RIP Dolly Parton

I was saddened to hear that Dolly Parton passed away. Country fans will have their particular memories of her. Here, I will reprise my post “Dolly the Vampire Slayer.”

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Or this could be called “Slay Belle.” So this is the convergence between Dolly Parton, country music star, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Dolly Parton rocketed to fame with her hit song “9 to 5,” which was the centerpiece of the 1980 movie of the same name. She became famous not only as a country singer, but as a symbol of what nowadays is called female empowerment.

Then there is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This is the TV series that jumpstarted the subgenre knows as urban fantasy. Were there some urban fantasy novels before Buffy? Sure. But it was the Buffy series that made urban fantasy an overwhelming subgenre in novels, movies, and TV shows.

So how did that happen? It turns out Dolly Parton was an uncredited producer of the original movie Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That’s right. And Dolly’s company financed the TV series. It was Dolly Parton behind it all the time! 

photo by Eva Rinaldi

But what if Dolly hadn’t done that? See my post What if Buffy had Never Been? 

Two Movie Posters and Your Name

I was told by the ticket taker I should wait twenty minutes for the movie I was going to see. It turned out to be late by thirty-five minutes.

In the meanwhile, I took a picture of the poster for Super Troopers 3.

I’m sure that is exactly what the movie will look like. And maybe I should have had the flash on.

The I took one for Runner.

That looks more interesting. I mean the poster, not my face.

So the movie I saw was Your Name.

This was the tenth anniversary showing. See my review here.

Edibles in Bins?

While standing in line for a prescription, I noticed this bin. It says, “Taste the Quality, Love the Value.”

It’s filled with hydrogen peroxide.

Here’s another one. It’s filled with wipes. Not as dangerous, but kind of gross.

Movie Review: Young Washington

We start with eleven-year-old George Washington (Will Joseph) after the death of his father. He had hoped to continue at school, but now he has to help his mother on the family farm. His half-brother Lawrence (John Foss) tutors him in the classics, including Cato and Plutarch, Seneca and Cincinnatus.  

The grown Washington (William Frankly-Miller) earnestly desires to be a British officer. But to be an officer, he must be a gentleman—a member of the upper class. He strives to have all the qualities of a gentleman, but he was not born into the correct family for that.

George Washington starts out as a surveyor. Lord Fairfax (Kelsey Grammer) agrees to have him survey the Fairfax lands in the Ohio Valley. Washington does better than that, trying to survey the entire Ohio Valley—a vast, unsettled wilderness. He discovers a French fort in British territory.

When he brings back the news, he is made a major in the Virginia Militia. Since this is a colonial militia, he is not officially a British officer, so he still has not achieved his goal.

The disastrous battle that ensues at the start of the French and Indian War is the center of the movie. Washington is not an effective leader. He blunders badly by ordering his men to build a fort with short walls in the middle of a lake bed. All the French and their Indian* allies have to do is wait for it to flood.

Experts who know better than I say the costumes and settings are accurate. The combat scenes are riveting. They have a “you are there” quality with a real dirtside view, without being explicit in the violence. And there is lots of mud. The contrast between those scenes and the elegant chambers of the aristocracy is purposefully jarring.

Critics pretty much agree with all of the above, then opinions diverge. Some say the movie has a made-for-TV quality, or that it is only useful for stirring up childhood patriotism. Did they just watch the trailers and fudge it from there? Young Washington is a great movie, and I don’t often say that.

This is a badly-needed exploration of the early years of George Washington, when he fought for the British Empire. No man starts out as a great leader. This is shown to be painfully true in the case of Washington. This is no hagiography or children’s story. The movie convincingly shows how he learned from his blunders to become not only a man, but a leader of men.

His bad decision concerning Fort Necessity might not be covered much in schoolbooks. But it is essential to understanding the man. William Frankly-Miller does a fantastic job of showing Washington as a young officer way out of his depth, fanatically yelling at his men to prepare for battle, then not knowing what to do when the French and Indians rain murderous bullets onto them.

Mary-Louise Parker does not quite look convincing as his mother Mary Washington, who was a hard-working farmer’s widow. But her harangue to George that the Lord wants him to learn wisdom from his mistakes is a fascinating scene. Also, Ben Kingsley is just about perfect as the snobbish Lieutenant-Governor Dinwiddie, who is unimpressed by Washington when he sends him out to give an ultimatum to the French, and who is then outraged that a battle ensued.

The main inaccuracy in the movie is showing a romance between Washington and Sally Cary. This did not happen. In reality he only met her after she married. Apparently this was added to appeal to women.

An anachronistic element was added by showing an Indian chief wanting to meet Washington. He had instructed his men to shoot Washington, but none of them could. The chief concluded a great spirit was protecting him. In more than one battle, Washington did have bullets tear through his uniform without leaving a scratch on him, and he did have two horses shot out from under him in a single battle. But this particular conversation occurred later in his career.

These minor criticisms do no serious injury to the film. Young Washington is a great movie that not only shows George Washington’s role in the French and Indian War, but also the tumultuous events that made him the leader he ultimately became.

*A historically accurate term for Native-Americans at the time.

Review of Masters of the Universe

I never watched the animated series He-Man and the Masters of the Universe or read the comic books. But one reviewer said this movie was not as bad as some people thought it would be, so I took a chance and went to see it.

