7 Days in May | Arthur and Austen

King Arthur (2004)



This post is about stuff that we watched the week before our Britain trip. Didn't watch any movies while we were traveling.

One of the things I wanted to see in England was Hadrian's Wall, so what better way to celebrate and learn about it than the totally historically accurate King Arthur?

I kid because I love. Not many people like this version of the King Arthur story, but it's probably my favorite. It's a cool idea to set it during the Roman occupation of Britain with Arthur being a Roman officer and his knights are indentured soldiers from the conquered region of Sarmatia. They protect Roman interests in Britannia by manning Hadrian's Wall against the Celtic Woads. Merlin is a Woad and so is Guinevere.

Calling it "the untold true story" is ridiculous, but the movie is clever and fun and the cast is awesome. Clive Owen plays Arthur, Ioan Gruffudd is Lancelot, and two of my personal favorites - Keira Knightley and Mads Mikkelsen - play Guinevere and Tristan. Guinevere kicks so much ass and Tristan is basically every fantasy RPG character I've ever created. There are tons of other great actors in it, too; more than I want to list.

On top of all that are some great set pieces and a thoughtful, touching exploration of loyalty and duty.

Northanger Abbey (2007)



We didn't get as many Britain Trip movies watched as we wanted to, but since one of our stops was Bath, we wanted to sneak in at least a Jane Austen. Austen spent time in Bath (though she didn't actually like the town much) and used it as a location in a couple of her novels. Northanger Abbey is one of those and since it's a commentary on gothic romances - a genre our whole family enjoys - it felt like a good way to introduce David to Austen's stories.

There aren't many adaptations of it, but the 2007 BBC version is pretty great with or without competition. It stars Felicity Jones (Rogue One) as the main character and does a great job showing how her world view is affected by the books she reads. If you've read the novel, you know that Austen wasn't a huge fan of gothic romance (I forgive her) and that Northanger Abbey isn't so much a parody of them as it is simply making fun. But to get there, the movie lets us into the main character's imagination and uses cool, gothic imagery to do it. It's the closest Austen gets to genre work, so it's a great introduction to her (even though the movie wasn't actually filmed in Bath).

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949)



Technically, I watched this out of order since it's the second of Ford's Cavalry Trilogy, but I accidentally watched it last ('cause I forgot that Rio Grande was one of them and not just one of the billion other John Wayne movies named after rivers). Really though, I think it fits best as the final in the series.

The other two are in black-and-white, but Yellow Ribbon is in color, so it looks more modern. And John Wayne isn't playing the same character he does in the other two, but an older officer who's getting ready to retire. Ben Johnson, on the other hand, does play the same character he does in Rio Grande, but in Rio Grande he's a raw recruit and he's obviously more seasoned here. So if we're trying to put together some sort of chronology to this weird, extremely loose trilogy, Yellow Ribbon ought to come last.

It's a good film, but my least favorite of the three. The plot meanders and circles back on itself and I'm never super invested in the romantic triangle of Joanne Dru, John Agar, and Harry Carey Jr. I probably would've been more interested if Dru's character had been played by Shirley Temple from Fort Apache, but that's just because I love Shirley Temple. Dru does a fine job; it's just that Carey's character never really has a chance, so there's not really any tension around that part of the story. Mostly it's just Dru and Agar pretending not to like each other and Carey suffering the fallout from their shenanigans. Not that I feel bad for Carey, because he's pretty unlikable.

I also didn't feel the weight of bad orders like I did in the other two films. Wayne's superior officer does direct Wayne into questionable activity, but it's not like anything that Henry Fonda or J Carrol Naish make him do in Fort Apache and Rio Grande. But that also makes it the most pleasant of the three films. That's not a compliment (the grittiness of the other two are what I like most about them), but it's a true statement and John Wayne is typically charming (and in an atypical way for him) and Ben Johnson even more so.

The Gunfighter (1950)



Every Gregory Peck Western I watch makes him more and more my favorite Western star. In this one, he plays a gunslinger who visits a town for reasons I won't spoil. He has enemies hot on his trail, so the town marshal - who also happens to be an old friend of Peck's - is trying to get him to leave, but Peck insists on staying until his business is concluded.

Peck is awesome in it and it's another great movie that tears down the fantasy of gunfighting as a glamorous life. Unforgiven got a lot of praise for doing that as if it was some sort of new innovation, but the more Westerns I watch - like the original Magnificent Seven and even Young Guns II, for crying out loud - the more I realize how ununique Unforgiven was in that regard.

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)



A classic and a favorite that I wanted David to see. It's too pretentious to be my all-time favorite '50s space invader movie (I like more cheese in them), but it's really well done and I love the design of the ship and of course Gort. It's an essential part of the science fiction canon.

A Cowboy, a Space Captain, a Private Investigator, and a Barbarian Walk Into a Bar... [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

That could be the beginnings of a really lame joke, but it's something more. All four of these characters, these separate genre icons, share something in common. They are all cut from the same bolt of cloth... the American hero.

The Cowboy grew out of the nostalgia for a Wild West that never really existed outside the imagination of Buffalo Bill Cody and his Wild West Show. You can see the beginnings of him in the fiction of James Fenimore Cooper (1820-1850s), but it is Owen Wister who gets credit for the first official Western novel, The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains (1902). After him come all the rest, from Zane Grey to Louis L'Amour, along with his near cousin, the Northern hero: Mounties to gold-miners in the fiction of writers like Jack London or Rex Beach. North or West, the trappings of the Western and Northern include the tough, solitary cowpoke who enforces his own stern code with a shooting iron or a hanging rope. Locales where you'll find him include the wilderness and smoky saloons.

The second of these true, American heroes is the hardy Space-faring Captain. Pinpointing an exact creator is a little harder, for science fiction heroes begin with John Carter of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs in February 1912 in "Under the Moons of Mars," acquiring all the fighting skill of the old romantic heroes, but then moving on to Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Hawk Carse, Eric John Stark, and the list goes on and on... Best of all of them was CL Moore's Northwest Smith, who hung around the seedy bars of Mars with his pal, Yarol the Venusian. These tough spacers drank segir, slept with alien chicks, and could shoot or punch their way out of any situation. They lead the way to the final icon, Captain Kirk of Star Trek.

