Will iconic images recorded in the grooves of an ancient vase unite the Holy Land or rip it further apart?

THE VASE

A novel by Mark M. DeRobertis

Muhsin Muhabi is a Palestinian potter, descended from a long line of potters. His business is run from the same shop owned by his ancestors since the day his forebears moved to Nazareth. The region's conflict saw the death of his oldest son, and rogue terrorists are in the process of recruiting his youngest in their plot to assassinate the Pope and Israeli prime minister.

Professor Hiram Weiss is an art historian at Nazareth’s Bethel University. He is also a Shin Bet operative on special assignment. With the help of fellow agent, Captain Benny Mathias, he plans to destroy the gang responsible for the death of his wife and only child. He puts a bomb in the ancient vase he takes on loan from Muhsin’s Pottery Shop.

Mary Levin, the charming assistant to the director of Shin Bet, has lost a husband and most of her extended family to recurring wars and never-ending terrorism. She dedicates her life to the preservation of Israel, but to whom will she dedicate her heart? The brilliant professor from Bethel University? Or the gallant captain who now leads Kidon?

Harvey Holmes, the Sherlock of Haunted Houses, is a Hollywood TV host whose reality show just flopped. When a Lebanese restaurant owner requests his ghost-hunting services, he believes the opportunity will resurrect his career. All he has to do is exorcise the ghosts that are haunting the restaurant. It happens to be located right across the street from Muhsin’s Pottery Shop.




Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Stories Should Make Sense

What's the use of writing a story that doesn't make sense? It is a wonder to me that often, Hollywood will make movies that make no sense. From the trailers, I thought Cloud Atlas would make sense. But after seeing it, I was disappointed. Spoiler Alert. It turned out that moguls in the big oil companies wanted to cause a mega disaster that would kill huge amounts of people. What it did was destroy the earth, and throughout the movie, it just didn't make sense. Talk about inhumanity. The story was full of inhumane practices and over the top cruelty. And eventually the earth became  uninhabitable. And to me, none of it made any sense. What I thought was going to be at least an interesting movie with an intriguing concept turned out to be a movie that just plain sucked, and ultimately Cloud Atlas makes my list of all time worst movies ever. That's how bad it was.

World War Z, on the other hand, was exciting and full of action. But I forgot to say one more thing that was a problem for me in yesterday's post about World War Z. They never explained just what caused the zombie problem to begin with. It was just all of a sudden, there were zombies running around. And not your typical zombies that walk around like, well, zombies. No. These zombie were of the variety that could run at full speed like Olympic sprinters. There have been other zombie movies like that, too, and I've always disagreed with that. Zombies, being reanimated dead bodies, should not be Olympic sprinters. And in WWZ, they seemed to be super strong, too. Again, I disagree with that. It's like having vampires that, instead of sunlight being fatal to them, they sparkle. It is changing a fundamental feature of what a creature is supposed to be like. Vampires should not be able to withstand daylight, and  zombies are not athletically gifted.

A good analogy would be making a superman movie where superman is unaffected by green Kryptonite. At least they haven't done that yet.

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