‘John Carter’ Movie: Boo! Hiss! Away Wi’ Ye!

I’m going to do something today that I’ve never done before–review a movie sight-unseen: this after having seen stills and trailers, and read a thorough summary of what is laughingly called a plot.

Disney’s John Carter is more than just this year’s biggest box-office bomb. It is a crime.

Edgar Rice Burroughs was famous for creating Tarzan, but he also wrote eleven novels set in the world of Barsoom–Mars–and featuring the immortal John Carter. This year is the 100th anniversary of A Princess of Mars, the first of the Martian series and Burroughs’ first published novel. (Tarzan of the Apes was second.)

The Martian novels were the finest stories Burroughs ever wrote, by far his most creative work. They are haunting. NASA and the Jet Propulsion Lab are full of men and women whose young imaginations were set on fire by these books, and that fire still burns. Quite a few young writers were inspired by them, too–including yours truly. Fifty years after making their acquaintance, I still read them with admiration and delight.

And along comes this abomination of a movie…

What they did, it seems, was to take elements of several Martian tales, randomly selected by not-very-bright 11-year-olds, throw them into a blender along with a lot of gobbledygook that they made up themselves, and, voila! A hebephrenic mish-mosh of a story that wouldn’t hold up if it had suspenders.

Great works of art are never improved by two-legged amoebas in Hollywood trying to make them more like video games. John Carter looks like a jigsaw puzzle put together by monkeys.

By all means, read ERB’s Martian novels: you’ll never forget them. But if you have any respect at all for writers and their work, approach this movie as you would an attic full of really irritable brown recluse spiders.

I love my art; it is God’s gift to me. I love the art displayed by other writers, which inspires my own efforts. And when this art is abused by dolts in Hollywod whose only inspiration is to make a buck… well, it gets my dander up.


“And Our New President Is…!”

Nobody’s here yet today, so I thought I might as well have some fun.

Having established in our country that being a community organizer (translation: troublemaker) fits you to be president, I think we can safely say that by that standard, just about anybody can be president. Thousands of West Virginians recently voted for a felon doing time in prison, believing he’d be an improvement over what we’ve got.

So why don’t we save ourselves the expense and the aggravation of a presidential election, and from now on, select our president by means of a nationwide lottery? Which will lead to a scene like this:

“Ladies and gentlemen! The next President of the United States is… Mrs. Roz Scuttlebutt of Elmira, New York! [Trumpet fanfare, fireworks] We’ve got her on the line right now, so let’s go to Elmira… Congratulations, Mrs. Scuttlebutt–you are to become the 48th President of this great land of ours.”

“But I don’t want to be president!”

“Ah, but that’s a big point in your favor, Mrs. Scuttlebutt!”

“But I won’t know what to do!”

“Not to worry–not knowing what to do never bothered any of our previous presidents. Most of them never did figure out what to do.”

“You don’t understand! I’ve never been president of anything–not even of my garden club! And I like it here, I don’t want to go to Washington, I don’t want to have to meet all those creepy people–”

“Tut, tut, Mrs. Scuttlebutt! When duty calls, you have to answer. Besides, it’s only for four years, and the pay is great. And if you spend the whole four years just hiding in the White House and playing slap-jack, you’ll still have done better than a number of presidents that I could name. And think of the fantastic vacations you can go on–as often as you like!”

“Well, if you put it that way… all right. I accept!”

And there you have it, all settled–without any debates, without attack ads and annoying phone calls… And we won’t have done any worse than what we’ve done already.


Stupid Masterminds!

Fiction abounds in criminal masterminds like Dr. Fu Manchu, Professor James Moriarity, Lord Reesh, et al. What they all have in common is, they’re smart. That’s why it takes someone like Sherlock Holmes to stop them.

We, poor devils, live in a real world dominated by stupid masterminds. Their schemes are too stupid to succeed, but they do just as much harm, maybe even more, than Moriarity and Co.