The Private Eye was invented by Carroll John Daly in "The False Burton Combs" in Black Mask (December 1922). Daly may have been first, but his work was expanded by Dashiell Hammett, who had actually been a Pinkerton agent, and later by Raymond Chandler, who elevated noir pulp fiction to the highest level. The central hero is, of course, a private detective, who knows the mean streets and follows his own code of justice. This doesn't always match that of the police, who are often as corrupt as the criminals. Mystery tales date back to at least Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murder in the Rue Morgue" (Graham's Magazine, April 1841), but was made hugely popular by British author Arthur Conan Doyle and his Sherlock Holmes in The Strand. The Private Eye was America's response to the effete murders in the vicarages over tea that the British cozy mystery was at the turn of the century. None of that middle class snobbery for the PI. He is a creature of independence, often found drinking in an illegal speakeasy.

The barbarian hero of sword-and-sorcery is our last of the foursome. The author who created him was Robert E Howard, in January 1929 with "The Shadow Kingdom," starring King Kull. Kull, like his replacement, and by far, the quintessential icon of S&S, Conan the Cimmerian, was a rough, deadly warrior, who claws his way to kingship. The barbarian is skilled with weapons, a hater of sorcery and evil magic, and a hero, but on his own terms and for his own price, which is often taken in gold, booze, or sex. He marches to the beat of his own drum, whether in a desert, a jungle, a filthy city with its steamy dens of iniquity. Conan walks a dark path and no furry little hobbits need apply.

So why do all these heroes exist, and why America? All of these characters are products of pulp fiction, whether in the early days when they were called weeklies, or in the later, true pulps. Magazine fiction since the 1880s had been driving genre with specialized types of reading. In America, this looked a little different than elsewhere, for North America was a land of pioneers. The sedate, well-established, Oxford-educated type good guy was seen as suspiciously too civilized for a land such as the US. American heroes had to be tough, whether they were in the Yukon or the Arizona desert or in imaginary lands or the quickly growing cities with the new problems of gangsterism and corruption. Only a hard man could walk the line between right and wrong.

World War II and later the Cold War would turn these heroes into sadly dated characters; no longer in style. They could have died in the pages of the pulps that folded and blew away by 1955. But was that really the case? Look at paperback sales in the 1950s and 1960s, and there they are again: the cowboy (Zane Grey and Louis L'Amour sold millions), the PI (whether he was Mike Hammer, Shell Scott, or Mike Shayne), the space captain (he fell on hard times in print but made it on radio and the small screen), and the barbarian (who sold millions of purple-edged Lancer paperbacks with the help of Frank Frazetta).

These characters all became icons, part of our collective culture along with the jungle lord and lady, the avenging swordsman, the secret agent, and the superhero. Love them or hate them, they all serve the same function: a plot Christopher Booker calls "Overcoming the Monster." The hero takes on the the "Big Bad" and wins, whether that is Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Beowulf. These heroes tells us we are not small, but can win; that our personal code is worth protecting, that there are reasons to charge "once more unto the breach." The hanging around in bars... well, what else is a hero going to do while waiting for that next adventure?

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

James Rosenquest: Man or Pseudoman? [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

If you read a lot of old SF mags like I do, you will surely come across names you aren’t familiar with. A quick look on ISFDB usually tells me which major writers or associate editors wrote the story under a pseudonym. Some that did a lot of this were Paul W Fairman, Milton Lesser, David Wright O’Brien, Randall Garrett, and Henry Kuttner. I mean somebody had to write all those Will Garth, CH Thames, Alexander Blade, and Ivor Jorgenson stories, right? But occasionally, just once in a while, you come across a name that wasn’t a pseudonym and you wonder: who was this wordsmith who wrote a half dozen stories, then gave up the game?

Such a writer for me is James Rosenquest. Never heard of him, right? Nor are you ever likely to. Unlike Cordwainer Smith, who is a pseudonymous author who began in the low-to-no-pay magazines, James Rosenquest is no genius waiting to be discovered. In fact, most of his stories appeared in Super-Science Fiction, one of the worst SF publications of the 1950s. At the end of the magazine’s run, for five issues in a row, James Rosenquest provided a story in a magazine filled with writers who would become famous in the decade ahead: Robert Silverberg, Harlan Ellison, and Jack Vance, as well as a few old pros like Isaac Asimov and Robert Bloch. The magazine was filled with hastily composed stories written on auto-pilot (Silverberg was pumping out 10,000 words a day) or unsellable clunkers from the reject pile. But neither necessarily applies to Rosenquest, as he was not a regular contributor elsewhere.

Are the James Rosenquest stories so bad? Obviously, this is a matter of taste. I enjoy monster fiction, so the cheesy, gigantic beasties and killer robots are right up my alley. The big magazines were Astounding, Galaxy and Fantasy & Science Fiction. I personally find '50s Astounding even more dull than '40s Astounding; Galaxy has many individual gems, but also many stories that haven’t dated well. Only Fantasy & Science Fiction remains enjoyable to read and that is because it was intended as a fairly literary mag from the beginning, so I don’t go there for my monster thrills. (That being said, they did publish Fritz Leiber’s “The Pale Brown Thing,” the novella that became Our Lady of Darkness in 1977.)

The bigger question for me is: who was James Rosenquest? No famous author has claimed him or been found out to be him, so we have to assume he was an actual person. The Internet guides say little. SFE: The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction says of the Rosenquest story “Dreadnight” in Shock Mystery Tales:

“…No notable authors appeared, at least not under their actual names; suspicions of multiple pseudonyms are fueled by the fact that bylines tend to be unique to this magazine (an exception being James Rosenquest, with previous credits in Super-Science Fiction and Fantastic Universe)…”

One possibility was that Rosenquest was WW Scott, the editor of the magazine. Quite often, when an editor can’t find enough material, he will write some himself, usually under a pseudonym. Harry Bates did it as Anthony Gilmore. Ray Palmer was Edgar Rice Burroughs knock-off JW Pelkie. Howard Browne was no less than twelve different pseudonyms. The same company did not own the three magazines that Rosenquest appeared in. Super-Science Fiction was published by Headline, Shock Mystery Tales by Pontiac, and Fantastic Universe by Leo Marguiles. Scott worked on Man-To-Man for Official Com Inc. in 1950, before heading to Headline where he edited Trapped (1956-60) and Guilty along with Super-Science Fiction.

Lawrence Bloch tells on the Mystery Scene website:

“…Manhunt was hard to hit, but WW Scott bought a batch of stories from me for his alternating bimonthlies, Trapped and Guilty. He paid a cent and a half a word, and the stories he passed on went to Pontiac Publications, where the rate was a cent a word….”

