Schlock Mercenary

Pre-orders for Force Multiplication, Schlock Mercenary Book 12, will open on Monday, May 23rd at 8am Mountain time. We’re quite pleased with how this book turned out. The stone circuit cover design defines the style we’ll be using for books 12 through 17, and the stuff inside the cover is at least as cool as all that. I love the bonus story that Sandra wrote, and Natalie Barahona’s art is perfect for it. I’m also pleased with the way the Force Multiplication story reads when reading it in one sitting. It’s pretty tight, if I do say so myself. Force Multiplication is $20.00 + shipping. Numbered sketch editions are $10 more, and only about 600 of those will be available. If you want one, you need to place your order quickly. Monday, May 23rd, 8am Mountain time. Maybe mark your calendar? Other Announcements As long as you’ve got your calendar open, there are a couple more things to maybe pencil into it. June 3rd: Planet Mercenary Backerkit Lockdown If you backed Planet Mercenary, on June 3rd you will no longer be able to change your order. Credit card processing will begin then, so now might be a good time to make sure the card (especially the expiration date) is still valid. You WILL still be able to change your shipping address after June 3rd. Details are over here on the Kickstarter Page. Note: We cannot combine Planet Mercenary Kickstarter shipping and Force Multiplication pre-order shipping. Sorry! July 1st: Registration closes for the Out of Excuses 2016 Writing Workshop and Retreat. In a nutshell, this event is a Caribbean cruise for writers and students of writing. It’s hosted by the Writing Excuses team, and it will the second time we’ve held the event in the Caribbean. If you’re interested, don’t delay registering because you might not have until July 1st. We’re limited to 150 attendees, and when we reach the attendance cap, registration closes.

Stake in the ground: Captain America: Civil War is the best Spider-Man movie we’ve had so far. It is also a solid Avengers movie, an unflinching follow-up to Age of Ultron. It is a pretty good Captain America film, but there are so many important players in the story it doesn’t really feel like Cap’s movie. That poster is crowded, and it’s still missing two of the costumed combatants¹. The real question is not whether the film lives up to its title. It’s whether it lives up to our expectations for Yet Another Awesome Marvel Movie. Here I will unequivocally affirm that maybe it does, but it was kind of long, and for the love of Uncle Ben can we PLEASE hold the camera steady? Yeah. Shaky-cam. A lot of it. During fight scenes, of course, but also on a couple of no-stunt, not much movement shots where we’re supposed to feel tense and off balance. Dear Hollywood: STOP THAT. Those moments were plenty tense without the wobbly tilt-and-jiggle that managed to induce actual motion sickness. Here’s a comic-book trick, Hollywood: keep the camera steady, but shoot those tense, off-kilter moments at a slight angle. During fight scenes, keep each shot steady, but give us steep angles. These people are flipping and jumping off of walls. Camera angle will sell their dynamic, athletic heroism far better than shaky-cam will, and will also let you showcase the amazing work that the stunt team has put together². Oh, hey, you already know that trick, because you used it perfectly on Spidey’s action. What’s the excuse for not using it elsewhere? Fortunately the big ensemble fight was minimally shaky. Unfortunately, I noticed. “Oh, hey, I can finally see what these people are doing!” followed quickly by “I sure wish I could have seen the action earlier. I bet it would have been cool.” But back to Captain America, and the question as to whether or not this was his film. One of Cap’s best speeches from the comic books (the one that has the word “move” in it, and which I won’t spoil³) is not delivered by Cap in this movie. It is delivered by somebody for whom it is perfectly in character, but it is delivered to Cap, not by him. So, for an audience a thousand times the size of the audience familiar with the original quote (at least) this epic, quintessential Captain America speech doesn’t belong to Cap anymore. So… I don’t think this is really his movie. He’s in it, and central to it, but it belongs to the players around him. Who are awesome, just so we’re clear⁴. Captain America: Civil War squeaks past my Threshold of Awesome on the strength of a great story and a strong ensemble, but only enters the list at spot #5 thanks to the weak and trembling hands of whoever was holding those cameras. ¹ Spidey and Ant-Man, who were an exceedingly entertaining addition to the line-up. And yay! This awesome new Spidey is part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and is getting his own movie! ² I think closing credits for films like this should list the stunt performers right next to the actors for whom they doubled. Their physical performances were a huge part of creating the character on the screen. I bet they’re not being paid enough, either. ³ Okay, fine. It’s behind this link. And don’t get me wrong, the line is delivered brilliantly in the film, and it feels more powerful for not having come from Cap. ⁴ When we can actually see them, because as long as I’m still holding this hammer I might as well pound that nail out the back of the board, and then pick it up again and pound on it some more. Maybe with enough nails the camera will hold still.

