Monthly Archives: May 2015
If there’s such a sound as a man squee (maybe a roh-yeah?) I just made it. Actually, it did kinda sound like “roh-yeah!” Like the Kool-Aid man pumping out an extra rep at the gym.
Finally someone is making a miniseries about the life of Bass Reeves. Yeah, the frontier lawman who inspired my own Marshal Voight in High & Hard. Voight’s more of a tragic character than Reeves, and his world is a flintlock fantasy, more 1680s than 1880s. But the core toughness and ethic of Reeves’s character (and the literary rarity of a black frontier lawman) really dug into my brain while reading the biography Black Gun, Silver Star.
Now, that very book is being used as the basis for HBO’s series. It’s a case of “I can’t believe it took us so long to do this.”
Not because Reeves was African-American. Because Reeves was a hardcore bad-ass. The kind of guy whose life demands to be adapted for the screen. The kind of real-life action hero whose existence debunks the smarmy urbane attitude that action films are inherently unrealistic.
Over his career as a marshal, Reeves killed over a dozen fugitives and brought thousands to justice, some of them among the most dangerous men in the West, but was never himself wounded. He did have his hat and belt buckle shot off, though. Born into slavery, he later beat up his former master’s son over a game of cards. When his own son was charged with murder, Reeves hunted him down himself and brought him to trial.
Pick up Black Gun, Silver Star and just read the first few pages. The story about the cowboys with the stuck horse will hook you on Reeves, a tough and intriguing character if ever there was one.
If anyone can do Reeves’s story right, it’s HBO. To say I’m pumped for this series would be an understatement.
There’s apparently a little dust-up in the film industry. Two famous talking heads butting heads over the same bullheaded elitism we see in fiction’s literary vs. genre debate. This time, the slapfest was between indie artsy director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu and closet conservative actor Robert Downey, Jr.
Caveat: if you’ve heard of this microscandal, you may think it’s about liberalism vs. conservatism. As an aggressive independent, I can assure you that it is not. But, we’ll get to that in a moment.
Item 1: It is now revealed that the train in the recent deadly derailing in Philadelphia was rolling along at twice the speed limit for that stretch of track.
Item 2: A sales exec is suing her former employer after being fired for uninstalling a GPS tracking app from her phone that allowed the company to track the movements of its sales force, 24×7, including after work hours … including how fast they drive.
Item 3: During Google’s recent on-road test of its self-driving robot cars, all of the wrecks that occurred were caused by humans driving the other cars on the road.
My readers are smart, and I’m sure you’ve already made a connections here.
Get this: One game world, dozens of games.
What is it? A single, sandbox virtual setting that is open to third-party developers for developing games, shows, or anything they like.
Working Title: Dove City
Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto franchise has hit a wall. Don’t get me wrong, I love the lavish detail of V‘s fictional state of San Andreas. And, the multi-character gameplay is incredible. And, the Heists are doing fantastically. Adverbially and financially speaking.
But, all of these things are symptoms of the fact that the franchise has hit a wall. That wall is one of scale. The open-world aspect of the game has become so remarkably broad a simulation that it overwhelms even the admittedly engaging story and characters. This is why three playable characters still feel dwarfed by the world in which they live. This is why Heists is necessary. Or … are necessary. Or whatever.
GTA has outgrown its premise for some time now—thus the tradition of extensive downloadable content (DLC)—and so have its clones and many other franchises. Some critics think all of these video game franchises should just be shut down. I’m not quite that pessimistic. I think the standard series like GTA, Assassin’s Creed, and Halo can be salvaged with some core tweaks. I’ve discussed how to save AC‘s seafaring trope before, but I think the satiric, modern-day, urban trope of GTA can be saved as well.