Since the Super-Science Fiction stories appear first, Scott may have written them at the magazine’s end, then kept the pseudonym when he wrote stories for the other two. What makes this unlikely is that Scott has no writing credits under his own name like most SF editors did, and he stayed on with Headline for at least two more years. Why sell to the competition? Why write SF at all, since the majority of his work was in men’s and mystery magazines? It is unlikely James Rosenquest was WW Scott.

I did a little poking around and found another author with the name J Wesley Rosenquest, who appeared in Weird Tales with “Return to Death” (January 1936) and “The Secret of the Vault” (May 1938). Did the J stand for James? Was Rosenquest a Weird Tales reader who contributed two stories as a teenager (perhaps) then went off to college and work, but returned to the typewriter in 1959? Who knows? I did some reading and a little detective work and came to this conclusion: it is quite possible they are the same writer. They both like semi-colons (but less in 1959, which could be a sign of improvement on a young writer.) They both see horror as a scientifically explained scenario rather than a supernatural one. In “Return to Death," a university-trained nobleman becomes paralyzed only to recover and be staked as a vampire by his less educated villagers. “The Secret of the Vault” has less obvious science to it, with weird eldritch tomes, but for all its talk of the liquid of essence, it isn’t so far away either. If J Wesley is James, his style became more dialogue-oriented, his SF themes more hackneyed, and in the end, not much of a better writer. The poor ending of “The Secret in the Vault” could come from the same one who wrote the poor ending of “Man-Hunting Robot.” (Despite this, it appears “The Secret of the Vault” was used for an episode of The Night Gallery in 1972, called “You Can Come Up Now, Mrs. Milikin” starring Ozzie and Harriet Nelson.)

Whether James Rosenquest was WW Scott, a pseudonymous writer, or J. Wesley Rosenquest, we may never know. What we do know is it that James Rosenquest wrote seven tales that stand or fall on their own merits. I personally found them worth a read, though no tears at the thought of him hanging up his quill pen in 1962.

“Horror in Space” (Super-Science Fiction, February 1959)
“The Huge and Hideous Beasts” (Super-Science Fiction, April 1959)
“Creatures of Green Slime” (Super-Science Fiction, June 1959)
“Man-Hunting Robot” (Super-Science Fiction, August 1959)
“Asteroid of Horror” (Super-Science Fiction, October 1959)
“Rope” (Fantastic Universe, February 1960)
“Dreadnight” (Shock Mystery Tales, October 1962)

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

Stranded on a Fearsome Planet: Two Novels of Survival [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

There is something immediately appealing about a killer planet. Science fiction has used the idea on numerous occasions, but the idea remains simple and the same: this planet is deadly. Why? There is the usual bad weather: it may be freezing cold, or burning hot, or have frequently changing weather, or just as likely earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, you name it. Add to this jungles teeming with killer plants and animals, hostile locals, and sometimes, when we're lucky, a terrible secret or two to be discovered. People who come from such places, survivors, are always bad-ass whether they are the hero like Leigh Brackett's Eric John Stark, who grew up on Mercury, or the ranks of Sardaukar from the imperial prison planet Salusa Secundus in Frank Herbert's Dune, soldiers so tough their very name sends chills down your back. It's pulpy, but it's fun.

I want to look at two novels here. One I came across by accident and was charmed. The other I saw as a kid and always wanted to read it. Comparing these two books got me to see a few things about this theme.

The first book is called Space Prison (1960) by Tom Godwin, which is also known as The Survivors (1958). No matter which title you encounter it under doesn't matter. This book moves. The idea is that an evil race of space creatures called the Gerns strand a number of humans on the planet Ragnorak, expecting them to perish. The icy world is filled with nasty creatures, but the humans don't die off. They get stronger and stronger. Eventually, they even capture a spaceship and go after the Gerns for revenge. Godwin tells the story in segments about different characters. Since their individual life expectancy is not so good, he tells how the group survives, not just one character. (I love that he named them the Gerns, probably after Hugo Gernsback, the father of magazine science fiction. This plot of humans triumphing over alien invaders is a theme Hugo cultivated back in Amazing Stories in 1926.)

The second book is Syd Logsdon's Jandrax from 1975. I saw this book way back in my youth and wanted to read it. It looked like a good adventure in the Edgar Rice Burroughs mode. I'm glad I missed it, because the story is so much more complex and I would not have been able to grasp its full meaning. The book's theme is so much more than a mere adventure story. The plot concerns a group of religious exiles who are stranded on a cold, inhospitable planet (sound familiar?). Jan Andrax (later known as Jandrax) is a planetary scout and the first half of the novel concerns him and his helping the colonists to survive. The colony builds a stockade and stores up food for the long winter. Eventually, he and all the other religious outsiders are driven out, forming a second group of people simply known as the Others. Jandrax realizes that for them to survive they must become nomads, following the Melt, the short summer-like period, across the planet.

The second half of the book follows Jean Dubois, a colonist who is crippled by a rival for a girl named Chloe. Dubois becomes a gunsmith, then leaves the colony to explore. He finds an island filled with mysteries, explaining where the extinct elder race that lived on the planet had gone. He leaves the island, shaken by the mystical experience, and ends up with the Others. He returns to the colony to face his rival and take back the son he left behind. Later Jean will return to the island as the Others' prophet of a new religion, leaving behind his grown son. Logsdon doesn't wrap it up neatly, but leaves many questions for the reader to think about.

Comparing these two novels got me thinking about crucibles. That's a good term for hell planets that forge humans into something stronger. None of us would ever want to go to such a place, but we all love the hero who comes out of them: cool, deadly, and usually pretty buff. It's why we love Tarzan, John Rambo, Wolverine, Jason Bourne, etc. All these characters had to endure some horrific event in their lives. Even Robin Williams in Jumanji fills this category. The man who survived the insane jungle of the Jumanji world. We like to identify with characters of this sort. We think in the back of our minds: they survived and became something more; so could I. This is a very old way of thinking. It is no doubt where the idea of the hero comes from originally, in the days of caves and smilodons. Tales that helped people living in dangerous times to be brave; to keep fighting. You will survive. Stories of this sort ignore such realities as PTSD, but offer something else: Courage in the face of adversity. So whether you go to a hell planet or find some hell right here on earth, the hero walks away. We will survive...

