Condemned Dreams: Compellingly Relevant Truths

I just saw George Tsouris's Condemned Dreams.  The feature-length movie, now streaming on Amazon and Tubi, is billed as a philosophical horror movie.   And it's not that horror films cannot have philosophic depth -- see Frankenstein and Dracula -- but Condemned Dreams has and is much more.

It's the story of a woman, Shy, arrested and sentenced to death, because the government doesn't like her ideas.  As such, it's a needed and much welcome attack on the fascism that's currently in power in the United States (and in Russia, etc.).  And its story of the condemned Shy interviewed in her cell by a reporter as she awaits her sentence, has much in common with 1984, Waiting for Godot, and Plato's dialogue Crito about Socrates in his cell, awaiting his deadly punishment and visited by his friend Crito.

Now, as is well known even by a student who took an introduction to philosophy course, Socrates refuses Crito's offer of escape, explaining that he (Socrates) might criticise the state, but would never put himself above it and evade its sentence.  I've actually been disbelieving that that's what actually happened, ever since I first read Crito in my Intro to Philosophy course with Prof. Henry Magid at CCNY in the 1960s -- not believing that really happened, because I know had I been in Socrates's shoes, I would have taken Crito's avenue of escape in  a New York minute.  (I was so vexed by the decision Socrates made, I eventually wrote The Plot to Save Socrates.)

Shy (Soft Abilez) in Condemned Dreams gets no visit from an old friend.  Instead, Lauren (Catherine Parish), a reporter whose career is tanking, pays Shy a series of visits, and their discussion, along with Lauren's conversations with Detective Marshall (Brady Moldrup), one of the cops who arrested Shy, are the beating heart of this riveting movie.  We're treated to a discussion of how we evaluate the life we've lived (Shy laments "all the time I wasted -- I could have accomplished so much more"), the meaning and limits of freedom (I always liked the Millian libertarian view that everyone should be free to swing their arms as far and wide as they please -- as long as they don't hit someone else's nose), and the proper role of police in a democratic society (distressingly relevant, as I indicated above, to what ICE is continuing to do in our country).

If this sounds like a lot of conversation, there is, and as such Condemned Dreams would make a highly compelling, relevant play.  In the meantime, check out the movie, and if you're in the mood for more talk, come to the free online conversation that will occur on StreamYard tomorrow (July 25) at 11am (New York time), featuring George Tsouris, Catherine Parish, Rew Starr (Lauren's editor), as well as panelists Nick Zaino, Ken Holmes, Caleigh LeGrand, and Yours Truly, hosted by Samita Nandy.

 

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (The Play): WhoDunnit in the Roaring 20s

My wife and I saw a preview performance last evening of Agatha Christie's 1926 novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, written, directed, and adapted by Mark Shanahan to the stage of the Westport Country Playhouse (in Westport, Connecticut), and we loved it.  The cast was nimble, the setting including the music and sound effects was fetching, and you can't go wrong with an early Hercule Poirot story.  As John Lennon might have said, "a splendid time is guaranteed for all".

A few words about Mark Shanahan:   He was my student in Fordham University's MA in Media Studies Program, where we first met in 2002.  I soon learned he was not only a brilliant student, but a gifted actor and playwright.   Indeed, his adaptation of my novelette, "The Chronology Protection Case," was a finalist for the Edgar Award in 2002, and you'll find Mark's audiobook adaptations of that, along with my novels, The Consciousness Plague and The Plot to Save Socrates over on Audible. 

You of course all know about Agatha Christie and her character Hercules Poirot.  I consider her the whodunnit equivalent of science fiction author Isaac Asimov.   His character Hari Seldon maps out the future, just as Poirot maps out the past, in particular, who murdered whatever suitable victim.  More than 50 movies and 70 television episodes feature the fastidious, deductive detective, some in the time in which the novels were first published, others in the present day.  One of the joys of Shanahan's adaptation is its zestful presence in the 1920s -- when the novel was first published -- down to the stick-like telephones and the dictaphone, which indeed plays a role in the ending (Mark learned his media well :)

Anthony Cochrane is a fine, emotive, justifiably pompous Poirot, and I especially enjoyed how he and a few of the actors talked not only among themselves but to the audience.  (Just about everyone on stage is a suspect, so I'm not going to say anything more about anyone else's acting, except it all was delightful.)  The story is of course a homicide mystery, but if you'd like a breath of fresh theatrical air in this hot, smokey summer,  I highly recommend The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which will be on stage at the Westport Country Playhouse July 14 through August 1, 2026.