Our masterminds think socialism really works, there are 57 states in the United States, society is better off without marriage and the family, you can spend your way out of debt, and so on. Even the people we think are really smart are really stupid. Hundreds of Nobel Prize winners have signed on to the Humanist Manifesto II–a document that recommends a mix of atheism, abortion, suicide, and homosexuality as the solution to the world’s problems.

If you wrote a fantasy novel or a detective novel featuring the machinations of a really stupid mastermind, it would be classed as unimaginative fiction. People would think you were trying to write a Democrat Party platform. “Duh! How about we tax the pants off people who work, and give the money to people who don’t work? That ought to get the economy humming!” There are real-life stupid masterminds working on that very scheme even as you read this. And others just as addled.

Go ahead, try it yourself–try to write a story in which the villain is a big stupid idiot whose asinine ideas can’t possibly result in anything but chaos and misery.

You’ll find you’re writing about real life.


Progress Report

I don’t feel like writing about the nasty things going on in my neighborhood, so I thought I might weigh in with a progress report on my new book–Bell Mountain #6, The Palace. Also, #4, The Last Banquet, is being typeset and should come up before the end of this summer, while #5, The Fugitive Prince, awaits its first round of editing.

So far I’ve got 10 chapters written of The Palace and a lot of neat stuff dancing around in my head. (If you’re one of those folks who ain’t even read Bell Mountain yet, then shame on you!) I had to take the first three days of this week to write up my formal review of The Hunger Games, so I hope tomorrow to go back to The Palace. Maybe it’ll stop raining tomorrow, too. It being springtime, I like to write outside.

Has anybody seen any reports of that turtle as big as a car that they dug up in a coal mine in Columbia? No, it was not alive! Really cool fossil, though.

Now, if they could only dig up Obummah’s college transcripts…


I’ve Finished ‘The Hunger Games’

As you can see by the headline, I’ve finished reading the book. I want to review it for the Chalcedon Foundation’s print magazine, Faith For All of Life, so there’s not too much I can say about it here. (Meanwhile, I hope some of you will be curious enough to visit the Chalcedon website, http://www.chalcedon.edu )

In the course of my work for Chalcedon, I read and review a lot of toxic books. I do it so that you don’t have to read them. I do it because it’s important to monitor the culture that we live in, and because it’s a sound practice to keep an eye on what the enemy is doing.

The Hunger Games is intended for an audience of young readers, but I wouldn’t recommend it to any but the most mature for their age. There is too much in it that is, shall we say, unwholesome. I don’t believe the author put it in there to celebrate evil: I’m pretty sure her intention is to warn us off the path our society is treading. That’s a good purpose–but I’m not entirely sold on her execution.

Meanwhile, until I can get a full review written, let me tantalize you with a single point. Although this book is very well written indeed, and very well thought-out, there is a hole in it–a gaping hole through which you could drive a rather large truck.

If you’ve already read the book, or seen the movie, have you seen the hole, too? If not, can you guess what it is?


Kiwis, Ahoy!

Somehow this blog keeps track of the home countries of its visitors, and displays them for me on a map. This is very cool.

Yesterday, I was astonished to learn that I had 10 views from New Zealand. Now how did that happen? Am I catching on in New Zealand? (Judging by the sales figures for my books, I am not catching on anywhere.) Are there really ten people in faraway New Zealand who even know I exist?

Well, in case any of y’all come back, here’s a shout-out: “Kiwis, ahoy!” I’ve never been to your beautiful country, but I was absolutely fascinated by moas and tuataras before I was three feet tall, and I still am. Fascinated by moas and tuataras, that is–I’m not three feet tall anymore.

Now let’s see if anybody shouts back…


I’m Reading ‘The Hunger Games’

Finally I’ve got a copy of Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games. Published in 2008, it has taken four years to translate the book into the box-office champion movie of this year (so far).