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

Planet Stories: Swimming Against the Tide [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

By the 1950s, adventure science fiction was seen as an embarrassment by those who had once written it for the Clayton Astounding and Amazing Stories. Under the banner of John W Campbell's Astounding, the new order in the 1940s was to shed the pulp past and move on to that logical, shining, serious genre known as Science Fiction.

But then there was Planet Stories, that little quarterly magazine published by Malcolm Reiss and Love Romance Publications. Stories set on other worlds where heroic men and women face terrible monsters. It was all too Edmond Hamilton for the snobs. (Oddly Edmond Hamilton and Jack Williamson, the two writers who crafted space opera in the 1920s and '30s never appeared in Planet Stories. Hamilton was writing Superman comics and was pleased to leave Planet Stories to his wife. Jack Williamson was one of the old pros who could satisfy the new rules of SF and was part of that Age of Campbell.)

So was Planet Stories all that bad? Certainly it featured plenty of space opera and sword-and-planet action. Many of the best of Leigh Brackett's stories appeared in Planet Stories, including her classic Eric John Stark tales of Mars. In fact, she was instrumental in carrying on the vision of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars as a world of strange wonders. This in turn gave Ray Bradbury a place to grow his Martian Chronicles with stories like "The Million Year Picnic," "Rocket Summer," and "Mars is Heaven," standard texts in classrooms and libraries as serious literature. Some of Raymond Z Gallun's finest work of the 1950s can be found there too with "The Big Pill" and "Asteroid of Fear." Like all magazines, it was a continuum of good to bad.

Looking at the contents lists of Planet Stories is quite revealing. The names of the authors break up into four categories:

• old pros 
• slumming stars 
• new writers who would go on to better things 
• the forgotten

Campbell and his crew dominated the 1940s. The markets for older-styled writers were shrinking. Astounding was setting the bar high and some were never going to make it. Writers like John Murray Reynolds, who had written for Weird Tales, wrote the very first story, "The Golden Amazons of Venus." Ray Cummings, Ed Earl Repp, Carl Jacobi, Ross Rocklynne, Fredrick A. Kummer Jr, J Harvey Haggard, E Hoffman Price, Otto Binder, Charles R Tanner, Otis Adelbert Kline, Neil R Jones, and Hugh B Cave were some of the earliest SF writers for Hugo Gernsback in the 1920s and '30s as well as other magazines like Weird Tales. For these writers, Planet Stories was a final stopping place before oblivion (or jobs in the fledgling comic book industry).

The slumming stars were Campbell-worthy writers who needed another market, had a story or two that Campbell would never buy, or simply enjoyed the adventure thing as well as hard SF. These included Clifford D Simak, Fredrick Pohl, Fletcher Pratt, Frank Belknap Long, Henry Kuttner, Theodore Sturgeon, Fredrick Brown, Manly Wade Wellman, Malcolm Jameson, and Laurence Manning. Some chose to hide behind pseudonyms; some did not. The usual reason for using a nom-de-plum was having two stories in the same issue. Poul Anderson used AA Craig, not out shame (he published 13 stories in the magazine between 1950 and 1955), but because that issue also featured "Tiger By the Tail" by Poul Anderson.

New writers (who would later become famous) include many big names as we know them today, though back in the late '40s and early '50s they were earning their reputations. These included Isaac Asimov, Damon Knight, Philip K Dick, John Jakes, Leigh Brackett, Basil Wells, James Blish, Jerome Bixby, Robert Sheckley, Jack Vance, Milton Lesser, and Stanley Mullen. For some of these writers, they were waiting for HL Gold to begin publishing Galaxy, or Anthony Boucher with The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. There were soon to be quality magazines that featured un-Campbellian SF.

The editors of Planet Stories balanced their issues with old pros and new up-and-comers, but about half of the names are writers whom I've never heard of, though some have large numbers of stories to their credit. (A few were the editors of the magazine as well.) Mostly they are writers of one or two stories, names that live on only in Planet Stories. These include John Wiggin, WV Athanas, CJ Wedlake, Lloyd Palmer, HF Cente, and on and on. At least ninety of them. They are the forgotten souls who tried their hand at the task, but have since faded from memory. Only one gained a small bit of fame. That was Keith Bennett, who wrote "The Rocketeers Have Shaggy Ears." The story was selected by Leigh Brackett for the Best of Planet Stories, Volume 1. (Sadly there was no Volume 2 and 3 and 4...)

Planet Stories published seventy-one issues, most quarterly, from 1939 to 1955. It never won any awards, but it was fondly remembered by readers. It was a final volley into the second half of the century. The fun story of interplanetary adventure would disappear for a short time, existing in comics and on television, but by 1977, with Star Wars, the top grossing film of the 20th century, the cry for adventure SF would be heard again, loud and clear.

And even to this day, with the turmoil at the Hugos, we see that SF still has two camps: one that wishes to drive SF towards literature and another that simply wants to feel the wonder of the stars over head, a smoking laser in one hand, and a laser sword in the other, as hideous bug-eyed monsters do unspeakable things to sexy young space maidens. (Modern readers demand much less silly versions of this, but the spirit is the same.) Sadly the genre never split into two separate things, with two different names. If it had, say "Speculative Fiction" for the literary types and "Planet Stories" for the rest, how fitting that would have been...

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

Robots Can't Lie: SF Mysteries Before Asimov [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

Isaac Asimov claims that the science fiction story was never truly married with the mystery story before 1953. Some authors tried, while others danced around the problem, like Anthony Boucher who wrote the mystery novel, Rocket to the Morgue in 1942, about science fiction fans, rather than being science fiction itself. It was Asimov who took this challenge most seriously. In his book Asimov's Mysteries (1968) he wrote of his quest:

But talk is cheap, so I put my typewriter where my mouth was, and in 1953 wrote a science fiction mystery novel called The Caves of Steel (published, 1954). It was accepted by the critics as a good science fiction novel and a good mystery and after it appeared I never heard anyone say that science fiction mysteries were impossible to write. I even wrote a sequel called The Naked Sun (published, 1957) just to show that the first book wasn't an accident. Between and after these novels, moreover, I also wrote several short stories intended to prove that science fiction mysteries could be written in all lengths.

The Caves of Steel and its sequels feature murders that involve robots. Was this an original idea? Hardly. Eando Binder had made robots famous as early as 1939 with his stories of Adam Link, a robot that is accused of murder and faces trial. Asimov's interest is not to turn robots into protagonists, but to explore his Three Laws of Robots (and how a clever murderer might get around them.)

