Les Maitres Fous (The Mad Masters) from 1955 may be the most WTF of all. It shows the goings on of an anti-colonialist sect in Ghana (still two years away from independence when the film was shot), complete with dog-eating, trances and dancing.
Is it a documentary? It is presented as such, but seems just far enough off-kilter to create serious doubts. The feeling is more like a modern “reality” show which is scripted to seem real.
Either way, it’s a bit of a disgusting film, in the purely visceral sense (I don’t get disgusted by unfortunate portrayals of people in old films – people who do so are too dumb to understand context). Blood and foaming mouths are not all that fun to watch.
But at the same time, it’s a film you can’t look away from. In that sense, it’s the cinematic equivalent of a bad road accident.
Interestingly, this one has offended both colonial officials (the butt of the supposed joke in the film) in its own day, and people who are outraged by the colonial era today. So it’s the gift that keeps on giving.
My own opinion? I didn’t like it. It feels like the objective was just to shock… without much underlying merit either from the anthropological side (unless it’s actually unscripted, which I find hard to believe) or from the artistic.
But don’t take my word for it. You can watch the film on YouTube, and draw your own conclusions. Since it’s quite short, at the very least you will find it interesting.
Gustavo Bondoni’s latest book is entitled Desert Base Strike. If monsters and modern battlefields, with non-stop action thrown in for good measure sounds like something you’d enjoy, then you can check it out here.
So. The BMW Z1. It’s a car I actually like quite a lot, one that looks better in the sheet metal than it does in photos. Despite the fanfare before it was launched, including the cover of the November 1986 Road & Track, this one never became a classic.
I think the main reason for that was that very few of them were ever sold. Perhaps the price prohibited widespread sales, perhaps it was the doors that rolled into the sills like electric windows or maybe BWM intentionally kept the numbers limited for corporate reasons. Whatever the reason, this isn’t a vehicle that entered the public consciousness, and it certainly never worried Porsche overmuch.
It’s fun to contrast this kind of car with the ones that Road & Trackgot exactly right and which changed the world forever. I’ll admit that I prefer the quirky cars to the classics – it’s fun to be able to say “what the heck?” or “oh, yeah, I remember that one!”
The best part of this issue is the Peter Egan article about driving a Hindustan Ambassador from New Dehli to Nepal. Classic stuff, and I suppose something that would be very different if you did it today.
Other highlights were the Salon of the Aston DB3S, which nearly won at Le Mans, and the GP coverage (1986 was a seriously classic year for Formula 1).
Gustavo Bondoni’s latest book is an action-packed creature feature set in the Sahara. Desert Base Strike is a chilling view of the future of genetically-modified animals in war… and you can check it out here.
Sure, only Spencer Tracy was a major star when they filmed Bad Day at Black Rock… but the casting director had a great eye for future megastardom. Cast in supporting roles in this one were Anne Francis (she became Honey West), Ernest Borgnine, and Lee Marvin (to my mind, these two will always be linked together by the masterpiece that was The Dirty Dozen).
Bad Day is a great film. It shares the Western setting and the tension with High Noon, but this one isn’t a western, despite its setting. This one is pure noir… but in bright badlands sunlight.
The tension builds slowly, starting with a train that stops at an unaccustomed place and the hostility of the townsfolk towards the only man who gets off at that particular stop.
Slowly, we come to understand what’s going on (the only clumsy part of this movie is how it reveals the crime at the center of the tale – what happened is way too obvious almost from the tenth minute of the movie). This doesn’t take away from the enjoyment of the film, however. It’s still extremely entertaining to watch.
The setup is pretty much all I can tell about this film without spoiling the whole thing, so I’ll limit myself to recommending you watch the movie if you can, since this fusion of Western and Noir is unusual. Noir supposedly takes place at night, in neon-illuminated cityscapes, while throwing the shadow of blinds against the wall of the detective’s lonely room. But you get the sense anyway, even in the bright daylight of the town of Black Rock.
But the sensibilities are all there. The single tarnished champion fighting not only the bad guys, but the way the world is, too. In this case, the message is about racism, 1940s style, but that’s just an excuse to get the quest going and, fortunately, doesn’t interfere with the story. This is a well-balanced, non-preachy film.
