BREAK NUMBER EIGHT: The Final Breakening

Mac Boyle July 22, 2019

Some big announcements will follow, but there is something I really need to get off my chest.

Yes, the President is racist. Even the people that still like him know this to be true, they just would rather we not talk about it. Or—if we do talk about it—we work ourselves into a stupor over it and forget to vote in a year.

That much is obvious. That is not what I need to get off my chest. But now that we’ve gotten that out of the way:

Robert Pattinson as Batman will be just fine.

Now, of course I would prefer the world to bring back Michael Keaton into the role in some kind of Batman Beyond situation, but I’ve been saying this for years, and there is still plenty of time to make that happen.

Every reaction to Pattinson taking over the role from Ben Affleck is blown out of proportion. Those that can only think of him via those silly vampire movies he did aren’t giving him a fair shake. Those abuzz about the possibility in light of his recent more interesting indie work think everything will work out.

But, please, consider this:

Everyone thought Michael Keaton would be a disaster. He was fantastic. People can complain about some of the merits of the two films he did and how they may have aged, but I’ve never heard an unkind word about his performance. Now, granted, if anyone ever did, they would suddenly sound like Charlie Brown’s parents, but I think the point that people liked it at the time and have fond memories of him as the Dark Knight even now.

Everyone was convinced that Christian Bale would be the perfect casting for the role. Ultimately, he probably ended up being the weakest part of the strongest Batman movies.

Everyone thought Ben Affleck would be terrible in the role, and well… He was fine in the role. The movies surrounding him were exercises in new and interesting ways to screw up a movie.

Do you want to know who—purely on spec—was the best casting of Batman, ever?

George Clooney in 1996.

The lesson? Nobody knows anything. Let them make their batmen. Everything (on that front) will be fine.

***

Whew, now that we have that out of the way, let’s get to the larger announcements in this entry.

Last week, I published “If You Enjoyed This Book,” the seventy-second flash fiction story I’ve written in the last year and a half. It will be the last story in that series.

The original notion was to produce these for two years, but that was also when I was trying to keep the entries under 500 words, a notion that also quickly evaporated. A byproduct of upping the word-count limit is that I now—even with omitting a few entries that I either wasn’t infatuated with or might work better in a different format—have enough stories to turn them into a book. The experiment is over.

I now begin the process of re-editing and organizing those stories into a volume, If Any Of These Story Goes Over 1000 Words, This Whole Book Will Explode. What happens to the blog entries in the meantime? All the links will remain live until the book goes to press, but the blog will be removed from the site’s masthead.

This may leave one wondering about what the site will look like in the future. You may have questions

1) Will I ever write another flash story?

Maybe. Over the course of the last 18 months I had a lot of ideas and almost-ideas, here’s just a few:

A story about a group of archeologists in the future uncovers the site of a laser tag arena, and can’t make heads or tails out of it.
The story of the participant in the famed Shelley/Byron writing commune (the one that gave the world Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus). Something tells me I might actually write that one up one day.
I tried several times to construct a story about the last person burned at the stake during the Salem Witch Trials. I wanted it to be funny, with the executioners past their peak enthusiasm for the mass murders, but it was always a story about being burned alive. C’est la vie.

Maybe other ideas will come to me, or maybe one of the above will light my imagination on fire again, and I’ll take to a pen to make things happen. If it does, it’s entirely possible that I will post it in this space, but I doubt I’ll ever get an itch to produce stories at this rate again.

Incidentally, one of the very first ideas I had when writing these stories dealt with a cabal of shadowy figures who make sure we forget that which brings us misery, but still feel miserable about it. I could never quite work the story out, until just a few weeks ago when I re-worked some elements and it became story #70, “The Misery Vampires.” Lesson? Hang in there, pals, some ideas just need time so you can work them out.

2) Will I still blog?

Simple answer: Yes.

3) What will I blog about?

