Duds on Display: A review of some real dogs

Duds on Display: A review of some real dogs

As people may have noticed, I don’t usually write negative reviews. Oh, I have on a couple of occasions, but in both instances it was for something that started out brilliantly, got my hopes way up, and then fell apart disastrously. They were just good enough to piss me off.

It’s not ingratiation. I don’t get favors or freebies from publishers or broadcasters, and anyone familiar with my political essays knows that whatever the hell it is I think I am doing, ingratiation isn’t high on the list. A few local people don’t talk to me because of those essays. I like to cheer them up by assuring them that they are psychically defeated by the soundness of my logic and the solid structure of the cases I build. Of course, they aren’t intellectually equipped to discern my brilliance. It’s sad, really.

But on reviews the main reason I avoid negative reviews is that the internet is full of snark, and I can’t make any appreciable addition to that particular mountain. And if I don’t enjoy something, why should I waste your time whining about it?

But I’ve kind of hit a patch of dreck in the stuff I’ve been reading and watching. I’ve hit a string of bad books, all of which were described as “best sellers” for Amazon or the NY Times or whatever. It wasn’t that they were lacking; they were flat out BAD. They belonged in the slush pile, not any best seller list.

Example 1: a story about ice roads on the Moon. Water ice. Now, that’s fine during the Lunar night, when it’s about -250F. But during the Lunar day, when the sun beats down far beyond anything the Sahara sees and it goes to 250 above, well, there might be a bit of a problem. Not in this book: the problem was meteorites kept hitting the roads and destroying them. I think I quit reading about page 15. It’s hard for a story to recover from that.

Example 2: a well-written story about first contact between dolphins and humanity. This had a plausible plot, some fairly decent science, and some engrossing characters. Quite a few of the characters died noble and/or heroic deaths. But then the author brought them back to life! In some instances, there wasn’t even any justification at all. Basically, a “then I woke up” ending. A good writer can evoke an admiring “what the hell?” out of me. In this case, it was not admiring.

Example 3: A superspy story with two augmented humans as agents with amazing powers, including hyper intelligence and access to all data on the internet internally. And it starts out well enough, but the story is told in a breathless “And then…AND then…AND THEN” style that usually ends up with velociraptors in F-35s fighting space vampires and the League of Super Villains. Worse, the co-protagonist is a woman whose only role, despite all her augmented powers, is to gape in utter adoring fascination at the wit and resourcefulness of her partner, who isn’t very convincing at either. Really, this story could have been written by Calvin. The comic page Calvin, not the grim philosopher.

Example 4: A book about a solar flare. I was interested, since I’m contemplating a story based on the same phenomenon taken from the back story in my novels. But this one was decidedly odd. For example, a jet ploughs into a skyscraper, and the characters act like nothing like this has ever happened before. Also, it takes place in Chicago, and of course with the entire electronic infrastructure destroyed, chaos and wild violence ensues. Only nobody seems to notice because, after all, this is Chicago. I think the author’s world view comes from Faux News.

Movies: Trump and the Illuminati sounds pretty bizarre on the face of it. But this Trump is a clone, created for some reason by mad Chinese scientists. Oh, and he’s on Mars. He’s been there for a thousand years, but that’s OK: he’s immortal. Why not use the original Trump? Well, he got assassinated after starting a world-wide nuclear war. Tch. So sad, really. “Trump” is a face on a space helmet, but the voice was pretty good.

Another movie was shot for about $20,000, and was basically a single-set story of the President, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, two scientists and an Air Force Lieutenant who are dealing with an alien invasion. Yeah, the SF channel pumps out dozens of those, but what made this one stand out was the utterly amazing scientific literacy that underlay it. It was written by someone who understands orbital mechanics, physics, and is solid in the theories behind exobiology. But the casting is utterly dismal. The President starts out looking like she was rode hard and put away wet, and by the time the denouement comes around, she looks like she was the star attraction at Swearengen’s in Deadwood on payday. A couple of them look like they’re reading their lines from a teleprompter.

Planet Dune: I don’t know how they got away with this. Desert planet, exotic rare export, huge worms that are attracted to sound. I know I’ve seen that somewhere else. It’s right on the tip of my tongue…Let’s just say the David Lynch version is better.

TV: Citadel. If you like Bond movies, you’ll love this. At a jaw-dropping 50 million bucks an episode, it has more than enough chases, special effects and general action sequences to satisfy the most ardent action adventure fan. But the characters are kind of vacant; it’s like they found people to play off-the-rack roles. And the ending is pretty idiotic. Actually that sounds like most Bond movies, too. If you’re into that, revel away!

There were some good encounters along the way, and I’ll revert to my normal format and review them in the near future.

But every once in a while, you just gotta vent.