Stalin vs. Trotsky

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a documentary about Kruschev, but this time we're turning the clock back to the aftermath of the Russian revolution. 

In the aftermath Lenin was the undisputed master of the Soviet Union, but he was ill, seriously ill and soon died. Left behind were the top leaders of the party; Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Pyatakov and Stalin.

Everyone besides Stalin were intellectuals, educated intelligent men well versed in political theory and able to debate on the subject with anyone. Stalin was essentially a thug. Little schooling to speak of, but he had funded the revolution with robberies, extortion and murder (amongst other things) when they desperately needed money, so Lenin was forced to give him something, so Stalin was made General Secretary. On the surface this was a nothing job, but Stalin for all his sins was a survivor and a natural schemer. He cleverly used his position to make himself the master of the Soviet Union, but how did this come about? Especially against the intelligent strategist Trotsky?

This is what this week's documentary is about. This is a decent documentary with mostly French historians translated to English but also some information from Trotsky's grandson. There is also really good film footage from those days, really interesting stuff. I wish it had gone deeper into the subject, but it will give you a good general grasp on the events following the death of Lenin.

That's that and all that. Join me again next time, and until then, have a great week! 

 

Direct link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IcDdKkfprg&list=WL&index=13 

Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga

I recently finished reading Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga (1967) by Hunter S. Thompson, the author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Hell's Angles was his first book, and it came to be as a follow up to an article he wrote for The Nation called 'The Motorcycle Gangs: Losers and Outsiders.' The article became very popular and several publishers suggested he write a book about them.

Thompson was introduced to the Oakland chapter of the Angels by a former Angel and fellow reporter, Birney Jarvis. Thompson became close to the Oakland chapter president Ralph 'Sonny' Barger and through him got to know a group of Angels quite well. Some of them stayed a while in his apartment, he went to their parties and drank at their bars. In all, he spent about a year in their company, interviewing them, hanging out and learning how they lived, why they did what they did, but also what they didn't do.

After a party that went out of hand in 1965, the then California D.A. published a report on the Angels that was picked up by Time Magazine, Newsweek and the New York Times. They however grabbed the most frightening and lurid parts of the report and declined to publish the part that said 'All charges dropped'. This gave the Hell's Angels a sudden level of fame they weren't ready for. The police targeted them on sight but tons of people want to party with them as well.

Sonny once told Thompson “You can't say a lot of good about us, so why the need to tell lies?” or something close to that. They couldn't understand why society would make up stuff about them and eventually accepted Thompson. He never joined them, and didn't wear their colors, which would have been (and still is) a big no no.

In the end, Thompson said the wrong thing to the wrong Angel and got stomped. On of his “friends” Tiny, dragged him outside and helped him into his car, and Thompson never went back.

The book is interesting from beginning to end. It can be weirdly funny but at times it is a hard read. Thompson doesn't sugar coat anything, he reports on the violence, the abuse, the drugs, riots and everything else. I never got the feeling that he invented anything in the book. What you read happened.

Besides the Hell's Angels the book is an interesting look at the mid 60's. The era of the Kennedy assassinations. The ramp up of the Vietnam War. The rise of flower power and LSD. The Rise of the Black Panthers. A conservative society suddenly confronted with radically different ideals, and in the middle, The Hell's Angels, loud smelly rebels that didn't give a damn, riding their massive bikes, willing to spit in the eye of whoever crossed their path. Or help them out, depending on how they felt that day.

I don't think you can read Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga and not feel anything. It doesn't necessarily teach you anything, too much time has passed for that, but it is compelling throughout. If you've ever been curious about the Angles, or California in the 60's, then this is the book for you.

That's that and all that. Join me again next time and until then, have a great week!

 

Krushchev

I recently watched a good documentary about Nikita Krushchev, and I thought I'd share it.

I have in my years of reading history come across his name many times. He is the one who took power in the Soviet Union after the death of Stalin. The one who built the Berlin wall, the one who stood behind the Cuban missile crisis, but who was he as a person?