Neither of the adult children (ages 20 and 18) I took to this film had ever actually played the Ratchet & Clank games. Both of them loved the film. I was pleasantly surprised by it. In particular I was surprised to find myself laughing out loud. After the third time it happened I began paying attention. I’ve concluded that the team responsible for this film has a really solid understanding of comedic timing. A great many of the jokes were dumb, or were very simple physical humor, but they were so well delivered, and included enough fresh components, that I laughed out loud in spite of having anticipated the punchline. If you’re a student of humor, I think this film bears scrutiny. If you’re not a student of humor, and that’s probably most of you, the film is a lot of fun. The voices are spot on, the designs are wonderful, and the animation is quite good. It shows off the finesse we’ve come to expect from Pixar and Dreamworks, but it comes from a studio without that sort of pedigree. (Looking at Ratchet & Clank‘s company credits on IMDB it’s hard to say just which studio handled most of the animation. If it’s CNHK then it’s their debut effort, which is doubly impressive.) Parents of young children should consider this one. I think little kids will love it, and I almost (read: not at all) wish I had little kids to take to the movies. Of the movie adaptations of video games I’ve seen, I can’t recall any of them being this enjoyable. Thanks to the great time I had with my big kids, Ratchet and Clank clears my Threshold of Awesome, and enters my list at #4 for the year.

A package arrived from our printer. It was full of pieces of paper for us to look at before committing to the print run for Force Multiplication. It’s looking pretty good. The painstaking hours (and hours and hours) of tweaks and adjustments appear to have paid off. We’re not taking pre-orders for this book yet, but that’ll probably start within a month. I’ll post more when Sandra picks a date.

I love this caricature a lot. Lar DeSouza has been doing these in conjunction with his MS Walk charity drive, which ends at the end of April. Oh, and he’s been doing the art live on his twitch.tv stream. If you want to watch him draw this one, he began at the 1:20:30-ish mark. I don’t know whether he’s full up on ’em right now, but if you follow @Lartist on Twitter he’ll probably make some noise about it.

There’s no way to film the Mowgli stories from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book absent the influence of the 1967 Disney classic, which casts a long shadow. Several such films have been made, and most of them didn’t work very well at all. 2016’s The Jungle Book does work, however, and it does so with surprising grace and beauty. And joy. I really loved this film. It took a while to win me over, but Bill Murray’s Baloo the Bear was the perfect re-imagining of the character, and King Louie’s remake as a gigantopithecus (an extinct genus of giant orangutan) was made complete when Richard Sherman, who co-wrote “I Wan’na Be Like You” with his brother Robert, returned to the 40-year-old piece to add lyrics. Which were performed by Christopher Walken. Murray and Walken had their work cut out for them, however, because newcomer Neel Sethi very nearly ran off with the whole show. Barefoot. And mostly naked. At age 12. (Note: I could continue to gush about skills on display here, including those of Idris Elba and Lupita Nyong’o, who were terrifying and inspiring, respectively, but it’s a long list.) Jon Favreau directed, and I have to say, I’m impressed. He managed to reconcile Kipling’s 19th-century morality-play view of the jungle with more modern sensibilities, including the St. Louis Jazz feel introduced to the Kipling mythos by Disney in 1967, and he did all this with a cast of characters that was almost entirely computer-animated in a way meant to fool us into thinking they were actual animals. 2016’s The Jungle Book enters my list at #3, clearing my Threshold of Awesome. I bought the soundtrack, and will probably pick up the Blu-Ray when it drops.

