What better premise than to have a character who hunts down people for a living, because they are behind on their artificial body part payments, than to turn the tables and have him hunted by his lifelong friend bent on repossessing his artificial body parts.

This movie raises questions about the value of life in a world where life can be extended for a price. Is it moral for a corporation to act like god in matters of life and death? Is it ethical to charge interest on a loan many will never be able to repay? Sound like the credit card industry?

I’m no conspiracy nut, but come on, the similarities are amazing. First, create a mindset where consuming reins king; instant gratification can be realized via a thin little plastic card, and where it’s more important to have things than to earn things. Flood the media with items you can’t live without like the latest car, flat screen TV, music playing i-gizmo, iPod, iPhone, and now iPad.

Or the ultimate item every consumer junkie needs: The buy one day pass to Disneyland and get the rest of the year free. WTF?! Who are they kidding? They want you to come back and spend money, and only when the park is off season and slow. Since all the Disney folk have to be there to work anyway, may as well get all the locals to stampede down and spend their hard earned cash buying overprice Disney garb. Look, they know you won’t wait in the ridiculously long ride lines, because half the available rides are closed during the off season, because in the back of everyone’s mind you’ll just come back when it’s not crowded. When is it ever not crowded? Don’t get me wrong, I love Disney and everything about the park, but it can be addictive. Luring locals back until they are hooked, then stringing them out all year long on a dose of Mickey and Goofy is not right.

Then when you’re fully strung out, the credit card folk offer a way to obtain these items when you don’t have any money left. It’s called credit, and with compounding interest, a never ending cycle of dependency is born. Pretty soon you’re using credit to pay for auto repairs, dining out, groceries… Then when they’ve got the “must have” needle pushed all the way up into your consuming vein, BAM! Jack the interest rate up so you’re never able to pay off the principal. Then they just sit back laughing and watching us squirm.

Now, apply the same paradigm to the health care industry. Extend it to the near future when due to our poisonous environment, we are getting sicker more often, more deadly, with no signs of a cure for a plethora of diseases. Again here comes instant gratification. Just sign here on the dotted line and presto! They insert the new liver, heart, pancreas, kidney, and wham bam thank you ma’am, you’re as good as new. That is until the bill comes in the mail, a bill you will never pay off because now that you’re healthy, you’re at Disneyland every weekend eating fried Monte Cristo sandwiches and buying overpriced merchandise from the gift shops.

I know what you’re thinking, “There goes The Atomic Writer again off on a tangent”. Alright, at least I admit it. So to appease my movie review reading public, let’s get back to Repo Men.

The ending sequence with the twist was fantastic. It seems over the top until the twist is revealed and then it all makes sense. The hallway fight to gain access to the pink door is reminiscent of a Quentin Tarantino scene, and what happens behind the pink door is sheer brilliance.

I thoroughly recommend this movie for all my movie going readers.

Remember, never stop looking up at the night sky and asking…what if.

Victor Grippi
The Atomic Writer

This movie is very intense on multiple levels and when you realize Paul Greengrass, director of the Bourne Identity movies had something to do with it, then you know why. The story centers on the first few weeks of the Iraqi war where in March of 2003 we, the US, invaded Baghdad due to reports of WMD’s; you know the nasty weapons Saddam Hussein supposedly was building and hiding all over the country. We initially claimed victory and thought we could okie-dok them into creating a democracy and them wham-bam thank you Saddam, we had a partner in the middle east. Well, in case any of my readers, who I hope do actually exist and not just in my mind, have been living under a rock, we are still there after seven years with no end in sight.

Matt Damon plays Roy Miller a chief warrant officer for the Army who keeps coming up empty handed at sites given to him by bad intelligence. He begins to doubt the existence of WMD’s and the story is based on finding out the truth as Miller goes rogue in the hunt for the truth. Miller tries to sound the whistle but is hushed up by the upper brass. He then meets an Iraqi citizen, Freddy, who tips him off to where a secret meeting is taking place with some high valued targets. Miller then recognizes one of Saddam’s generals, Al Rawi, and decides to hunt him on his own with the help of some renegade CIA operatives. A lot of the action is with a handheld camera and it gives the sense of actually being there.