Was he the funny buffoon as some saw him? The loyal but dumb peasant who did as he was told, or was there more to this man who was born a poor peasant, worked as a miner and eventually rose to supreme power?

He is depicted in Enemy at the Gates (2001) by Bob Hoskins and in The Death of Stalin (2017) by Steve Buscemi, both very different portrayals. Turns out both movies got parts of Krushchev's personality correct.

The documentary is interesting in several ways, but the inclusion of Krushchev's son and granddaughter adds a good personal touch many documentaries can't do.

So, if you are interested in history, do watch it and I hope you enjoy it.

That's that and all that. Join me again next time and until then, have a great week!

Direct link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhGHXKfOSrA&list=WL&index=9 

This Housing is just WoW

So Housing has arrived in World of Warcraft in its Early Access stage, if you have pre-ordered the Midnight expansion, which I have. I'm normally not a fan of pre-orders, but I bought it with in-game money, so who cares?

If you're not in the know, Horde and Alliance have their own special islands accessible from their capital city portal rooms that take you to the relevant island. There you can choose a plot of land that you want, pay 1000 gold and the house is yours. Once bought, you can customize your house appearance which is separate from the inside. In fact, there is no correlation between inside and outside at all. A house that is a small and shabby shack on the outside can be a huge and elegant mansion on the inside. The options for how you want the outside of your house to look is incomplete for now, more options are coming in patch 12.0.

The genius of the housing system lies in its free form modularity. Every piece of décor whether it is a shelf, a lamp, a tree etc. can be resized, turned and moved anywhere you want. Do you want a floating bed? A series of tiny statues on a shelf above your stairs? Go for it. You can also combine décor items by placing them inside each other, creating new things. Put a smelting brazier inside a table so the fire shows a little bit and you have an impromptu stove top. Stack three fountains on top of each other to make a big fountain if you want. It is almost to the point of “if you can imagine it, you can do it”. Sure, some items are outside only and vice versa, and outside lighting is currently disabled, but the housing décor system is incredible. It far exceeds what I imagined Blizzard would do.

But with everything positive there are a few negative sides as well. There are several ways of collecting décor, from achievement rewards (added retroactively) to vendors, quest rewards, drops and crafting. The others are fine, although I hope they add more drops to old dungeons. No, the big negative comes from crafting décor.

First off, Blizzard did say that you don't need maxed out crafting per expansion to craft the new décor and it is true, but you do need very high skill. 240/300, 60/75, 85/100 and so on depending on the expansion skill roof. They could have staggered the décor to work as a catch up mechanic, but they sadly elected to put it all at a pretty high level, meaning a blacksmith can craft intricate magical armor before a chandelier.

Then we get to the material components and they are ridiculous. I had hoped we would be able to utilize all the crafting materials in the game, but alas no. With a few exceptions, everything requires top level, rare ingredients, even for mundane items. A bronze banner requires 8 khorium bars, a metal that is very hard to find instead of using bronze which exists in the game! A Gilnean pitchfork requires 12 elementium bars and 6 volatile earth... A pitchfork! This is equivalent of going to IKEA and buying a tungsten frying pan and a set of titanium cutlery. It makes no sense. Where are my copper pots? My silver cutlery? I hope they change this, but I'm not holding my breath.

Blizzard has also added a new crafting material, Lumber, which can be harvested in pretty much every zone as long as your character has bought an axe from a special vendor. This is fine for things like benches, beds, chairs, you know, things that use lumber, but it is a must for all crafted décor like pillows, decorative potions, books, plushies etc. I like the lumber mechanic but please make it make sense.

For being in early access, the Housing system is already a massive success. Besides my complaints above, it is fun, creative and really exciting. I truly hope my concerns are laid to rest when Midnight launches, but even if they aren't, housing is an incredible addition to the game, a real success, and I can't wait to see how it will be developed going forward.

