Movie Reviews: Christina's House

Christina's House
directed by Gavin Wilding

This thriller movie started out with a few good ideas but quickly went south. As is usual for the genre the movie featured some gratuitous female toplessness but as the female in question was supposed to be in high school the movie felt sleazier and more disturbing than it needed to be.

It's strange that there are so many thriller or horror movies featuring high schoolers depicted by actors/actresses who are past college age. That probably says something about other social issues but I'm not going down that path in this review.

This movie was made in 2000 but had a very eighties vibe, which I thought was the only good thing about it. The plot or acting certainly weren't strong points.

The Tarling Family , father James (John Savage), daughter Christina (Allison Lange), and younger son Bobby (Lorne Stewart) has moved to a rental house on the outskirts of town. I think it's because the family can be closer to the mother/wife Joanne (Chilton Crane) who has gone completely bonkers and is locked up in an insane asylum.

Sounds Of The Universe

Have you ever wondered what black holes sound like? Humans can't get close enough to a black hole to hear any sounds that they might make and even if we could, do not have the ability to hear frequencies far outside of our range. 

But black holes do make sounds. And some scentists have been boosting the frequencies black holes make to levels that are audible to humans. The results are fascinating. 

In space you can’t hear a black hole scream, but apparently you can hear it sing. In 2003 astrophysicists working with NASA’s orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory detected a pattern of ripples in the X-ray glow of a giant cluster of galaxies in the constellation Perseus. They were pressure waves — that is to say, sound waves — 30,000 light-years across and radiating outward through the thin, ultrahot gas that suffuses galaxy clusters. 

They were caused by periodic explosions from a supermassive black hole at the center of the cluster, which is 250 million light-years away and contains thousands of galaxies. With a period of oscillation of 10 million years, the sound waves were acoustically equivalent to a B-flat 57 octaves below middle C, a tone that the black hole has apparently been holding for the last two billion years. 

Jumi Bello and Plagiarism

There are some career paths where "fake it 'til you make it" is a viable strategy to get ahead. Some of my favorite musicians stole songs from other musicians and made millions. 

I have known people in the information technology or accounting fields who lacked the leadership experience or knowledge that they claimed to have or should have had given their expected salaries or job titles. Sometimes this worked out for them because they worked diligently to catch up. 

Sometimes this worked out for them because they were related to, friends with, or married to more powerful people who ran interference for them. Sometimes this worked out for them because they were the correct complexion or gender. So it goes. Life isn't fair.

However in today's world it's easier than ever to check up on someone and verify that they have the credentials they claim to have or have created the work they claim to have created. So regardless of what people have gotten away with in the past, it's probably the best move today to be honest about things like credentials and creations. 

Jumi Bello, an aspiring author, learned this the hard way. Bello, forced to admit that portions of her debut novel were plagiarized, wrote an explanation and mea culpa that were also plagiarized. 

Movie Reviews: Sugar Hill (1974)

Sugar Hill 
directed by Paul Maslanksy

This was another low budget American International Pictures feature that combined horror and blaxploitation themes. Sugar Hill wasn't a great movie but it had a few good scenes. Some of the story is illogical but that's normal for the genre. 

American International Pictures also created or distributed similar films such as Blacula, Count Yorga, Black Caesar, and Coffy . Some actors from those films appear in Sugar Hill. Sugar Hill's director would later produce the Police Academy movies. Sugar Hill's most direct antecedent was Coffy. As in Coffy, a sexy Black woman confronts a racist power structure. Maybe Coffy's star, Pam Grier, wasn't interested in appearing in Sugar Hill? 

The special effects here aren't ground breaking or even that convincing. Nevertheless, despite that, or perhaps even because of that, there are some honestly creepy moments.

Movie Reviews: Tolkien

Tolkien
directed by Dome Karukoski

This was a tightly focused, though ultimately not very revealing look at J.R.R. Tolkien, the famous academic and author of "The Lord of The Rings", "The Hobbit", "The Silmarillion" and several other fantasy stories, most of which were set in his imagined pre-historical world of Middle-Earth. It's not easy to make compelling films about writing, and this isn't one of them. Writing is usually a solitary activity that takes place internally in a writer's brain. How do you dramatically depict that process visually so that it will resonate with people watching it?

Perhaps smartly, the director doesn't attempt to do that. Instead the director focuses on what he can visually express: Tolkien's gift for languages, Tolkien's fascination with Northern mythologies and heroic tales, Tolkien's budding romance with and fierce love for the woman who would later become his wife, Tolkien's experiences during World War I, and Tolkien's platonic love for his close friends at King Edward's School at Birmingham.

Movie Reviews: Road Games (2015)

Road Games (2015)

directed by Abner Pastoll

This 2015 British-French co-production referenced the 1981 Australian-American film of the same name that starred Stacy Keach and Jamie Lee Curtis. The 2015 movie is a thriller with twists , not a gory horror film. I thought that the movie missed its mark. Road Games has a lot of misdirection. 

But I quickly guessed the major plot twist. The other mysteries weren't interesting or made no sense. 

I enjoyed the bucolic settings. Road Games is set in rural France. Road Games looked great but could have spent more energy on establishing the difference between urban and rural living. Jack (Andrew Simpson) is an apparently charisma free British young man who vacationed in France with his girlfriend. 

Book Reviews: Bad People

Bad People
written by Jeremy Bates

Because paid work has become more demanding, I haven't been able to do much reading. I want to change that. I hope to read at least three or four new books a month. Lacking the time to sit down and enjoy say, something the size of War and Peace , I chose a collection of short stories, or as the author describes them, short novels. 

Collections of shorter works don't take much time to finish. If you read a bad story,  you can find a good story in a few pages. The author has less time to go on and on; he must quickly grab your attention and keep it. The author must put up or shut up.

Jeremy Bates is talented. There aren't many authors who can rework 2500 year old stories into modern thriller tales so skillfully that you're halfway done with the story before realizing what happened.

These are thriller tales with some explicit sex and violence. There are no ghosts, ghouls, vampires, or other supernatural entities. Bad People is about well, bad people--though who the bad guy is may not always be obvious. There are four short novels.

"The Mailman":

In 1985 Mick Freeman is a Los Angeles record executive who is searching for the next big rock band. Mick thinks he's found them in The Tempests, a drug addled group that reeks of danger. Unknown to Mick, his wife Jade has become bored. Mick doesn't make her motor run any more. Jade is a housewife. When the new twenty year younger handsome mailman Ronnie makes a move, Jade reciprocates. Complications arise.