Awhile back I ranted about NBC doing a remake of the Rockford Files, which, mercifully, the pilot that was filmed was canned by the network but they’re apparently not giving up just yet. I’m amused that the pilot was rejected by the network. Given network television’s mediocre standards to begin with that pilot had to be really bad.

Meantime, over at CBS, they’re gearing up for the fall premier of the new Hawaii Five-O, bringing a modern spin to a classic cop drama series, which by the way ran for TWELVE seasons.

That’s a lot to live up to. And based on the promo I watched over on CBS.com, it falls totally short.

C’mon, CBS, seriously? You recycled all the character names yet none of these characters even remotely resemble their originals? WTF? Danny is a Jersey sewer rat who ends up in Hawaii for God knows what reason, he hates the place and he and McGarrett do nothing but annoy the ever living crap out of each other?

And Kono….is a girl? And…and…you couldn’t find any Hawaiians to be part of this cast? Seriously??

Look. The promo by itself wasn’t bad. Really. But the fact that all these characters, instead of being a new generation with their own unique names (to go with their obviously unique identities), are given the same names as the originals is what kills this whole thing. Granted, anybody who’s never seen the original Five-O won’t know the difference but those of who have seen original Five-O are going to have a tough time with this. At least, I am.

Actually, I won’t have a hard time with it because I won’t be watching it. I’ll stick to the original Five-O.

My Prediction: The new Five-O will not last beyond its first season.

And that’s being generous.

At least, the worst ten minutes I’ve ever seen. I had never heard of this series and hadn’t been seeking it out, but I later I read that basically it’s a nine-hour hostage drama. Yawn. Like that’s never been done on television before?

The first ten minutes of this thing was so full of “Gee, didn’t see THAT one coming!” moments it was laughable. These five guys, I find out later, are Iraq War vets. What the @#%*!& possessed them to rob a bank I don’t know but they did and it goes awry real quick.

What caught my eye, of course, was the bank. Whoever wrote this script either never worked in a bank or worked at one that had really crappy procedures. This bank had just received a large armored car shipment. There’s this guy who I assume is the branch manager, who looks like he’s permanently constipated, who’s all nerved up about this shipment. Apparently this guy hasn’t been in banking very long.

The money is stacked on a table in the vault and counted by two people, a man and a woman. I’m not sure if they were employees or if they were auditors or what, but once they finished counting the money and had both arrived at the same figure, the branch manager gives them a ten minute break. They go off, find a closet and proceed to commence some nookie.

No foolin’. Or…rather, yeah, foolin’ around. Ahem. Anyway.

The money, by the way, is still on the table. The vault door is wide open, but there’s a rather cheapie looking gate before it that’s closed. The money is a LOT. Easily upwards of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Our five rejects from the auditions of the New A-Team show up in a nice new Chevy Suburban…or maybe it’s a Tahoe, park across the street from the bank and four of the men head on over, all of them dressed to “Kill Point” in shirts and ties and suits and wearing long over coats.

Banking Robbery Tip #1: If a group of men enter your bank wearing long over coats on a day that really doesn’t require long over coats please take note.

They don their black masks and remove from under their coats more fire power than was in Fallujah in November 2004. In fact, you may recall a story in the news about some 20,000 (or is 200,000?) weapons that are missing from Iraq? I think these dudes had some of them.

They announce their intent of the robbery. People scream. And scream. And scream. The poor maintenance kid gets his ass kicked, literally, because he doesn’t move fast enough off the ladder he’s on. Everybody’s screaming, down on the floor, their poor little heads in their hands. Screaming and crying.

The bank robbers spread out, one covering the customers in the lobby, another covering the bank employees behind the teller line, which includes the branch manager, who’s cowering under the teller line, looking like he’s about to discover a cure for his permanent constipation. The other two men demand keys, go unlock the el cheapo gate, walk into the already open vault, find ALL THAT MONEY fresh for the picking on the table and pack it up in their bag.

But wait! There’s a customer in the lobby, down near the check writer, out of sight of the robbers who text messages his wife that the bank is being robbed. “Call 911!”

Frikkin’ brilliant.

Outside, our wheelman over hears the radio of the meter maid (how convenient!!) that the cops are two minutes away. He whips out his cell phone, calls his buds in the bank tells them they got “a solid two.”