But this is not Jason Bourne and he is not on the run from the government. The marketing made it sound that way. The first and second acts are carefully plotted out with both the CIA connection and the elusive Magellan character, the reported source of the intelligence, providing a compelling story to draw us in. The climax of the movie did fall flat and devolved into several long action sequences with no real payoff. Miller finds out that Al Rawi, Saddam’s General, is Magellan, and all he wants is the truth. Well all he gets is the truth in the form of Al Rawi’s statement that there are no WMD’s and : “just because you have taken Baghdad doesn’t mean who’ve won the war,” rings true after seven years. Then Freddie pops Al Rawi a couple of times and reminds Miller that the US does not decide what happens in his country (Iraq).

This movie chronicles a fictional story of why we invaded Iraq. WMD’s were just an excuse to go to war with a country rich in oil. Sure Saddam Hussein was a terrible mass murderer, promoter of terrorism that perhaps ended up on our shores, and all around bad guy. But why not invade for those reasons alone? Why drum up this story of weapons of mass destruction ready to be used against friends and allies of this great country. Perhaps it’s due to the age we live in. An age where war is not fought against geographic entities calling themselves countries, but between ideologies who call themselves human.

A major flaw with The Green Zone is that we are constantly reminded of the WMD conspiracy at every turn of the story. They didn’t exist, we know this, so let’s move on. The action is great with long sequences of heart pounding thrills as we experience the grief of war within a post 911 battlefield.

I think the closing image of The Green Zone is worth noting. We see a long straight highway leaving Baghdad full of Humvee’s traveling towards an oil field. The closing image says it all.

Remember, never stop looking up at the night sky and asking…what if.

Victor Grippi
The Atomic Writer

Let's go down the Rabbit Hole together...

In the latest Tim Burton feature we have a retelling of the classic Alice in Wonderland and Through the looking Glass stories originally by Lewis Carroll. What makes this version unique is the state of the art special effects and 3D rendering creating an immersive and enjoyable cinematic experience that lacks in only one little itsy- bitsy area – story. As fas as story goes, Alice in Wonderland lacks a compelling storyline that left The Atomic Writer yawning and almost falling to sleep a couple of times. That is until the Cheshire Cat materialized and imparted his words of wit on our eager ears.

The story borrows elements from both Alice in Wonderland and Through the looking glass. In Alice, the Red Queen’s army is made up of playing cards. You know the Jack of Clubs, Ten of Diamonds, and such. In The Looking Glass the army is made up of chess pieces. Blending these elements with the Red and White Queen and the ultimate antagonist, the Jabberwocky, works to a degree, but elements of the story that should have drawn us into the plot and allowed the audience to fully invest and root for the main characters just don’t work out. I mean what does Alice really want? What is her backstory? A little girl who has dreams and then learns later perhaps those weren’t dreams. Or is Alice a symbol of the suffrage movement. But was that Lewis Carroll’s real intent? Or more likely, our twenty-first century take on it.

Alice has kind of a character arc, although it seems contrived and forced at the end when she decides to slay the Jabberwocky in the last few minutes of the movie. It happens suddenly and without much preamble. Too many things happen to Alice and cause her to react instead of act on her own. In fact, going back to the slaying of the Jabberwocky, Alice reminds me of Milla Jovovich in Ultraviolet or perhaps in any of the Resident Evil features. She turns into the strong female protagonist who slays the dragon and saves the kingdom. But didn’t she just meet the White Queen, Anne Hathaway, so what investment would she have to save her? Remember, all that Alice wants is to wake up from what she thinks is a dream and go home. But isn’t home where she’s about to become a wife slave to an Englishman with bad teeth? Is it a dream? Or does the rabbit hole exist deep within all of us. Ah, my friends, that’s the real question. How many of you out there have dared to peek down your own internal rabbit hole, and come back sane enough to tell about it.

The movie is book ended with the above ground Alice struggling with a pending engagement in a stuffy high society nineteenth century England where a woman’s place is beside her husband and silent. The undertones of the modern Alice amp up this woman with a cause, aka suffrage, aspect and the parallels with the underworld do make a poignant point. In the top-world Alice has very little say in her future and is quite timid and shy. While in the under-world she is the captain of her own destiny and learns that she is indeed the real Alice and expected to fulfill the destiny so conveniently drawn out on the scroll of life. Well, let me clarify “Captain of her Own Destiny”, Alice is her own captain at least in the last 15 minutes of the movie where after shrinking and growing a few too many times she decides to suit up and pull her Milla Jovovich impersonation.