Recommended for lovers of Noir and people who enjoy seeing stories that take place in the west.
Gustavo Bondoni’s latest book is Desert Base Strike. It’s about the fight against people turning genetically modified dinosaurs into weapons… and you can check it out here.
Gustavo Bondoni’s Desert Base Strike is available for kindle and in paperback. Purchase link here, and I leave you with the cover–which I love–for your enjoyment!
By now, I should be used to it. Save a couple of exceptions, the books in my Baen prize box all had one thing in common: instead of harping on depressing post apocalyptic stuff, these books look at adventure… which makes them about a million times more fun than most of the other new work in the genre.
Tyger Burning is no exception. A straight-up space adventure / space war book that delivers, similar in feel, if not execution, to The Expanse. I really did enjoy this one.
It’s the story of a super-soldier who has immigrated into the US at a time when an alien invasion is imminent. All he wants is to have a tranquil life with his son and mother… but he gets drawn into the war (in a slightly convoluted way, but one which makes the book better for those who can suspend disbelief) and becomes a critical piece of Earth’s defense.
And while most of the elements of this book can be found elsewhere, the way they’re combined makes for a truly fresh and entertaining read, and one that passes surprisingly quickly. And the title’s wink in Blake’s direction resonated with us here at CE.
So, if you’re looking for an entertaining, well-written space adventure/war book, you could do a lot worse than to pick this one up. Recommended.
Gustavo Bondoni’s latest novel is a science fiction thriller entitled Splinter, which probes the boundaries between man and machine in a far-future space colony. You can check it out here.
I will be honest. I watch 2 kinds of films: fun movies from Hollywood the UK–comedies and action/ adventure or SF/F, mainly–and films on the 1001 movies list. I almost never watch a non-English-language film unless it’s on the list. So my education about French, Italian or Japanese cinema comes mainly from the list. I never go near Argentine cinema… I find it unbearable.
And the only part of a Bollywood (or, as in this case, Bengali/Tollywood) film I ever saw was 5 minutes of some weird musical adaptation of a classic fairy tale (I think it might have been Cinderella) that my wife was watching. I fled as soon as my sordid curiosity was satisfied.
So I’m something less than an expert on Indian film.
But I’ve started working on that, with my viewing of 1955’s Pather Panchali (which roughly translates to “song of the path” as far as I can make out – corrections welcome in the comments).
This one is a slow, albeit fascinating film that shows the life of a poor family in an Indian village. They struggle to get money to buy food and do repairs on the house, and it’s all relatively peaceful, the monotony broken only by tempests in teacups, until the very end (which I won’t spoil).
I think the lack of enormous drama for three quarters of the film is what makes this picture brilliant and warranted its inclusion on the list. The setting and characters would have been completely wrong for a sweeping melodrama. And even the one large event is just that, an event, and life goes on. It is a peaceful film.
Or at least it is watching it nearly 70 years after it was filmed. I imagine this movie would have caused a certain amount of indignation among contemporary Indians for its portrayal of the country’s poor, and the backward–almost medieval–picture it paints of the peasantry. A few power lines and a steam train are the tangible symbols of the civilized world for the main characters… Jetliners and television, staples of the ’50s would have seemed like science fiction.
I didn’t love this movie, but it was watchable. I understand there’s a restored version you can purchase from The Criterion Collection which is likely very nice. For my own part, I watched it on YouTube. The English subtitles are available by selecting the Bangla CC option.
It’s certainly interesting enough to merit a watch.
Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer whose latest book of literary fiction is entitled Safe and Sorry. It documents the intertwined lives of a group of characters who, despite barely knowing each other, cause seismic shifts in one another’s lives. You can check it out here.
Car magazines of the Road & Track type were essentially a news outlet in their heyday. They brought you the latest from the automotive world, things you would never have seen in the mainstream media, as well as race coverage that would have been ignored by major outlets. You read that months magazine and you were just as well informed as pretty much anyone.
The internet, of course, changed all that, and now magazines are very different in feel. Those that survived the major crunch are the high-gloss ones that understand that the tactile pleasure of holding and smelling and feeling paper will never be available digitally… and who also know that everything looks better when it isn’t on a screen. Don’t ask me why, but this just is.