It’s about the only solid thing they have. So they pack up the money and out the door they go. Calmly start to walk back to their nice Chevy Suburban/Tahoe.

Inside the bank, a woman gets up off the floor, takes a concealed gun from her holster, walks out the front door and starts shooting at these guys.

WAIT A FREAKIN’ MINUTE HERE!! Who the hell is this chick?!?! I don’t know if she was a customer or a bank employee, but if she’s a customer I’d like to know why she was carrying a concealed weapon INTO a bank, and if she’s an employee I wanna know why she’s packing heat?! Must be a damn tough neighborhood!

Bank Robbery Tip #2: There is no need to bleed over money. Really. There isn’t. Kids, don’t ever try this at home.

Well now things really get ridiculous. A shootout ensues…Gee! Didn’t see THAT one coming! The cops start to show up. Even the meter maid gets involved, sorta. Meanwhile, the armored car guys are on their way back because one of them dropped his cell phone earlier when they made the cash delivery. SHEESH! How much more friggin’ ridiculous is this going to get?

A lot more. The armored car guys get into the shootout. There’s bullets flying everywhere! There’s more shooting going on here than in the first 15 minutes of Saving Private Ryan. And in all that shooting only ONE of the bank robbers gets shot.

The Chevy, by the way, is pretty much shot to hell.

The woman who started all the shooting gets hit in the leg. She retreats back into the bank. If I had been in that lobby, I woulda bitch slapped her.

Our amateur bank robbers meanwhile, are under fire from all directions and, oh did I mention only one of them gets hit? They “fall back” and somehow…SOMEHOW….manage to get back across the street to the bank again, all the while dodging more bullets than in the shoot out scene of Sondra Locke’s house in the Clint Eastwood movie The Gauntlet.

Our chick with the gun, aims to shoot one of them. They hit her first, in the neck. Doesn’t kill her but she ain’t having a good time breathing.

From there, things really get @#$%ed up. The robber that got hit got hit in the chest and it looked to be about three inches above his heart…is still standing! WTF?!

Our bank robbers, seeing the wounded woman on the floor are now all concerned. Huh? Cripes. A moment of human compassion. Where the hell did this come from?

So they perform a good deed and do an emergency trach on her using one of the pens from the writing desk. Somebody’s been watching MASH reruns it would appear.

And at the point we close Act I and go to commercial. Blaugh. The trach thing was bad enough (although good special effect) and I had no desire to stick around for the rest of the show. I eventually found a Dukes of Hazzard rerun on CMT.

The only good thing about the entire thing (bizarre as this is going to sound) was that one of the bank robbers was dressed to “Kill Point” in a three piece suit…

I have a certain cop-muse who has a fondness for three piece suits too. Tho’ he has no desire to be robbing any banks!

This much I know: He’s the lead singer of a band I’ve never heard of called Babyshambles. Otherwise, all I know about the poor guy is he’s got severe drug problems and has had various run ins with the law. He’s also Kate Moss’s boyfriend and they were rumored to have married on New Year’s Day 2007 in Thailand. Moss’s people quickly put the kibosh on that rumor. Doherty’s people…well, I have no freakin’ idea. Does he even have “people”?

Anyway, so who the hell is Pete Doherty? I’ll admit I’m not the most up to date on contemporary pop culture, but I don’t live under a rock. I have a television, I listen to the radio, I read the news, I have access to the internet and I do go to the grocery store where I look at the magazine covers and tabloid trash in the check out aisle that scream at me for attention. BRITNEY! PARIS! JESSICA! LINDSAY!

Oh man, WHO GIVES A *$&#!*%!

I mean, really. I’ve decided that if you’re more prominent on the celebrity trash mags of the day, then you are in anything else, your career is over. Finished. Done. Unless you’re Paris Hilton, who’s entire career was born out of being featured on the trash mags and celebrity gossip columns anyway. And get this! Do you know what her claim to fame is? She’s heir to a freakin’ hotel chain. Wowwwwwww! She’s made a CD that apparently nobody’s listening to and did a TV show that very few watched. But the press is just falling all over themselves to get a picture and know every last thing she’s doing!

And I’m working my 9 to 5 job because…ah, well because I’m not skinny enough and I don’t have blonde hair apparently. And I’m not the heir to a multi-million dollar hotel chain. Damn. I wonder if I could apply to be Tom Bodet’s heir? (Okay, he doesn’t own the Motel 6 chain but I think you get my drift.)

