reviews – Page 2 – Phil Slattery, Writer, Publisher

Reviews Needed

I am seeking people to review my works and who post their reviews to markets in the US, Australia, New Zealand, or Canada. I offer my Kindle e-books for free periodically according to Amazon policy. You can find my works on my Amazon author’s page. Let me know which you would like to review and I will let you know when it available for free or set up a date that you can have it for fee. I am most interested in having reviewed either my short horror (A Tale of Hell and Other Works of Horror), my collected poetry (Nocturne: Poems of Love, Distance, and the Night, a callous and disinterested lover), my short fiction on relationships (The Scent and Other Stories), or my action-adventure novelette (Click). The other two works are contained in A Tale of Hell and Other Works of Horror.

My Quick, Initial Impressions of Michael Crichton’s Next

On Monday I drove to Dallas to meet my wife and family and lead them to our new residence in deepest, darkest Arkansas. The drive is six hours one way. In Texarkana (about half way), I stopped at Books-a-Million for a quick break, to get some iced tea at Joe Muggs, and to find out if they had any new audio-books available. There I found Next (published in 2006) by Michael Crichton. At five hours length, it seemed to be ideal for the remainder of my journey to Dallas and most of the journey back (I picked up Pride and Prejudice on the return leg). After the end of the novel was an interview with Michael Crichton, which was probably the best part of the audio-book, because it provided insight into how he got the idea for the novel and Mr. Crichton discussed his fascinating views on the insane world of corporate patenting and marketing of gene technology. It’s a shame that his views weren’t as clearly expressed and understandable in the novel as in the interview.

During the interview Mr. Crichton said that he wanted to make the book reflect the complexity of the issues surrounding gene patents and corporate ownership of genes. That came across very well in the book. Mr. Crichton touched on numerous topics, which made for a complex novel. What did not help was that instead of focusing on the stories of a few characters, he seemed to bring in one or two new characters every few minutes (remember I had the audio-book). Not until the end of the novel did he focus on a few main characters. I felt like I needed a notebook and pen to keep track of all the characters and the minor plots behind each, of which there seemed to be a thousand. Most of these plots focused on the legal and ethical problems of gene technology, which, while often intriguing, did not make for an exciting book. Indeed, while the first few pages showed promise of adventure with a detective trying to surveil someone who had stolen several embryos, after that there was little true action until the last few chapters. There is some corporate espionage and black marketing of genes and theft of chimeras (mostly human-animal hybrids) to make for some excitement, but nothing as action-packed as Jurassic Park.

If anyone wants to know why economy of characters is important, he/she should read this novel.

Next was not so bad that I threw it out the car window. It did have its highlights and lighter moments and probably because I have something of an analytical mind (as my friends and acquaintances tell me), it did keep me intrigued and curious as to how everything would be resolved. However, for me it was something of a mild disappointment considering that it came from the author of Jurassic Park, The Andromeda Strain, and many other fine, entertaining novels.

Would I recommend this book to others? It wasn’t a waste of time, I will say that, but its focus on legal and ethical problems would probably bore some. I would recommend this to people who are interested in the law and issues behind the evolving world of gene technology and research and the corporate patenting of it or to people who are interested in the law and/or technology in general. Fans of Michael Crichton would probably find it interesting, but I doubt anyone would find it exhilarating.

I may write some more on this later, but these are my initial impressions. I have posted this review on Goodreads also.

Hasta luego.

Reviews Needed

Update of October 29, 2019: William Peter Blatty Reads The Exorcist (audiobook)

Taken from the Audiobook cover on YouTube.

Last night, I started listening to The Exorcist, read by its author (William Peter Blatty) on Youtube. This is great stuff. Blatty has a terrific voice for narrating horror. I recommend listening to it, particularly as Halloween is rapidly approaching. I am not far into it now, The narrative is approaching the evening party where Regan first shows evidence of her possession to the world.

Review of “The Lovely Bones” by Alice Sebold

Just now, I posted a review of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones on Goodreads. I am posting only the opening two paragraphs here, because the rest of the review contains spoilers. If you would like to read the entire review, please look me up on Goodreads or look up reviews of The Lovely Bones and search for mine among the hundreds already there.