So imagine my surprise when I stumbled across "Robots Can't Lie" by Robert Leslie Bellem in a copy of Fantastic Adventures, July 1941. This murder mystery has a man, Tim Kermit, framed for murder by a robot that identifies him as the killer. Because of the way robots record what they see, they are considered infallible witnesses. Tim's only chance of avoiding the Lethal Chamber is to escape and repair another robot that was found broken at the murder scene. In the end the escape and repair are a trick that brings out the real killer.

Bellem tells the tale in his usual loose, noir style with Q-rays replacing .38s and gliders replacing cars. What the author lacks in style he makes up for in pace. Editor Ray Palmer interrupts in Hugo Gernsback fashion (with footnotes) to explain the SF trappings such as the Q-bolt used in the murder weapon, the viso lens of the robot, and the personal radio wave of the autorad, all in pseudo-scientific gooblygook that does nothing to further the story.

Now to go back to Asimov. He never said that no one ever tried to do it, only that it had never succeeded. What strikes me first off, is how similar the mystery ideas are between "Robots Can't Lie" and his Lije Bailey novels. I doubt Bellem was familiar with Adam Link (though he may have been), but Ray Palmer certainly was aware of his competition. Isaac Asimov was also fully aware of the Binders. He had permission to use the title I, Robot from the brother duo who had used it earlier. Was Asimov familiar with "Robots Can't Lie"? He was a bit of an Astounding/John W Campbell snob, so would he have read anything as pulpy as Fantastic Adventures? Unlikely, but his interest in robot stories may have superseded his snobbery.

Does "Robots Can't Lie" work as an SF-Mystery? Better than Asimov might have liked to admit. The robot-witness idea certainly could not happen in a regular mystery. This is one of Asimov's key criteria: a good SF-Mystery can't work as a regular mystery, nor is it simply SF. I'm not going to say you couldn't rewrite this story without SF trappings or robots. Replace the robots with human witnesses and it would work. (There is even a chance Bellem's story was largely rewritten by Palmer, though I have no proof of this.) Bellem was a high production writer, pumping out millions of words a year, and his ploy of trapping the villain is hardly novel. Asimov's novels by comparison could not be rewritten in this fashion. Even if Asimov wasn't the first, he certainly was the best at creating such SF Mysteries.

The other thing that makes me giggle is the 1980s adoration of how William Gibson brought a Raymond Chandler style to Cyberpunk. You want full-bore noir SF, here it is, the real thing from one of noir's cheesier hacks, back when Gibson's father was still reading Thrilling Wonder Stories.

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

Gravity (2013)

Who's in it?: Sandra Bullock (Bionic Showdown, Demolition Man) and George Clooney (Return to Horror High, Return of the Killer Tomatoes!).

What's it about?: A novice astronaut (Bullock) is stranded in Earth's orbit without a ship when a space shuttle mission goes horribly wrong.

How is it?: My default setting is to have zero interest in movies about people stuck alone in one setting for an hour-and-a-half. Though I've heard good things, I've never seen Castaway, Open Water, or that one with Ryan Reynolds buried alive. That's why I resisted Gravity when I first heard about it, even though it stars two of my favorite actors and was made by one of my favorite directors.

The pull of Bullock, Clooney, and Alfonso Cuarón became too powerful though, especially when paired with almost universally great reviews and a serious admonition by the right people to see it in 3D. I'm almost as disinterested in 3D as I am in watching a person try to stay alive for an entire film without any antagonists, but when other people who don't care for 3D tell me that that's the way I need to see a movie, then I usually listen. And I'm glad I did.

Though the action of Gravity all takes place in Earth's orbit, it's not just 90 minutes of Sandra Bullock floating in space, which is what I sort of feared. She has plenty to do as she tries to make it back to solid ground and there are lots of complications to prevent her from getting there. Sometimes you don't need a bad guy.

There's also some light character development as Bullock - because of some trauma in her past - has to remember why it's even important to live. This is the weakest part of the movie, but it does drive her character's emotions which in turn gives her some great scenes that remind me why she's one of my favorite actors. George Clooney doesn't have to stretch as much, but he's perfectly charming as the more seasoned astronaut who commands the shuttle mission and it's not his movie anyway.

As thrilling as the story is though, the real treat is the way it's presented. Cuarón mixes live performance and CGI seamlessly to create some amazing and breathtaking shots. They really do need to be seen in 3D though to appreciate their full glory and should be viewed on the largest screen possible. I don't know how much Gravity will reward multiple viewings, but it's a powerful, immersive experience and needs to be seen the right way at least once.

Grade: Four out of five debris clouds.

Hand-Held Thunder: The History of the Blaster [Guest Post]

It's always a pleasure when G.W. Thomas sends in a guest post, not only because I get to share it with you, but also because I always learn something new. Thanks again to G.W. for this history of ray guns and blasters in scifi literature and film. -- Michael

Martian Heat Ray

It made sense when Science Fiction went to the stars that the brave men and women who plumbed the depths of space would need weapons suited to their new environment. A firearm requiring oxygen or air pressure would not work in the vacuum of space, nor could an adventurer lost on a distant planet find ammunition for a conventional gun. As with so many of Science Fiction's standard props, it fell to H. G. Wells to arm the enemies of Man with such a weapon in The War of the Worlds (1898):

It is still a matter of wonder how the Martians are able to slay men so swiftly and so silently. Many think that in some way they are able to generate an intense heat in a chamber of practically absolute non-conductivity. This intense heat they project in a parallel beam against any object they choose, by means of a polished parabolic mirror of unknown composition, much as the parabolic mirror of a lighthouse projects a beam of light. But no one has absolutely proved these details. However it is done, it is certain that a beam of heat is the essence of the matter. Heat, and invisible, instead of visible, light. Whatever is combustible flashes into flame at its touch, lead runs like water, it softens iron, cracks and melts glass, and when it falls upon water, incontinently that explodes into steam.

Garrett P. Serviss can take credit for inventing "The Distintegrator" in his "Thomas Edison's Conquest of Mars" (1898), America's answer to H. G. Wells:

Another soft whirr in the instrument, a momentary flash of light close around it, and, behold, the crow had turned from black to white! 

"Its feathers are gone," said the inventor; "they have been dissipated into their constituent atoms. Now, we will finish the crow." 

