but not before she can pass the film to her sister, Juliana, who takes up her sister's mission through some unfortunate consequences. More unfortunate consequences follow for her family and her boyfriend and his family. All the while, the Nazis and the Kempeitai (the Japanese version of the Gestapo) plot to retrieve the films. They also plot against each other since both the Japanese emperor and Adolf Hitler are aging and seemingly on their way out. The power vacuum could spark a much larger conflict.

If all this isn't complicated enough, what the films depict is more strange--an alternate reality where the Allies have won the war. A strange, almost impossible hope is hinted at. Naturally the Nazis and the Japanese want to suppress that. But not all the Nazis and Japanese are on board with their oppressive regimes. Plenty of conflicts arise.

The story is very fascinating and well-realized in this TV series. Fallen America has a sheen of German and Japanese culture. Navigating this multicultural minefield is tricky for Juliana and Joe. They have very different motivations and struggle with how far they will go to achieve their ends. The writing is very good and the production values are stellar. The actors are very believable and the characters, even the evil ones, have plenty of nuance and three-dimensionality.

Highly recommended.

Parental warning: The show contains occasional graphic violence as well as depictions and discussions of Nazi eugenics and other atrocities. The nudity is very minimal with hardly any sex. The language is mildly R-rated--there's at least one f-bomb per episode, but not many overall.

Book Review: Black Panther The Complete Collection Vol. 1 by C. Priest et al.

Black Panther: The Complete Collection Volume 1 written by Christopher Priest and art by Joe Quesada, Mark Texeira, Vince Evans, Joe Jusko, Mike Manley, and others

Wakanda is an African kingdom about the size of New Jersey and is also the home of the only known deposit of vibranium, the metal from which Captain America's shield is made. The country is a mix of extreme wealth and technology along with tribal customs and social structures. The king, T'Challa, is head of the Panther Clan and thereby the Black Panther. His leadership abilities are enhanced by an herbal concoction that increases his strength and his senses. His outfit uses vibranium to make him more invulnerable and he has some high tech gadgets (like the Kimoyo Card that lets him access other technologies) too. His body guard, the Dora Milaje, are two young women taken from Wakandan tribes and are being groomed as potential spouses as well as providing sidekick action support.

Set in the 1990s, this new series (at least it was new in 1998) features Black Panther in some challenging adventures. He's come back to New York from Wakanda to fix a bad situation--the poster child of a charity he supports has been killed. His absence from Wakanda was orchestrated by forces determined to take his throne. The situation is further complicated by his U.S. handler, Everett K. Ross, a young white guy who narrates most of the story to his American boss. Ross is full of pop culture references and tells the most exciting parts of the story first, frustrating his boss, who is secretly in love with the Black Panther ever since their college days. Ross gets tangled up in the story and has adventures of his own while he supports his client, Black Panther, to get America's interests advanced.

The story itself is interesting and has plenty of action. The deliberately choppy narrative I found annoying even as I saw its purpose in an issue-by-issue story arc (this book contains 17 comic-books' worth of issues, so almost a year and half in publishing time). The pop culture references are twenty years old and they have not aged well. Most of the comic relief is based on those references, so the book is not as fun as it once was. The political situation is interesting. T'Challa plenty to do resolving conflicts with the United States and with factions at home. Other superheroes make appearances that fit naturally into the story (except for the two issues with the Hulk) and give a sense of the bigger picture within which Black Panther is operating.

Black Panther is an interesting character. He's no-nonsense and direct in his actions. His honesty is refreshing, even when it doesn't necessarily help him. I also like that he's just as likely to outthink or outscheme an opponent as he his to outfight one. He makes a fine hero.

Recommended.