Let’s not forget one of the best characters in the movie, The Cheshire Cat. An amazing job on his animation and his dialogue is entertaining. I’ve always liked the Cheshire Cat and have worked him into several of my own stories. Of course I must mention the Mad Hatter for he is truly another memorable character. Here’s a role where the actor needs to play a goof ball insane lunatic and who better to pull it off than wacky when he wants to be – Johnny Depp.

All in all The Atomic Writer throughly enjoy Alice in Wonderland and fully recommends it to all my readers. Go ahead and bring the kiddies because it is a story no more scary than the Wild Hare’s ride at Disneyland. I mean come on, I remember, as a wee lad, getting the crap scared out of me on that ride. This movie is no different. And look how I turned out…

Remember, never stop looking up at the night sky and asking…what if.

Victor Grippi
The Atomic Writer

Stutter Island might have been better

The Atomic Writer liked this movie, but grew tired waiting for the last reel payoff that never really came. Don’t get me wrong, the movie is well worth seeing and is very entertaining, however with all the extravagant buildup I was let down in the end. I started to think is this the work of M. Night Shyamalan? Could he have been hired as a ghost writer for this project to avoid the expectations and justified letdown of his recent cinematic attempts? Sure the movie had all the beats of a classic noir psychological thriller, but the clutter of over the top visual imagery, a soundtrack dictating the movies conceit, and almost melodramatic performances leads me have to not recommend this movie to my readers. See it on DVD for sure, but save your money at the box office.

In the latest Martin Scorsese movie, Shutter Island, we find an overt attempt to create a masterpiece only leading to a forced payoff in the denouement. The story of two federal marshals sent in 1954 to an island off the coast of New England to investigate a dangerous missing patient. The dialogue on the ferry seems forced and full of exposition in an attempt to quickly reveal backstory. Add to this the cellos of Robbie Robertson’s score blasting away followed by freaking out violins, as the ferry arrives on the island, reminds me of a Hitchcock or Stanley Kubrick movie.

The island creates a boxed, trapped in feeling with the electrified fences, iron gates, medieval maximum security building and jagged rocky cliffs along the shoreline. DiCaprio’s character, Teddy, begins to feel like he’s becoming a prisoner when the walls start closing in around him. Ben Kingsley plays the director of the facility who wants to use modern treatments on his patients, but what is he hiding? Max Von Sydow plays a character that reinforces Teddy’s nightmare of freeing German concentration camps during WW2. But who are these doctors? I would have liked to know more about them. Are they conducting Nazi like experiments on the patients? Remember this is the cold war era and this was very much on everyone’s mind. DiCaprio, is haunted by dreams of the war and of his late wife that are not needed in the story. Like flashbacks, only in a dream, these attempt to provide backstory that could be relayed through character actions. Characters are defined by how they act, not with what they say. Showing us the gruesome atrocity of Nazi concentration camps sends a familiar message, that killing and war are wrong, but seems out of place in this movie.

Mark Ruffalo’s sidekick character makes us wonder who’s side he’s on, and the movie uses misdirection very well in this sense. We become enthralled in the psychological torment DiCaprio is undergoing but where is it leading? All the tight close up’s, the eerie backgrounds, the soundtrack, and mystery eventually leads to a payoff that is too fast and cheap. DiCaprio makes it to the lighthouse only to find empty rooms and Ben Kingsley sitting at the top at a desk with a whiteboard (weren’t there only blackboards in the 1950’s) ready to explain all the misdirection and the little role playing game they were playing.

Wouldn’t have been better to let the game go fully awry? Perhaps DiCaprio escapes the island and continues his delusion on the mainland where he uncovers some truly meaningful reveals. Maybe he discovers a newspaper article on a missing federal marshal? Becomes an innocent on the run. You see where I’m going with this…

Shutter Island tries too hard to be great and like most things in life, trying to hard is not a good thing. The screenplay is an adaptation of a novel, and like most things coming out of Hollywood, original is not in the equation. Perhaps if Shutter Island was written as an original screenplay, it could have saved the film.

Remember, never stop looking up at the night sky and asking…what if.

