Author Archives: Bob Evans

Widow’s Bay

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More and more it is becoming apparent that Apple TV, the streaming service with an apparently non-existent promotional budget while boasting fantastic budgets for their films and television programs, is offering some of the best series for anyone streaming at home. The latest addition to their already impressive lineup is the horror comedy Widow’s Bay.

AppleTVThe titular location is a small and economically depressed fishing community on a scrap of an island off the New England coast. The mayor, Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys), determined to bring tourist dollars to the town, ignores the pleas of local crank Wyck (Stephen Root) that the island is cursed, assuring Loftis that only Death and Horror can come from bringing in strangers; pleas that Loftis ignores and over the course of episodes comes to understand that Wyck is not a crank and that a curse lays upon them all.

Widow’s Bay is the creation of writer/showrunner Katie Dippold whose comedy chops include Parks and Recreation, but professionally this series represents her first foray into horror. The premier episode (people keep calling the first episode of a series the ‘pilot’ but a pilot is a very different beast, for an excellent definition see Pulp Fiction), is quite light on the horror elements relying on a single image that promises horrors to come but is principally concerned with the comedy of the eclectic and quirky set of characters. However, episode two sets both a tone of unease and building tension that releases with a fast and visceral bit of horror that then continues throughout the series. Where the series lands, I cannot say as Apple TV, wisely in my opinion, has stuck with the week-by-week release model that builds better word of mouth than Netflix’s binge method of releasing the entire slate of episodes at the same time.

So far, my favorite episode is number 4, Beach Reads, which gives us context for what I feel is the most relatable citizen of the community, Loftis’ assistant Patricia (Kate O’Flynn). A social outcast from her age cohort and someone desperate to be seen in her beige anonymity Patricia, after finding a mysterious self-help book, attempts to reinvent herself and how the people perceive her only to find that she has somehow stepped into a folk horror with echoes of The Wicker Man.

The comedic elements of Widow’s Bay are not over-the-top farce or outlandish absurdity though it would be difficult to call this purely character-based humor. Rather the humor is always just off from center, the characters are nearly realistic but never quite there, it might be best described as ‘uncanny valley’ comedy. A perfect example can be found in episode two, Lodgings and the board games found in the lobby of the island’s quaint hostel. No boardgame company is going to produce Daddy’s Home the game of avoiding the drunken and violent parent when they return home but it provides a perfect complement to the unease of the episode as Loftis, on a dare, stays in the hotel’s haunted suite.

While the first episode did not fully engage me I was intrigued enough to come back and then found the series to my taste. I look forward to completing the season and hopefully it lands well.

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Not The Man I Used to Be

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90 days ago, I embarked on the less than thrilling adventure of trying to lose weight by way of dieting. I make no judgment against people who are employing the GLP-1 agonists to help them curb their appetite and shed their weight it is simply that I would prefer to at least attempt my weight loss by way of diet first.

What had worked for me in the past, though there had been a few bumps and minor issues that I had found annoying, was using the Weight Watchers app. The program, though not very expensive, is not free and works by a fairly simple process. Each food is assigned a point value, roughly correlating to its calories, fat, and simple carbohydrate composition. Some, like fresh fruits and vegetables, are given a value of zero points. Participants log their meals and snacks, tracking the points and attempting to remain under a daily allotment. To give a person ‘wiggle room’ should they choose the less strict program, which I have, there is also a pool of points known as ‘weeklies’ that can serve as a buffer for any time a dieter exceeds their daily limit. Any surplus points at the end of a day, up to no more than four, rolls over into the weeklies pool, providing a little more flexibility. There is a vast database of processed food that can be easily searched by way of their barcodes on the packaging, making logging them quick and easy. In the newest version of the app, one can even take an image of your food and have the estimated point values located by way of an A.I. engine.

