Author Archives: Bob Evans

Horrible Imaginings Review #3

The on-line at home edition of the Horrible Imaginings Film Festival continued yesterday. We kicked off the day completing the monsters are everywhere block of short films the two standouts from the completion of the block were Suspension about a fighter pilot trapped after ejecting in a tree where a monster stalks him and Malakout a haunting stop motion piece from Iran.

We then moved on to the feature film Survival Skills, presented as a narrated training movie for rookie police officers set in 1988. This filmmaker nailed the look and the tone of the 80s perfectly managing to make a satire with loads to say and plenty of entertainment.

Our house then broke for pizza and gaming before my friend and I returned to dark cinema.

Our second feature was The Return a passable tale of a young man facing the demons of his past following the mysterious death of his father. A competent Canadian entry The Return didn’t break any novel or interesting ground but managed to any critical failures.

We closed out the evening with another block of shorts the theme this time ‘Twisted Innocence.’ For me the standouts from this grouping of shorts were Bakemono where a Japanese’s girl encounters a traditional demon from folklore, My Brother Juan told entirely with a young girl being interviewed by an official of the state about her older and sick brother, and winning the award for most disturbing was Milk Teeth set in an orphanage where children pay a terrible price in hopes of being adapted.

Special mention goes to the stop motion short Kim, a charming and witty piece about a siren and her place in the grander ecology.

The festival continues.

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Horrible Imaginings Review #2

Yesterday was my first full day of streaming features and shorts form Horrible Imaginings Film Festival 11.

We started with the Feature Darkness in Tenement 45, a period pieces set in 1953 with New York City being evacuated before a suspected biological attack by the USSR. The film is set in one tenement as the residents deal with dwindling supplies and food and rising tension and paranoia. Sadly, this feature did not work for me. I think the filmmaker’s objective lay just beyond their abilities with a scrip that was functional but not quite there, talent that couldn’t quite carry the subject matter, and cinematography that capture the sense of the time.

We followed that up with a block of short films the theme being ‘Blood is thicker than water.’ This had a number of really good entries with standouts being Smiles from Spain, Separation, and Hammurabi.

At this point in my household we broke for dinner and evening board and card games.

After gaming and with my sweetie-wife retiring for the evening we resumed the festival with the feature Luz: Flower of Evil from Columbia. This feature sported fantastic production values with extensive color grading that recreated the feel on Kodachrome film that helped enhance the feature’s setting in the 1970s. It concerned an isolated community with its charismatic religious leader and their search for absolution in his repeated attempt to identify the reborn Christ. Ultimately though this feature also did not work for me. In the end the film’s conclusion failed to provide a satisfying resolution to theme or character.

We concluded with the short film block “Monster are Everywhere.” Though the evening wore too late and we shall view the final films in the block today. However, the standouts so far are Night Crawl where prisoner tunneling to escape make gruesome discoveries, Spiritual Practice, that centers on a military style training academy for exorcists, and Face your Fears where a young woman frightened of the dark engages in a terrifying game hoping to lose her phobia.

Today the terror continues.

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Horrible Imaginings Review #1 DEAD

The pandemic has forced the cancelation of many beloved events and some, like Horrible Imaginings Film Festival have move to an on-line model for 2020. So, while I have been deprived the pleasure of seeing friends and making new ones at the Frieda Cinema in Orange county this year, I have not been denied access to nearly 30 hours of horror cinema.

While the festival opened Wednesday evening with a double feature of The Brain That Wouldn’t Die and its 2020 remake for me and my sweetie-wife we started Thursday night with the New Zealand Feature length horror Comedy Dead.

Dead is the story of a stoner who has discovered a combination of marijuana and neurological medications that allow him to see and interact with ghosts, the ghost of an uptight and obsessive police officer, an attorney with a drinking problem and house arrest as they search for a serial killer stalking Wellington New Zealand.

Tilting decidedly more towards comedy than horror Dead is an entertaining little movie just under an hour and half the film delivers with talents performances, colorful cinematography, and just the right blend of explicit gore to light-hearted comedy with a touch of heart all wrapped in a light air of mystery surrounding the killer.

Dead made for an excellent launch to this year’s festival and I look forward to diving into the short film block and more feature films from around the globe.

 

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Streaming Review: Get Duked!

Several weeks ago, my sweetie-wife discovered the trailer for the Amazon Original, meaning they purchased the exclusive rights, feature film Get Duked!and on August 28th it became available on Amazon’s Prime Video Streaming service.

Get Duked! (You ignore the exclamation mark) is the comedic, farcical story of 4 city boys dropped into the hinterlands of the Scottish highlands as part of a contest the Duke of Edinburgh Award but three of these young lads are delinquent youths with the final member of the quartet a naive youngster who actually cares about the prize, a laminated certificate.  However, once there are beyond the supervision of the sole adult in charge of the contest the ragtag assembly are hunted by mysterious and murderous landed gentry intent on ‘culling the herd’ of degenerate and unacceptable influences. Add into this mix of underachieving and limited intellect boys a collection of baked farmers and a local police station intent of glory beyond tracking the local and evasive bread thief and you have a movie that is pretty far from serious.

