Half a Week with the New Television

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Last week, on my birthday, was the day I scheduled for the delivery of the OLED television to replace my dying LCD set. For simplicity’s sake I kept the size the same, a 55″ diagonal, so that the new television would fit perfectly on my already existing stand. The delivery notification indicated an arrival window starting at 3:00 p.m. and terminating at 6:00 p.m. Naturally, the thing did not arrive until 7:20, giving me and my sweetie-wife just barely enough time to take down the old television and mount the new one with a short period of relaxation before she headed off for her bedtime.

I connected my Xbox One and region-free Blu-ray player, installed a few apps, established that the set worked and made sure that there would be no motion-smoothing to destroy the films I watched before heading off to bed myself.

The next day I took care of recycling the packaging that the television had arrived in and taking the LCD to an electronics recycling location to deal with the heavy metal and special materials that required it. With all of that completed I could spend the weekend making sure that everything worked and settling in with my new tv.

Eight years ago, when I had purchased the LCD,  OLED technology had been frustratingly out of comfortable reach for me. Now with the tech having tumbled in price and a discount that I got through my employer, this television actually cost me less than the one it has replaced. Overall, I have to confess that I am quite happy with the OLED screen. It has the infinite contrast that comes from being able to produce true black in the image and the colors look great. When I put it into gaming mode and get the full frame rate the image looks fantastic and the response is quick, though I am still far from the most talented player in the Call of Duty matches that I enjoy.

The most frustrating thing about the new set is that its smart features are not Roku, and as such I lost two apps that lived in my old set that are not available with the LG operating system: Kanopy a free streaming service that builds off your library membership, and The Criterion Channel which fortunately I can replace because an app for that is available on the Xbox operating system.

The only thing I do need to be vigilant about is switching from one device or app to another. Saturday evening I had been playing a match and then decided to move to YouTube and watch some reaction videos. I killed the game and launched YouTube on the Xbox and not the native app on the set. The reactor was watching Taxi Driver and for several minutes I wondered if she had launched her copy of the 70s classic in High Frame Rate with motion smoothing. I knew Scorsese had not filmed that movie with overly bright and flat lighting that looked like a soap opera.

No, it wasn’t the reactor, switching from a game to video on the Xbox the set had remained in gaming mode and played the video at 60 frames per second, inserting a dozen invented frames per second into the masterpiece. Lesson learned. I am now quite careful about switching apps and inputs.

That aside, I am quite happy with my new television and hope to get a decade of use out of it.

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Finally, it’s not About Grief: A review of Obsession

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Saturday was a rare two-trip to the local multiplex. In the morning with my sweetie-wife we saw the light action film In The Grey, a quick observation, is a fun film and worth the trip. This review is for my evening feature at the theater, the new horror film Obsession.

Focus Features

From writer/director Curry Barker Obsession focuses on Baron ‘Bear’ Bailey (Michael Johnston) and his seven-year crush on Nikki Freemen (Inde Navarrette.) Though he has known Nikki since high school and is socially a friend, a teammate with her on a trivia team, and a co-worker at a local musical instrument store, Bear had never confessed his feelings or attraction to her, unable to conquer his own crushing insecurities and doubt. While seeking a gift for her at the local crystal and mysticism store, he purchases a ‘One Wish Willow Branch’ and after yet another bout of frustration where he again fails to tell her his feelings, Bear snaps the branch as instructed and wishes for Nikki to love him more than anyone and anything in the world. Now the object of her obsession, Bear discovers, as Spock warned Stonn, that having a thing is not as pleasing as wanting, and by the third act the discomfort turns to outright horror.

The true horror in Obsession is not the maniacal jealousy that the mystically enslaved Nikki presents whenever anything or anyone frustrates her unquenchable need to be with Bear but that enslavement itself. Nikki’s will and her ability to make any choices for herself have been ripped away by Bear’s selfish and childish wish. Here and there throughout the film flashes of the person trapped by the spell peek through the facade of the Nikki that is supposedly ‘in love’ with Bear. By the third act it is clear that the real Nikki is unable to avail herself of any action as her body is puppeteered by forces beyond her control. She is not possessed by an evil entity but has been rendered a ragdoll forced to live out a distorted fantasy of desire and affection. While many recent horror films have been meditations on grief and loss Obsession is about consent and the evil of an entitled mindset.

