Monthly Archives: May 2026

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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Revisiting: The First Omen

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This past weekend the Irish-set horror film Hokum, which I had been looking forward to, opened to its theatrical run, but after pinching a nerve or something in my neck by doing the idiotic thing of turning my head, and with the pain forcing me to abandon my plan to go see the film, I stayed home, nursing the protesting area.

20th Century Studios

I got my weekend horror fix by rewatching The First Omen, a 2024 prequel to the wildly successful Richard Donner film The Omen which, like The Exorcist, inspired a franchise of mediocre to terrible sequels. (Yes, I am aware that The Exorcist III possesses a vocal fan base, but that movie is the best of the lot and for me it rises only to mediocre.)

I ventured forth a little more than a year ago to catch The First Omen in theaters and gave the film a middling review here on my blog. So, why revisit something that hadn’t been all that inspiring the first time around? Sometimes the headspace I am in when I see a movie can cause me to come away with an impression that the movie did not earn or is unjust to the feature. The first time I watched The Godfatherit did not make that great of an impression on me. perhaps I was distracted, perhaps I didn’t quite allow the film in, or perhaps it was simply the wrong movie for my emotional state. However, when I rewatched it a few years later suddenly I ‘got it.’ The film is brilliant, and I adore it.

Did the same thing happen with the unloved The First Omen?

No.

The movie remains middling. A competently crafted piece of cinema that is not terrible but failed to reach the potential that had been possible with a stronger script and a bit more attention to the story it was attempting to integrate with.  The performances remain strong, and Ralph Ineson stepping into the role originated by Patrick Troughton is inspired casting. Ineson, while physically very different from Troughton pulls in the sense of the character so powerfully and so perfectly that it is wholly credible that this is the same man who tried, in vain, to warn Ambassador Thorne that his child was in fact the antichrist. Nell Tiger Free as Margaret, a young American woman on a voyage to become a nun and who is pulled into the conspiracy to birth the antichrist, is quite good in her role and none of the failures of the feature can be laid at her feet.

No, the script is the trouble.

In addition to not melding seamlessly with the film it is a prequel to, ignoring such things as that it was very clear that the child Damien, the future antichrist, did not have a human mother but had been birthed from a jackal, or ignoring that Father Brennan had been riddled with cancer, The First Omentried too hard to reset the franchise and set itself up for sequels that could never mesh with the established continuity.

Some years ago, there had been released a remake of the original The Omen, a film I have never been able to watch in its entirety. It is proof that casting and direction are essential elements and put a step wrong there and you’ve critically damaged your production. In my opinion the best course of action as a horror fan is to consider that there is only one Omen film, the first, and ignore the existence of all the rest.

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The New Television Has Been Ordered

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Well, as I mentioned in a previous post my 8-year-old 4K TCL smart television has been developing faults that are annoying, faint vertical lines that were apparent in some scenes and invisible in others. This past weekend, after several attempts at resetting the set in hopes that would clear up the trouble failed, I bit the bullet and ordered a new set.

Where the old set was an LED, the new one an OLED LG B5 smart TV is a technology that had been outside of comfortable financial resources in 2018. It also has better response times well suited for my casual Xbox gaming of playing Call of Duty on the weekends and getting my butt kicked by teenagers with mutant reaction times.  I ensured that the set also had a setting to display films as films and not as some unnaturally clear, motion-smoothed soap opera.

Thanks to a discount through my employer, Kaiser Permanente, and a spring sale code from LG itself, I managed to knock nearly $200 off the already discounted price. I am not sure, but I may have paid less for this far more capable television than I did for the set that will soon be recycled.

The original shipping date had it arriving this Thursday, May 7th, but that wasn’t going to work for me as I would be at the day job. I rescheduled the delivery for next Thursday, which just happens to be my birthday and part of a long weekend I had planned for celebrating the fact that I will have officially reached Medicare age. So that is when I will take down the old set, set-up the new one, and the next day have a company come out and pick up the discarded television for e-waste disposal and recycling.

OLED has superior black levels and ‘infinite’ contrast, so I will have to decide among my 4K discs, which one will christen the new set.

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Q-Ships and the coming Gerrymander Wars

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In the early days of the Great War, later to be known as World War I, there existed a distinct set of rules for conducting warfare by submarines against civilian shipping. After all civilian ships are not military combat vessels and it was considered a crime to sink civilians without warning. Undersea Boat, U-Boats, were, when attacking a civilian shop, expected to surface, announce that the ship was targeted to be sunk, and provide the crew and passengers time to abandon the ship in their lifeboats, and once that evolution had been completed, then the sub would sink the vessel. All very proper and civilized warfare.

England, an island nation, quickly discovered that losing tons of shipping weighed heavily on both their economy and their population. They took drastic action to save their crucial shipping, inventing the Q-ship. A Q-ship, converted from a standard commercial vessel, boasted deck guns that could be hidden from view. (And the reason the department of hidden and special gadgets is known as Q-branch.) Once an enemy U-boat surfaced and made its intention to attack known, the hidden guns would be deployed and the submarine sunk. Imperial Germany responded rationally and stopped providing civilian ships with any warning, sinking them on sight in unrestricted submarine warfare, pushing the United States of America to enter the war.

When the sequel war came about no nation attempted restricted submarine warfare, instead sinking enemy vessels of every type without warning or mercy – evidence that any standard or norm once abandoned is forever lost.

The Constitution of the United States requires that every decade the federal government performs a census and based upon that the congressional districts for the House of Representatives are drawn.

In 2003 after the Republicans gained full control of the government of Texas, they sought to replace the district maps that had been drawn following the 2000 census, breaking the norm of only redrawing the districts each decade. Democratic members of the Texas government even fled the state in an attempt to deny a quorum and prevent the redrawing of the lines but ultimately failed to kill the scheme. In 2006 the mid-decade redistricting got the seal of approval from the US Supreme court when they interpreted the constitution as requiring a redistricting every ten years but not forbidding it at other times. Further exacerbating the issues of congressional districts is a pair of Supreme Court decisions, 2019’s call that the issue of drawing lines for partisan purposes lies beyond the scope of Federal courts to address and this year’s call that the Voting Rights Act doesn’t require majority-minority districts throws open the season for unrestricted gerrymandering warfare. Districts drawn to advantage one political party that just happen as a side-effect disadvantage any particular racial group are now perfectly constitutional.

As with submarine warfare a civilized norm once abandoned is dead. With early votes in the primary already cast, Louisiana is seeking to redraw their districts to eliminate Democratic seats and states with Democratic trifectas are speaking of drawing lines that eliminate every Republican seat within their states.

I despise the current and proposed gerrymanders, but I am also a realist and understand that the current Republican party, headed by a vainglorious buffoon who hates above all things being held in the slightest manner accountable will never ever reach a consensus to ban the offensive practice of politicians picking their voters. The only hope that exists is for the GOP to lose their hold on the Federal government and for the Democrats, should they hold all three branches in 2029, be forced, and they will have to be forced because like the ring of power having the seats is powerfully seductive, to fix this with Federal laws.

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