Movie Review: The Quiet Man (1952)

The Quiet Man (1952) directed by John Ford

Sean Thornton (John Wayne) returns from America to his birthplace, a small town called Innisfree in Ireland. He goes to buy the old homestead (his grandfather had been sent to Australia; his father went to America when he was a wee lad). The land and cottage are owned by the Widow Tillane. She is reluctant to sell until town bully Will Danaher (Victor McLaglen) shows up and tries to outbid the American. Slightly annoyed, she agrees to sell to Sean. Meanwhile, Sean has fallen for a beautiful redhead (Maureen O'Hara) who turns out to be Mary Kate Danaher, the sister of Will. She is excited by the prospect of marrying Sean but wants to follow the Irish proprieties--having a matchmaker start the arrangements, getting permission from the family, etc. Will is not at all enthusiastic about the match so plenty of conflict ensues. The local parish priest, the Protestant minister and his wife, and matchmaker Michaleen Flynn (Barry Fitzgerald in a great performance) rally to Sean's cause, especially when he seems less than willing to fight for the love of Mary Kate. Sean suffers from a bit of culture clash and from his own personal demons.

The movie is an amazing love story, steeped in Irish culture and actually filmed in Ireland (a novelty for Hollywood in 1952).  Sean and Mary Kate are very layered characters who have a lot of chemistry. Wayne and O'Hara are great together. The movie well balances the serious and the silly elements of the story. Dramatic moments are tempered with a quintessentially Irish sense of whimsy. The movie is utterly delightful.

Highly recommended.

Also, this movie was the subject of A Good Story is Hard to Find podcast #39.

Movie Review: A Wrinkle in Time (2018)

A Wrinkle in Time (2018) directed by Ava DuVernay

Meg should be the envy of everyone at school. She has a cute little brother named Charles Wallace. Her parents are highly capable scientists. Unfortunately, her dad is too capable and vanishes without a trace while trying to develop a way to travel across the universe with the right harmony and the power of the mind. He's been gone for four years and the family quirkiness is not endearing to her fellow students. Meg is the classic nerd outcast at school. Her cute little brother sticks up for her but he is also precocious and off-putting to his classmates and his teachers. He'll befriend just about anyone and he brings a kooky lady home one night. Mrs. Whatsit (Reese Witherspoon) is a bit New Agey and mysterious, promising adventures and a chance to find their dad. Soon enough, weird stuff starts happening. Meg, Charles Wallace, and male classmate Calvin start traveling to other planets guided by a trio of Mrs.'s who want to find the dad to help fight a spreading darkness in the universe known as "The It" based on the planet Camazotz.

If this summary seems a bit wacky and disjointed, then I have successfully presented the storyline of this movie. The story moves along with a lot of incoherent (or maybe just shifting) rules. Even by the end of the film, some things still make little sense. The conclusion where everything comes out okay is a little forced and the theme of "believe in yourself and you can do anything" has been done to death in kids' movies. A hackneyed theme is fine if the characters are well-written and well-performed but that's not the case here. The script is more to blame than the actors. A good story can carry an overused theme but again, the script fails the film. The visuals are creative and amazing but special effects are not enough to carry a movie for me.

I haven't read the book, though talking with friends it's either amazing or a bit muddled (probably a combination of both). Scanning through some reviews after seeing the movie, I see the movie makers didn't stick to the story of the book. I probably will read it at some point (we have it on our shelves), but this movie is no inspiration.

Not recommended.

Book Review: Essays of a Catholic by Hilaire Belloc

Essays of a Catholic by Hilaire Belloc

Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) was the son of a French lawyer and an English suffragette. The family moved to England after the father's death in 1872. Hilaire became a great scholar and writer of books, poems, and essays. This volume of essays was compiled by Belloc and focuses on cultural and historical issues from his own perspective, often contrasting a Catholic position with contemporary thoughts and attitudes.

In many of the essays, he contrasts the Catholic and the Protestant cultures in Europe, especially in England. Education is a big concern, since the government funded and mandated primary schools also follow the government approved version of history that casts Catholics in a bad light and can (perhaps unintentionally) undermine their faith. Belloc notes that parents are the primary educators of their children and parents' rights should be primary. He also discusses the slim possibility of England as a whole converting back to Catholicism. He even recommends a return to Latin as an international language, especially in light of the complete failure of Esperanto, "which is about as much like a human language as a jigsaw puzzle is like a human face." [p. 238] The contrasts are interesting but feel a little dated.