Barker and cinematographer Taylor Clemons made excellent use of silhouettes, often presenting the ensorcelled Nikki as a figure that could only been seen in outline, with all of her features lost in impenetrable darkness, making her both a terrifying figure to behold and one that reflected the nature of her own entrapment. Inde Navarrette is the stand-out performer of this film, first giving us a Nikki of depth and complexity that we get to know before Bear enslaved her and then a Nikki driven only by her obsession that switches in the blink of an eye from loving to frightening when frustrated in her ‘desires.’ The film’s final resolution comes as both inevitable and a terribly tragic with Inde giving perhaps one of cinema’s best screams that transmutes into heart-wrenching cries.

While this may not satisfy the horror fans form whom ‘body counts’ and ‘kills’ are the metrics of a successful horror movie it worked quite well for me. It is not in the zone of a film where it might be possible to read everything as only suggesting the supernatural, such as last week’s film Hokum, the filmmakers leave no doubt that the mystical nature of the ‘One Wish Willow’ is, in the world of the film, real, placing this clearly more in line with Hereditary than The Wicker Man and that should be enough to let you know if Obsession a film I thoroughly enjoyed is rigth for you.

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Thank you HBOMax

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Last night I got most of my streaming applications loaded onto my new OLED television and while some of them worked just fine a few, (Disney+ and others) wouldn’t actually load and stream content. It was late, I was tired and sweaty from taking down the old tv and putting up the new one so I figured I would just let the matter rest until today.

I got the rest of my apps loaded but I was still seeing the loading circle of doom when I tried to play content from some of them. HBOMax had to be the final app loaded because it had a very different login than the others. (When I originally signed up for my AT&T fiber internet access way back in 2016 the promotion included free HBOMax for as long as you kept the service. They no longer offer that to new customers but those of us who signed up then still get free access to HBOMax.)

When I sorted out the special login and got it working, HBOMax displayed a failure message when I tried to play anything, advising me that I should go into the settings of my device, find the one for IPv6 and switch it off. I did that and HBOMax played just fine, and so did all the other apps that had been giving me trouble. Only HBOMax bothered with a dialog box for the user. Thank you, HBOMax, for thinking about the people at the other end of the internet connection.

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The Birthday Post

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Well, here it is early evening, and my birthday is coming to a close. I received plenty of well-wishes on Facebook from friends both near and far. Each and every one was treasured and lifted my spirits.

Though, to be honest, for most of the day my spirits were in no need of lifting. My sweetie-wife took half a day off from her work and spent it with me. We went out for lunch to Outback Steakhouse. I had wanted to try out Texas Roadhouse, but they did not open until 3pm and other considerations made that a non-starter. I have a nice New York Strip, a side salad, bread, and mashed potatoes, still counting the points for my Weight Watchers journey, down about 26 pounds so far, but not caring if I failed to stay under my daily quota, which I exceeded but not by very much. I had intended to order an indulgent dessert but the server failed to return promptly and so I simply paid via the tabletop device and we came home.

My sweetie-wife gifted me with a 4K UHD copy of Godzilla Minus One (in my opinion the very best Godzilla film, even better than the 1954 original.) She also got me a Call of Duty game so I could waste more hours being slaughtered by mutant cyborg teenagers and their inhuman reflexes. Now all I needed was the delivery of my new 55″ OLED television. It was scheduled for between 3pm and 6pm.

Ahh, the optimism of delivery windows.

It arrived at 7:20 pm.

We had already eaten, and my sweetie-wife helped me take down the old failing television, remove its brackets, affix them to the new set, and hang it on the stand, an evolution that took in total about 40 minutes.