Victor Grippi
The Atomic Writer

The Book of Eli

In The Book of Eli we see the hero, Denzel Washington on the road in a post-apocalyptic world littered with bomb craters and full of Mad Max characters that appear to be re-using the same costumes from the original movie. We never actually learn of what type of bombs these were only a “flash” that tore open the sky. We can assume atomic but then the survivors seemed to not have radiation poisoning. Don’t get the Atomic Writer wrong, I liked the movie and its powerful message almost as much as I like to write, but not quite.

Early in the story we have the scene where Eli beds down for the night, bar-b-cues a cat he hunted earlier, then gives a piece to a little mouse who somehow survives alright on his own. This is a screenwriting technique known as “save the cat”. The late Blake Synder coined the phrase which literally means to show your hero doing something nice so we the audience will like him. A character can save a cat from a tree, help a little child or throw a bone at man’s best friend. Showing the hero do this also prepares us for the other side of a complex character: The dark side.

Within minutes of “saving the mouse” we watch a brutal fight scene where, and yes this is another technique us screenwriters like to do; we show the hero doing something he’s very good at. In this case it’s killing other people, a skill undoubtedly valuable in this post-apocalyptic world. He whips his combat machete around and a half dozen men fall limp to the ground. We see him later wheeling a pistol around and shooting armed gunmen off the tops of roofs and over a hundred yards down the road, and when the twist comes at the end, and I’ll leave this out so this is not a total spoiler, it could only come from divine or supernatural intervention. He is protected because of the importance of his mission.

We begin to respect him when he turns down Mila Kunis for sex. Okay, on a personal note: I thought he was being stupid turning her down, and I know this sounds cheesy, but hey she’s HOT, and I’m a red blooded atomic writer!

He does this in the name of the book, which later we learn is the King James version of the Bible if we hadn’t already figured it out. This makes the divine intervention angle more plausible. He’s on a quest to deliver the book to a place where it will be respected and protected. Why not just take the back roads and stay away from other people? I mean if this really is the reason he has been given supernatural powers then why did it take him nearly 31 years to get to Alcatraz? Well why did it? Even if he started in the Northern most tip of Maine, it would not take someone, especially with supernatural powers, 31 years to get to the San Francisco Bay. One possible reason is that it makes a better story. Can’t make a movie about a guy tiptoeing through the woods to deliver a Bible. Nah, it just doesn’t work. We need at least three acts, 15 major beats, according to Mr. Snyder, in order to make up a well structured movie.

Good screenwriting is telling a story in pictures more than in dialogue. It is always better to move the story forward with images and actions that the character does instead of telling the story with talking heads. This is an axiom in the business, and The Book of Eli does this very well. If you want to tell a story in pictures you need these basic elements:

1. A single main character shown in 95% of the scenes.
2. A world that limits interaction between people, like the post-apocalyptic genre.
3. Make your hero do a lot of reading.
4. When he’s not reading show him pulling a Jackie Chan maneuver on the minor characters with a very sharp object.
5. Use supernatural or divine intervention to explain why bullets seem to just miss him.
a. if he does get shot at close range, make sure he can still walk down the road.
6. Create a twist to reveal at the end of the movie so that the audience leaves trying to wrap their heads around the validity of it, and not the central question of why it took him 31 years to get to San Francisco.

Please anyone out there correct me if I’m wrong…

Overall, The Atomic Writer recommends The Book of Eli and just wants his readers to know the full story and behind the scenes motivations that the writer, Gary Whitta had to deal with. Great job Gary.

Remember, never stop looking up at the night sky and asking what if.

Victor Grippi
The Atomic Writer

I know you must be thinking the Atomic Writer has lost it this time, but read the entire post and I think you’ll find new insights into this great movie and agree with my comparison.

I really think the title speaks for itself. I just returned from seeing this amazing movie in the Dome in Hollywood, and can honestly say “I see you” to James Cameron. Avatar reaches out to the audience on many levels, the top most being the incredible world Cameron has created on Pandora.

I felt immersed in Pandora’s enchanted forests and fluorescent jungles and in the beauty of the indigenous people who live there. These people, called the Na’vi, are connected to all other living things in their environment and share a unity of spirit and a circle of life. They biologically connect to the trees and animals in their world through their ponytails; okay you have to see it.

