Category Archives: Fantasy

Adventure, Fantasy

The Pirate, The Princess, and The Farmboy

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My son had never seen Star Wars.

Oh, he’d seen cartoon spinoffs from the second trilogy, and played with the Lego sets. Those never really impressed him. And is it any wonder? The movies most are familiar with today, which all that spun off from, are utterly forgettable.

I’m referring to the first one—Episode IV: A New Hope. The movie that pimp-slapped all the arrogant marketing “experts” who thought they knew what would and wouldn’t sell. They all thought it would be a laughable flop. Everyone just knew that even straight science fiction didn’t sell anymore by 1977. But moviegoing audiences didn’t realize they weren’t supposed to like it, and went back to see it multiple times, keeping it held over in theaters for umpteen weeks in a row. In constant dollars there’s probably never been a movie that’s done as well at the box office. And on the clout of that one movie, George Lucas can get away with foisting all kinds of lackluster cinematic drivel on us for the rest of his life.darthben

As I suspected he would, my son loved it. His favorite character? R2D2.

What I couldn’t help noticing this time (my first viewing of it probably since the revamped Greedo-shoots-first version in the 1990s, but perhaps my 15th viewing overall) is what a solid bit of acting the principals put in.

There are some exceptions (“You know of the rebellion against the Empire?????”), but overall it’s rather impressive. Why? Well, for one thing, they had to sell some dialog that’s rather difficult to make sound natural.  And secondly…

Star Wars: A New HopeWell, by today’s standards the special effects are dated and hokey (at least on the small screen), saved only by some rather desperate editing. But the actors didn’t even have that. Now granted, a regular person doing what actors normally have to do would feel stupid doing it. Multiply that  a few times over for these guys who had to perform scenes almost in a vacuum, sure that whatever effects were put in afterwards would be of the cheesey Roger Korman variety.

In interviews later, the actors admitted they feared exactly what the studio execs did: that this would be a colossal joke, sharing the infamy of Plan Nine From Outer Space and other such dreck. But they put their hearts into it anyway and it couldn’t have succeeded without them.

Fantasy, Reviews, TEOTWAWKI

Post-Apocalyptic Affirmative Action: The 100

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You can find this series on Netflix or Amazon.

The scenario:

Earth was destroyed in a nuclear war. Hundreds of people survived in space stations orbiting the planet. The space stations were sent up by different nations.  They eventually found “unity” and combined all their stations into one impossibly gigantic station called “the Ark.” Cute, huh?

This multinational colony all speaks English. No biggie–we can accept that, as it makes it easier to tell a story. There is artificial gravity everywhere in the Ark, too–even the sections not spinning. The ace mechanic (a woman, of course) manages to fix heavy machinery on a regular basis without even getting her hands dirty, and while maintaining a perfect manicure. Because booty. (That’s right, this actress, though typically skinny, has the nicest rump you may see on TV, and she’s also smokin’ hot above the shoulders. But you’ll only get treated to the full package when she’s first introduced.)

So much for technical realism.

Air and resources are running out on the Ark, so they send 100 juvenile delinquents down to Earth to both get them out of the space station, and to serve as lab rats and demonstrate whether the environment is survivable. There are some legitimate criminal types mixed in, but most are just misunderstood teens.

It turns out the Earth is survivable (or there would be no series). In fact, the “Grounders” (a primitive society descended from survivors who never left the planet) are doing just fine, biologically. They also speak English with no dialectic variation from the multinational space station contingent.

So what we have here is potentially a TEOTWAWKI survival story with plenty of conflict within and without the “100” culture for a competent writer to work with and keep interesting.

PC Utopian tweaks:

Every single leader of import is either a woman or a minority–with occasional antagonistic exceptions like a white male who leads a sort of lynch mob. And of course the best leaders are the females. Even the Grounders–a hunter-gatherer society where survival depends on physical prowess–have a female leader and plenty of pixie ninja “warriors.”

Ri-iiiiight.

There are a couple bad-boy types. One becomes the bleeding heart pacifist “voice of conscience” type after the ship lands. The other was a janitor on the Ark, and becomes co-leader with a Strong Female Character who is star of the show. Of course she is the stronger, wiser, more rational leader of the two. Bad Boy #1 has, as his girlfriend, the hottest chick on the show (the aforementioned “mechanic”), but, in a society where females are apparently in short supply, he ditches her for the plain-faced blonde protagonist with the body of a teenage boy.

In fact, within a couple episodes, the show began to resemble a soap opera. The question the audience is prompted to ask is not “How will they survive this catastrophe?” but “Who’s sleeping with who this week?”