Nemesis: Good to the Last Drop

My wife and I binged Nemesis -- eight episodes all up on Netflix -- and really enjoyed it.   The story is a life-and-death contest -- psychological, physical, strategic -- between two brilliant, driven men: LAPD Detective Isaiah Stiles and suave criminal mastermind Coltrane Wilder.   Stiles is convinced that Wilder, who has high-profile fronts in real estate and philanthropy, is behind and actively involved in all kinds of big crimes, including at least one that affected his family, but nobody including his police superiors believe him.

That's a good enough set-up for an edge-of-your-seat police series in itself, but both men are married to beautiful, highly intelligent women in complex relationships, and their families play an increasingly important role as the narrative unfolds.   Stiles's father and son, and Wilder's sister-in-law are major characters with elements of compelling stories that intersect with unforeseen consequences.  In addition, police of various positions and loyalties, and people in Wilder's gang with different levels of reliability, play crucial roles.

All of this rolls out with shoot-em-up action, including an excellent massive battle between good guys and bad guys, neither of which are entirely good or bad.  The acting was excellent.  No one other than Domenick Lombardozzi (Ray Donovan) (born on my birthday), Chris Bauer (For All Mankind), who both played senior LAPD people, and  were known to me, but all were memorable, especially Y'lan Noel as Wilder, Matthew Law as Stiles (a great example of name determinism), Mo Irvin as his father, Cleopatra Coleman as Wilder's wife (whom I just realized I saw and liked in a strange little time-travel movie In the Shadow of the Moon), and Gabrielle Dennis as Stiles' better half.

Hey, Nemesis was great summer fun, and would likely be just as good in winter.

Project Hail Mary: Better Than Disclosure Day

Well, the wife and I saw Project Hail Mary last night on Amazon Prime (it just got there this month, after its release in theaters in March) and I  liked Project Hail Mary a lot more than Disclosure Day.  Which is not to say I didn't like Disclosure Day, and the two are not exactly the same exact genre, so maybe the comparison is unfair.   But they do have a lot in common: humans and interstellar intelligences, unlikely heroes, oddball humor, life and death situations on the planetary level.

But Project Hail Mary has a lot more soul in the story, more humanity in the best sense of the word, and a more memorable, lovable interstellar intelligence.   Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) is one of the best human emissaries to the stars -- Tau Ceti, in this case -- in all the movies and TV shows I've seen on that topic over the years, beginning with Captain Video and His Video Rangers in the 1950s on the shortly lived Dumont Channel.   Grace surprises us at numerous junctures, as does Rocky (James Ortiz), the intelligent being from the planet Erid (circling the real star 40 Eridani), who with Grace goes to Tau Ceti e (the planet named Adrian in the movie).  Rocky doesn't have a face, though if you look at Rocky carefully at certain times from certain angles, it almost seems he does (I say "he" because Ortiz does Rocky's voice).

Drew Goddard wrote the screenplay from Andy Weir's novel, not surprising given the excellent job they did with The Martian.  Like that movie, Project Hail Mary is a fine piece of science fiction that plays with the limits of scientific plausibility.   Indeed, because the threats and solutions in Project Hail Mary are interstellar, far wider in scope than Mars and Earth, its connection to science is stretched pretty far and thin.   But in the end -- and in the beginning and middle, too -- I felt I was seeing a riveting story that Isaac Asimov or Robert Heinlein could have written, unlike a central element of Disclosure Day which felt more in the province of Walt Disney.

I also had no idea about how Project Hail Mary would end, until the very end, which is always a big plus in a movie.   This derives from the complex, unusual character of Ryland Grace, astutely written and perfectly acted.   In addition, the cinematography was otherworldly convincing and topnotch.   If you're in the mood for a movie in which Earth is threatened by something from outer space, in a situation that unfurls in a way that Hugo Gernsback would have really enjoyed, you can't go wrong with Project Hail Mary.