Wait a minute, haven’t we seen this before? I mean not on a distant planet named Pandora, full of six legged rhino mutations, flying lizards, giant fluorescent mushrooms, and beautiful scantly clad yellow eyed females. Where you can literally say, “Yeah, I got some great tail last night,” and actually mean it. But isn’t the underlying message a familiar one. Save native cultures and their environments from the evil clutches of the big bad west. I’m 100% for saving all indigenous peoples and their environments; I haven’t had a chance to travel to most of these places on Earth, let alone Pandora, and would like to experience these “alien” worlds first hand before they are gone. With that said, The Atomic Writer knows that if we destroy these places he will never get to see them, but he also knows we cannot go back to the way it was. We cannot reverse the hands of time and take a technological step backwards to a more simpler time. Human nature and the needs to strive to be the best would quickly bring us back to the same point. We must learn to live within our means and understand all living beings are here for a reason.

Exploring space and finding new worlds to spread out into makes the most sense to me. Change is the only constant in life, and those that oppose it are destined to fail.

When I first saw Dances With Wolves, I thought man I wish we could go back and live off the land like that, to belong to a unified community where you don’t have to fight the rat race of the big stinky city in order to survive. Where everyone has a place and a purpose. But this wasn’t the real world back then, it never was, it’s only a man made afterthought created to entertain and romanticize the period. But lets get back to Avatar.

We meet Jake Sully a paraplegic ex-Marine who replaces his recently departed brother on a mission to distant Pandora. Now what better character to create than a person who cannot walk and then offer him the chance to run, jump and generally be more agile than the Chinese men’s gymnastic team. And the only thing Jake wants, at the start, is the money to have the spinal cord operation to make him walk again. Now his brother was supposed to be the Avatar driver, but since the hybrid alien/human avatars are so expensive, and are grown to work with the DNA of its host, Jake comes in as a reluctant fish out of water. Why not just have him be the Avatar driver off the bat after being a great soldier who is injured in battle? Why create this backstory of an untrained hero? Well the story and plot would fall flat if Jake already spoke the native language and already knew about the Na’vi.

We need to see the interaction between Neytiri, played by Zoe Saldana, and Jake. We connect with Jake and feel sorry or him and then see a fish out of water as he plays with his new legs. This reminds me of Dances With Wolves, where we see Kevin Costner’s character as a fish out of water in the world of the native American’s as his mentor, Mary McDonnell teaches him her culture. Now wait a minute isn’t there a similar theme threading through both movies. They are both soldiers in the military, they are both seduced into an indigenous culture that seemingly lives in harmony with the environment. And don’t both turn against their people to join in a battle against a foreign invader? Well don’t they?

Avatar also borrows from one of the most successful science fiction stories of all time, The Matrix Trilogy. Instead of jacking in and entering a virtual world made up of other jacked in humans and artificial agent programs; in Avatar you connect your mind to a genetically engineered indigenous Avatar who can breathe, run and jump and presumably get the inside scoop on the locals. When I saw the exo-skeleton battle suits, reminiscent of Matrix 3, I knew what Cameron was pitching to the studios: The story is The Matrix meets Dancing With Wolves.

Our hero enters “another world” where he comes as a savior reluctant at first, but after some Jujitsu training by a convented mentor, accepts the challenge before him and crosses the threshold into the new world. There he learns who his allies and enemies are and approaches the inner most cave. He faces a supreme ordeal and seizes the sword before his road back where in the crisis undergoes a resurrection and rebirth. If you’re wondering what the heck I’m talking about, the above is a basic outline for a mythic story. Myth stories are found in every culture and are universally understood on a subconscious level by all peoples.

The Matrix had a very distinct mythic structure, however Avatar is much more subtle in each myth plot point.

Overall, The Atomic Writer enjoyed Avatar very much, it’s my cup of tea, and would fully recommend it to movie goers. Will it win a best picture award? I doubt it. It’s not a bad movie but it falls short in structure that could have made it a much stronger story. I question the motivation of Jake Sully and what he really wants in the movie. Perhaps if we knew more about him; saw him doing things to reveal his character. A character is defined by what they do, not what they say. Oh sure his body undergoes physical change but his character only becomes rebellious against his own culture in a way we’ve seen before.

You need to see Avatar in 3D in a theater. The suspension of disbelief will not work watching it on DVD in the home.