I’m so glad you/I asked. I won’t do what I had done in the past and produce a new article/blog entry every week. That was just as grueling as the stories became. I’ll probably check back in here at least every other month to offer some thoughts. Like with the stories, if the mood strikes me, I may write other pieces as well.

But…

I will still be posting regularly to a new, third blog on the site. Last year, after taking a deep dive with old Siskel and Ebert at the Movies clips on Youtube, being absolutely wrecked by both Ebert’s memoir Life Itself and the 2014 documentary that shares its subject and title, and reading a few of Ebert’s review collections, I wanted to take a stab at movie criticism myself.

I decided I would write a review (of no fewer than 300 words) of every movie I saw from that day forward. I would have to have seen all of the movie to write the review. If I had already reviewed it for this experiment, then I could take a pass.

Given the amount of time I spend watching movies, that may end up being a tall order…

All right. I lied. I made that decision about a year ago, and have been writing the reviews ever since.

So, now I have reviews of 144 films, encompassing over 70,000 words of material. It’s like a bonus book that I’m not even going to charge you for. There are a few Batman movies, to be sure*. A lot of newer horror releases I watched for Beyond the Cabin in the Woods, like Us (2019), Midsommar (2019), and beyond all comprehension The Nun (2018). Lora and I watched every Marvel movie that didn’t feature Edward Norton**, and those reviews are ready for your perusal. Oh, heck, just take a look at the list as of today, July 22nd:

The reviews are probably rougher than what I would normally post on the site, but this keeps me in regular writing and updating without having to come up with ideas from nothing every week. I’m okay with that if you all are.

For now, though, feel free to look around the space, and check back in often. Things will be changing around here pretty starkly and I can’t wait to show you what I’ve been working on. The final season of The Fourth Wall is just the beginning…

*In fact, I became very aware that I watched Batman (1989) three times in the last twelve months, which seems right about on average for me, even if one of the times was on the the big screen for the first time.

**No particular reason. We just skipped it in our marathon. I may circle back around to it soon.

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BREAK NUMBER SEVEN: The Word Count Game

Mac Boyle May 13, 2019

~As I write this line it is 04/21/19 and the flash fiction blog has just edged out the movie review blog fro 50,000 words. As some of the stories may not make it into the book, and I have it in my mind (and will probably insist on it, unless my brain truly dries up with potential story ideas) pushing it at least past 60k, there is still some work to do.

~As a side note, I’m writing this line on 04/29/19, and it appears that the movie blog book is now at 49K and change. All of that written in just over six months. Imagine what I could do with my life if I didn’t feel the need to blog…

~So, Endgame happened. Obviously, the death of (REDACTED) left me a little underwhelmed, while the death of (ALSO REDACTED) may have me careening toward the beginnings of what will eventually be my mid-life crisis. The time travel doesn’t make sense when looked at it through a macro lens (especially when the fate of (REDACTED ONCE MORE) comes into play. And the unpacking of time travel tropes is probably objectively fun, it only served to send me careening into a full-blown panic attack, as it is trucking in the same lane of a project I currently have in development.

~Speaking of which, the scripts for all six episodes of The Fourth Wall, Season 2 are at a point where I can start showing them to some people. Weird that I’ve even made it this far on this, although there is still much to do. The script book looks to be hovering right around 96,000 words (before any other ancillary material might be added in), so that’s definitely the longest thing I ever wrote.

~With all of that above, I’m a little unmoored as far as writing projects are at the moment. Things will obviously speed up again as I get closer to being in production on the new season. Get back to getting The Once And Future Orson Welles ready for public eyes? Maybe, but I think I’d like a little more uninterrupted writing time runway before I truly, finally pivot in that direction. Keep writing flash and get that catalogue to a point where I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I’ll have enough to move forward on a volume of the stories? Seems more likely. Finally break down and just play some video games for once? Feels incredibly tempting.