Maybe that’s the root problem: Much like what feministas and SJWs want to do to video games (what #gamergate is all about), they have invaded genres like TEOTWAWKI/post-apocalypse and have twisted it into just another pop culture tool to sell their agenda and condition an audience that would rather just be entertained.

They weren’t content to have their own gynocentric gathering places and their own gynocentric entertainment. They have to take over what few male sanctuaries are left and ruin them, as well.

If you want to watch something in this kind of modern-people-dealing-with-prehistoric-challenges flavor, a much better choice would be Terra Nova. It only lasted one season, and is certainly not perfect, but is far superior to this flotsam.

Fantasy, Reviews

Pre-Flood Fiction

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You ever have a really  cool idea, but are too busy with other stuff to make it a reality before somebody else comes along and does it? Then you grumble under your breath when other people rave about what a cool idea it was.

It’s happened to me too many times over the years. One of the latest is this one: Brian Godawa’s fantasy series set on antedeluvian Earth.


Intending to read the whole series, I started with this one in order to follow it chronologically. Maybe that was a mistake.

Chronicles of the Nephilim was a good idea and pre-flood Earth is a great setting for a fantasy tale. Also, the author had to have done some homework in Enoch, the Bible, possibly Jasher and some other sources. All props to him for that.

I think I would have enjoyed a summary of his research more than this novel.

What grates on me are major selling points for the average feminista reader. In particular the “cute” romance elements didn’t sit well with me at all–especially the smarmy syrupy pet name exchanges . And I get a little more irritated every time I run into the obligatory amazon superninja character.

In the author’s defense, my patience had been sorely taxed before I ever heard of him, so it only takes a straw or two to break my camel’s back.

My camel’s name is Suspension of Disbelief.

The author did build a quest tale, of sorts, around the historic sketch left us via Genesis and Enoch 1, with some plot twists and such. I can’t say I liked any of the characters enough to become absorbed, or even smooth over the parts that ruffled my feathers. I set the book down for a couple months before forcing myself to finish it. Having heard raves about the Noah book, I’m almost tempted to give him another chance, but it’s certainly not a priority.

Action, Adventure, Fantasy

Top Five Count Down: Badasses of Dude-Lit

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What is “dude-lit” you ask? It’s a term I coined even before becoming the Two-Fisted Blogger. It’s been hijacked somewhat by homoerotic hacks and delta or gamma males getting in touch with their feelings, writing (allegedly) masculine counterparts to the womyn’s fiction on the bookshelf.

That is not dude-lit. I thought of the term first, so I’m gonna continue using it to describe fiction written for red-blooded heterosexual men. I guess you could call it red pill in the post-Matrix period.

It’s not the highbrow stuff you see touted on some manosphere blogs, though.  Dude-lit isn’t for the wine-sipping, chess-playing side of your personality. It’s for the beer-slamming, ball-playing , trash-talking side.

So I thought I’d highlight some of the he-men of literature. I ranked them partly by their place in the socio-sexual hierarchy, and partly by how fun it is to read them.

Here’s the start of my short list of dude-lit heroes from over the years–the kind who are in short supply anymore in the pop culture of our feminized society:

5. Conan

Yup–a classic is in the Top Five. I know there’ve been Conan stories written since the death of his creator, but I’m including only the character as written by the delightfully un-PC Robert E. Howard. He’d never get this fantasy series published by the New York Publishing Cartel today–not without watering the barbarian down, adding some amazon superninjas and slipping an approved left-wing message into the Hyborian Age.

Conan is an alpha living in the ultimate habitat for alphas. His age and region is swarming with musclebound cutthroats, but the Cimmerian stands out above them all. He is perfectly at home in anarchy, yet you can also put him in a society with structure and he’ll rise quickly toward the top. In the movie he began adulthood as a slave, was promoted to gladiator, then gained his freedom and graduated to brigandry. In the books his self-improvement continues all the way to kingship.

Tarzan is a classic who didn’t make my Top Five for a couple reasons. While the ape-man is nobody to mess with, either with bare hands or primitive weapons, he is more of a beta male or arguably a sigma. He keeps to himself and has no ambition to leadership–even among the ape tribe that raised him. He also falls quickly into wunitus (1/”one”-itus) after meeting Jane.

Despite being raised in the jungle by apes, Tarzan is far more civilized than Conan…hence, not quite as much fun.

Browse by next time for my #4 pick.