Avatar is a technological achievement, a visually groundbreaking movie to be remembered for the ages, but it’s not a great story.

Remember, never stop looking up in the night sky and asking….what if.

Victor Grippi
The Atomic Writer

This is certainly the case in Law Abiding Citizen. In fact, on the second page the family is attacked by a home invasion and the story takes off from there. We meet Gerald Butler’s character, the father, soldering some electronic device with a magnifying glass, while his daughter makes bracelets in the living room. They both seem very happy and we begin to like the father because he pays attention to his child and the child reciprocates her love to him. We feel empathy for him. Almost immediately the home invasion occurs and instantly we feel sympathy for him for the tragedy occurring to his family. These are all tools a screenwriter uses to help the audience, or reader, connect and invest in the protagonist. We care what happens to him.

Later, we meet the Jamie Fox lawyer character who works for the DA. Here we are shown a driven man eager to move up the ladder no matter what it takes. He believes that the ends justify the means, and is more concerned about having a high conviction rate than doing what is right. We see him bouncing down a spiral staircase, a metaphor for descending down into a corrupt world, with his boss the DA. The message slipped in here is this: The justice system is corrupt and it doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what you can prove in court. Jamie lives by this philosophy. During the staircase scene, we learn he has made a deal with the killers of the mother and daughter, and must tell the father the news.

This story has two protagonists who each are presented in a different light. Both will have transformational arcs taking them to different emotional places by the end of the movie, although they are in the physical place. The writer, Kurt Whimmer, skillfully weaves this story together by creating a statement against the judicial system by creating complex characters who represent this system. By personifying pillars of the system in characters like the DA, the police, the major, the warden, we the audience become emotionally invested and subconsciously open up to the message.

By routing for and feeling empathy for the Gerald Butler character, who we believe has been done wrong, and then feeling sympathy for the Jamie fox character, the target of the masterful ploys of his prisoner, we are in a constant emotional tug-o-war. Does justice prevail, or do the means justify the ends? This creates a fertile breeding ground for the writer to reveal cracks in the system without standing on a soapbox. The goal of a successful screenplay is to slip your message to the viewer/reader without him knowing about it. Law Abiding Citizen does this wonderfully on multiple levels.

To recap we have one protagonist who has been deeply wounded by the brutal death of his wife and daughter. We learn he is a master of weapon technologies and could skin a lion in his sleep. This skill allows him the opportunity to get revenge not only on the killers but on the system itself. In the process he destroys himself. He is the classic anti-hero.

To recap the second protagonist, we have a driven lawyer who believes the ends justify the means and will do anything to get a conviction. He has no time for his daughter and takes his family for granted. This diametrically opposes the other protagonist. Their character arcs collide and create an effect on each other. In the process this character learns to not make anymore deals with criminals, and to get closer to his family.

This is the classic dual protagonist scenario where one is the hero and the other the anti-hero. BRAVO to Kurt Whimmer for giving us an excellent story.

Remember, never stop looking up into the night sky and asking, what if.

Victor Grippi
The Atomic Writer

p.s. My screenplay, Privileged Voice is currently a semi-finalist in the 2009 Writers On The Storm screenplay competition. Wish me luck!

The movie is divided into five chapters.
Chapter One: Once Upon a Time … Nazi Occupied France
Chapter Two: Inglorious Basterds
Chapter Three: German Night in Paris
Chapter Four: Operation Kino
Chapter Five: Revenge of the Giant Face

This is the ultimate revenge movie set within a myth of its own. If you like QT’s other movies: Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill 1 and 2, and his last, Death Proof, then you will enjoy his latest. QT’s inner mind works overtime as his genre mixing and history bending skills are at their best. I enjoyed the long drawn out scenes where each character speaks volumes without saying a word. This is very reminiscent of Hitchcock, where the scene builds and builds, with each turn of the screw, up to its eventual climax.

The interrogation scene at the French farm is a much-needed emotional release following the overture, which grounds Inglourious Basterds in the real world—at least through the lens of cinema. To the beat of Ennio Morricone spaghetti Western music, a French farmer watches a jeep filled with Nazis travel the road to his house as he chops wood with his daughter. Close-ups of his anxious face alternating with long shots of the vehicle coming nearer and nearer, his eyes meeting those of his three terrified daughters—the sequence comparing favorably to both Leone and Hitchcock. What follows is an unnervingly polite interrogation over a kitchen table by Nazi Jew-hunter Hans Landa, played by Christoph Waltz.