Anyway, back to this Pete Doherty dude. Is he anybody I should give a hoot in hell about when there’s a story about him in the celebrity gossip column of my local newspaper? Cripes, he’s been featured enough times I was beginning to wonder what I was missing. Is Babyshambles the next new Beatles? Were they taking the world by storm, selling millions of albums and burning up the charts before the young Mr. Doherty succumbed to the evils of drug use and had the long arm of the law yanking him up by the collar? Should I be putting my entire life on hold to catch up on who he is and this band? I mean, if my local “Capital City Gazette” keeps featuring him in the celebrity section, he must be somebody right?

Well, no. He’s not. According to wikipedia…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babyshambles

Doherty’s claim to fame is merely the fact that he’s had drug troubles and run ins with the law. Wow! Here’s a guy’s whose poster I gotta put on my wall! Here’s a band whose records I should probably buy because it looks like it’s a miracle they actually record any albums to begin with, considering they sometimes don’t show up for their live shows, or Doherty is stoned out of his freakin’ mind and he smashes guitars on stage.

Yawwwwnnnn. Y’know The Who did all that 40 years ago. Been there, done that, please find something different to do.

Anyway, I figure actual completed records from this band must be rare. So they may be collector’s items someday.

Just like Paris Hilton’s CD. Collecting dust in the bargain bin at the local Wal-Mart.

By the way, classy looking guy eh? And what’s with that hat? Who does he think he is, John Lennon?

Not even close. And frankly, never will be.

Operation Glenn Miller
Written by Leo Kessler (AKA Charles Whiting)
Published: 2001 by Severn House Publishers (UK and US)
Pages:

Glenn Miller, for those of you not familiar with the name, was a popular bandleader in the late 30s/early 40′s. At the height of his career, Miller disbanded his hugely popular orchestra and enlisted in the Army, creating a band there that was hugely popular with the servicemen and women and with the general public. In June of ’44, Miller and his AAF band were transferred to England. In December, Glenn got on board a plane bound for Paris and was never seen again

For those of you who are familiar with my writing, you know I wrote a Hogan’s Heroes story with “guest character” Major Glenn Miller. I had never written anything in my fiction with real people before and don’t intend to make a habit of it after this. LOL. However, while looking through Amazon.com one day for Glenn Miller CD’s and whatnot I came upon this book. Operation Glenn Miller.

Of course, I could find no synopsis for it and had no idea what the plot was, but it was fiction and it obviously had something to do with Miller and by golly I was gonna get my hands on this thing to see what it entailed. Getting a hold of the book however, proved a test of patience. I attempted to order it through Amazon.com but after 6 months of “We’re unable to locate this product, do you still want the order to remain?” Amazon finally gave up. My order was suspended and my $ credited back to me.

I kinda gave up on the book after that. Then one day a couple of months ago, I decided to try again, only this time I checked out the “Used” section of Amazon.com and found a copy available. I placed my order and a few days later I had the book in hand.

A brief skim of the book indicated that Miller was in the story itself as a character. This had been the Big Question in regards to my wanting to get the book to begin with. Is Miller in it? What the heck kinda plot are we talkin’ here? How is he portrayed?

Friends….sit down for my Critical Review of “Operation Glenn Miller.”

In my few short years of Studying All That Is Miller, I think I’ve come across just about every half-baked conspiracy theory there is out there as to what really happened to him. Various “fictional crap” (as Miller’s biographer George Simon put it) have speculated that he ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time and was killed by black marketers, he dropped dead upon arrival in Paris, he dropped dead at a whore house in Paris, he took off to save Marlene Dietrich when the Battle of the Bulge began (hell, what red blooded American male wouldn’t have done that?), ect., ect…

One conspiracy theory even claims that Miller was shot to death in Ohio in May of 1945. Although this theory fails to account for where the heck he was between December ’44 and May ’45, the theory has a mysterious Doctor X, who on a radio show in 1993, claimed to have been the doctor in attendance when the wounded Miller was brought in. Now, really, what good is a conspiracy theory without a mysterious Doctor X?! By the way, you can purchase a copy of this “famed” radio broadcast on the internet for the low sum of $80.