~Aaaaaaaaaand the movie blog just—with my review of Thor (2011)—hit 50,000 words as well. Odds are it will lap the flash blog, and then only continue to grow. Means the average entry is 505 words. Also means that if the numbers hold up, I watch about 132 films per year (not counting several of the films that appear in the blog that I’ve watched on repeat). Not sure if I should be bummed or proud of that.

~Also on that note, I didn’t think my 100th movie review would be for Shazam (2019), but here we are.

~Speaking of movies I did a review of that I’ll probably watch a couple of times, I had the unique opportunity to see Batman (1989) in a theater. As many times I had seen the film, I had never seen it on the big screen. The theater was about a quarter-filled with people who looked exactly like me. I wondered quietly if all of our lives had gone along a similar path, only to bring us to this time and place. The film—as I had quietly suspected for a while—is a different experience in the theater, and was probably meant more for that venue. Danny Elfman’s score rattles the one when it isn’t coming out of the puny speakers of a television. I may be hearing things, but I think for the 4K release—for which these screenings were intended as a promotion—they’ve tinkered with the sound design. Films of the 70s and 80s had this wonderful sound when guns are shot. It had nothing to o with what I would imagine is the reality of bullets, but more akin to a bell ringing. This film was once filled with that strange twang. Now? The bullets sound like bullets. I’m not sure if I like that, but then again, I didn’t really expect to have them ask me about it. Might just need to isolate that sound and use it more in The Fourth Wall this season and keep the dream alive.

~I don’t know how much I should talk about this next bit, but sufficed it to say things are happening here at Party Now, Apocalypse Later Industries. This space and the things I’m involved in may look quite a bit different a year from now, or at least I hope it will. It’s nice to have that hope again. It feels like it’s been a while.

BREAK NUMBER SIX: She Keeps Writing. The Music Swells. End Of Series.

Mac Boyle March 4, 2019

~Last week I finished the rough drafts of The Fourth Wall Season 2. While there is quite a bit of work left to do—as a matter of fact, most of the work left to do—I’ve told myself the story, and that makes a lot of things much clearer. Now if only I can settle on a title for Episodes 3 and 6…

~If you’re reading this, you’re digging deeper into the site than most, I’d imagine. So, here’s a little update. As I write this, the movie review blog is already up to 84 entries. Even though it’s existed for almost half as long, it is already giving the flash blog a run for it’s money in word count. Who will reach 50,000 words first? Flash fiction is currently at 45,612. Movie reviews are at 42,830. Stay tuned, but the direction for the 3.0 version of this site is starting to shape up.

~An old friend passed away recently… I’m sorry, that should have read “a movie theater of which I had a lot of fond memories—but had fallen into disrepair—recently shut down all of a sudden. The Promenade Palace 12, once owned by Hollywood Theaters and then absorbed by Regal, hadn’t much as a single upgrade since 1998 when it opened, and it was starting to show. Frequently empty as a tomb, I guess it made sense that the theater would eventually collapse in on itself, much like the mall around it. I just get bummed out when these things happen, especially since I had just been there not more than a couple of weeks before to catch a last-minute matinee of Aquaman (2018). Had I known it was going to be the last time I would ever be in the theater, I might have made more of an event of the occurrence.

And then the news came that mall management insists that the theater will open again under new management. They said two weeks, but that was nearly two months ago. We’ll see. But maybe, just maybe, one thing in this world can turn back the clock.

~As I go about reorganizing the music I carry with me on my new phone, I am struck by a dilemma. I’ve cut out all Woody Allen movies from my watching diet, for reasons. Is it okay to re-adopt the music from those films for my listening diet? I mean, the soundtrack from Manhattan (1979) is one thing, but should I really punish the Marx Brothers for the crimes of another man, long after they were all dead? It’s a subject worth some consideration.

~As I write this particular sentence, it is 02/08/19. I am eating a pretzel, listening to AC/DC, and reading a biography of Eliza Hamilton. It occurs to me while I am doing this that I am likely the only person in the entire universe doing this exact same series of things at the same time.