As the camera begins to circle and Landa moves in for the kill and this good farmer edges ever closer to betraying the family he has bravely hidden, each dramatic beat is brings us closer to the final climax. This is what I enjoy most about the movie. Long scenes that are expertly developed and have dialogue dripping with sub-text that adds just the right amount of seasoning to the main plot point of the scene. We know something is going to happen, but every time we venture a guess, the plot turns and we frantically realize we were wrong. Keeping the audience guessing on the edge of their seats is what GREAT WRITING is all about. Of course, The Atomic Writer strives to achieve this very effect in all he writes, but let’s get back to this discussion. Leaving the audience in a state of suspended animation, as they bite their nails immersed in concentration, waiting for the shoe to fall, is what QT does best. I won’t go into the other excellent scenes like this, I’ll leave for you, my readers, to visual enjoy…

And we must not forget Mike Myers, as the British General who outlines operation Kino. I almost lost it, and fell off my seat, during the first close up of Mike Myers trying to play it straight. I kept thinking he was going to bust into an Austin Powers skit at any moment.

Here’s a snippet of the script:

This movie is well worth seeing whether you are a QT fan or not. Hey, if The Atomic Writer likes it, then you will too.

Remember, never stop looking up at the night sky and asking…what if.

Victor Grippi
The Atomic Writer

The FERMI Gamma ray telescope recently launched by NASA, has in only 5 months discovered 16 new pulsars. A pulsar is the rapidly spinning and highly magnetized core left behind when a massive star explodes. Most of the 1,800 cataloged pulsars were found through their periodic radio emissions. Astronomers believe these pulses are caused by narrow, lighthouse-like radio beams emanating from the pulsar’s magnetic poles.

The Vela Pulsar spins 11 times a second. It is the brightest most consistent source of gamma rays in the sky.

This movie shows one cycle of pulsed gamma rays from the Vela pulsar as constructed from photons detected by Fermi’s Large Area Telescope. The movie includes data from August 4 to Sept. 15, 2008. The bluer color in the latter part of the pulse indicates the presence of gamma rays with energies exceeding a billion electron volts. For comparison, visible light has energies between two and three electron volts. Credit: NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration

A pulsar’s radio beams only represent a fraction of its power. The gamma rays they emit represent far more. Somehow the pulsar is able to accelerate particles to near the speed of light along magnetic field lines. These particles emit gamma rays as they arc along these magnetic lines.

Eventually pulsars will lose energy and slow down. The radio and gamma emissions will drop below detectable levels unless a new source of energy is found. Some pulsars live near younger energy spewing stars and the pulsar is able to siphon off this energy, in the form of highly charged particles, and this fuels the pulsar to keep it spinning faster and faster.

If we take this one step further and speculate a bit: what if a pulsar, fueled by a neighboring star, spins fast enough to accelerate particles at the speed of light. Not close to but at or above the speed of light. Could this be enough energy to open a wormhole? To tear open the fabric of space to allow travel into the 5th dimension, where theoretically time travel could occur.

Could the power of this pulsar be harnessed and used as a source of energy? Could an advanced intelligence place a spinning pulsar next to a star and then travel across the universe and place another pulsar in a similar arrangement? We would have two high speed wormhole portals? Enter into one, and arrive almost instantaneously in the other? Hmmm… makes you think doesn’t it.

Take a gander at the latest all sky map of the newly found FERMI pulsars.

Sorry for spilling out over the side, but the thumbnail image just didn’t look right. You, my dedicated readers, deserve the full sized image.

FERMI has already discovered many GRB’s or gamma ray bursts, up in the sky, but now has confirmed the existence of 16 new pulsars never before detected. How many more are out there waiting to be discovered? Up until FERMI, radio astronomer’s were only able to see a pulsar if one of its poles happened to cross Earth’s line of sight. FERMI detects the highly charged photons they emit but in some cases only detects a few per minute. Yes, only a few tiny photons per minute. But with such a sensitive instrument what discoveries may lie ahead?