I listened to the audio version read by the author, Alice Sebold. This version is about 10.5 hours in length and I listened to it on a trip from Midland, TX, to Gillett, AR, that lasted about 10.4 hours (counting only actual driving time). When I arrived home, I brought my baggage, groceries, and the dog in and dropped everything else until I had finished it.

This book is very well written. It is poignant, thoughtful, easy to comprehend, and reader-friendly. The title does not refer to what you probably think it does. That’s not revealed to the last chapter or two. It really makes one think about one’s relationships with one’s family and how one fits into the overall picture of life and death. I definitely recommend reading this book. It might change how you look at things.

Please continue to my profile on Goodreads to read the rest of this review.

Review of Titus Andronicus, October 13, 2019

Anthony Hopkins in the eponymous role of Titus Andronicus

After I watched Equus on Sunday, I decided to ramp up the drama into horrific tragedy by watching Julie Taymor’s bizarre 1999 film version of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus.

This film is bloody enough in its own right, but it transcends the usual graphic horror found in Stephen King novels or teen slasher flicks by showering the innocent as well as the not-so-innocent with the soul-wrenching agony of parents watching their children and the children watching their siblings suffer horrible deaths and torture.

Think of Titus Andronicus as Shakespeare’s predecessor to Game of Thrones with the horror turned up a notch but without the mercy that occasionally pops up.

Wikipedia notes that Shakespeare wrote this to “to emulate the violent and bloody revenge plays of his contemporaries, which were extremely popular with audiences throughout the 16th century [per Joseph Quincy Adams’ Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus: The First Quarto, 1594 published by Scribner’s Sons, 1936].

Shakespeare knew how to work with his audience’s emotion.

Unlike other Shakespeare plays, this one is not based on a historical character. It is set in an unspecified time in Rome after the reign of Julius Caesar. Titus is a general returning from a successful campaign against the Goths (who defeated the Romans at Adrianople in 378 CE followed by the Visigoths sacking Rome in 410 CE). He has brought with him the Goth queen Tamora and her three sons. To pay homage to the gods during the interment of 25 of his soldiers, Titus sacrifices the eldest son of Tamora, who begs for her son’s life. Titus continues with the sacrifice.

The emperor of Rome has died and just after the execution of Tamora’s son, the emperor’s son Satuninus ascends to the throne. Saturninus wants Titus’s daughter Lavinia for his bride and Titus gives her to him, even though she is in love with Bassanius. Just after Lavinia takes her place beside Saturninus, Titus gives him an additional gift of Tamora and her two remaining sons. Saturninus practically drools over Tamora. Lavinia immediately runs off with Bassianus, but Saturninus has the woman he craves, so he decides not to bother with Lavinia. This makes Tamora the empress of Rome. Things keep getting worse and worse for Titus and his family as only Shakespeare can do. Lots of gore and blood and screaming. If John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, George Romero, Dario Argento, and Guillermo de Toro could team up for a movie, this would be the movie they would make, but in King James English. Lots of limbs and heads coming off.

Julie Taymor sets this in a fantasy time, where swords and guns, horses and cars,, togas and suits are used with anachronistic abandon. From what the Wikipedia article on Titus Andronicus says, she did this to show the timelessness of violence. In one of the few obscenities I will use on this website, I will say NO SHIT, JULIE. VIOLENCE IS TIMELESS. TELL US SOMETHING WE DON’T KNOW.

But then, her production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest is also unusual including the gender of the wizard and main character, Prospero, is changed from a man to a woman. Still, If she hadn’t translated these films to cinema, who would have. I am grateful that I got to see them in whatever form, so long as they remain reasonably true to Shakespeare’s script. Setting a Shakespeare play in another time is not unusual. Kenneth Branagh did it with Hamlet and Baz Luhrmann did it with Romeo and Juliet.

Still, with Taymor the effect is still a tad weird. She starts out in the modern day with a boy of about 11 playing violent games with toys on his kitchen table. He is then whisked away to the fictional time and world of Titus Andronicus, where he spends several scenes loitering in the foreground and watching the main characters, before he becomes Titus’s grandson toward the end of the movie.

In my humble opinion, the movie could have done without the character of the modern boy. It’s too distracting from the story and the dialogue. I don’t mind so much the setting being in a fantasy time and world, but the boy is an unnecessary detail that adds nothing to the plot or to the overall story.