 

To Live and Die in L.A.

I ran across:

To Live and Die in L.A. (1985),

and it seemed cool, so I watched it.

This movie is based on the novel of the same name by former US Secret Service agent Gerald Petievich, who also co-wrote the script with the director William Fridkin, yes he of Exorcist fame.

Our main protagonist is William Chance (William Petersen), a Secret Service agent with a love for recklessness. His partner Jim Hart (Michael Greene) is a few days from retirement when he is killed at a solo stake out hunting the notorious forger Eric Masters (Willem DaFoe). Chance swears to get Masters by any means necessary, and together with his new partner John Vukovich (John Pankow) they get to work blurring the line between justice and revenge.

All I wrote above is a huge cliché, but being made in '85, To Live and Die in L.A. kind of gets a pass on that. To be fair, the movie is a visual celebration of 80's cinema in general. Chance stares at the ocean while brooding on his partners murder. The sunset shots of L.A. are dime a dozen shots these days, but I think they work.

Besides the names I mentioned, To Live and Die in L.A. also stars John Turturro, Dean Stockwell, Robert Downey Sr, Steve James and more. The names might not mean much to you, but anyone who has watched movies from this era knows their faces well. All told, this movie has some sterling actors, and it shows.

A quick note about the music. If you like 80's music, To Live and Die in L.A. has a great score. Let's leave it at that. It works.

Now lets look at Friedkin. I've seen a handful of his movies by now; The Exorcist, The French Connection, Sorcerer, Cruising, the video for Laura Branigan's song Self Control, and now To Live and Die in L.A.

I've come to understand his style a bit, a gritty sense of realism overlaid with a gloomy, almost grim sense of doom. You get the feeling that, besides the obvious danger, there is something sinister just around the corner, something nasty hovering behind the camera waiting to pounce. With Friedkin you never know if things are going to be alright. They might not be.

To Live and Die in L.A. is no exception. Shots of palm trees swaying hard in the wind, silhouetted against a red smog gives the feeling that things are not well. There is a fair amount of nudity and sex in this movie, but it isn't erotic and exciting. Friedkin makes it all seem tawdry and a bit nasty. It's more about sating a need than emotion, like watching someone wolf down food. It's hunger more then enjoyment. There is also a fair bit of blood, but set against the rest of the movie, it seems almost trivial.There isn't really a good guy here as lines become more and more ill defined as the end increasingly justifes the means.

So, do I recommend this movie? Absolutely. To Live and Die in L.A. is not a masterpiece, it is absolutely an 80's action thriller, from its neon green credits to the music and the frankly cliché plot points, but it's also something more. Lots of movies do the 'tormented maverick out for revenge' thing, but I have rarely seen it done as well as Friedkin does it in To Live and Die in L.A.

That's that and all that. Join me again next time, and until then, have a great week!

 

Gotti

I decided to watch:

Gotti (1996).

This HBO movie has been called the most accurate mafia movie ever by former made man Michael Franzese and I can see why.

Starring in the main role as John Gotti, we have veteran actor Armand Assante, and his co-stars including William Forsythe, Anthony Quinn and no less than five future Sopranos members. Gotti was at the time the most popular movie HBO had produced and in fact became the springboard for The Sopranos.

The movie starts in 1973 and concludes in 1992 and takes us and Gotti from the boss of a small crew in the New York Gambino family to the very top. There isn't all that much more I can say about the plot. There is a lot of talking, even more shouting and some murders as one would expect. Surprisingly enough, Gotti isn't a very violent movie despite the killings.

With a cast like this, it is no surprise that the scenes are mostly pretty good, and the music is what it is supposed to be, but I have a big problem with this movie; there is no real coherent plot. Gotti is essentially a collection of scenes set in chronological order but the flow is almost non existent. It felt to me like the writers sat down and wrote out the isolated scenes and then the director filmed them and that is that. I wasn't expecting Goodfellas, but some cohesion would have been nice. In a movie that spans 20 years you get no proper passage of time. Sure, Gotti's hair gets a bit grayer and he dresses nicer, but otherwise the story feels like it took twenty months not years. It rushes through some events, and dwells on others and maybe I missed something, but I was genuinely surprised at the poor flow.