Written and directed by Ninian Doff in his feature film debut Get Duked! is a frivolous affair that is suitable for an hour and half of drama free entertainment. The young actors are capable and manage the difficult balance between being youths in trouble and characters you do not want to get injured or killed while several older actors get a chance to show off some comedic chops usually missing from the sort of parts that they play. I’m particularly thinking of Kate Dickie perhaps best known for her turn on Game of Thrones as the unbalance Lysa Arryn turning in a fine performance as the local chief constable desperate for glory and advancement.

The Scot accents in the film get a little heavy and with rapid overlapping dialog some viewers may wish to engage their television’s closed captioning systems to follow all of the voices but in general Get Duked! provides decent light-hearted escape from today’s terrible times.

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Discovery During Drafting

One of the things I hear fairly often from pantsers, writer who compose their text directly without a synopsis or outline guiding their writing, is that creating an outline feels to them like something that drains away surprise and spontaneity from their work.

Fair enough for them but I find that even with my extensive outline and synopsis building the pieces still manage to surprise me with revelation along the way.

My current work in process started with just the barest idea of who got killed, who killed them and why. Okay, that’s the essential elements for a murder mystery but hardly enough for me to fully understand the world or the characters so I moved on to extensive notes about the world.

I created these notes to explain to myself how the ship, which would take generations to reach its destination, worked, how the various groupings of people coalesced into stratified cultures and how all that impact the formation of character and motivation. That itself revealed some subtle changes to the original concept that deepen the ‘reality’ of the world.

Next I produced a bullet pointed act break down of the story as experience by my protagonist. I like working with acts not because the structure is king over all but because understanding how structure emerges from story illuminate what I need for this particular tale.

The curious thing and the discovery is that when I started making the bullet points for Act 1 I had a very simple understanding of the antagonists point of view, a very reductive reason for their actions, but when I reached Act 5 and the protagonists and the antagonists clash in a final revelation of truth not only had I discovered a deeper relationship between the two but the antagonist’s motivations had deepened. It because easier to see how they were the heroes of their own story and discovering this at this very early stage will make the prose outline a richer and better document with its own surprised which will repeat with the novel itself.

Somehow, I always have discoveries inside my thoroughly plotted stories, discoveries that would have eluded me had I tried to ‘pants’ my way through it.

This is not to say pantsing is a wrong approach merely that surprise and discovery is part of every process and you need to find the process that works for you.

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Horrors Ahead but It’s All Good

The horror I am referring to is not the dystopian political landscape, nor the hellish pandemic scarred terrain of our future for the next few months but rather to dark cinema, frightening film, that will shortly be coming into and enriching my life.

This week year 11 of the Horrible Imaginings Film Festival. Two years ago, the festival moved from its native city of San Diego to the Santa Ana in Orange county about an 80-minute drive from my home and in anticipation of days going back and forth to the festival I took several days off extending my weekend to five days. Of course, the pandemic has shattered these plans but the festival’s director Miguel Rodriguez has managed to keep the celebration alive by movie it online and this weekend I will still be watching blocks of short films and several features all of these from around our world. It will not be the same without the mingling in the theater’s lobby, discussing the films we just watched with the fans and filmmakers but in the depressing times we must find what joy we can.

This weekend will not be my only excursion into unknown horror cinema. Sunday night while doom scrolling through the terror that is my twitter feed, I came across a link of an older Finnish horror movie that the tweet described as a were-reindeer movie. I mentioned it to my sweetie-wife, who has a love of things Finnish, and soon we discovered the film The White Reindeer from 1952 was a Cannes and Golden Globe Award winning film inspired by pre-Christian Finnish folklore. Well, damn! That’s something we both need to see and bang a Blu-ray of a recent restoration has been ordered and should arrive from Germany later this month.

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Fight Your Motivated Reasoning

Motivated Reasoning is the process where, quite subconsciously, a person used their reasoning to arrive a conclusion that conforms to their already held preconceptions and notions avoid the unpleasant dilemma of changing their opinion about a subject.

People utilize their motivated reasoning skill in a variety of settings and problems but it always occurs for subject to which the person has attached a high personal value, usually related to an identity or core personality self-image. A person who thinks of themselves as generous will find all manner of ‘reason’s when faced with evidence of selfishness. A person devoted to a political faction will construct elaborate chains of logic to maintain that their chosen position and party are ‘good’ and not tainted but some misdeed. An artist who has poured deeply person feeling into a work is likely to reject criticism rather than reevaluate their process or technique. All of these actions and example are not evidence of a person being ‘bad’ or dishonest, often the motivated reasoning takes place below the level of awareness, it is a defensive mechanism.