I have been on this program now for 90 days and I have managed to cut out nearly all of the ‘bad’ snacking that had been contributing to my weight gain. To date I have lost 27 lbs and not felt overly deprived except on the occasional day when the craving for something rich and sweet hits particularly hard. The only week where I consumed all my weeklies was my birthday week and all in all I think that one is one I can let slide.

I still have a way to go before I am close to my goal but this time around, I am finding the process a bit easier.

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Now is the Spring of Our Electronic Failures

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April and May turned out to be not so great for several of my electronic devices.  The first to give me troubles was my Xbox One, when it began dropping the wireless connection between both my controller and my headset. Once it progressed far enough that I couldn’t watch a complete YouTube video or play a single session of online Call of Duty, I bit the bullet and took the device in for repairs. It took two attempts and replacing the chips and transmitters for both the Bluetooth and WiFi components, but the repairs seem to be holding.

Next went the 55″ LCD Television. I have already documented that journey with a couple of other posts. While the screen had not failed completely, the faint, but growing in intensity, lines across the left quarter of the screen had become too pronounced to ignore. It was a blessing that the replacement OLED set ended up costing less than the set it replaced.

I had thought my device troubles were in the past and then after watching the Blu-ray of The Body Snatcher, still the best performance of Karloff’s career and a criminally underseen film, my region-free player went belly up. The power light remained lit and the tray refused to open. I tried to reset the player, even leaving it unplugged from power for more than a day, but nothing could cause it to cycle. Tomorrow the replacement player, this time one capable of displaying 4K discs in addition to being region-free (I had been using my Xbox One to play4K titles), arrives.

So, that is nearly my entire entertainment system either repaired or replaced in less than six weeks. On the bright side, this OLED television looks fantastic and hopefully the new player will complement it well. I have a birthday gift from my sweetie-wife, the 4K edition of Godzilla Minus One(A film that surpasses the 1954 original) that I look forward to watching once everything is set-up and running.

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Death and Me

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A dear friend lost a person close to them recently and that has me thinking and pondering on death and all the various ways it has, from some of my earliest memories, touched my life.

I have no clear idea of how old I was, 5 or 6 I guess, when my puppy ‘Snowball’, a quite unimaginative name for an all-white dog, was struck and killed on the road in front of our North Carolina home, but the incident has stayed with me. Death came again to my life when I was 9, when my brother awoke and told me bluntly that Dad had died. I have no memory of being told that Dad’s illness was terminal and my impression from that time was that it came as quite a shock, but memory is always plastic and unreliable, particularly when trying to recall traumatic events of childhood.

My maternal grandmother, whom we, my mother and some of my siblings, lived with after my father passed, died at home after a long illness. After that I had a respite from death intruding into my life for several years until my brother Lonnie, having sat at the wrong poolside table to escape a summer heat wave, was gunned down along with two other men he had been chatting with. I was 18 and in the United States Navy and my sister recalls, that upon delivering the shocking news to me over the telephone,  that this was the first time she had ever heard me curse.

Death’s intrusions are not always deeply personal. While serving aboard the USS Belleau Wood(LHA-3) on a cruise of the Western Pacific, two men aboard died, one a marine who ignored safety regulations and fell from a helicopter in flight and the other a naval crew chief who was on a helicopter that crashed on the flight deck and then tumbled over the side into the ocean. I knew neither of these men and their deaths touched me only tangentially.

It returned to a personal meaning years after I separated from the quite unsuitable to me and to the U.S. Navy military service.

A close friend and gaming buddy, on the day he purchased his motorcycle, drove the machine after a heated verbal argument with his wife (One should never ride angry. Motorcycles are unforgiving vehicles.) and, taking a curve too fast, jumped the divider and collided with an oncoming truck.

In 1997, following a stroke and a prolonged illness, my mother insisted on returning home, despite the doctors advising her that she would grow weaker and die, who, like her mother, died at home, on her own terms.