That said, Gotti is by no means a bad movie, but it would have benefited greatly from better editing. Do we really need to see the FBI agents drinking in a club, depressed at Gotti's latest acquittal? No, we don't. The feds can remain anonymous unless they are important as individuals like in Donnie Brasco. Did we need to see Gotti visiting his dying friend and crew member in a hospital and hand feeding him the filling in a cannoli? Again, no. Would I have liked to see more than one scene on the final decision to kill the current boss of the family? Yes. You get the point, I'm sure.

So, do I recommend this movie? If you are interested in the subject matter, then yes I do. We are talking about the real events that surrounded a mob boss who was made Time Magazines Man of the Year after all, and that is fascinating, but if you only want an entertaining mob movie, there are others that are just better films. Gotti is not a bad movie, but disappointingly it's not great either.

That's that and all that. Join me again next time and until then, have a great week!

 

The Conversation

For once I watched a movie that I haven't looked forward to, in fact, I can't remember where I heard of it, but I watched:

The Conversation (1974).

This thriller was written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola and has a pretty good cast. I'd even argue it has an unnecessarily good cast. Gene Hackman is our main star, Harry Caul, which is fine, but his assistant, Stan, is played by John Cazale yet only appears in three or four scenes. Harry's sort of girlfriend is played by Teri Garr and only appears in one scene. Robert Duvall appears in one and a half scene and is uncredited for some reason. Harrison Ford is well cast and has decent screen time. Please understand that I'm not really complaining, but these wonderful actors are wasted in such short scenes. Practically any actor that looks the part would do, and yes, I do get that we're talking early 70's, and some names weren't that big yet, but both Cazale and Duvall were in The Godfather, so it's not like they weren't well known.

Oh well, we're here to talk about The Conversation. Harry Caul is the preeminent electronic surveillance expert in the country. His legendary skills have landed him a job for The Director (Duvall). Harry and his team photograph and record a couple talking in a busy square and their conversation turns very serious. The job done, Harry contacts the client but only gets to meet The Director's assistant (Ford) who pays him, but in a fit of pique Harry refuses, stating he'll only hand over the tapes to the Director personally.

Harry's problem is that he is a very moral man, or at least he tries to be. He is also extremely private and somewhat paranoid. A famous job he did in the 60's led to three people dying, and he feels responsible. He is worried that the couple is in danger, and he becomes torn between his professionalism and the money it brings and his religion and conscience. That is all I'm willing to say to avoid spoilers.

The Conversation clocks in at just under two hours, and despite being a typically slow 70's movie, it isn't boring. There are scenes that I wondered about, feeling that they seemed a bit unnecessary, but there is no wasted space in this movie. Every piece of the puzzle is important, even though they don't make sense at first. Remember, The Conversation was made in a time when the audience was assumed to be watching the movie instead of playing with their phones.

With Coppola's direction and the cast we have, The Conversation is absolute quality, no doubt about that. However, it is a very different creature that either The Godfather parts one and two or Apocalypse Now. It is realistic, almost unpleasantly so, but at the same time it grabs you and demands to watch Harry's conflict to the end.

The sound is also worth mentioning. The music itself is fine, nothing out of place but there is a lot of other sounds as well. There is electronic interference picked up by microphones and this eerie panicked noise that raises the tension mirroring Harry's anxiety perfectly. Superb work there.

So, do I recommend this movie? Absolutely, if that wasn't made clear by the fact that my only “complaint” is that the actors are too good. The Conversation is not made for passive background watching, but if you pay attention, it is a great movie.

That's that and all that. Join me again next time, and until then, have a great week!