So, with the television mounted on the stand, but not yet with any devices connected, the day is drawing to a close. Once she retires to bed, I will set about getting the television working and all the settings just where I want them. Tomorrow, which I also have off, I will cart the old one away for recycling.

While I had hoped to be watching my brilliant infinite-contrast set already, I still cannot complain about the day. I spent a lot of it with my sweetie-wife, had a tasty steak, and no true disaster struck. Not bad for the day I officially join those who for Medicare.

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Taking Feedback — A Necessary Skill

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With my query letter to agents hoping to gain representation for my paranormal horror novel Outrageous Fortune failing to entice interest, I turned to some help getting a review and feedback on the letter and the first 5000 words of the manuscript.

I have never been one of those writers who is terribly precious about their work. I want people to like the stuff, and I sincerely hope that people who read my work are entertained, perhaps moved, and maybe even come away thinking about the world in a slightly different manner, but critiques and criticisms are a part, an unavoidable part, of any creative’s journey.

That said, one should not blithely ignore feedback, nor should one accept it uncritically either. There is a skill, a vital one, in interpreting feedback and knowing what it might be saying about the work and just what might not be successfully coming across to a reader.

When I got this particular piece of feedback, I could see what the person had in their mind and why in their professional opinion the pages were just barely below the threshold that they would need to have more requested for an agent’s review. They read the character as having no immediate goal, no forward drive. Which is fair, the character at the start of the story is floating in a charmed and blessed life where everything goes their way. Their dice rolls always comes up ‘sevens’. the story is the disruption of that life and what it reveals to be the truth behind it to the character. I can’t say that were wrong, their opinion seemed valid and their concern genuine, but I also saw difficulty in implementing any revision that might address this perceived shortcoming. Mind you they made no specific suggestions as to specific revisions, no goal for the character to chase or inner conflict that might be driving them, only what they saw as feature lacking that agents required.

Then, while playing Dominion online with my sweetie-wife Tuesday evening, a possible solution exploded in my noggin. It would not require a new scene but an alteration of an existing one very early on in the first chapter, it would bequest to the protagonist some forward momentum with a concrete goal for him to strive for, expand a little more on the environment of 1984 San Diego, and expound on the character’s moral grounding. All with what promises to be just a few short paragraphs. Between an A.I, powered search and a KPBS article from a decade and a half ago, I found the information I required to execute the idea. Fixing this issue and possibly breaking through to the next level of interest from agents would make a terrific birthday gift to myself.

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The Plaid Project Continues — The Keeper of the Flame

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As I wrote in February, I have made it a project of mine to watch every classic film noir that was clipped and used in the montage comedy Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, the Steve Martin/Carl Reiner feature from 1982. This past weekend I finally got back on the train and watched the 1942 film The Keeper of the Flame starring Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn.

MGM

The film started with a terrible thunderstorm and a car hurtling off a bridge, killing its sole occupant Robert Forrest, an idolized and beloved patriot of the United States, driving the entire nation into grief and mourning. The small New England community is quickly overrun with reporters eager to cover the man’s untimely death, eulogize him to the nation, and perhaps impossibly get access to the secretive Forrest estate and elusive and reclusive widow. Among the throng reporters is Stephen O’Malley (Tracy) freshly back from Germany as the Nazis begin their march towards war, already deep in their persecutions of the Jewish population along with everyone else they deem ‘undesirable’ to their deluded notions of national and racial purity. O’Malley, a devoted follower of Forrest and his ideal, intends not to simply cover the tragic accident but to produce a definitive biography of his idol but when he succeeds in infiltrating the estate his reporter’s instincts kick in and his suspicions grow that something is off, that a truth about the crash and about the man is being hidden and O’Malley digs for that secret while becoming enamored with Forrest’s widow, Catherine (Hepburn.)

Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid used only the car crash at this film’s start for their feature, leaving the rest of this deeply political drama untouched for me to discover in this viewing. The secret that is hidden by the estate and the family I found to be one that was readily apparent but perhaps would not have been so obvious to an audience in 1942 freshly thrown into the global conflict that would see millions dead before it finally ended. Hepburn and Tracy maintain their unique chemistry even as they play, at least initially, characters who harbor a deep distrust of one another. The film was well shot and well written though my suspicion, later confirmed, about the ‘twist’ kept me from fully enjoying this feature. If you wish to see this film unspoiled, and its currently streaming on HBOMax, then stop here. Those unconcerned about spoilers, care read on.

The secret is of course that this beloved ultra-patriot who so perfectly embodied the ideals of the perfect American was in fact a fascist with intent to use his influence, connections, and wealth to seize control of the nation with himself as dictator like the foreign despots he so admired. His widow, seeing that the bridge had failed and knowing he would be taking that route, withheld any warning for her husband leaving him to die a hero in an accident and saving the nation from his plots.

It is charmingly naive that in 1942 the writers and creatives could only conceive of a fascist coming to power in the United States by hiding his true nature and not by blatantly bragging about his desires to be a dictator and openly flaunting his hatred and racism. Hopefully the next film, Johnny Eager, will be far less relevant.

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Movie Review: Hokum

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This past weekend was a celebration of cinema with two trips to the local multiplex and the last feature film to be watched on my 55″ LCD television before its replacement later this week, so, it is fitting to kick off the week with reviews.

First up, the horror film Hokum.

Neon

The third feature film from writer/director Damian McCarthy Hokum is once again set in his native Ireland. Successful American author Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott) has traveled to the small and isolated Irish hotel where his parents had honeymooned and, after many years delay, to spread their ashes in the thick nearby wood. Bauman reacts to stories of hauntings and witches trapped in the sealed off honeymoon suite with the skepticism appropriate to not only an American of the 21st century but of a writer known for his dark, bleak novels of human futility. After uncharacteristically warming to a member of the hotel staff, Fiona, Bauman returns to the hotel as it is closing for the season to discover that she has gone missing, and Bauman begins investigating, a process that draws him into the supernatural dangers of the hotel and his own terrible history.

A common comment I heard about Hokum before seeing it was that in tone and intensity the film compares to Ari Aster’s Hereditary, a film that I very much enjoyed and found unsettling in the best possible manner. Now, having seen Hokum I disagree with that comparison. Hereditary was relentless in its narrative and focused with tremendous precision. I found this movie to be a little less focused, some of the plot turns struck me as fairly obvious, when Bauman spoke obliquely about his childhood trauma, I knew instantly what the third act would reveal, and Hokum’s plot meandered a bit, but not to any great detriment, just enough to make a comparison with Aster’s film misplaced.

The film I would compare this one to is 2020’s critically underseen and undervalued The Night House, written by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski and directed by David Bruckner. Both films spend considerable time in exquisitely shot darkened scenes with fantastic use of negative space and briefly seen and unsettling imagery. Where Hereditary finishes with imagery and a resolution that might be fitting to one of Bauman’s own novels, Hokum crafts a more traditional if not entirely settled ending for its tale that again fits as a comparison with The Night House.

A second element that Hokum shares with The Night House beyond its cinematography is that by the ending of the film events can be reasonably interpreted as either supernatural or a product of the protagonist’s own mental state with just enough ‘evidence’ to push most viewers into the supernatural conclusion.

Colm Hogan’s cinematography for Hokum is, pardon the pun, picture perfect. The deep shadows and blacks of both the night and the isolated area of the hotel are dark enough to conceal the threats from both Bauman and the audience and yet never so dark as to become frustrating to a moviegoer. McCarthy’s script, while suffering from a touch of predictability, is populated with enough realized characters as to make the plotting work even when that obvious reveal is telegraphed well in advance.

Hokum is enough of a slow burn, quite the opposite of a ‘slasher’ horror film, that it works best in the theatrical environment where someone watching the film will not be continually distracted by their electronic devices, the well-lit room, the kitchen beckoning them with snacks, and the ever-present noise of the outside world. This should be, and needs to be, seen in a darkened auditorium with others reacting to every moment of suspense and shock of a sudden appearance. If you are a fan of horror films, particularly of one that rewards patience, then waste no time in getting to your local theater and seeing Hokum.