Well, even today, the first advantage of owning a magazine is that the article you remember reading will be exactly where you remembered. It’s harder to search mags than to google stuff, but at least the articles won’t be modified or simply disappear (and require attempts to wayback machine them).
But is that really a reason to read the things? Probably not. You don’t, after all, read your encyclopedias from cover to cover, after all. So why bother.
I think the thing I like the most is to read about the times they were printed in the words and through the lens of the people who were active then. I love looking at old cigarette ads. I love seeing just how angry the 55 mile an hour speed limit made real humans or just how much everyone, Republican and Democrat, wanted to forget the Jimmy Carter era. Likewise fuel crises and things like attitudes about how dangerous motorsport was.
One of the things I’ve always loved is the outrage expressed when people who have never given a damn about racing suddenly speak up against it when something (usually a fatal accident) happens and makes it reach the front page. I propose a rule to be applied to every aspect of life: if you don’t have a proven interest in a subject before some controversy sweeps it into the public eye, then you aren’t allowed to participate in the discussion once it does. You may have your opinion and voice it to friends, but no action will ever be taken on those grounds and no one who matters will be forced to listen to it.
Can you imagine how much better that rule would make life in the era of social media? Bliss.
But I digress. So I like to get context. Hell, I could do that from period novels, newspapers or National Geographics. Why Road & Track?
Well, apart from the obvious answer that I like cars, there’s also the fact that it’s fun to know the future the journalists didn’t back then. So if one of the scribes ascertains that Nissan’s Mid-Engine 4-wheel-drive car was green-lighted for production, you can shake you head and say “uh-uh.”
Then there are the race reports. Event the ones not written by he incomparable Rob Walker and Innes Ireland are worth reading to remember the era and to understand what generated awe, and what was already considered ho-hum (after generating awe in the previous issue).
Finally, the articles about automotive history, classic cars and the simple joys of enjoying what you drive are timeless. You could reprint the things today, and it would be exactly the same.
This particular issue? A Ford vs. Chevy battle, some econoboxes and, more interestingly, a long article about the 1986 Indy 500 and tree, count ’em, three F1 race reports.
Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer whose latest book is a science fiction thriller entitled Splinter. If you’ve ever wanted to explore how the limits between human and machine intelligence will evolve as mankind colonized the galaxy, this one is for you. You can check it out here.
I’ll admit that my opinion of Judith Merril as a selector of Year’s Best stories was colored by my first impression. I had the terrible misfortune that the first of her books that I read was SF12, and it’s still, by a huge margin, the worst collection of science fiction stories I’ve ever read, both on the story selection side and from the viewpoint of the editor’s notes that went with it.
Yea, I know that one was from the mid-sixties, but it’s a wonderful example of someone trying to hard and really, really screwing up.
In this case the problem is mainly story selection, as Merril, though more opinionated than one would prefer in her comments, is at least less disruptive and lets the stories speak for themselves without turning the entire book into some manifesto for her theories (which turned out not to have proven correct). Or at least not as much as in SF12.
Perhaps I’m spoiled. The Year’s Best and best of SF books I grew up on were those where the stories were selected by Dozois, Conklin, Wollheim, Hartwell and Asimov/Greenberg. These books were focused on core SF, unconcerned with pushing the agenda of some critical theory or another, and still manage to showcase the literary end of the spectrum without disappearing up their own assholes.
Merril? Well, let’s just say that with the number of books she edited, I’m surprised no one had to file a missing persons report on her.
So what’s the problem with this one?
As far as I can tell, Merril was obsessed with two notions when reading for this volume. The first was that the sense that science fiction isn’t serious literature needed to be assaulted with fury. It was imperative to prove–not just say, mind you, but PROVE–that the genre can stand toe to toe with those serious writers that produce work that moves forward the cause of western civilization. You know… the ones who write for The New Yorker.
The second obsession was with the whole “boundaries of science fiction and fantasy” thing. Now, I’m the first to admit that there is a large reader overlap between the two genres and, as a writer, I’ve crossed genres a time or two. But…
But I do believe there is a definition of science fiction, and dropping ghosts and dragons into a story pretty much disqualifies the tale (unless they’re genetically modified dragons bred for a specific purpose like McCaffrey’s).