Star City 1.8: Sacrifice and Relevance

from my collection of Soviet space medals

Well, the season one finale of Star City -- episode 1.8 -- was one of the best finales of any season of any series I've ever seen.   It fired on so many cylinders -- ethical, personal, and sheer human accomplishment.  Here are some of them (and there will be spoilers ahead):

• Valya actually landing on Venus -- the end of his "one-way" trip (as he put it) to our neighbor planet between us and Mercury and the sun.  He did this because he had to be in the bathysphere, firing off Venerus, so Venerus could get back to Earth.  Also, because he knew the Soviets would hunt him down and kill him if he got back to Earth.
• Belikova, the first woman to land on the Moon, doing her best to stop the Soviet fascist monsters from killing Sasha and Lakshmi.  She knew those fascist soldiers would stop for a least a few seconds before they shot her down -- she was known to everyone in the Soviet Union -- and indeed they just took her into custody, without harming her.
• Sergei working with Chief Engineer Korolev to get Venerus back to Earth safely, which in this alternate history is Finland, not the Soviet Union, whose lunatics in power would kill their own people.
• Not completely a sacrifice,but nonetheless very admirable: Sasha not going with Lakshmi into Finland, but staying in the Soviet Union, so he could in some way be closer to his wife Belikova, whom he’s come to love.

I know I keep talking about the Nazi-like government that existed in the Soviet Union.  Korolev says none of that really matters, the important thing is "We sent human beings to Venus."   As usual, he has the best lines.  He sees the deepest truths.   But, for me at least, the fascism of the Soviet Union -- the murder of anyone who gets in the way of their agenda, even heroes who have risked their lives to go to Venus and back -- is also a deep truth, and very dangerous.  And its depiction in Star City, as I keep saying, is especially relevant -- fortunately for the series, unfortunately for us living in the United States and therefore the world at large.   I look forward to its continuing depiction in Star City, and its reduction in relevance to what is happening in the real reality unfolding in the United States.

See also Star City 1.1-1.2: Fascism and Space ... 1.3: Sadness and Joy ... 1.4: Venus in Blue Genes ... 1.5: The Spy Who Went to Venus ... 1.6: "You're A Monster" ... 1.7: Return Voyage

in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover

The Fix: A Short Film with a Crucial Story

I first met Amanda Greer nearly a decade ago, in 2017, after I saw her performance as Marilyn Monroe in Anthony Marinelli's play, Max & Domino, which was playing at The Duke on 42nd Street in Manhattan.  I had first gotten to know Anthony some years before, when he asked me if I thought he got Marshall McLuhan's concept of "acoustic space" right in the play Anthony wrote (later made into a movie) of the same name (Anthony did get it right).  And I first got to see Denise Reed, with Amanda, in Marinelli's production of Sartre's No Exit in 2020, and I saw the two again in Anthony's wise and hilarious Why I Had to Kill You While You Slept in 2023.  Denise also played an important role in an episode of FBI on CBS in 2024, and joined Amanda and Anthony and me in a dramatic reading taken from my 2024 novel It's Real Life: An Alternate History of The Beatles at Big Red Books in Nyack, NY in 2025 (Anthony and Amanda are real-life characters in the novel).

I tell you all this because when I heard that Amanda and Denise had formed a production company -- The Abbey, Stories Worth Telling By Women, For Women -- I couldn't wait to see one of their movies.  And The Fix, an 18-minute short (co-written by Chelsea Hattan and Anthony Marinelli, from a story by Amanda Greer), is one powerhouse of a film -- a brutal,  scathing, heartbreaking, hopeful, all-too-real portrait of what it means to be a woman addicted to heroin.

The heartbreak and horror of heroin addiction has been depicted in feature-length films like Trainspotting (1996) which also tried to leaven its message with dark humor.  The Fix has no time for that.  There's nothing funny about its smiles.   Anyone who thinks there's an easy exit out of this kind of hell will be quickly disabused.  Indeed, the creative work that comes closest to the The Fix in tone and message is something even shorter than this movie, John Lennon's "Cold Turkey", a song 5 minutes and 1 second long.