~Although this will just miss Black History Month by a minute, a tweet (or, rather, a series of them) came across my radar that detailed what a an African American Batman would be like.

Now, of course some are going to be bent out of shape about such an idea, and really, seriously fuck them. This in inspired. You’re telling me that Batman can credibly be The World’s Greatest Detective, a manic depressive Tim Burton stand-in, an aging Dirty Harry type, a straight up murderer*, and—in the guise of Adam West—the greatest hipster doofus the world has ever known, but can’t be an educated, woke as hell black man?

Anybody that isn’t into this idea isn’t a fan of Batman at all. Fight me, America.

Now, that all being said, looking at a bat flying into a window and deciding that it is a symbol that will inspire fear in the cowardly and superstitious lot of criminals is kind of the biggest White Guy Leap Of Logic (™) in American culture, but I digress…

*Seriously, read some of those early Detective Comics stories from the 30s. That Batman loves two things, guns and pushing people to their deaths.

What this bird isn’t telling you is that this picture was taken on March 5th.

BREAK NUMBER FIVE: Why Did I Agree To Do This Again?

Mac Boyle December 24, 2018

Whew. 2018, am I right? Can any of us remember the last year that was just normal sauce? Like 2012, maybe? But 2019 is going to be our year, right?

Ahem.

Despite a full six weeks dealing with Laryngitis From Planet X, I did manage to get ahead of the curve. In fact, at the time of this writing, this is the last non-appointment obligation* I have for 2018.

I’ve written and edited all of the flash fiction stories for this year. It was an interesting experiment, and at this point I’m pot committed, so I’ll definitely do it for another year. There’s a book there. Indeed, even without publishing a book this year, I managed to write (by my best estimates) 85,701 words, and even published most of them in one form or another. Not a bad haul for a year that quite frankly often asked why I was doing this all to begin with.

I’ve also completed the final mix on The Fourth Wall’s holiday special. I’d offer some more insight into its creation, but at this point I’m a little Christmas-ed out, and this year I actually think I’ve earned it. By the time you’re reading this, you can listen to the show your self, in case you missed it:

I have also finished my reading goal. 62 books, and we’ll aim for 64 next year. I’m relatively proud of the mix of trash and “real” books. Only a few books based on TV shows with the word “Star” in the title. All in all, part of this complete breakfast. Here’s the list. “(a)” denotes an audiobook (unabridged, naturally, I’m not some kind of animal).

1. George Lucas: A Life (a)

2. Along the way (a)

3. Easy Rider

4. All New Letters From A Nut

5. Fire and Fury

6. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (a)

7. Dennis Hopper: The Wild Ride of a Hollywood Rebel (a)

8. Gremlins 2: The New Batch

9. The Hunt for Red October (a)

10. Thanks For The Money (a)

11. Copper and Gold

12. Star Trek: Prey: Book One (a)

13. On Writing (a)

14. Nightmare of Ecstasy

15. The Day of the Doctor

16. Discovery: Drastic Measures (a)

17. The Soul of a new machine (a)

18. The Paradise Snare

19. The Seven Percent Solution (a)

20. Wonder Boys (a)

21. Dies Infaustus

22. Into the Void

23. Rogue Saucer

24. The West End Horror (a)

25. North by Northwest

26. The Canary Trainer (a)

27. Discovery: Fear Itself (a)

28. How to American (a)

29. The Great Gatsby (a)

30. The Two-Front War

31. The Hound of the Baskervilles (a)

32. A Brief History of Time (a)

33. Go Set a Watchman(a)

34. Console Wars

35. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (a)