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A Weekend of Cinema … or at Least Movies

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Friday has arrived bringing the weekend, and I, provided I do not manage to injure myself by performing the terribly risky action of turning my head, the weekend should contain two trips the theater for in-auditorium cinematic experiences.

Last weekend I had planned to see the horror film Hokum Saturday evening. Hokum has been getting good notices, though I have been burned before by movies being talked up — I am looking at you X and Barbarian — and it looks fascinating. However, when I went out to pick up the takeaway food for me and my sweetie-wife’s dinner, I twisted my neck in a wrong manner, pinched something, and found the pain too intense to allow me to submerge my mind into a film. So, I canceled my AMC theater’s A-List reservation and suffered at home. This weekend, on either Friday or Saturday, I shall once again try to see this Irish-set horror film about an unpleasant man and a haunted hotel.

In addition to creepy isolated locations and unsettling events, I also plan to enjoy a comedic murder mystery with The Sheep Detectives.

Co-written by Craig Mazin, the creator of the astounding limited series Chernobyl and showrunner for the equally well-received The Last of Us, Mazin returns to his comedy roots with a tale of a herd of sheep determined to solve the murder of their beloved herder. With a fantastic cast and a plethora of good reviews it promises to be entertaining, funny, and heartfelt. I had planned on seeing this film long before any of the reviews had arrived. Mazin also co-hosts the podcast Scriptnotes for screenwriters and things interesting to screenwriters, and has talked, without spoiling any of the details, about this script for years, naming it his personal favorite.

Aside from those two excursions to the cinema I plan to sit down and watch the next film in the Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid catalogue, Keeper of the Flame, here at home. It will be perhaps the last feature film to be shown on my dying LCD television.

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A Lethal Literary Trope

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Tropes, in prose and in cinema, are commonly used ideas or conventions that are at once familiar and if overused trite and cliche. Enemies-to-Lovers, The Real Enemy is the Best Friend, The Chosen One, The Hidden Society or World, are but a tiny sampling of well-worn tropes. The Harry Potterfranchise makes extensive use of two, Harry is the Chosen One, destined by prophecy to end the villain’s reign and life, and the entire ‘Wizarding World’ is hidden from the rest of humanity, existing in a secret space just outside of the public’s knowledge.

Used correctly tropes can make the world building of a piece of fiction faster and more easily grasped by the reader or audience; subverted they generate surprise and a fresh perspective that can illuminate actual reality; and badly deployed or overused they become cliches that tarnish and degrade a work. But something that is less considered is the danger a trope can present to the world that the reader or audience lives in, when a trope ceases to be a device for fiction and is taken on as a representation of reality.

The hidden but vast conspiracy, such as vampires, aliens, or a cabal of ultra-wealthy Satanists, who manipulate the world’s events, is, in my opinion, a terribly dangerous trope because it aligns so closely with actual paranoid delusions held by far too many.

In 1988’s John Carpenter’s They Live, adapted from the short story Eight O’clock in the Morningby Ray Nelson, a down on his luck itinerant worker, Nada, stumbles onto the fact that human society is being managed by extraterrestrial aliens who keep humanity in a perpetual state of perceptional blindness in order to craft the global capitalist culture by which they extract the world’s resources with the assistance of a small cabal of quislings that have betrayed the rest of the world for personal wealth and power. Nada, after a brief spree of killing the aliens as he encounters them, joins a band of resistance fighters and, in clear trope fashion, succeeds in revealing the vast conspiracy to the wider population.

Carpenter, whose political leanings are clearly on the left side of the accepted spectrum, intended his film to be a critique of capitalism and specifically the culture around the American Republican Party and the head of that party at the time President Ronald Reagan. However, not everyone interpreted his satire in the manner that Carpenter intended.

