Robert Emmett Murphy, Jr.

  Welcome to the Season of the Leopard Man What I’m about to write about concerns acts of violence that have erupted so recently that any factual statement I make may be proven false in only a few hours. Though I write knowing I’m facing the risk of forced retraction, I wish to express my thoughts none-the-less. In the last 48-hours there have been three significant (apparent) acts of terrorism in the USA. All three (probably) were the acts of Lone-Wolves, without any organizational affiliation. In the two cases that the ideology of the perp is (believed to be) known, the ideologies are as radically removed from each other as they are radical in-of-themselves. In two cases the perps are dead, in one case there was an additional innocent killed, and in all cases there were multiple serious injuries to the innocent. In the attack with the most serious potential (but also the only one wherein no one died) was the bombing here in NYC. The perp in still at large, and his identity seems ...

  Dark Places  (novel by Gillian Flynn, 2009)     This is a seriously good, but also seriously flawed, Crime novel. It triumphs in its Characterization, but poorly resolves its Plot. Forgive the Plot. The people in it are so rich and real, it more than makes up for that. It opens in 2009, but about two-thirds take place on a single day in 1985. Across that earlier date, the accumulating crisis within the Day family come to a head and for the POV Characters there seems no way out ( “ It was surprising that you could spend hours in the middle of the night pretending things were okay, and know in thirty seconds of daylight that simply wasn’t so.” ). We,  the readers, know this better than the Characters themselves, because we already know how many will be dead before the next sun rises.   It has three POV Characters: Thirty-one-year-old Libby Day, who speaks in first-person in the 2009 chapters, and Libby’s mother Patti and brother Ben, who alterna...

  Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) In addition to its endless imitators, Jack Finney’s novel “The Body Snatchers” (1955) had four credited feature film adaptations, and three of them are actually good. This 1978 version is the second, Directed by Philip Kaufman and Written by  W. D. Richter. It now holds the distinction of being considered among the best Remakes ever made in-or-out of the SF,F&H Genres.  It understood what makes a truly distinctive remake: a recognition that the world has changed, and though the old stories still speak to this new world, the language should be adapted to convey the full potency. Think of why Mafia movies borrow so much from William Shakespeare, it’s not laziness, it’s the pursuit of a Contemporary Vocabulary for the for the greatest of all Dramas, which is, in fact, what Shakespeare himself did, as almost all his plays are adaptations of older material. Here, Kaufman, a much-honored Director but not especially known for SF,F,...

This will be the longest essay of the season… 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) (1/3) "If anyone understands it on the first viewing, we've failed in our intention." -- Arthur C. Clarke “The problems in interpreting the film do not lie in the visual glut of the closing half hour. With all its complex and exquisite imagery, I think everyone will agree it is a visualization of rebirth. The problem throws us back to the ship Discovery: what sort of man is being reborn?” --Samuel Delany 1. Background Following the financial failure of “H.G. Wells’ Things to Come” (1936), English-speaking cinema essentially abandoned Genre of SF for more than a decade, but during that same time there was an explosion of both the quantity and quality of SF literature in the magazine market. Cinema’s indifference to SF changed abruptly in 1950 because the Real-World was now living in the shadow of the Atom Bomb and on the cusp of Space Exploration. There was a sudden boom intelligently-conceived, dec...