Infamy, Infamy -

"They've All Got It In For Me"
Or, perhaps, not.  I won't apologise for stealing a line from "Carry On Cleopatra", except to note that one has to speak it aloud with a slight deviation from The Queen's Received English.  Now -

No, Art!  Later!

     Excuse our idiot pictorial assistant, Art.  I shall smack him with a shovel later on.
     What I wanted to talk about was the return of "Z Nation", and you'll see where I'm going with that title in a minute or two.  Three, possibly, depending on your reading speed.
     Now, the series began with a flashback film, which means we know our gallant band of survivors are going to survive once more, which kind of takes a bit of the dramatic tension out of things.  It also serves to introduce a group of new characters: The Man, Doctor Teller, Kaya and her grandparents and A Hand.  Plus the Shangri-La of "Zona", which is a zombie-free haven hinted at previously.
     When I say "A Hand" I don't mean a severed limb that scuttles around a la The Thing -

Art, you baffoon -

    - I was referring to The Thing from The Addams Family.  Art?

Better.

     I'm not being very succinct here.  All we see of a certain character is his wrinkly wobbly hand, groping in palsied fashion for a mobile phone, and his smug grin at film's end.
     For your information, Kaya and her grandparents rescue Citizen Zed, and nurse him back to health.  This is good; Citizen Z gives hope to all you out there who lack movie-star looks.
     Anyway, back to the lack of infamy.  The Man is patently a villain, who turns up at an isolated community wanting to lay hands on Doctor Teller.  Here he is -

     Unarmed and unarmoured, and with a splendidly shiny bald head to aim at.  Does anybody shoot him?  No!  Never, not once, does anybody ever try to shoot him, despite the multiple times he parades in front of them like a human target.

Further proof

     Not even our hard-bitten bunch of heroes bother to shoot him, and they're pretty ruthless when it comes to shooting.  Art?

Still unshot

     One also has to ask how many hundreds of zombies were in a trailer that can obviously only hold a couple of dozen, especially as the director decided to raise the tension by having them erupt out of the darkness at the rear of the trailer, leaving a big empty space at front.
     I must have missed the reason for everyone in the compound wearing hazmat suits, viz:

Natty tailoring

     You'd think that this would make The Man and his minions a little less hasty about killing people, because - which one is Doctor Teller?

"Infamy" By John Toland
I've just finished reading this rather curiously-structured work on Pearl Harbour*, and as the title mentions, the aftermath.

Art gets it right, for once

     You may not be aware, but there were no fewer than ten investigations into the attack, many of which were designed to whitewash the Roosevelt administration and dump the blame on the commanders at Hawaii.  Toland can't quite bring himself to say that it was all a conspiracy, though that's the impression he leaves.  More considered opinion has it that incompetence at all levels was the real reason Dec 7th was such a bad day in Hawaii if you were American; incompetence that was subsequently swept under the carpet, for a while.

Kermode Uncut
He most certainly is, and anyone approaching him with a sharp bladed object will have ME to answer to!
     Here is evidence of his musical tastes -

The tee shirt, the tee shirt!

     It's a little obscured, so allow me -

Mark's on the left, mine on the right

    This has nothing to do with what I wanted to post about, which was his blog video about "The Greatest Novels Never Filmed".
     As soon as I saw that title I said to myself - this is okay, I'm on my own and won't be frightening anyone - 'Gratity's Rainbow'.  First we had to go through a lot of other also-rans, like 'Catcher In The Rye' which I started to read, disliked and got rid of, and something by Cormac McCarthy that appears to be equal parts perverse sex and violence, before we got to -

     Told you so!  And the reasons why it's never going to be filmed?  Too long, too complicated and too post-modern.  I don't know about that last one, but the first two definitely apply, and, besides, where would you get a trained attack-octopus?



*  The correct spelling, thanks.