Anyway, I digress. I’ve read it all folks. And I was glad to know that at least my story, which will incorporate Miller’s disappearance as part of the plot in the third segment but is in no way a conspiracy theory, can serve as something good for the legacy of Mr. Miller, instead of being something akin to tabloid journalism. Really bad tabloid journalism.

Operation Glenn Miller is a conspiracy theory disguised as historical fiction. Leo Kessler has two author notes, one at the beginning of the book explaining that this was “an attempt to tell the truth” and another at the end, like a final footnote explaining that certain locales still exist and their apparent condition, even after 60 someodd years, still lays credence to the “theory.” Mr. Kessler seems to be a very well informed individual on the second world war (he oughta be, he fought in it, according to his bio) and also apparently is very well informed on Glenn Miller. Unfortunately, some of the more finer details of Miller as a person are lost or forgotten about in this book and Miller is portrayed like a fish out of water. Okay, so he’s suddenly thrown into some screwed up G2 assignment on the request of Eisenhower which is totally out of his realm, but he comes across in the book as a little weak, a bit dim and thoroughly confused. His dialogue is awkward and not once, NOT ONCE, does he light up a cigarette. (Perhaps this is why he seems “off” in this story.)

Maybe I’m biased because I happen to like the guy and I admit that. But as the reader, I felt sorry for him and embarrassed for the situations he would find himself in. The entire book seems to be a “Let’s See What Weird Scenarios We Can Throw Glenn Miller Into and See What He Does!” type thing. From a near brawl in a pub (with a drunk Ernest Hemmingway, no less), to a meeting with OSS agents at a Paris whore house, to being taken to a “death depot,” Glenn is dragged through the most awful places in Europe during WWII and surrounded by the most whacked out characters this side of Alice in Wonderland. And the OSS characters (OSS was a pre-cursor to the CIA) find his involvement in this covert assignment a colassal joke.

The entire book is a like a car accident. Somewhat crudely written, the descriptions vivid but bordering on crass and the characters kooky, all the same you can’t help but read it. More or less because you’re wondering what’s going to happen to poor Glenn by the end of it. Given the history, you know he’s not going to survive (and the foreshadowing is so obvious in this book that it’s comical) but you keep reading wondering if his end will be described as crassly or crudely as the scenes of death in the rest of the book.

Now, I realize this is a WWII story. People die in wars. Unpleasantly. But look, make me feel bad the person got killed. Or make me horrified. Don’t make me laugh!

Eventually I did find a synopsis online for Operation Glenn Miller which said, basically, that the Germans take advantage of Miller’s disappearance to send in a double to try to assassinate Ike. Um…no. This book was certainly not of that synopsis, but I’m wondering if there’s another book out there. A Miller look-like pulling a pistol on Ike. Yeah….I just can’t wait for that to be published.

I’d attempt to synopsi this book, but I was just as confused reading the thing as Miller was as a character in it. But I think it went something like this…

The Allies have been broadcasting propaganda from Luxemborg (Radio Luxemborg). The Germans want the radio station destroyed and have a ragtag SS unit in route (The Wotan). The Allies, meantime, want to make an offer to the German’s for a chance at negotiating a separate peace. I think. I dunno, they end up with the remains of some German folk hero who the Allies are willing to give back as a token of good faith. In addition to the return of the body, a special broadcast is to be made featuring none other than Major Glenn Miller.

Of course, could he make this broadcast from London? Hell no, they gotta have him go to freakin’ Luxemborg to do this! Before that tho’ he gets dragged along by two OSS men to a “death depot” (my term) in Belgium to pick up this body. Basically it’s a staging area for the return of the dead from the front, where they’re processed, identified and then shipped back to wherever. Miller gets sick no less than three times during this scene. What connection the body and the broadcast have…who knows. Miller can’t figure it out (even though he asks, but the answer is a beat-around-the-bush covert OSS type answer) and as the reader, even though we know things Miller doesn’t….we really don’t know anymore than he does! The final scene at the radio station, as Miller’s about to go on the air, there’s the sound of gunfire outside. There’s an explosion as the front door is blown open. Miller looks up and….

End of story.

No kidding. I’m thinking maybe the muse finally abandoned the author by that point. “Look,” Miller could have said during an author/character conference, “you’ve already put me through the damndest #$%&*! in this thing, you’re NOT describing my death. Story is OVER!”

And not a moment too soon.