American neo-Nazis saw a very clear metaphor in the film, one that reflected and validated their own twisted conspiratorial delusions. To them the movie was very boldly speaking about the international influence and control exerted by ‘the Jews.’  Carpenter augmented this interpretation by not only having the aliens occupying the very top of American society, including the presidency itself, but they also lived and worked in the most common of professions, putting in their hours as beat cops and random businessmen on the streets — a bit of clumsy worldbuilding that validated the delusional and evil beliefs of the neo-Nazis and their ilk.

I do wonder just how much of the conspiratorial culture we suffer today was fertilized by the paranoid political thrillers of the 1970s. The movies that espoused the idea that the CIA manipulated events, that every assassination is evidence of secret plots operating behind the scene. Hell, how much of the moon landing hoax was supercharged by Capricorn One and its faked Mars mission plot? What looks ‘popcorn movies’ that only existing to pass a few hours are really ideas. Ideas that in the true sense of the word ‘meme’ take hold in people’s minds and spread like a virus.

This goes beyond the poorly thought out worldbuilding of They Live and into the heart of the story conceit, that, in the face of all reason and evidence, it is possible for a vast and all-powerful conspiracy to exist in the world. It doesn’t matter that in the end this is a silly and overly simple adventure story, the foundations of that story validates the very concept of that vast conspiracy. People may come away knowing that aliens aren’t real, but they ‘know’ that conspiracies are and the subtle effect of such tales is to reinforce and nurture such fantasies that are mistaken for reality.

Antisemitism is a live and terrible thing in our world. It is not a thing born of fantasies but one that is driven by dark and twisted ones, clumsy and ill-considered employment of conspiratorial tropes feeds into and reinforces it. There is not a direct line between stories like They Live and events such as The Tree of Life mass murder, but because the line is not straight or easily seen doesn’t mean that no connections exist. Stories shape how we see the world, what we believe to be true and what is false and they also instruct us how to fight the evil that they present. Because of this I think that vast and all powerful conspiracies need to be used in fiction with extreme caution and perhaps best of all, never.

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Dreams Do Not Work That Way … at Least Not For Me

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There’s a trope in writing and even a little in the visual arts of television and film that also annoys me when it pops its head over the battlements but to unpack it, I must first talk about the way I experience dreams.

Dreaming while asleep apparently appears across species and while nearly universal are also powerfully idiosyncratic. I had one friend who described that as a child and into his teenage years every nightmare started in exactly the same manner; he was belly crawling through the tall grass of his backyard and suddenly he would come across a hideous stone idol, bats would fly, and then the scene would change as he fell into the terrifying dream his subconscious had cooked up that night.

I myself will sometimes have dreams in which I do not appear, but play out like movies with close-ups, cuts, and even recognizable stars playing parts in what are often frightening horror stories that my mind conjures up for its own amusement. Those dreams are uncommon, and the more generalized dream is one that plays out entirely from my own point of view, I am there experiencing the events and sensation of whatever the dream has crafted. And no matter how outlandish or at odds the dream is with reality, be it that I am having a grand time at an amusement park with a dear friend who in real life had passed away some years earlier, or the strange shifting scenery when walking around a corner and I find myself in a location that could not possibly have existed around that bend, such as walking from a school hallway and directly into the deep desert, the dream presents, at that moment, as absolute and uncontested reality. If something makes me question the events as impossible, that is the moment sleep slips away and I awake in my bed. Dreams, while they are playing, are unquestioned. They are what is.

That very unquestioned nature, that aura of total acceptance, bring us to the trope that annoys me so very much.

When a character in a book or in a show or movie finds themselves suddenly confronted with events that are far beyond their daily life and who mutters or exclaims ‘I must be dreaming,’ my suspension of disbelief shatters. That’s not how it works. If you are dreaming you do not know that you are dreaming and you accept it. So this trope, not only is it tired and worn, something that should be rejected on those grounds alone, it also breaks character for me and I would be so very happy if I never ever come across it again.

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