Howard here… I couldn’t bring myself to see Hardcore Henry. I was too busy, and too stressed out, and this did not look like something that would make me in the least bit less anxious. Fortunately for all of you, my friend Bob saw it. He started to tell me about it, and I said “stop! Write this down and let me steal it.” That’s probably not how he’ll tell that story… My good friend Howard Tayler asked me to review Hardcore Henry for him, so this will be a crosspost between robertjdefendi.com, schlockmercenary.com, and curiosityquills.com. I’ll break it into two sections, the review and an analysis from a more writerly standpoint. The analysis will likely have more spoilers but just a few. Read the sections that are right for you. The Review Hardcore Henry is, without out doubt, the most terrible movie I’ve ever loved without reservation. It’s fast-paced. It’s a riot. It is a popcorn movie in it’s purest sense. Unless you see it in D-Box like I did, and then the seats will fling your popcorn onto the row in front of you. So be warned. Hardcore Henry is, in essence, the twitch.tv stream of the virtual reality first person shooter that’s coming out in ten years or so. Told from the point of view of Henry, a mute protagonist who is brutally murdered during the opening credits (and I mean brutally), the movie begins with the cybernetic rebuilding of his body, the introduction of his wife, the attack of the antagonist, and a blast into the non-stop action of the film. This is a movie where every punch is a literal blow to the camera and every stunt is entirely from the point of view of the stuntman. It takes the criticisms of “shaky cam” movies (which I generally hate), embraces them and takes them out to dinner and dancing. It owns every glorious flaw. And there are flaws. My my God, are their flaws. From interviews I’ve heard with Sharlto Copley (Powers, District 9), they embraced these flaws. If these interviews are correct, Copley saved this movie, because the filmmakers wanted to make a serious film, and Copley seemed to understand that if they tried to make a serious film, what they got would be terrible, but if terrible was their goal, then what they got might just be genius. So this movie embraces its warts. The villain is hackneyed and terrible and has inexplicable powers (because technology!). The conceit that explains Copley’s character is more the pretense of an explanation than an explanation itself, and the climax involves a solution that seems to be making fun of action movies, video games, and Legolas all at the same time. And here we come to the caveat of the film. This was, for me, the second funniest movie of the year. I rarely laugh out loud at a film and I burst out laughing at least four or five times during Henry. However about half the jokes are totally straight plays of action tropes. The other half are video game tropes. If you don’t get into either of these, you will lose at least half the humor. If it’s video games you aren’t into, it’s probably more than half (the movie literally has a silent protagonist and at one points goes into full tooltip-style quest tutorial). If these facts sound appealing to you, you will likely love this movie. If you didn’t understand half of that last paragraph, you might want to skip it. It aims at a certain few groups of viewers with a laser focus. It ignores the rest, and that’s okay. It’s pretty clear from the trailer that this movie knows what it is and makes no qualms about it. But if you get motion sick, maybe watch it from the back half of the theater. Or take motion sickness pills before you go. The Analysis The genius of this film is its paradoxical two-fold stance. Most movies that approach this level of absurdity feel like they need to wink at the audience and prove that we are all in on the joke. Hardcore Henry embraces this absurdity, but it never wavers in its viewpoint. It never blinks. It play its tropes with a perfect poke face, and if I can mix metaphors, doubles down. Its rare you see a film display this amount of courage. It knows what it is, and it plays the entire thing entirely straight. The first time I laughed out loud, Henry was trying to escape in underground tunnels, a subway I believe. He darts down a side tunnel only to see it filled with cops, looking for him. He turns and runs down another tunnel, and for the briefest moment you see not one, but two…two…women pushing baby carriages, blocking the way. Two. I burst out laughing at the movie’s own self aware ridiculous moment, but what won me in the scene is that the camera barely registers the two mothers. Henry takes them in and immediately Jackie Chan’s his way up the wall. I’m not sure if I was the only person laughing because I was the only person who got the joke, or if I was the only person who saw the joke. I really wonder how much I missed. That other viewers got. Technically, this movie is very challenging. It is not natural for a stunt man to do the things he has to do in this movie as Henry. A stuntman enters a zen state to do his work. In one scene, a scene pointed out by Copley in interviews, the stuntman playing Henry doesn’t just get set on fire and have to hit his mark. He has to be set on fire. Then jump through a window. Then hit his mark. Then catch the appropriate images on camera on the other side. Then perfectly time turning back to catch the other two stuntmen also on fire. The stuntman part is probably old hat. The cameraman stuff is probably pretty old hat too. But doing them both at the same time? It’s like trying to chew and cry on camera, two mechanically exclusive actions that can happen naturally but are very difficult to manufacture at the same time. And as for the special effects, I’m sure there’s some CGI cable replacement and non-stunt CGI, but the stunts themselves are spot on and live, and there’s a visceral power to knowing that you’re seeing what the man himself sees. The moment in the trailer where he drops a grenade in a van, speeding down the road, and the van explodes, hurling him into the air, and he lands perfectly on the back of a motorcycle? There’s no CGI in that. No cuts. That scene was filmed live and presented as is. They used a crane, sure, but how hard is that shot even with a crane? I can’t imagine getting it in just a few takes, and this movie was too low budget to afford a lot of tries. And that is mentioning all the stuff that’s just improved. “Hey, you think we can shoot a running chase scene right up the girders of that bridge?” Usually I analyze plot and character. This movie has no plot and character. The plot and character are so bad that this almost has to be intentional. The villain’s final monologue is only one step above, “Evil plan, evil plan, this is my evil plan, mwah ha ha ha ha ha!” And it’s only that so they could play it straight. The movie hits a bare minimum of plot points and twists and then it moves on. It doesn’t pretend you’re there for anything else. Hardcore Henry is a prime example of knowing your goals, making your promises, and then fulfilling them with the deftest hand you can manage. And I can’t believe I’m saying this, but it succeeds.

Sandra and I have been grinding hard for the last week in order to get Force Multiplication out the door to the printer. Saturday we¹ arrived at a final cover. Monday we got test prints, in color, for the whole book. Today? Well, today is spent fixing things². Our goal is to send this to the printer on Friday. Pre-orders won’t open for at least 45 days, though. Be patient! ¹Me, Sandra, and K.B. Spangler, who drew some amazing circuitry for the cover texture.