Fantasy

Another Free Kindle Book (For Limited Time)

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Anybody remember Mad Magazine back when it was funny? Hmm, probably not. Well, anyway, it was hilarious once upon a time.

How ’bout the early movies of Mel Brooks and the Zucker Brothers? (Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles, Airplane, Airplane II) Get the picture now?

That gives you an idea of the type of humor to be found in this short political satire The Greater Good. But it’s not from the typical/obligatory left-wing perspective–quite the opposite.

Well, hmm. It’s written as if it is, in fact, from the typical/obligatory leftist/feminist/homophile slant, but with razor sarcasm that lampoons the typical Marxist (usually called “liberal”), feminist and white knight memes, tropes and so-called logic.

It’s free for a couple days.

Fantasy, Politics/Current Events

Marvel Comics Gives Thor a Sex-Change Operation

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Maybe you heard the same rumors I did about Marvel replacing the god of thunder with a chick. I decided to check this out, and now that I’m done puking I can report to you that, yes, it’s true.

Some of you who have paid attention to the encroaching agenda by the pied pipers of pop culture are not surprised in the least by this groan-worthy development. Others are wondering just what in the blazes is going on. I’m going to list some possibilities.

1. Marvel editor Wil Moss and the writers in the bullpen have an overpowering compulsion to foist yet another amazon superninja on their readership, but simply lack the imagination to create an original character.

There’s a lot of evidence  of this epidemic throughout the leftist-dominated entertainment industry. Hollywood, for instance, is so bankrupt of creative ideas that they can dream up nothing to make movies about besides old TV shows, video games or toys. (Oh yeah, I forgot other movies).

2. Nobody at Marvel is educated enough to realize that the pantheons of mythology are brimming with goddesses they could build another super-character out of.

Back in the early 1960s Stan Lee plucked Thor from the Norse pantheon to style him as a superhero. As natural an overlap (superheroes and gods of myth) as that is, it was an original idea at the time. But then I established the status of original ideas in # 1 above.

3. The white knights at Marvel know a new superheroine on the comic shelves would go over pretty much like Elektra went over at the box office, so they have to hijack a well-established character to make their ubiquitous feminist tropes even more inescapable.

This is the likliest reason for this knee-jerk “evolution.” Deep down they realize their fantasy femme won’t be able to pull her own weight.

4. Series writer Jason Aaron has trouble getting women to pay him any attention and thinks being able to point to this female-empowering achievement will earn him some dates.

This is assuming he is heterosexual, which might very well not be the case. But homosexuals and feminists share a lot, ideologically, so this could still be part of a desperate ploy to amp up his romantic portfolio.

5. Forced feminization of a strapping Nordic stud is a private fantasy of Aaron, or Moss, or the mistress who has their balls secured in her purse. Giving Thor tits is their encoded fantasy for public consumption, but enlightened agents dwelling among the unwashed masses will decode the message and understand that their utopia draweth nigh.

Again, my wording assumes they are heterosexual. But I’d rather not transpose this scenario since I’ve puked enough for one day.

6. Speaking of private fantasies, this development grew out of a masturbatory fetish involving a butch blonde dominatrix in a valkerie costume.

Judging by the obligatory amazon superninjas infecting action adventure across every medium, I suspect this fetish is common among beta and gamma male manginas. And please don’t ask me to speculate on what she does with the hammer.

So what’s next for the social programmers? Marvel also uses Greek hero Hercules occasionally. How does “Herculisa” sound?

Don’t be surprised if they use a heart attack to finally kill off Tony Stark, leaving Pepper Potts to become “Iron Maiden,” and Captain America is sodomized into “Captain Rainbow” or something. (No, actually it would be worse if they left his name the same and just did to him what Brokeback Mountain did to the cowboy icon. ) I understand there’s already a “Spider-Girl.”

Of course this latest gender-bending is nothing new. White Knights all over comicdom got tingles up their legs when Frank Miller introduced a female Robin in the mid ’80s. And Marvel’s Captain Marvel (not to be confused with the original, who got his powers from a wizard named Shazam) had a counterpart called Miss Marvel. Eventually Miss became Captain and who knows whatever happened to that guy once the gamma suits in the bullpen stripped him of his mask and tights.

I watched some Justice League cartoons with my son recently. Couldn’t help noticing a couple items there, like how Hawkman has been replaced by Hawkwoman, and how she (though she has no super powers unless they’ve changed that, too) is depicted in a way that makes even Superman look ordinary, if not an inept wimp, in comparison.

No, this “evolution” is nothing new. It’s just more in-your-face than ever.