Instantly there was another adjustment of the index, another outshooting of vibratory force, a rapid up and down motion of the index to include a certain range of vibrations, and the crow itself was gone—vanished in empty space! There was the bare twig on which a moment before it had stood. Behind, in the sky, was the white cloud against which its black form had been sharply outlined, but there was no more crow.

Barsoomian Radium Gun

While Serviss and Wells slugged it out in fiction, in the real world, Nikola Tesla was working on the idea of actual direct-energy weapons as early as 1900. In his The Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-dispersive Energy through the Natural Media he discourses on charged particle beams. Still, fiction was slow to follow.

The first big writer to consider what a personal sized space weapon might be was Edgar Rice Burroughs in his maiden flight as a writer, "Under the Moons of Mars" (All-Story, serialization beginning February 1912). ERB realized that Martians would not necessarily have the same weaponry as Earthmen and came up with the "Radium" rifle:

These rifles were of a white metal stocked with wood, which I learned later was a very light and intensely hard growth much prized on Mars, and entirely unknown to us denizens of Earth. The metal of the barrel is an alloy composed principally of aluminum and steel which they have learned to temper to a hardness far exceeding that of the steel with which we are familiar. The weight of these rifles is comparatively little, and with the small caliber, explosive, radium projectiles which they use, and the great length of the barrel, they are deadly in the extreme and at ranges which would be unthinkable on Earth. The theoretic effective radius of this rifle is three hundred miles, but the best they can do in actual service when equipped with their wireless finders and sighters is but a trifle over two hundred miles.

Despite the range, most of the fighting on Mars takes place with swords. So much for logic. Still, it paved the way for other writers to think outside the box.

Buck Rogers

The term "blaster" was coined in April 1925 in Weird Tales (Amazing Stories and Astounding did not yet exist!) in "When the Green Star Waned" by the obscure Nictzin Dyalhis:

"Well, it was for me that, in obedience to Hul Jok's imperative command, I was holding my Blastor pointing ahead of me..." 

Another Weird Tales alumnus was Edmond Hamilton who wrote most the SF in the magazine. He had the Blue Ray of Death in "Across Space" (Weird Tales, September 1926) and the Cold Ray in "The Atomic Conquerors" (Weird Tales, February 1927) and the De-Atomizing Ray in "Crashing Suns" (Weird Tales, August 1928).

Buck Rogers, who was still Anthony Rogers when he appeared in "Armageddon 2419" (Amazing Stories, August 1928) by Philip Francis Nowlan, found the future Americans at war with invading Asians and using rocket launchers called Rocket guns and the following:

I took the weapon from his grasp and examined it hurriedly. It was not unlike the automatic pistol to which I was accustomed, except that it apparently fired with a button instead of a trigger. I inserted several fresh rounds of ammunition into its magazine from my companion's belt, as rapidly as I could, for I soon heard, near us, the suppressed conversation of his pursuers.

In the same issue, in an equally monumental tale, The Skylark of Space by E. E. Doc Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby goes back to the Burroughs' method:

They found that the X-plosive came fully up to expectations. The smallest charge they had prepared, fired by Crane at a great stump a full hundred yards away from the bare, flat-topped knoll that had afforded them a landing-place, tore it bodily from the ground and reduced it to splinters, while the force of the explosion made the two men stagger...The pistol cracked, and when the bullet reached its destination the great stone was obliterated in a vast ball of flame.

"The Girl from Mars"

Hugo Gernsback published "The Girl From Mars" by Jack Williamson and Miles J. Breuer in a pamphlet in 1929. This was the one thing he published in between owning Amazing Stories and his new set of magazines which included Wonder Stories. This tale features three Martians raised on Earth, children sent in capsules like Superman would be in the comics four years later. The two males fight a super-hero proportioned battle for the female using an array of weird weaponry most the size of a coin:

The ultramundane man thrust a hand into his pocket and pulled out one of Worrell's little instruments. I did not see the shape of the thing, but as he clasped it in his hand, a vague green fire flowed out of it and flashed across to Fred. What that force was, I do not know - some form of electric energy, or of ions, perhaps. The green radiance condensed about my son. His brave advance was abruptly checked. An expression of agony came over his face. He tottered and began a scream that ended in a rattling sob. For a moment his body was outlined sharply in the curdling green incandescence. Mason relaxed his grip of the tiny device and calmly returned it to his pocket as my son, burned and distorted, fell heavily to the floor.

"The Crystal Ray" by Raymond Z. Gallun (Air Wonder Stories, November 1929) features another racist war between America and the Yellow Menace. America survives with a final desperate weapon, the Blue Ray:

From the bow of one of America's ships a faint beam of bluish light stabbed out and struck an enemy craft, sweeping it from stem to stern! It passed through the vessel as though she had been made of glass, instead of thousands of tons of metal. Immediately the dreadnaught began to blunder oddly as though completely out of control. What had happened to her occupants? A grim smile passed over Pelton's lips, for he knew!

Brigands of the Moon

In Amazing Stories, November 1930, it was John W. Campbell, still writer, not yet all-important editor, who really figured out how such a weapon would actually work in "Solarite":

“Imagine what would happen if we directed this against the side of a mountain—the entire mass of rock would at once fly off at unimaginable speed, crashing ahead with terrific power, as all the molecules suddenly moved in the same direction. Nothing in all the Universe could hold together against it! It's a disintegration ray of a sort—a ray that will tear, or crush, for we can either make one half move away from the other—or we can reverse the power, and make one half drive toward the other with all the terrific power of its molecules! It is omnipotent—hmmm—” Arcot paused, narrowing his eyes in thought. It has one limitation. Will it reach far in the air? In vacuum it should have an infinite range—in the atmosphere all the molecules of the air will be affected, and it will cause a terrific blast of icy wind, a gale at temperatures far below zero! This will be even more effective here on Venus!

1931 seems to be an important year for ray guns. At Teck's Amazing Stories, April 1931 Nat Schachner and Arthur Leo Zagat came up with the Disruptor in "The Emperor of the Stars". That same month in Hugo Gernsback's Wonder Stories, The Annihilation Beam appeared in Leslie F. Stone's in "The Conquest of Gola," and Clark Ashton Smith had his Zero Ray in "An Adventure in Futurity". Jack Williamson offers another form of weapon, the Matter Annihilation Ray in "Twelve Hours to Live" (Wonder Stories, August 1931).