We are immediately plunged into Eternia, a world of vaguely high Medieval architecture and modern-looking body armor. The young of the aristocracy are ruthlessly trained to be warriors. Adam, the son of the king, is the smallest of them and quite hapless. A girl named Teela tries to encourage him, though she could knock him down.

The kingdom is invaded by Skeletor, who pretty much looks like his name. His forces use an odd combination of weapons: high-tech devices what never run out of ammo, and traditional bladed weapons. The power of Eternia is contained in the Sword of Power, so Adam and the Sword are sent through a portal to our world. Alas, the force of the portal rips the Sword from his hands.

We skip fifteen years to find Adam (Nicholas Galitzine) stuck in a dead-end job in human resources. He is subject to tortuous sessions on communication and de-escalation. But he spends every spare minute on endless online searches for the Sword. Will he find it?

Not to spoil anything, but the rest of the movie would be realllly boring if he never did.

Masters of the Universe is a fun combination of over the top action and wry self deprecation. The action involves extremely complex CGI, sometimes too fast for the eye to follow. The best example of the humor is when Adam grasps the Sword in Eternia and calls the overwhelming power into him. Teela (Camila Mendes), who is now grown up and devastatingly lovely, cries out, “We are saved!” The next moment, the sword is knocked from his hand. Teela says, “We are screwed.”

Adam is no reluctant hero. He yearns to be one, but is anything but a hero in our world. Even in Eternia, when he has the sword, he is often bumbling around. But the stakes are high. Skeletor has killed thousands of people. When Adam asks Teela why Skeletor is so evil, she replies, “His face is a skull.” Enough said.

What could be a moral to the story comes from sensitivity training smashing into ultimate evil. Adam uses his human resources training to try to communicate and to de-escalate situations, and he always fails. Duncan (Idris Elba), a worn-out warrior, tells him that muscles are needed. Although not denying that attempts to communicate are important, we see that sometimes evil must be destroyed by a muscular hero (in this case, one swinging a sword.)

So Masters of the Universe is not the politically correct superhero movie some dreaded. It is more of a partial sendup of sensitivity training, using a he-man kind of character.

One disadvantage of the movie is long emotional one-on-one scenes, even while battles are going on? There are a few cases of foul language and swearing, which are not only inappropriate, but do not match the tone of the movie.

Overall, this was a successful transformation of a comic-booky story into a movie that does not take itself too seriously.

Dr. Who’s Police Box

Here are a couple other pictures from Norwescon. One could simply be walking down a hallway from the lobby and encounter this:

Close inspection showed this:

I did not try to pull the handle. Should I have?

Cherry Blossoms

This was from a few weeks ago.

Norwescon II—Supplemental

I didn’t take a lot of pictures at Norwescon this year. You can see a lot of pictures from the 2022 Norwescon here and here. Click to enlarge any of them.

Here is an amazing black dress.

These are floor costumes.

We also had a pair of pirate costumes.

Star Wars cosplayers put on quite a production. Here’s a picture—sabers up.

A somewhat different pose.

And a close up of a few of the players.

Norwescon 1—Supplemental

I attended Norwescon, the largest science fiction/fantasy convention in the Pacific Northwest with an emphasis on writing.

First, about the hotel. This was the Doubletree Inn in SeaTac. Yes, the city was named after the Seattle-Tacoma Airport, otherwise known as SeaTac. This is the only city I know of that was named that way.

This was my worst experience at the hotel, which I have been to several times, or any hotel at all. This may sound petty at first, but my key cards would not work. My room was at the farthest end of the hotel, so I had to walk outside all the way back to the front desk. Since this has the most conference rooms in the Seattle area, it made for a long walk, there and back again. I was given a new pair, but only one of them worked. I noticed a woman down the hallway was having the same problem, since she was pressed against her door and muttering under her breath about her stupid key card. This kept happening, so I was eventually issued a total of eight.

I didn’t realize it at first, but my door would not close all the way and lock on its own. The Thursday night of the convention, I was lying in bed and watching the TV’s channel guide scroll.

Someone opened the door.

We couldn’t see each other because of the room configuration. I said, “Hey.” I didn’t yell it because I was trying to fall asleep. The person didn’t try to enter, and I think it was just a case of someone opening the door to the wrong room. But at the time, I was somewhat antsy. I was in a less than dressed state. After a few seconds of nothing happening, I ran to the door and slammed it shut with both hands as hard as I could. That probably scared whoever must have been retreating down the hallway.

No matter how widely I opened the door, it never fully shut on its own, as the image above shows.

The windows outside the elevators I used were filthy. There were so many streaks of who-knows-what, when the cab went up, it looked like it was raining. This was really bad.

From the elevator at the far end of the hotel, I could see one of the massive wooden posts that held the hotel up from the nearby lake was split badly. I should have taken a picture to show the hotel management. It was that way when I was at Norwescon two years ago. In all that time, no one noticed and took action?

When I checked in, I was told that parking was free for the convention, and I just had to use a key card at a parking gate. You can guess how well that worked. I tried my last two working key cards, but they were rejected. I pressed the Help button repeatedly, but no one ever answered. Finally, I had to use my credit card to get out of there. I was charged $57.60.

 That night, I called the hotel and explained what happened. When I said I had pressed the Help button several times, the person interrupted me. She said very tersely that a buzzer or something goes off on her desk when that button was pushed, so that could not have happened. She wasn’t much help.

To be fair, the hotel restaurant has a good breakfast buffet. And when I called the accounting department the following Monday, they said they would refund the parking charge to my credit card.

Next will be an account of the convention itself.