COVID-19 took a close friend who perished in the hospital, counted among the more than a million Americans who died due to that disease. Another close friend and writing partner suffered a neurological condition that horribly took his voice and his motor control before taking his life.

It seems that I have experienced death in all the manners in which the Grim Reaper can claim us: terminal disease, homicide, accident, and sudden illness. I can say that there is no ‘easy’ way to experience the loss of a loved one, no method that robs you of their company makes the losing of that company even slightly more bearable. Death comes for all of us. I have known that in the pit of my stomach since I was 9. The best we can do is be aware of that fact and cherish the time we have with each other and not waste it on futile and pointless hatreds and petty disputes.

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Can Texas Send a Democrat to the Senate This Cycle?

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Well, the answer to that is yes, it can but will it do so is a very different proposition. It has been about 30 years, three decades, since a Democrat has won a statewide office in the nation’s second-largest state. Texas is about as ‘red’ as you can get in terms of how friendly the political ground is for the Republican party, but that doesn’t mean it is impossible for this year’s election to erupt with a surprise in November.

The most compatible comparison might be the 2018 Senate race between Beto O’Rourke and incumbent Senator Ted Cruz. It was an off-year cycle election with Trump in the White House and a presidential approval of less than 50 percent. While O’Rourke failed to dislodge the disliked senator from his seat, his failure was closer than one might expect in the Lone Star State, falling about two and a half points behind when the votes were tallied. It was not a terribly surprising result as at no point during the election cycle did O’Rourke lead Cruz in the polling.

2026 is not the same as 2018.

Trump’s approval numbers are in the low 30s with some polls dropping him into the 20s. In 2018 the economy was humming along with very low interest rates without any serious inflation concerns. 2026 on the other hand is seeing serious inflation, with gas and food prices rising rapidly in the shadow of an unpopular war without an apparent end in sight. This is the situation at the start of the summer with a long hot travel season ahead. Add to this that while O’Rourke sought to unseat an incumbent, Talarico isn’t facing the same challenge.  While Cruz was personally unlikeable to many, he presented and coded as a bog-standard Republican politician. The same cannot be said of Paxton, whose scandal sheet trails him like toilet paper stuck to his heel. Also, unlike O’Rourke, Talarico has already led his opponent in several polls.

Does this mean that Talarico will win?

No.

I would still call Paxton the favorite but not a prohibitive one. This cycle is trending closer to a toss-up than any Texas Senate race in memory. I think this race will be close enough that the national party will be forced to expend resources on a race that in any other year they could have safely ignored. November, no matter how it turns out, should provide some excitement.

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Movie Review: The Mandalorian and Grogu

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I am, at most, a casual Star Wars fan, old enough that I watched the original set of films on their initial release and to have been disappointed by the sequel set. Most of the television series that have followed I have had little to no interest in with the exception of Andor and The Mandalorian. Andorbrought a gritty moral ambiguity to the story of a rebellion that struggled to overthrow an authoritarian empire while The Mandalorian told tales in the setting of a more straight-forward morality much like many classic Western movies. Both approaches are valid lines of exploration within a setting as vast as the Star Wars franchise, and both appealed to me on very different thematic fronts. I will confess that while I adored the first two seasons of The Mandalorian, I felt that the producers had damaged their show and premise with the changes presented in its third season. Now, three years after that final season aired, a curious phrase considering that the program was never actually broadcast, the long-awaited feature film centered on the two principal characters has arrived in theaters.

Sadly, the disintegrating quality of the story-telling that began with Season three continues in The Mandalorian and Grogu. While I cannot honestly say that this film is bad in some ways, my opinion is worse than that, because this film is dull and uninspired, vanishing from my memory like a dream a few hours after waking. This movie strikes me as the worst sort of ‘fan service’ with callbacks to characters from other media that serve no thematic or story purpose beyond having a fan point and smile because they recognized the reference.