In wasn't any different over at the Clayton Astounding. Ray Cummings must have had Wells in mind when he created the pencil heat ray in Brigands of the Moon (Astounding, March 1931) :

My pencil ray was in my hand and I pressed its switch. The tiny heat ray stabbed through the air, but I missed. The figure stumbled but did not fall. I saw a bare gray arm come from the cloak, flung up to maintain its balance. Or perhaps my pencil ray had seared his arm...

Flash. Ah-ahhh.

Of all the spacemen to appear in the Clayton Astounding, Hawk Carse was certainly the most famous. In "Hawk Carse" (Astounding, November 1931) he is described as "... Hawk Carse the adventurer, he of the spitting ray-gun and the phenomenal draw, of the reckless space ship maneuverings..." In the story there is little or no explanation of how a ray gun works for by this time none was necessary. The Hawk Carse stories were modeled on the Western and how the gun worked was no longer important, only that the hero was lightning fast. The ray gun had arrived.

C. L. Moore's Northwest Smith in his first appearance "Shambleau" (Weird Tales, November 1933) shows he knows his way around a weapon in the opening scene:

"Smith, lounging negligently against the wall, arms folded and gun-hand draped over his left forearm, looked incapable of swift motion, but at the leader’s first forward step the pistol swept in a practiced half-circle and the dazzle of blue-white heat leaping from its muzzle seared an arc in the slag pavement at his feet..."

By 1934 in Triplanetary (Amazing Stories, January-April 1934), E. E. Doc Smith replaced his X-Plosive with the "Standish", a beam weapon of immense power. Smith would later coined the word "Super-Weapon" in "What a Course!" (Thrilling Wonder Stories, June 1939:

Going up to a blank wall, he manipulated an almost invisible dial set flush with it surface, swung a heavy door aside, and lifted out the Standish - a fearsome weapon. Squat, huge, and heavy, it resembled somewhat an overgrown machine rifle, but one possessing a thick, short telescope, with several opaque condensing lenses and parabolic reflectors...He set his peculiar weapon down, unfolded its three massive legs, crouched down behind it, and threw in a switch. Dull red beams of frightful intensity shot from the reflectors and sparks, almost of lightening proportions, leaped from the shielding screen under their impact.

Pew! Pew!

Disappointing as Buck Roger's initial weaponry in the Pulps, he didn't really get going until he became a comic strip character in January 1929, leaving Earth for outer space. Once out there, Buck's futuristic weapon inspired the generations that followed. The XZ-31 Rocket Pistol appeared at the February 1934 American Toy Fair and sold for 50 cents.

And of course, right on Buck's tracks came Flash Gordon in January 7, 1934. With Buster Crabbe playing him in the serials in 1936, everyone now knew what a space gun was supposed to look like.

The events of 1945 and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki mark the end of fun, futuristic weapons. The real thing had arrived and they weren't so fun. For a while Science Fiction focused on bombardments as everyone worried that the Russians would fill the skies with death. But TV gave us new men in silver underwear and the ray gun became the province of Children's entertainment or the stuff of jokes such as Chuck Jones's brilliant "Duck Dodgers in the 24 and 1/2 century" (Warner Bros., 1953). Daffy whips out his Disintegrator Pistol and pulls the trigger. The gun, of course, disintegrates. But eventually TV shows like Lost in Space, Star Trek, Space 1999, and of course Star Wars would bring these glittering hand-held weapons back into our consciousness. Call it a ray gun, call it a blaster, it doesn't matter. As Han Solo says, perhaps erroneously: "Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid."

Additional resources:
Kurogawa's Virtual Ray Gun Exhibition
Technovelgy's Weapons in Science Fiction

 G. W. Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

Blue Worlders hate cephalopods, part 1

[via Pulp Covers]

Top 10 Movies of 2012

10. Pitch Perfect



Movies get bonus points for coming out of nowhere and surprising me, which is exactly what Pitch Perfect did. I like Anna Kendrick and a capella singing just fine, but neither would typically be enough to get me to the theater by themselves. What I do love are movies about contests that We've Just Gotta Win and this one is hilarious (especially - but not only - thanks to Rebel Wilson).

9. The Dark Knight Rises



Not as great as The Dark Knight, but it's a good finale to Christopher Nolan's trilogy. It proved once and for all that Nolan's Batman is not the comic-book Batman, but I'm okay with that. I not only like the way Nolan finishes the series, I wish the comics would wrap up the same way.

The thing I was most excited about for this film though was seeing Catwoman and it didn't disappoint me on that level. Anne Hathaway narrowly edges out Julie Newmar as my favorite Catwoman (only because Newmar's version had a touch of crazy that I don't think the character needs).

8. The Cabin in the Woods



Embraces most of what I love about horror movies while making fun of everything I hate. The ending isn't perfect, but the rest of it sure is.

7. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel



I'm a sucker for elderly British people and stories about second chances. This was right in my wheelhouse on so many levels.

6. Skyfall



I haven't actually talked to anyone who's called Skyfall the best Bond movie ever, but I've heard that such people exist. If I were to meet someone with that point of view, my response would be, "Really?" Because I don't think they're thinking that through very well.

Skyfall is a lot of fun, it's gorgeous, and it works both as the 50th anniversary of the Bond series and as the finale of the trilogy started in Casino Royale. I especially love it from that last perspective. Say what you want about Quantum of Solace's dumb story and boring villain, but one thing that film did right was continue the story of Bond's relationship with his country as personified by M. Skyfall pays that story off in a beautiful way while also reintroducing elements from the pre-Casino Royale films that I didn't realize how much I'd missed. It's also got a great villain and covers its themes in interesting ways. It's a great Bond film.

But the best ever? No way. It owes too much to the early Connery films to seriously consider letting it surpass them. I'm not even sure I like it as much as The Living Daylights or Casino Royale.

5. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey



My including The Hobbit this high on the list is all the evidence anyone needs to verify that this Top 10 is my personal one and not an attempt at the 10 Objectively Greatest Movies of the year. If I were being objective about it, I'd agree with the critics who point out that Peter Jackson is indulging his every whim at the expense of telling a tight story. There's a reason that he released a Theatrical Cut of the Lord of the Rings films and then an Extended Edition for DVD. A lot of people simply don't have the patience to sit through scenes that legitimately could have been deleted to improve the pacing.

That said, I'm solidly in the camp of people who will only ever watch the Extended Editions of Lord of the Rings. I love all that extra stuff. I love seeing Middle Earth that fleshed out. I absolutely don't mind seeing Jackson do the same thing with The Hobbit. But I also can't be too harsh on those who do mind it. Jackson risked alienating those folks when he chose not to release a shorter, theatrical version, so it's fair for them to say it didn't work for them.