Action, Fantasy, Historical, Reviews

No-Frills Japanese Mythology?

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Is it mythology or embellished history? I’m not sure.

This film had great potential. The visual component was breathtaking, the acting solid, some of the plot ingredients tantalizing. For the first half hour it was shaping up to be a top-notch epic.

One of the main characters (played by Keanu Reeves) is a “half breed” who is also a boy partially raised by “demons.” For both those reasons he is an outcast among the clan he is imbedded with.

During a visit of the Shogun, the master of the clan is framed for a dishonorable crime by a witch working for a rival clan. The Master (Asano) commits seppuku, leaving his samurais without a master (the textbook definition of ronin).

This was all a plot by the rival master, Kira, and the witch Mizuki to have their clan take over the province, which they do. You can probably guess where the story goes from there–which is not a criticism, necessarily.

What is worthy of criticism is the gaps in character development; outright neglect in character building in some cases, and a choppy, rushed execution of the narrative.

Some probably would complain that the film is too long already, but I believe some more screen time was necessary to make it flow. There were some cultural insights and other expository requirements left out which could have saved it for a western audience. With a big budget historical epic there’s just no excuse for cutting corners in the screenplay.

The story concept was much more interesting than Dances With Japanese Wolves The Last Samurai. However (and it hurts me to say this) ruthless adherence to formula, as in the Tom Cruise vehicle, might have been an improvement.

I don’t remember any nudity or sexual content, so this aesthetic adventure might be a candidate for Amazon Instant Theater with the kids. Despite being a one-time fan of Akira Kurosawa, I haven’t seen many samurai films by other directors, and know nothing about other versions of this movie. Nevertheless,  I’m including a couple links below.

Action, Adventure, Fantasy

The Greater Good

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There’s a lot of stuff happening to America, to the freedoms of those who live here, and the opportunity quotient of those who will continue to live here. None of it is really a laughing matter, yet the perpetrators are just begging to be mocked.

I resisted for as long as I could, but finally just had to weigh in.

GreaterGood2
Faster than a jerking knee… More powerful than a rape accusation… Able to leap to counterfactual conclusions in a single cognitive bound… Look–on the silver screen (and the TV screen, the computer screen…and now your Kindle screen too)… It’s an action movie come to life! It’s a vision of utopia! It’s Womyn!

 

But goose-stepping Obammunists aren’t the only ones facing the business end of my rapier wit. The creative (and not-so-creative) forces behind much of the mainstream superhero and action/adventure  bupkus gets a literary barb or two in my just-released e-book, The Greater Good.

Anybody who knows anything about Hank Brown knows I love me some action/adventure…and superhero stories, too. That doesn’t mean I can’t smack down the hackneyed plot contrivances and ridiculous cliche`s so en vogue these days, though. In fact, my affinity for the genres qualify me to kick them around a bit.

After many missed opportunities and an overall bad experience with KDP Select (the year it debuted), I withdrew all my published books from the program.

I enrolled this book in KDP select (and, having learned the facts rather late, will nonetheless no longer choose DRM for anything I publish, either) because I intend to participate in discounts, promotions and so forth with this kindle-only satirical superhero spoof.  As a matter of fact, the first discount is right now and you can get it absolutely free for a limited time.

I must warn you, though, that you have to be bilingual to truly understand this book. That’s right–you must be fluent in Sarcasm.

Fantasy, Reviews

A Battle of Sorcerers

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Jim Morris, after returning from Vietnam, became an author of fiction and non-fiction. After playing catch-up on the sex, drugs and rock & roll he had missed out on during his three tours in the 1960s, he began exploring Toltec spiritualism in the mid-to-late 1970s. It is that background which informs this supernatural tale, much the way Star Wars was built upon George Lucas’ understanding of spiritual forces which began after suffering a car accident in his youth.

Morris is not just an author, but an experienced editor as well, and knows what makes a story sing. His humor has appealed to me since my first encounter with his work, and many of his experiences as a soldier resonate with me as well, even through fictionalized sequences in his novels. And as an adroit storyteller does, he built this yarn around a strong character: Dave Perry.

Parry (like Morris) is a Special Forces veteran, as well as a current DEA agent. His heredity is partly from the Cherokee Nation, which is why he’s given an undercover assignment in Talequah, Oklahoma to bust some alleged Peyote users as part of a local political struggle involving a quid pro quo arrangement between the FBI and the Tribal Chief. Of course, as the title indicates, Dave gets waist-deep in a whole lot more than he bargained for.