Perhaps FERMI will detect light (photons) from another world, another dimension, or the light of days past. Perhaps it will peer into another large area telescope from an intelligent race of people who search the heavens for evidence of others like themselves. No one wants to be alone. We all struggle to maintain a sense of belonging to a greater cause, a larger humanity; even if it is only a faint spot of light flickering at the end of the tunnel we call life.

Remember, never stop looking up at the night sky and asking…what if.

Victor Grippi
The Atomic Writer

What’s up with the latest installment in the boy wizard series? I mean, come on, have we become so love-struck with Harry Potter and everything Hogwarts that we’ve become blind to poor filmmaking and storytelling? It seems anything Potter, no matter how poorly done is accepted wholesale, without the normal critique that accompanies all other ventures. To be specific, if one were to analyze the latest installment: The Half Blood Prince, on any scale of movie making revelry, I’d have it give it a C-.

Yes, below average is the mark I give the half blood prince which can be traced to both deficiencies in the source material and in screenplay adaptation; plot holes that keep bothering me in the overall storyline. For instance, where is the omnipotent Harry Potter we saw in the last installment, The Order of the Phoenix? And even in the Goblet of Fire, we saw a strong powerful Harry Potter who could do battle with the dark forces as he learns to flex his magical muscles. Tremendous lightning bolts of magic being repelled and thrown back to defeat his enemy. In The Half Blood Prince we watch in vain as Harry tries to zap Professor Snape, after he and fellow Death Eaters have committed their dastardly deed. Snape casually deflects Harry’s powerball with one hand and then zaps Harry back causing him to fall to the ground. WTF! This unfortunately is the big battle scene in the movie. It’s almost an afterthought, a sort of, okay let’s add in some magic ball throwing just to spice it up. Alright, to be fair I will mention the excursion into Voldemort’s secret cave hideout where on an inner cave island Harry and Dumbledore do battle with what look like emancipated Holocaust survivors only to orb back to the castle at Hogwarts with no reason or explanation. It was nothing but simple spice and icing added to the half baked cinematic cake they’re shoving down our visual palettes.

Where is the Atomic Writer going in this post? There is a method to my madness, as is usually the case, so please bear with me. What we have here reminds me of episodic television. Each episode follows a formula where the protagonist becomes entwined in seemingly inescapable danger only to find a way out of the mess and rescue the damsel in distress in time to break for the top of the hour sales pitch. The Harry Potter series is just the same. Come on, if these people were anything close to realistic wizards with the capability to perform magic and such, why not just grab Harry and orb off to the dark one and finish business. Why, in The Half Blood Prince does Snape, whose cover is now blown, just zap Harry, tie him up and fly off to Voldemort; because they need to get at least two more movies out of it. It’s all about money. MONEY, MONEY, MONEY!

Well, Mr. Atomic Writer, you H.P. fans are now barking, you just don’t like the story. I love the story, but on each installment I am getting more and more disappointed. Where is the creativity of the first three movies, the sense of wonder and awe that J.K. Rowling instilled in the concept of a school of magic and all the associated trimmings that have since become worn out novelty. The storyline should have been over after the Prisoner of Azkaban when Harry who believes it was Sirius Black who caused his parents death, finds out at the end the truth. This should be the end, all done, it’s a wrap… But wait, the author didn’t just want to write a trilogy, heavens no, she needed to write at least seven installments. Why? MONEY…

Let’s be honest, if these wizards truly had magical powers then why is Harry allowed to live? If he is the chosen one, who could kick the evil ones butt, then why keep beating around the bush, with near escapes and cliff hangers leaving us on the edge of our seats waiting for the next installment? Answer: to keep us coming back for more.

J.K. Rowling, Warner Bros, and the system need to keep working, keep collecting paychecks. It’s sad but true. They need, like the rest of us, to keep eating. But in the process they are insulting our intelligence by artificial constructs and cheap parlor tricks that keep Harry, Hogwarts, and their friends, running in circles. Why not reinvent some of the original magic that went into the original books? Why stretch out the storyline to the point where our intelligence is continually rendered moot in order to watch more magic ball throwing, broomstick competition, and now in the half blood prince, childish kissing and love potions that try to further develop a character that by now is not half baked, but well over cooked.

Remember, never stop looking up at the night sky and asking…what if?

Victor Grippi
The Atomic Writer