Personally, I would have preferred that the movie be more historically accurate, even though the characters are fictional. Julie should have just picked a post-Christ era of the Roman empire and ran with it.

Mel Gibson could have done it better.

Anyway, if you are into horror, like I am (though I don’t go for really graphic stuff), this may be the Shakespeare play for you.

Overall, it was a decent production and NOT BORING. I was definitely wide awake and pausing the movie when I had to take the dog out. I don’t do that for all films. The plot is intriguing and the characters sympathetic with good and evil in each, though often one outweighs the other.

As with all Shakespeare plays made into movies and sticking to the original script, the King James English is tricky to learn at first, but it can be done. I have watched several of these films and it takes a while to adapt, but it helps it you read the closed captions. Once you adapt to it, you will wonder what happened to the beauty of the English language over the centuries. There are some beautiful and incredibly poignant passages in the dialogues, made even more poignant when you understand the overall situation the speaking character is in.

I would write more, but I have a headache from being in the declining phase of a cold and will close it here. Maybe I will write more later. I have wanted to watch Titus Andronicus for a long time and finally got around to it today. I am glad I did.

I recommend this movie highly, especially for all Shakespeare aficionados.

Review: “Equus” the Movie (1977)

On Sunday, I watched Equus (1977) starring Richard Burton and Peter Firth. This is a powerful movie.

When I first heard about Equus, I thought it would focus entirely on the character of Alan Strang, an English teenager who blinds six horses and is sent to a mental institution by the courts. However, the movie (I have not seen the play, though I have started reading its script) seems to focus more on the character or Dr. Dysart, the psychiatrist who analyzes Alan Strang to find out his motives for blinding the horses in the stables where he worked. In short, he was insane, but what made him insane?

I won’t go into a lot of detail about what Dr. Dysart finds or how he finds it, because that is the mystery to be solved. Watching how both these characters change is fascinating. The movie analyzes both, perhaps giving a bit more emphasis on Dr. Dysart. I think this is because Dr. Dysart represents an educated audience looking into the soul of Alan Strang. What Dysart finds effects him deeply just as I think it effects an audience deeply, because what Dr. Dysart finds makes him examine his own relationship to the world and to God as well as reflecting on his own existence. At one point, Dr. Dysart begins to so intensely understand Alan’s viewpoint that Ithe tells Mrs. Dysart that he actually envies Alan.

Both the movie and the play were written by Peter Shaffer, who won a Tony award for it and for his following play Amadeus, which was made into a much more successful movie than Equus.

The movie was directed by Sydney Lumet. An interesting difference between the movie and the play is that the movie is staged very realistically in offices, homes, a stable, etc. but the the play’s script has the stage set in a very minimalist, in a sense, abstract fashion. I would love to see a performance of Equus. The minimalism would keep the audiences mind(s) focused on the characters and their interrelationships and not on the set or on anything that is peripheral or tangential and of no importance to the narrative.

I have to wonder how Peter Shaffer developed the character of Alan Strang. He wrote an exceptional portrayal of a madman and how he became mad. I understand that he based the play on a news article he read about a young Englishman who blinded six horses and then started loo,king into that story. That character is brought to life vividly by Peter Firth. I have to ask myself as well how Peter Firth developed his portrayal of Alan Strang. The ideas of Shaffer and Firth on this character seemed to mesh wonderfully for an awe-inspiring performance.

It is interesting to note that, in one sense, this movies shows how the change in one man stimulated the change in another man.

I am no actor, but to me the acting in this movie was top-notch. Richard Burton gave a performance that on par with his performance in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Peter Firth played Alan Strang.

All in all, this is a fascinating movie with strong performances that reach deeply into the characters’ souls and will very likely reach into the souls of the audience as well and cause them to reflect on their own existences just as Dr. Dysart does.

Podcast: My Interview on KSJE radio (90.9FM) with Traci Hales-Vass on Nocturne… and more

For those of you who have not heard it, here is a link to my interview with Traci Hales-Vass for Farmington (NM) public radio KSJE 90.9 FM, which aired on September 18, 2019. The topic was my poetry collection Nocturne: Poems of Love, Distance, and the Night, a callous and disinterested lover. Many heartfelt thanks to Traci for having me on her show.