36. The Accidental President (a)

37. I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie

38. Invisible Man (a)

39. From A Certain Point of View (a)

40. The Man With the Golden Typewriter

41. The Shining (a)

42. Alligator

43. End Game

44. Minority Report and other stories (a)

45. Mindhunter (a)

46. The Buried Age

47. Space Odyssey (a)

48. A Study in Scarlett (a)

49. Agent to the Stars (a)

50. English History Made Brief, irreverent, and pleasurable (a)

51. The Everything Store (a)

52. Once Burned

53. The Sign of Four (a)

54. Halloween

55. The Firm (a)

56. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (a)

57. What If (a)

58. The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (a)

59. Spider-man: Hostile Takeover

60. A Confederacy of Dunces (a)

61. Halloween '18

62. Life Itself

So, let’s make 2019 ours. I think there are some opportunities there. We may just have to learn to let go of the past a little bit. Yes, past, I’m looking in your direction. You know who you are. You know what you did.

* My therapist, my wife and I (at different points in time, mind you) are quick to point out that a full 90% of my “obligations” are self-inflicted. I’d say I’m working on it, but then I’d have to come up with a due date out of the ether, so let’s just skip that part.

This is the first selfie I took in the game… And as you can tell by the advanced suit I have on, it took FOREVER TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO DO THIS. I have still not mastered the use of onomatopoeia, apparently.

Break Number Four: Doin' Whatever a Spider Can

Mac Boyle October 8, 2018

A brief confession. There is now an entirely new, third blog (fourth, if you count the RSS feed for The Fourth Wall) on the site. It isn’t in the masthead options, but there is a link hidden somewhere on the site. I’m not sure if I’ll ever go fully-public with the new musings, but I might. In the mean time, if you’re interested, go seek it out! It’s not in the main site directory, but it’s also not hidden all that well.

I was not terribly hungry one day recently at lunch and decided to get a happy meal. I don’t know what’s happened with these things in the last twenty-five years, but I felt a little out of my depth. The toy was—essentially—a tiny plastic rolodex-y metal directory, with an entry each for each of the Justice League. Is this what qualifies as a toy these days? What was all the more bewildering, is that I received instructions to ask my parents permission to download a McPlay app so that I could somehow get more out of the trinket. Now I just need to make a call to my parents and get permission so I can figure out if there is something more to this thing.
What happened to all of the DVDs at Circuit City…? Of course, as I type that, I realize that Circuit City has been entirely closed for nearly ten years, and I really mean to ask why Best Buy has stopped carrying so many DVDs… I’m getting the sinking feeling that physical media is never coming back in the big bad way that it was before. Am I like the guy in 1979 who takes a good hard long look at his 8-track collection and realize things will never be the same? At least DVDs are alive and well at used stores and the flea market. Im not sure why that’s comforting.
So I’ve been playing the new PS4 Spider-Man game. I can’t honestly remember the last time I actually finished a game, but there is a better than even chance that I will play this all the way to 100% completion. It exists in a better world than the one we’re stuck with for the time being, and I like it a lot. At first, it does feel like a rip off of the Batman Arkham games, but layers upon layers keep getting added in, and I think it is reasonable to assume that it is far more fun to be Spider-Man than it is to be the Batman. Which feels like a sacreligious thing for me to say, but there it is.
I’d say more, but production for The Fourth Wall holiday special is in full swing, to say nothing of the need to finish the scripts for the second season, more flash fiction stories, a third blog (apparently), trying to be a functioning human being, and I’ve got a great responsibility to use my great power to save New York City.

I kind of got out of control with the selfies after I figured it out. Don’t let MJ’s chillness fool you. This is a very serious situation.