The imaginary dystopian world of The Hunger Games has some features which I find disturbingly familiar: rationing of electricity and health care; manufactured food shortages; abolition of the right to bear arms; no one owns a car–but they do have high-speed rail! Jerry Brown would be so proud of them.

Also: no one has a right to travel from one “district” to another, and even if they were allowed, they’d have to walk; public schooling is the only from of education allowed; and the government has taught its downtrodden serfs to spy on one another.

All of these things are right out of the Agenda 21 “sustainability” playbook. They are all “progressive” dreams come true. When such dreams do come true, we quickly discover that they’re nightmares–but then, of course, it’s too late.

Welcome to Obummah’s second term…


Would You Kill Yourself if a Celebrity Told You To?

What do you suppose people would do, if they turned on the TV and saw something like this?

“Hi. I’m George Clooney/Cheryl Crowe/Rosie O’Donnell/Barabbas [plug in the celebrity of your choice], and I need to talk to you about a very serious issue…

“Scientists tell us that human population levels are not sustainable: that, unless we “build down” the population before it’s too late, everyone in the world is going to suffer horribly–from starvation, from disease, from war…

“So we’re looking for unselfish persons–maybe someone like you–who will take the first step… The new Adios! pill from [plug in your favorite "green" company] is guaranteed to give you a quick and painless exit from this overcrowded world. Best of all, it’s absolutely free!

“For a sustainable, green tomorrow for your children and grandchildren, why not say ‘Adios!’ today?…”

How many people do you think would take the Adios! pill?

Yes, I know–I’m a fantasy writer, and I’ve just created another fantasy. It’s just for fun, right?

But what do you think would happen if they really tried this stunt?


Where’s Daddy?

This may seem an odd topic for Mother’s Day, but think about it–where have all the fathers gone?

Time Magazine–it’s only about as thick as a supermarket flyer now–had a cover story this week on something called “Attachment Parenting,” with a cover photo showing a a rather striking “mom” with a four-year-old boy literally “attached” to her by the breast: yes, a four-year-old boy still breast-feeding.

Is the boy’s father presumed missing? Some 40% of America’s children nowadays are born out of wedlock, so maybe Daddy was never in the picture in the first place. Or maybe the father in this case is merely invisible, irrelevant, not part of the equation.

Call me old-fashioned, but I think my father would’ve had something to say about it if my mother had insisted on breast-feeding me after I could walk and talk and wear clothes. Something like: “What are you trying to do to my son? Raise him up to be some kind of great big mo-mo?”

But consider our hopelessly corrupt culture’s take on fatherhood.

No dads–that’s great!

Two dads–that’s even better! Hip-hip-hooray!

One dad–boo! Hiss! Boo! How archaic, how sexist! But if you insist on having one dad in the household, the least you can do is make him silent, invisible, and totally ineffectual. Otherwise he might say something gauche when Junior goes off to kindergarten and the school’s Gender Coach teaches him, “You can be a boy one day and a girl the next, depending on how you feel.”

I grew up in a world of men and women. God help the children of this benighted age.


An Utterly Shameless Appeal

I’m told it’s very bad form for an author to plead with the public to buy his books. But is it just as bad to implore people to get their family, friends, neighbors, and casual acquaintances to buy them? Yeah, probably…

But I am also told that I must be my own publicist–rather like taking out my own appendix. I have neither the knowledge nor the talent for this role.

Look, if you’re already among the few, the proud who have bought these fershlugginer things, you are excused from reading this–although I would greatly appreciate it if you somehow compelled others to buy. But for those of you who hang around here and haven’t yet obtained any copies of my books–hey! Come on! Don’t you realize you’re allowing me to be outsold by all sorts of dreck about teenage vampires and witches and necromancers, etc.? Aren’t you ashamed of that?

This is Lee the Publicist talking, not Lee the Writer. Lee the Publicist is something of an idiot. Lee the Writer stands utterly aloof from this shameless appeal for sales. It’s all the Publicist’s doing. Honest!

But if by some unlikely chance it works… well, then I’ll take credit for it.

 


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