Lucasfilm/Disney Studios

The movie begins as we follow Mando executing the final elements of a bounty hunt against an ex-imperial officer that has set himself up as a warlord. It is a prolonged action sequence that carries no narrative weight; we know nothing of the person that is being hunted and have no emotional connection to anything that transpires. There is no drama or suspense as the movie’s principal character dispatches unnamed stormtroopers with an ease that drains the action of any stakes. Worse yet, the entire sequence has absolutely no impact on the events that follow. The entire bit could be excised from the film and not one following scene would change. To the plot it matters not at all. It exists only to be a ‘thrilling’ scene for the fans who want to see Mando ‘kick ass.’ I found the entire thing as interesting as playing a video game on ‘God Mode’ where your digital enemies are incapable of any victory.

The rest of the movie is equally meaningless.

Stories, when they are well written, are about change, about characters either growing into a better version of themselves or falling due to the flaws in their nature that they are unable to overcome. The Mandalorian and Grogu is utterly static. The characters enter and exit the story unmoved and unaltered by their experiences. Even when it might appear that Mando has caused troubles by eliminating a criminal contact that the fledgling New Republic had compromised itself by working with, an off-screen deus ex machina absolves him of any error with a bit of clumsy exposition revealing that the criminals were in fact, sans any evidence presented in the movie itself,  betraying the Republic the entire time. Our hero, The Mandalorian, is incapable of making mistakes of any consequence or of judgment. A hero like that can only come off as flat, dull, and uninteresting.

Truly, the only section of the movie that held my interest was the street food vendor voiced by the legendary Martin Scorsese.

The Mandalorian and Grogu has neither the cynical tone of evil acts performed for the greater good of Andor nor the direct and easily understood choosing the morally right path of the series The Mandalorian or of the films, instead telling a tale that makes no stand and chooses no side. I fully expect to have forgotten this movie within a week.

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The Most Reality-Defying Aspect of Obsession.

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The quite successful supernatural horror film Obsession turns on the protagonist Bear gaining a wish by way of a magical and apparently mass produced gag gift, the One Wish Willow but the wish-granting twig is not in my opinion that aspect of the film that is at odds the most with our objective reality and the element that fits that category is syptomatic of an issue across Hollywood.

Bear, the girl he has an unrequited crush on, Nikki, and their friends, Ian and Sarah, in addition to comprising a bar hopping trivia team, all work in the musical instrument and sheet music shop of Sarah’s father. They are young college-aged persons with their lives currently unmoored by deep responsibilities and serious careers, ideal characters that could have an affinity with horror’s prime demographic, the under-30 movie goer. And yet there is an element in the film that is utterly unrealistic — apparently not one of them is a roommate arrangement.

Nikki lives in a house, we see Bear drop her off there in the film’s first act, a small but nice standalone structure, with no mention of anyone expecting her home. Bear has a house that he apparently inherited from his grandmother. These four young adults, holding down minimum wage retail jobs, have credit cards, can afford to go bar hopping, and all live alone with the privacy and seclusion that works so well in a horror movie.

I have worked a number of dead end, low wage, retail jobs, and not one of them afforded me the ability to live alone. When I did live alone for a short while working that sort of minimum wage job it took two of them and even then, every penny mattered. I certainly did not have the resources for repeated nights out visiting multiple bars. (Even if I had been the sort of person for whom that would have been attractive.) The idea that three of them, discounting Sarah because her family owned the business, would even get full time employment and not something more realistic like a work week under 30 hours is stretching credulity to the breaking point.

This highlights a systemic issue in Hollywood, fewer and fewer of the creatives have had personal lived experience outside of upper-middleclass lives that afforded easy access to college, and all that opportunity affords. I recall in the later seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer after her mother had passed away, Buffy needed to get a job at a fast-food burger joint in order to take care of her and her sister. Again, even if her mother had somehow managed to purchase a California house outright with no mortgage, it would be impossible for Buffy to support herself, maintain the home, and raise her sister on the meager wages afforded by such a menial job.

