On the Subject of Murder

When I was an undergraduate, over a decade ago, I once had a man sit down next to me and tell me his life story. This was nothing new. Over my time at college, I had been the walking confessional for a multitude of people. The accidental ménage à trois over the summer break? I heard about it. A woman whose mother stated that she aborted every child "just so I could love you and you alone"? Heard it twice.

But this time was a little different. I don't recall how the conversation started, but I remember vividly where it ended up. You see, he was an immigrant from Ireland, and he had just done a seven year stint for murdering his sister's rapist.

Yup. Situation normal for me.

If you are somehow shocked or surprised, don't worry, I wasn't. My attitude was to shrug. I'm relatively certain I would be interested in doing the same if I had been in his circumstances. My Irish compatriot elaborated, stating that he had felt nothing while he offed the son of a bitch in question, and casually mentioned that he cared about who he cared about, and wouldn't have felt much of anything if he had killed any other random person in the area -- though he was careful to point out other people to use as his example. He wasn't trying to intimidate me, merely trying to illustrate a point.

What I didn't know then, but know now, is that sociopaths come in several varying flavors. Though how much of that is "sociopath" and how much is "I scared the shrink" is a topic for another day. In America, the American Psychological Association has decided to make psychopathy and sociopathy lumped into "anti-Social personality disorder."

My general attitude is to say "Oh, screw off."

Let's be real for a moment, shall we? If someone comes into my home and I kill the little bastard, I may be affected by many things, but I will not, under any circumstances, feel guilty over murdering him, her, or it. Given how good I feel after a rousing class of Krav Maga, I may -- and I stress MAY, in large capital letters, as I have never done it -- even feel good about having killed the intruder, if only for no other reason than I survived the ordeal. This would probably have me labeled as a sociopath by most professional shrinks.

Should a someone in the military feel even a speck of guilt over having killed someone trying to kill them? They might, but are they obligated to? Nope. Sorry, but when people are shooting at you, shooting right back at them is the only reasonable course of action.

But if they don't feel guilty about it, congratulations, they get the label of sociopath. And, of course, baby killers, and monsters, and murderers and ...

Yeah, they should just shut the hell up. I call BS on the whole concept of a soldier being automatically "a killer," with all the negative connotations that usually comes with.

Spectre: a review

So, I just saw Spectre this weekend.

It was .. ahem.... how do I put this....?

It's NOT the worst Bond film I've ever seen.

It's not even the worst Daniel Craig Bond film I've ever seen.

However, this is the one that pissed me off the most.

Let's start with the good elements: The bit players were great. M, Moneypenny, and Q were quite enjoyable.  Even "C" was entertaining, played by Sherlock's Moriarty, Andrew Scott, who is for once, UNDERacting -- and you know he was hired by the Bond people because they particularly wanted to have him fall from a great height, to his death ... because they didn't kill him like that in The Reichenbach Fall, and the Bond people rectified that.

As for the rest of the film?

It sucks. It's dreadful. It's confusing. And worst of all, it's BORING.

The plot is simple: Judi Dench's M has one last mission for Bond -- an assassination, then show up at the funeral. Bond goes, seduces the widow of the man he just assassinated, and is pointed to a secret meeting of Spectre. Bond overhears a name he knows, sees someone who is dead, and is promptly chased out of the meeting. Bond hunts down the person whose name he overheard, and is told to go pick up the girl of the day to find out more. She is of course kidnapped.At this point, I start having major problems.

When the Bond girl du jour is kidnapped from a clinic that looked like it should be owned by Telly Savalas in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Bond chases the bad guys' three car caravan with a plane. Yes. he's using a plane to chase cars. Now, I've seen Bond films where he is chasing someone through the streets of Moscow on a tank, and where he's been chased down a snowy mountain where Bond was using only one ski ... and yet, somehow, those feel far less absurd than this chase with the plane. Also, those were at least entertaining.

The editing is terrible. At least, I presume it's editing, and not just a terrible script. One moment, we see Bond standing in front of a clinic in the Alps as the bad guys drive away, and the next, he's in an airplane flying after them. Where was the plane? No idea. Did we see it at all in the film before then? Nope. Does he explain? Not at all. It gets worse later on, where Bond gets out of an empty, abandoned and gutted building before it explodes .... by riding out on a perfectly good and usable speed boat that's apparently just left under the building. Yup. Apparently, speed boats are so disposable, it was just left there.

Influential Author: Jeffery "Devious" Deaver

Jeffery Deaver has a wonderful way of messing with one's mind.

In my household, “to Deaver” something means to put a backspin on a storyline so hard that the audience gets whiplash. When I mean thriller, I mean it doesn't slow down-- at least not for long.

In my house, the man is so well known for screwing with his readers in surprise twists that whenever we see a writer radically twist everything we thought we knew about the plot, and do it fifty pages away from the ending of the book, we say that he "Deavered" the plot, or "pulled a Deaver."

The man likes to play games. Then again, he's a Fordham law school graduate, so that may have something to do with it.