I’d say about a third of this book falls outside the boundaries of science fiction and into the fantasy genre.
Worse, of the ones that did fall into SF back in 1964 (the year these stories were published), a depressing number of them were chosen because they focused on the emerging sciences of massy psychology / psychiatry and ESP. Merril was of the opinion (proven wrong these past 60 years) that these sciences would move far beyond the manipulation of masses as perfected by the Nazis and into truly outlandish, science fictional spaces.
They haven’t, and ESP has been relegated to fantasy.
Sadly, these obsessions squeezed out the real SF, leaving the closet quite bare when it came to selecting a favorite among those. There were no Asimov or Heinlein tales deemed worthy that year (which is doubly baffling considering what actually was in there), but Clarke came to the rescue with a story that, though not one of his best, was good enough to make it stand out in this company: “The Shining Ones”.
Best story of all was not an SF tale, and barely–with the suggestion of a possible ghost story–a genre tale at all. But when you can include a story by John D MacDonald in a collection, you do it, and don’t ask too many questions. “The Legend of Joe Lee” is a spectacularly well-written story. Wrong for this book, but wonderful. Finally, I will confess to having enjoyed Rick Raphael’s “Sonny” despite being an ESP tale and having a crap ending. The writing just pulls you in.
So, can I recommend this one?
Yes, but mainly to people looking to deepen their knowledge of the genre, and perhaps to understand the gestalt from 60 years ago, when many of us weren’t born.
Gustavo Bondoni’s latest novel is a science fiction thriller (no fantasy elements in this one, I’m afraid -Merril wouldn’t have approved). It’s called Splinter, and you can check it out here.
We all know about tuner cars, right? You take a design that has been smoothed out by the greatest designers in the world and add fiberglass skirts and spoilers and air dams to it until it is unrecognizable. Then lower it to the ground so you can’t run it on any surface bumpier than a billiard table. Finally, add about 500bhp. Nowadays, you can also light up the bottom with neon.
Other than the extra horses, which I absolutely support, the rest of it is an exercise in bad taste rivaled only by thick gold chain necklaces and reggaeton music (often blared out of these selfsame vehicles). It’s the ironic sign of someone who desperately throws money at being different from everyone else, only to become a cliché.
In the eighties, however, there was one single case where the tuners actually made a certain stock vehicle better every time they touched it. That car was the Ferrari Testarossa, and the one on the cover is a case in point. Willie Köenig will never be accused of having subtle good taste, but he did the first thing any of us would have done when he modified the Testarossa: he removed the god-awful side strakes! The fact that he also killed off the pop-up headlights actually predicted what the factory itself would do a few years later, and is also a good thing.
Going the opposite route, was Rinspeed, who created a gnome called the Rinspeed R69, which is probably the ugliest vehicle ever, and yes, I’m counting Pontiak Aztek and the PZL M-15. Judge for yourself:
Apart from the tuner thing, this mag was quite entertaining, with a Salon of an early Mercedes, and some grand prix coverage, plus the annual Le Mans report.
We also had to say goodbye to two talented drivers: Jo Gartner and Elio de Angelis. Elio, in particular, was sad for me, because he was my favorite non-Ferrari driver as a young boy. The eighties were the first sanitized decade where driving was super safe and drivers expected to die of old age, but these two fatalities served to remind everyone that race car drivers should never be recruited from the ranks of the timid. If you’re not willing to risk it all, there are other things to do.
Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer whose latest book is a science fiction thriller entitled Splinter. You can check it out here.
In this era when Alfa Romeo is an F1 backmarker, many younger readers may be surprised to learn that it was once one of the greatest names in both Grand Prix and sports car racing, winning F1 world championships in both as well as the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
I’ve shown my drawings here before (hey, it’s my blog, I can torture people with my art if I want to), and I thought this one would be interesting as the last great Alfa Romeo race car… the T33/TT/12 that won the Sportscar World Championship in 1975 – shown here at the Nürburgring.
For a full gallery of my drawings, you can look here (this one isn’t up yet – maybe next week).
Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer from Argentina who dabbles in art as a way to de-stress.
Classically Educated 