My Amazon Book Reviews: Douglas Whaley "Corbin Milk"

The Spy Who Fell In Love
4 Out Of 5 Stars

Corbin Milk has a dilemma. Well, several dilemmas. He's a top spy for the CIA, who have no qualms about using the fact that Corbin is a drop dead gorgeous gay man as sexual bait while working undercover. His new found lover wants Corbin to stop using his sexual prowess on his spy missions. And to top it off, his supervisor is a closet case who wants a night in the sack. These are the main twists turning about in "Corbin Milk," a thriller in three parts.

First is a mission to the Middle East, where Corbin must find his way into a super secure palace. Then a trip to Amsterdam, to take down a sadistic Russian into rough sex, and then the most tricky mission of all...making a secure relationship with the new love of his life, George Yancy. All the while, he has to fend off the snooping supervisor who is far too interested in Corbin's love life and makes Corbin's job all the more difficult on the home front.

"Corbin Milk" makes use of its characters and fleshes them out well. Corbin himself is a complex man, a superior spy who winds his way through difficult missions in realistic fashion, and the other folk play important roles without succumbing to cliché. Corbin works hard and plays harder, and all the other members of the story keep up with the book's pace. A thriller with romance at its core, "Corbin Milk" is a book I savored, one episode at a time.

My Amazon DVD Reviews: "Rubber"

Self Inflation
3 Out of 5 Stars

"Rubber" is a very funny 30 minute short horror satire expanded into an 80 minute mediocre movie. However, the brilliant premise of a tire wreaking revenge across the desert and falling in love is gutbustingly funny in short bits at a time. The Tire (listed as "Robert" in the credits) humanizes itself by wobbling, rolling, shimmying and doing unexpected things throughout, but when Robert gets mad, heads are gonna blow. They also discover a penchant for NASCAR and swimming pools.

The failure of the movie comes when a "Greek Chorus" of spectators gets added to watch "the film" via binoculars somewhere in the California desert. They get used to break the fourth wall by doing things like chastising one of the viewers for trying to videotape the movie. "That's piracy," one of them scolds"You could co to jail!" They seem to have been included mainly as padding, even if Wings Hauser does some scene stealing as one of those spectators. Meanwhile, Robert is rolling through the desert, blowing up things he can't mow down, and having a tire epiphany when he comes across a junkyard where the leftover tires are being thrown atop a blazing pile.

Soon, Robert has decided his steel belted brethren are ready to take over the world. A few times during "Rubber," I kept thinking about Stephen King's "Christine," and that perhaps Robert was that particular vehicle's last surviving member...and boy, was he mad. The final shot alone is a hoot and a half. Ignore the fact that this tire is over-stuffed and you'll enjoy the fun.

My Amazon DVD Reviews: 44 Inch Chest

The Diamonds Aren't Forever
3 Out of 5 Stars

Colin Diamond is having a crappy day. His wife of 21 years has left him for a hunky young French waiter. He beat his wife up over this, drank himself into a stupor, destroyed his house, and now he and his friends are holed up in an abandoned building with "loverboy" tied up in a cabinet. One should always beware of sleeping with Papa Bear's honey; he may be a murderous gangster.

This is the premise of "44 Inch Chest," a modest if stagy British film that features a few of my favorite actors. Ray Winstone is Colin, who is hurt, confused, vengeful and unsure of what he should do now that his life is destroyed. John Hurt plays Old Man Peanut, a greasy, profane thug who would be happy to slowly torture Loverboy to death, because that is what real men did back in the day. And then there's Ian McShane, the super cool gay gambler who seems to be the most rational (and therefore, the most deadly) of this band. He's happy to flaunt his sexuality, but not flamboyantly. It's more like a taunt; give him and his "9 and a half" any guff, he'll kill your puny butt and leave no witnesses.

Tom Wilkerson and Stephen Dillane round out the crew, and they all spend most of this movie cajoling Colin into manning up and getting rid of the punk that stole his woman. Other than the set-up and some effective flashbacks/dream sequences, the story plays out in the room where the gang has their hostage. Gangsters or no, this is no action movie. There's a lot of talk about the sanctity of marriage, what it means to be a man, what love means, and about the movie "Samson and Delilah." Frankly, without McShane, "44 Inch Chest" would not be all that compelling. It's time he got a lead of his own.

A King and an Angel are Gone

I am sitting here, stunned. Michael jackson, a mere year older than me, died this afternoon. While I would not count myself as a fanatic, I was always in awe at the man's immense talents. When I was a kid, one of my first 45's was "ABC." When I graduated from college, the first Top 40 stations I worked for was one of those "Hot Hits" stations that would repeat the top ten in about a three hour period. WQBQ started in 1982, and the Top Ten included "Billie Jean" and "Beat It," with the recurrents including "The Girl Is Mine" and others. It was likely that you'd hear 2 or more Michael Jackson songs an hour. Yet the public seemed to not tire of them, and "Thriller" remains one of the largest selling albums in history. I still have the CD in my collection, an album that has been in my music probably two or three times. And when I worked as a club DJ in Dover, Delaware, the albums "Thriller" and "Bad" still made people dance.

While his public antics, trials and health issues had long overshadowed his recorded work, I can't begin to estimate what Michael Jackson did to influence music and pop culture. I can still vividly remember watching an elementry school band slog their way through the usual marching band stuff and pop oldies that every young kid has to play, but then the band leader made an announcement that the kids had a special song that they wanted to play. A steady drumbeat began and dozens of little feet began to ecstatically tap and play "Billie Jean." Despite the somewhat studious nature of their playing prior to this, you could see their faces light up as they leaned into their instruments and put all their hearts into playing this, the coolest of songs for these kids to be playing. For these elementary school kids, Jackson was their gateway into loving music.

Michael Jackson may have been overwhlmed by the court cases and the plastic surgeries, but for me it is those kids in the school band that will be my measure of what Jackson accomplished. It will be the night I watched him doing the moonwalk on TV for the first time. It will be the fans who rallied to the Sunset Blvd Tower Records to see the "HisStory" statue when the box set was released. And even if he spoonfed and obligated newspapers to call him "The King Of Pop," he managed to make himself into the stuff of his dreams.

Had hers been the only celebrety passing today, Farrah Fawcett would still have been newsworthy, but add Michael Jackson's sudden death, and Farrah was almost overshadowed. Yet it is hard for me not to notice, because as a gay man not yet out of his teens, the infamous "Farrah" poster was one of only two women to be pinned on my teenaged wall. (The other was Linda Rondstat.) And while news reports had been making us aware that her battle with cancer was on the brink of taking her from us, the announcement of her passing still felt like a tug at the heart. I always have an issue with people who discribe a battle with Cancer as "Couragous," as cancer is an illness and not a challenge you choose. You would never consider describing anyone with cancer as "cowardly." Her fight with her Cancer was one she took on with dignity and determination. She looked at what she was doing as an opportunity to show women what dealing with cancer was, realistically. It was honest, it was heartbreaking. What she did in 1976 was charm us as a glamourius Charlie's Angel. What she did in 2009 was win us with her warmth and honesty, even if her 'glamour' had long passed, but her charm never went away.