Dave Perry has a strong resemblance to the title character in Silvernail, which is to say heroic and likeable, without being a boy scout.

 

I’m not sure how Jim would feel about this, but I could probably argue that Battle of Sorcerers completes a trilogy of sorts, with John Silvernail representing the hero’s condition prior to spiritual awakening, Dave Perry begins the transformation, and Spurlock is the completed guru/shaman/witchdoctor with his physical and spiritual selves mutually aware.

It would be difficult to ignore the mystical undergirding of this book. Although presented with the Cherokee accent, the religion of the eponymous sorcerers is decidedly Eastern.  There is no good and evil, per se, but white and black magic/light and dark sides of the Force/Yin and Yang. Or “love and bullshit” as John Sky, the master shaman/Messiah figure of the novel (with the same chi as Quetzalcoatyl) frames it .

Here is one of the funniest parts in Sorcerers, after Dave decides to become the disciple of John Sky (who in this scene is working on a pickup truck):

“Here’s your first lesson in Indian Medicine,” he (John Sky) said. “Get over the idea that you are your body.”

He nodded toward a wrench on a wooden stand near Dave. “Then hand me that wrench.”

“With what?” (Dave asked.)

However you feel about the religious component to the story, Battle of Sorcerers is a fun, entertaining, and well-written novel. Jim says he has trouble categorizing the genre. I would call it a “feel-good supernatural thriller.”

Action, Adventure, Fantasy, Reviews

Thor: The Dark World

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Originally posted November 2013

Goldilocks is back…and he acts like a grown-up.

Iron Man 3 continued that franchise’s plummeting spiral into stupidity, despite a very strong start. At the theater for the Thor sequel I saw a preview for the next Captain America movie, and it’s hard to tell whether or not that one will follow in the cinematic footsteps of so many other sequels. It will be very difficult for anyone in Hollywood tasked with a superhero movie to top The Avengers, despite its flaws. I fully expect the next one to suck.

All that being said, The Dark World is, IMO, an improvement on Thor.

Granted, the Thunderer didn’t burst on the cinematic scene with quite the panache as Shell-Head. But that may be due to the difficulty of writing a character like Thor to appeal to a present-day audience. The Tony Stark of Marvel Comics received a makeover that would be heretical with a character like Marvel’s Thunder God–though he gets laughs every now and again [like with his ”he’s adopted” line in The Avengers] he’s always been not just a straight man, but quite the grandiose straight man. Iron Man’s ”Shakespeare in the Park” line about him was even more true of the comic book Thor than the movie Thor. There’s just no way you can turn him into a wisecracking party animal like the one Robert Downey Jr. portrays.

The appeal of clever humor was not lost on Dark World’s creators, though most of it comes from the supporting characters. But what they really banked on to ensure popularity was the Chick Appeal Factor. There are plenty of shots with actor Chris Hemsworth’s rippling triceps prominently displayed of course, but the film makers’ emotional super-move was in the romantic sub plot. Thor’s got an admirer in Asgaard–a kick-butt valkerie with a projected longevity commensurate with his [about a 5,000 year life span] but his love for earthbound mortal Natalie Portman is so strong that he gives up his extra-terrestrial friend with benefits…he even turns down the throne of Asgaard. You know how important monogamy was to the Vikings and all their gods.

Let us pause to hear the collective sigh and ”Aaawwwwwwww…” from ladies around the globe. If they’d only throw in a shot of Thor slicing cucumbers in the kitchen, this would get an Oscar nomination for Best Picture.

About that throne. In the first movie Thor wanted it but his father Odin decided he was too rash and immature to rule. Well now he’s all grown up–wise, mature, level-headed–and Pops wants to give him the throne…but Junior don’t want it no more.

In fact, it’s Odin who behaves rashly and a bit immature this time.

The plot involves a convergence of multiple worlds. By ”worlds” I mean parallel dimensions or something. And there’s a dark elf who wants to turn it all…well, dark. It gets a bit New Age with the wormholes opening at mystic power cores and such. I’m actually a bit surprised they only played with the one in the vicinity of Stonehenge and didn’t also take us on a tour of the pyramids in Egypt and the Americas. Anyhoo, it is also proven to us that beings from Asgaard can be killed.

And of course the film makers had fun with the Loki character. He has long teetered between villain and anti-hero and they’re still milking that to good effect. But for a hot minute in this movie they might even succeed in making him a sympathetic character for you.

Decent action with great visuals, plus some nice sprinklings of humor make up for whatever problems you might find with the plot and premise. Overall, a fun flick your girlfriend will probably enjoy more than you.