Speaking of cold turkey, of course in reality there are ways out of heroin addiction.  But all are life shaking.  Is The Fix wrong to vividly portray such a painful situation?  No, because it's also a testament to sheer human willpower, how the part of us that strives to save our lives can triumph over the part that seeks to blissfully self-destruct -- they're two sides of the same human coin.  Anything that shows people this reality is eminently worth seeing.  The Fix been making the film festival rounds -- garnering 16 nominations and 9 wins -- and will be at the 32nd Annual San Antonio Film Festival later this month of July.

Here's the trailer.

Star City 1.7: Return Voyage

I always say that unless you see a character's head blown off, or dissolved in a vat of acid, he or she may still be alive.  I learned this watching 24.

[And there will be spoilers ahead ... ]

It apparently happened again at the end of Star City 1.7.   Last week, in episode 1.6, we saw Colonel Raskova of the KGB ordering the murder of cosmonauts Sasha, Valya, and Lakshmi, by depriving them of their oxygen on their way to Venus -- after Sasha and Lakshmi disobeyed Raskova's order to do that to Valya --and Chief Engineer Korolev quit in fury and disgust as a result.  This week, in episode 1.7, we learn that the Venera (the Soviet ship to Venus) is returning to Earth as per schedule.

Now, that does not necessarily mean that the three cosmonauts are alive.  For all we know, the Venera was designed to move through space to and from Venus and even send messages back to Earth automatically.  And I guess the KGB and their lackeys in Star City could explain the three cosmonauts dead on the ship as due to a malfunction. But from what we've already seen on Star City, the cosmonauts, like our astronauts in that period of time, were more than spam in the can, as our real astronauts used to say.  They had work to do, making sure the voyage was on track, and all the tech was operating as it should.  So chances are the fix we saw Sasha attempt to put in at the end of 1.6 indeed got working to save at least one of the three, and I hope even more.

As I've already said here in earlier reviews, the battle between science and paranoid fascism in Star City is an excellent metaphor for the battle the U.S. is going through right now, with RFK, Jr and his anti-vaccine policy in our Department of Health, and much more.   I'm very glad to see science perhaps gaining the upper hand in Star City, and I'm hopeful it's beginning to happen right here in America on this Fourth of July.

See also Star City 1.1-1.2: Fascism and Space ... 1.3: Sadness and Joy ... 1.4: Venus in Blue Genes ... 1.5: The Spy Who Went to Venus ... 1.6: "You're A Monster"

in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover

Review of Jude O'Reilly's Heartbreaker: No One's an Angel

I just finished Jude O'Reilly's Heartbreaker, about a desperate mother's hunt for a serial killer who wiped out her whole family and left her to blame, literally.  I really enjoyed this novel, chocked full of stunners, replete with a multi-twist ending with shocker after shocker.

Now, readers of this blog through the years since 2006 will know my high regard for Dexter and its spinoffs, about a serial killer intent on eliminating serial killers and others out to destroy more or less good people.  O'Reilly's serial killer would be an ideal target of Dexter, he or she -- they, in today's parlance -- has nothing good about them.

O'Reilly has a keen understanding of human nature, including academe, a field I know all too well.  "Some of my colleagues are more interested in their own research. But for me, it’s the light that goes on in their eyes when a young person realizes a profound truth for the first time,” a professor tells the mother hunting the serial killer.  And O'Reilly's way with words infuses other elements of the story that somehow manages to be sassy, sexy, sage, and frightening throughout.  

Harvesting organs has played a role in fiction at least since Robin Cook's Coma in 1977, made into a movie the following year by Michael Crichton. Heartbreaker -- which applies more than figuratively to its story -- takes this to a whole new level.  Daphne, the desperate mother, is a defense attorney, and her interactions with police and lawyers provide a simmering blend of law, medicine, and often life-and-death ethical dilemmas that you'll likely ponder long after you finish the novel.

O'Reilly is British, and among the new words and phrases her novel taught me are "swallow hands","kohl eyes","plinth", and "blagging".  They'll be no blagging of your time if you read Heartbreaker, and I highly recommend it if your heart and soul are in need of a rollercoaster ride.

.