BREAK NUMBER THREE: In Defense of Squares

Mac Boyle July 30, 2018

These stories are getting weirder and weirder, only 25% of the way through the goal. Nothing weirder that last week’s “You Ain’t Nothin’ But a Hellhound,” I’d imagine. But wait next week for part two. I’m heading somewhere with that, I swear.
Birthday was a good one. Four movies, pretty much in a row. Ocean’s 8, which I liked, but felt that it’s fealty to the Clooney trilogy got to be a bit excessive, even though I liked those movies. Tag, which was funny enough, I suppose, but had an ending so deflating and at odds with the rest of the movie, that it may be one of the worst of all time. The Seven-Percent Solution (1976), which I naturally loved, and loved the first time I saw it. Meyer is Meyer and you can’t do much better than him. And finally (or at least, so far) California Typewriter (2016) which I still have a little less than an hour left on it and it’s fantastic. Then again, there was little chance of me not liking the film. I’m feeling a little guilty about typing this on my computer while I do so. Between this and Life Itself (2014), the best things I’m watching now are the documentaries.
More movies I’ve seen over the summer:
- Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (wasn’t enthralled; needed more Goldblum)
- Ant-Man and the Wasp (liked it; let’s face it, could have used some Goldblum)
- And most recently Mission Impossible: Fallout (liked it, but fear that the glowing reviews over the last week might have left my expectations higher than they ought to have been).
With my participation on “Beyond the Cabin in The Woods” I’ve seen (for the first time):
- Creepshow (1982) (liked it, but the experience of seeing it in a midnight showing in 35mm might have helped)
- Thr13en Ghosts (2001) (really hated it, worst editing of all time, even if Adrean Messmer rightly brought in Suicide Squad (2016) as a contender for that unique distinction)
- The Haunting (1963) (really didn’t like, don’t see what the big deal is for some people)
- The House on Haunted Hill (1959) (liked it more than the others in our haunted house run, but that’s not saying a whole lot)
It’s only now occurring to me that I should invest in some kind of movie journal.
Relenting to the cloying, dulcet tones of my past, I broke down and bought Christmas With Conniff (1959). If you’re unaware of the album, you clearly did not spend a lot of time with my of my relatives over the last 50 years. Without any sense of irony (mainly because irony wasn’t invented until 1973), my grandfather calls it the greatest album ever made. The Ray Conniff singers sound sort of like if someone went on The Lawrence Welk Show and proceeded to have a diabetic coma. What’s more, with my frequent listenings to the album, whenever my car communicates with my phone to start playing music, they assume I want to listen to it. 100-plus degree heat coupled with the sudden summoning of their rendition of “Sleigh Ride” might be a little too much for my primitive meat-based brain to handle.
Had a dream a few days ago that Jeb Bush was President, and I was so happy. Well, not that happy… But happier, to be sure. I really look forward to the day that we can elect some completely boring person to run the country so we could just let them do it and not have to think about it all. the. time.
Speaking of existential dread and the Ray Conniff singers, here’s a <little story> from the before-times of January 1972. The White House held a celebration for Reader’s Digest’s 50th anniversary. While America outside the walls was in a similar turmoil, the event inside was built out of pure safety for Nixon. Bob Hope? He’s on board with the War, sure. Billy Graham? No problem there. The President even celebrated the absolute square-ness of the evening before handing the dais over to Conniff and his singers. At that point, a Canadian (because of course she was Canadian) last-minute sub singer Carole Feraci took control of the whole show. Just watch**:

I don’t know why I keep thinking about that incident lately. Maybe I just want a few more squares to speak out. Feels like that’s the only way we’ll get out of this. Which, I think they will, eventually. I don’t think we have it in our collective spirit to become a authoritarian state. We’ll flirt with it, sure, but I think our fundamental character avoids it. This isn’t to say this has always been a virtue; I’m also of the mind that our current predicament is just as much a result of that character trait. But, when it comes right down to it, the founding of this nature wasn’t about taxes, or freedom, or the ability to take freedom from somebody else, it was most succinctly about a group of disaffected people—with agendas as numerous as the population of the country—screaming out with one voice, “You are not my Supervisor!” Maybe we’ll say it again.

** In case you didn’t watch to the end, after the crowd turned on the whole affair, Conniff asked her to leave, to which she replied, “Certainly.” Because she’s Canadian, and of course she was polite about it.