This extends beyond low wage jobs that are below the poverty line. The lack of military personnel also affects the quality of storytelling in the film and television industry. Sure, they bring in consultants and such when they are making a war movie but all too often the writers, producers, and directors work from a state of ignorance when they attempt to have military characters that are not specifically working in battlefield condition. It is that sort of blindness to how things really work that allows J.J. Abrams to have someone go to a military-style academy and graduate not as an ensign but as captain despite having no actual command experience.  or for Joss Whedon to have elite special forces that blindly accept a briefing with no questions asked about the particulars. Those sorts of unit are comprised of some of the smartest people in the military. Far from perfect, granted, and prey to any other human failing, but they are not dumb just accept what is presented types.

The stratification of the people and the limited backgrounds that they represent are a far more damaging force to film and television than any ‘nepo-baby’ troubles.

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Should Firearm Owners be Held Responsible for the Misuse of Their Weapons?

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San Diego this week suffered yet another mass murder tragedy when two young men, one apparently still legally a boy and the other legally an adult, murdered three people at a local Islamic center and mosque before taking their own lives. It is a terrible history that this city has at least three times has been thrust into the national spotlight for this sort of violence; Brenda Spencer in 1979 when she opened fire on an elementary school, killing two adults, injuring eight children, and a police officer, James Huberty in July 1984 when he killed 22 and injured another 19 at a McDonald’s, and now this act of brutality.

Early reports, and it should always be kept in mind that early reports are often erroneous and littered with mistakes, indicate that the firearms were taken from the parents of one of the cowardly killers. This week’s attack is not the first in which the perpetrators obtained their weaponry from others who legally possessed the firearms. The unsecured nature of the firearms is in these particular cases a crucial element in the chain that led to murderous disaster.

Gun safety advocates often attempt to pass laws that would require firearms in the home to be secured in a gun safe to prevent theft and misuse while gun rights enthusiasts dispute such proposals usually upon the lines that rapid access to firearms is necessary for self-defense in the home and that the expense of gun safes is in effect a tax with the purpose to depress ownership rather than any actual and practical safety concern.

Should firearm owners who do not secure their firearms in a manner that precludes easy theft or use by an unauthorized person face either criminal or civil accountability?

In criminal law there is the doctrine of felony murder which stipulates that anyone who participates in a felony crime can be held legally responsible for murders that are committed in the commission of that offense even if the person did not actively participate in the killing directly. A getaway driver outside of the bank being robbed is equally guilty of murder as the man who gunned-down the security guard inside the bank.

It is clear that felony murder doesn’t apply to people who have had their firearms taken without their consent or with no knowledge of the crime that is about to be committed with them. Any criminal liability would have to come from new legislation passed with that clear intent. Is such a course wise?

Perhaps.

It is clear from the sheer number of unsecured firearms in homes across the nation that to rely on the inherent responsibility of their owners is a fool’s errand. It is also clear that such proposals would face fierce opposition from the gun rights community. There was a township in the state of Georgia that passed a local ordinance making it a crime to leave a firearm in an unlocked motor vehicle. That’s it, if you left a gun in your car you had to lock the car. The conservative state government in the next session amended their supremacy laws to make such a local ordinance void. It is hard to imagine a more benign restriction of firearms possession but even that proved to be a bridge too far. I doubt any such legislation as required firearms be secured and that the owners would share in some criminal liability for unsecured guns used in crimes could ever see the light of day.

Civil liability has a better shot at viability but that requires private civil actions that incur expensive legal actions and to be honest, civil penalties carry not the weight and fear that criminal ones do.

In the short term there is no solution to this nation’s gun death troubles, of which about half are suicides but being self-inflicted doesn’t make those deaths any less tragic or any less worthy of prevention. The truth of the matter is that this is. deep cultural infection and one that has hounded our nation for generations and will likely carry on for generations more.

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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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