He also provides a fascinating look at economic and scientific issues from a Catholic perspective. He disparages usury and shows an interesting, morally acceptable way for investors to make money. He demonstrates the pitfalls of capitalism and the complete unacceptability of socialism. His essay "Science as the Enemy of Truth" presents a brilliant condemnation of the "Modern Scientific Spirit" which he dissects in minute detail. The breadth of issues he deals with is impressive.

The joy of the book is in Belloc's precision of argument. He knows how to say exactly what he means  and to assess the relative value of arguments based in reason, speculation, and emotion. He is decisive without being condescending or insulting. He has both clarity and charity, a hard mixture to achieve. Some of his issues are less relevant today, but his intelligence and his attitude are an excellent example in our age of television- and Twitter-sized arguments.

Recommended.

Cabin Fever at Savage Mill

Savage Mill hosted a Cabin Fever event on Saturday, March 10, 2018. My two sons and I went to enjoy some of the activities. Mommy and my daughter were off at an American Heritage Girls event, otherwise they would have joined us.

Savage Mill

A bit of the interior

We arrived about half an hour before events started so we went to The Family Game store and tried out one of the games in their game room library. The prescholar picked out a game named Zero, which we were a little nervous about. Delving in, we discovered it is an abstract card game where the goal is to score as few points as possible with a hand of nine cards. Cards come in seven colors and are numbered one through eight. If a player has five or more cards of the same color, they don't count for the score. Multiple cards of the same number only score that number once, e.g. if you had three 7 cards they would only add 7 to your score. We enjoyed playing until it was time to go to one of the demos.

Sweet Cascades Chocolatier demonstrated how they handcraft truffles. They showed us an actual cocoa pod and what the contents looked like.

Shaking the bean

He wants to take it home!

The beans inside the pod are held together in a gooey white substance that is removed. The beans are dried and roasted to make cocoa nibs, some of which we tasted. They had chocolate flavor but not very much sweetness.

Beans dried but not separated (no pic of the nibs we ate, sorry!)

They then demonstrated how they hand-dipped the truffles (these had a ganache filling that was hand-rolled earlier) and put special decorations to identify the truffles.

Drying and decorating workspace

Machine that properly stirs and heats the chocolate for dipping

It wasn't a mistake that the lady had a balloon with her because she was about to make a chocolate bowl. The balloon was also hand-dipped and allowed to dry. Once the chocolate is solid again, the balloon is deflated and a nice little bowl is left.

Dipping the balloon

Isn't this a waste of good chocolate?!?

Set to dry

Finished product

The chocolatier also had a raffle for the chocolates and the bowl. We entered but did not win.

Our next event was story time at Books With a Past, which is an awesome name for a used book store.  My youngest son was the target audience, so my older son found a book on the shelf to read for the ten or twenty minutes of story time. The store has comfortable chairs and couches so he was satisfied. My younger son enjoyed the story time but he also snagged a book from the shelf and read a story to himself while he listened to the lady read to the group. She read Ten Rules of Being a Superhero by Deb Pilutti and Charlotte and the Rock by Stephen W. Martin and Samantha Cotterill.

My son is in the back of the group

Rocking at story time

Our next planned event was a game demo at The Family Game Store which didn't start for another half hour. We ordered lunch at Say Cheezz Grille. My elder son had the best grilled cheese sandwich of his life (or so he claimed). My younger son had chicken nuggets with french fries (which he shared) and the most potent barbecue sauce ever. I had the "Oink and Egg"--a sandwich with a scrambled egg, your choice of sausage, ham, or bacon, and a slice of cheese (again, your choice). I had bacon and swiss on my sandwich, a yummy and filling treat.

Great food

We headed over to the game store and tried the demo of Kingdomino, a tile-laying game where players bid on various tiles for their kingdom. The tiles are domino-shaped and have either one or two types of ground on them--hills or pastures or fields or forests and so on. The trick is to get the same type of ground on different tiles touching and to have ground with crowns marked on it. The area of ground is multiplied by the number of crowns in the area (thus a large area with no crowns would yield no score!). The game is fun and quick. We decided to buy the game and received a spare throne for the starting tiles and a cool tower that holds and dispenses the domino tiles. They don't come with the game normally but the store had promo items to give away. Good thing we came early!