The best way to combat it is to question not that which confronts your world view, or that which attacks your directly, but question those things, evidence, and conclusion that make you feel warm and safe. The lie that is most dangerous is the lie we want to believe. Seek out evidence and arguments contrary to your positions, and not argument that have been filtered through allies presenting the counterargument or you will simply be swayed by their own motivated reasoning. When you reach a conclusion that is alignment with what you already accept as right and proper be merciless on yourself for flaws in your reasoning and logic. This is not easy and it is a never-ending process but you cannot reach truth via self-delusion.

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Is the Mafia a Militia?

A common action among firearm rights supporters is to organize into independent militias invoking the phrasing of the second amendment as a support for their actions. This is often combined with a fairly strict anti-government mentality and a stated readiness to combat the government should it overreach. This bravado has been on display this year with displays pf tyrannical government overreach such as public health measures combating a lethal global pandemic.

The Mafia and organized crime in general whether it be Russian international criminals laundering millions of dollars through real estate or Baltimore youths dealing in street drugs are all armed and anti-government are they too also militias?

The question is ludicrous of course they are not but what divides the ‘militia’ from the ‘gang?’

It is important to remember that when the second amendment refers to a ‘well regulated militia,’ it is speaking of a common and well understand definition. The militia was an irregular force that could be called up and activated at the state’s requirement. The need for individuals to have a right to bear arms was essential as the militias were not funded and supplied by the several or individual states. Each man brought his arms and the commander of the local militia, and these were men of wealth and property, financed the heavier arms such as cannons. It is clear from history and intent that the second amendment is an individual right that supports the militia’s existence.

But any group of people with arms are not a militia.

When a group of people self-organize to enforce the law as they see it, pass judgement on guilt, and met of punishment, they are not a jury they are a mob and are not conducting a trail but a lynching.

As with a jury a militia is an arm of the state. A citizen can arm themselves to prepared to fulfill their duty to the state as a member of the militia but the activation and deployment of the militia is a state matter not one of personal preference or self-aggrandizement.

If you organize, cross state lines, and commit likely crimes you are not a ‘militia’ you are a gang.

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Defeating Trump is Merely the Eye of the Storm

Trump is not the storm that is battering our political shores. Trump is the storm surge, the destructive water crushing and eroding our norms and shattering the dykes of good governance but he is merely a product of the storm, an emergent property of the cyclone and should he be defeated in November, even if it is by margins so large and unquestionable that we are certain of the result on election night, the storm will not have passed but instead will have presented the false calm of its eye.

Without the benefits of aircraft, satellites and radar an approaching hurricane seems at first like a large but normal storm, there is nothing in the growing winds, darkening clouds, and sheets of rain to foretell the monster that is imminent. For decades the growing reactionary racism, rejections of reality, and insular inbred system of information of the Republican party and its supporting organization have been the building storm. Trump is not a sudden lightning strike that shatters the air and then vanishes he is the product of the building winds, the lowering pressure that pulls the sea from its bed to wash away civilization. While the storm surge deals tremendous damage, it is not the most dangerous part of the hurricane that is the eye wall where the winds are the fastest and can rip tress from their roots and houses from their foundations.

When you pass through the eye wall into the storm’s eye the winds vanish, the skies clear, and the calm can lure you to your death. Because when the other side of the eye brings the storm back it does not build slowly as it did before but rather the winds go from calm to full force in moments, now battered weakened and damaged structures from the opposite direction, shattering weaking building with the sudden force.

Trump defeat will be a moment of clam but Trumpism, the vile, racist approach to American governance will not have vanished. The attacks, spurious and hyperbolic on the new administration will, with their resemblance to GOP behavior during the previous Democratic Administrations, seem like a return to normalcy and like the hurricane’s eye we must not be lulled into compliancy or expect that the worst is over. 2022 and 2024 will be end of the eye and the return to the fight for survival and we must be ready for it. The storm surge will have passed but not the storm.

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I Miss the Theatrical Experience

All of my life I have been a fa of movies. My earliest memory is of some Hammer Frankenstein in lurid color at a drive in in North Carolina. I can vividly recall sitting in the Sunrise theater in Ft Pierce Florida watch Escape from the Planet of the Apes, and while in the navy the day before we deployed to the Western Pacific for a six-month cruise, I spent twelve hours in various theaters watching movie after movie. In short going out to a movie is a valuable experience for me and one that I have dearly missed since the pandemic induced shut started in March.

On social media I can see that in some states the theaters are re-opening with enhanced procedures to help fight the spread of COVID-19 but not yet here in California and honestly as much as I miss the experience I’m very hesitant to return to that sort of public exposure without the benefit of a vaccine.

I am not passing judgement on others if they are taking every available precaution but this is not a game and people are dying. I know that with the medication I take for my arthritis avoiding infection is particularly important for me and that’s a major if not the dominate factor in my thinking. But I also interact with others, albeit fewer that I have before this crisis started, and I must do my part in preventing to spread, sparing my community, my friends, and my loved ones.

Despite my 55″ 4K television watching movies at home is not the same experience but for 2020 it will have to suffice.

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