Even for me, it's not perfect. With Lord of the Rings, I love pretty much every change Jackson made to Tolkien's novels, but I miss the Bilbo that was blustered out his front door and into adventure by Gandalf in the book. Jackson's Bilbo begins his journey too eagerly for my taste. He's too heroic too early. It felt right as I watching it, so maybe I'll re-evaluate after I've seen all three films, but it feels like Jackson needed to speed up Bilbo's character development in order to make him more likable in this installment of the trilogy.

That - and the fact that it is the first installment in a trilogy instead of a complete story - keeps The Hobbit from being higher on my list.

4. Mirror Mirror



I've already written about Mirror Mirror a couple of times, so I'll spare us all another review. I really, really love this movie though.

3. Les Misérables



I knew I was going to have problems with this movie from the first time I saw the trailer and teared up listening to "I Dreamed a Dream." And I was right. Through the whole film, if I wasn't crying over the human misery, I was crying from the joy of hearing those songs again.

I've seen Les Misérables on stage a few times. It's my favorite musical and the reason I think Phantom of the Opera is over-rated. So I'm very familiar with the songs, but I don't own a cast recording and can't listen to them any time I want. I've never cared about hearing the songs outside of the context of the story as presented by actors.

But because I love those songs - and the story - so much, I've longed for a version with actors that I could own and watch whenever I want. In other words, I've been wanting this movie for about twenty years. And it was everything I hoped it would be. (Even Russell Crowe, who isn't an especially strong Javert, but has a perfectly lovely singing voice outside of that.)

The only reason Les Misérables isn't higher on my list is because I can't separate it from my feelings about the stage production. I don't know how I would've felt about it if I wasn't already in love with it from the moment it was announced.

2. The Avengers



Oh, wait... I mean the other Avengers movie about a red-headed spy in a black catsuit.



I seriously reconfigured my Top 3 movies I don't know how many times right up to the point of writing this post. There was a long time this year that I couldn't imagine any movie bumping The Avengers from first place.

A lot of my love for the movie is because it never should have worked. If I've learned anything from a lifetime of movie watching, it's that movies are never as awesome as we hope they'll be. From the moment Samuel L. Jackson appeared at the end of Iron Man, we were all thrilled by the notion of an integrated universe of Marvel superhero films all leading to an all-star Avengers movie. But admit it, you didn't think it would deliver, did you? I certainly didn't. It couldn't possibly live up to the awesomeness of its premise.

Except it did. It totally did.

And, in the process, it gave us the Hulk movie we'd all been waiting for.

1. Looper



Outside of its being really stinking good, the reason Looper is number one on my list is because it's not based on something I already loved. I had to give it bonus points for being a completely original story about characters I'd never heard of before. And what a story.

I dig a good, tightly plotted time-travel story as much as the next person, but what I really love are stories that make me think and re-evaluate my opinions about people. I can't talk about how Looper does that without going into spoilers, but it's so much more than just a fun, scifi movie and deserves to be Number One.

10 Movies I Could Take or Leave in 2012

If you're just now tuning in, I'm counting down the 43 movies I saw in the theater last year. The bottom of the barrel was in this post, so we pick up with Number 30 this week: the part of the list where I found things in each movie to like and dislike, in more or less equal amounts.

30. The Bourne Legacy



I was more eager for this than I should have been. I hoped it would be a decent placeholder for the series until Matt Damon found a reason to come back, but it was a tired plot with very low stakes. Nice performances from Jeremy Renner and Rachel Wiesz, but they didn't have much to work with except for a couple of really effective action pieces.

29. Man on a Ledge



Another thriller in which the excellent cast is wasted on a generic, predictable script. Genesis Rodriguez steals the movie and brings Jamie Bell along with her though. I want another, better movie about just the two of them.

28. The Woman in Black



An effective, spooky movie with a welcome performance by Daniel Radcliffe. That ending though... It's designed to clear the road for Woman in Black 2, but is so cynical and obvious about it that it not only kills my interest in a sequel, it also makes this one un-rewatchable for me.

27. Men in Black 3



I'm not a fan of the Men in Black movies. They're disposable entertainment that I tend to forget about as soon as I leave the theater. This one actually stuck with me, but I haven't made up my mind about if that was for the right reason or not. The movie's point is unclear, but whatever it is, it makes it in a memorable way.

And Josh Brolin is super entertaining as Young Tommy Lee Jones.

26. Hotel Transylvania



I would've liked it a lot more if Dracula didn't sound like Adam Sandler doing a Lugosi accent. I mean, that's exactly what's going on, but I wish it wasn't so distracting. Other than that, it's a funny movie with some amusing interpretations of classic monsters.

25. The Expendables 2



The first one was pretty miserable, but they got me back to the theater by adding Chuck Norris to the mix and promising to expand the roles of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis. There were still some huge, ridiculous plot holes, but I loved the finale as everyone used their best moves (and best lines) to show each other up. What it has over the first one is "fun."

24. Flight



Not the movie I expected. I thought it was going to be more of a legal drama, but not being that doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing. Taken on its own terms, Flight is a powerful, effective film about addiction and the lengths people go to deny it and cover it up. I liked it a lot for that and enjoyed being surprised by it, but it's a difficult movie to watch and I can't imagine I'll ever want to see it again.

23. Argo



Nice thriller with some laugh out loud moments, some harrowing ones, and a couple of great, touching ones when reluctant participants in the escape plan decide to commit to it. Unfortunately, the script goes to great lengths to ramp up the tension in unbelievable and cheesy ways that kept reminding me this couldn't be how it actually happened.

22. Prometheus



I already wrote a long post about this one, but short version: There are some truly great and fascinating ideas in this visually stunning movie. It's just too bad that they're executed so very, very sloppily.

21. Brave



I just rewatched Brave the other night and liked it better than I did the first time. I don't know if I liked it well enough to move it out of this section of my list, but maybe. I'm certainly not as disappointed this time.

The biggest thing is that I was able to spot the moment where Merida and her mom resolve their conflict. It was right where it was supposed to be, but the first time around I missed an important, but subtle line of dialogue and some equally vital body language. Turns out, the point of the movie really is about compromise and the bravery it takes to do that when you haven't yet exhausted all the stubborn tantrum-throwing you'd planned on doing. It's a much sneakier message than I was prepared for, but I liked it more for that. Maybe next time, I'll like it even better.