Game and bonuses

We were going to buy some chocolates for dessert and to bring home for Mommy and my daughter but the chocolatier is also the grilled cheese place. All the workers were occupied with the lunch rush. No one was working the chocolate counter! So we went home for dessert.

The mill had plenty of other activities at other stores--a children's craft at Aww BABY Organics, earring making at Bead Soup, and painting a pint glass at Rams Head, to name a few. Since I was the driver, I didn't go for the pint glass event since it was free only if you bought a pint of beer (which doesn't come in a take-home container). Maybe if we had stayed longer after lunch I could have gotten away with it but the young one still does nap time and had to get home before too long.

We had a lot of fun and look forward to more events at Savage Mill.

TV Review: Westworld Season One: The Maze (2016)

Westworld Season One: The Maze (2016) created for television by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy based on the screenplay by Michael Crichton

In a not too distant future, the well-to-do can vacation at Westworld, an amusement park that recreates the late 1800s American West, complete with saloons, trains, cowboys, farmers, Civil War vets, and Native Americans. All of the characters in the park are highly sophisticated robots that are almost impossible to distinguish from the real people who visit. Of course, safety measures are in place so that none of the visitors (they are referred to as "guests") are harmed by the local androids (called "hosts") or each other. Guests can join in various storylines in the park--joining a posse, fighting with bad guys (including bloodthirsty Native Americans), defending a ranch, gambling, etc. The park would be idyllic if it didn't bring out the worst in some guests and if the people running it wouldn't come into conflict over how best to run the park.

The park was invented by Dr. Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins) who has overall creative control and a mysterious past (his original partner in the project died in an accident just before the park opened thirty years earlier). He wants to push the limits of storytelling and has an odd relationship with the other workers and the hosts. A mysterious Man in Black (Ed Harris) is a frequent visitor who wants to solve the ultimate puzzle of the park, the titular Maze. He's both helped and hindered by the hosts, a few of whom he's come to know quite well. Some robots start to glitch, remembering bits of their previous cycles through the storyline (the typical visitor stays two weeks and the stories are set to run through the fourteen days). One robot thinks she is going mad; another thinks she can escape from what feels like enslavement.

The show isn't so much interested in seeing the hosts becoming human as it is in discovering whether they achieve consciousness, presumably the most human characteristic of humans. Some of the guests and employees clearly think the hosts achieve a certain level of humanity. Viewers can reach different conclusions based on the sketchy evidence presented. The filmmakers seem to be ambivalent; they seem more interested in exploring Dr. Ford's obsessions with the park and his God-like power over the park.

Some of the plot lines are not very believable as they are going along. If I hadn't had trust in Jonathan Nolan (brother of Christopher Nolan of Batman and Inception fame) and hadn't had the DVDs on loan from the library (with only a week to watch them), I might have bailed out on the show. I marshaled through to the end and patience was rewarded for the most part--glaring errors were not in fact errors (or at least it was easy to interpret them as ultimately having a reasonable explanation). One or two things still strike me as highly implausible but I'd have to watch the series again to try and figure that out. Some of the plot twists at the end also make rewatching an interesting prospect. I fear the show is not quite good enough to make me watch it again right away, like The Sixth Sense did so many years ago.

While the show is much deeper than the 1970s movie, I'm not sure that it is that much more satisfying. The show provides a lot of fodder for thought, which I enjoyed. The film makers clearly planned for a second season (which is coming out on HBO in a few months as I write this) which makes the story less complete and therefore less satisfying. I recommend it, but not highly.

Parental Warning: The show does have a lot of graphic nudity, though most of it is shown as the hosts are reprogramed or repaired by park employees, so the nudity isn't sexual in nature all the time (though parts of the park are explicitly sexual--this is an HBO series after all). Moments of hard, graphic violence do come up. The themes are also challenging. Some of the characters have very salty language--again, this is an HBO series and sounds like it. I'd say this is the equivalent of a hard R rating in movies, so only late teens and up is my recommendation.