Balance

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Spring came early this year.  I’m not talking about Punxsutawney Phil, but rather the fact that a leap year shifts the vernal equinox a day forward.  According to experts, spring begins today.  In The Wicker Man (it’s about oh so much more than the movie!) I discuss the seasonal holidays of the Celts.  The vernal equinox was surely known, but the beginning of spring was understood to be Imbolc, around February 2.  Since their summer began on May Day (thus the eponymous Wicker Man), the equinox was halfway through spring.  Modern paganism traces the equinox celebrations back to Ostara.  The day takes its name from the germanic goddess Ēostre, who also gave her name to Easter.  The holidays were intertwined, just as Christmas was entangled with Yule.

I find the equinoxes and solstices times for a spiritual pause.  Sure, there’s the simple astronomical fact of equality of light and dark, but there’s also something more.  Something that feels cosmic and that helps direct our destiny.  From now on there will be more light than dark.  But only for six months.  Even with Daylight Saving Time, our capture of light is of limited duration.  It makes sense to make use of the light while we have it.  Of course, those of us who rise early end up falling asleep before dark, but even so it’s starting to get lighter in the mornings again.  The equinox is a time for reflection.  And like most times for reflection, business doesn’t recognize it as a holiday.  Who ever heard of a holiday on a Tuesday?

The thing about spiritual messages is that they often come to you rather than the other way around.  At certain times, however, conditions are just right for something to break through.  It does require some listening, however.  So today, as nature holds everything in balance, try to take an unrushed moment to ponder.  For some of us it may come before the fury of work tears through our peaceful meditations, while for others it may come with the calm that five o’clock brings.  However we find it, this is a special time because this day is unusual.  It is a time of balance.  We all know how rare such things are in life in a topsy-turvy world.  The earliest flowers are already blooming around here, suggesting that as light increases so will hope greet us, if we watch for it.  The world is full of wonder, and an equinox is a time to look for it.

Bigger Picture

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One of the quirks of my thought process is that I tend to look for the bigger picture.  I’ve always done this and I suspect it drives some people batty when they ask me a question and I begin to answer from what seems to be a tangent.  (I also think this is why I performed well in the classroom.)  So, when I saw the article by Eric Holloway on Mind Matters, titled “Why Is Theology the Most Important Empirical Science,” I had to take a look.  Mostly a series of bullet-points that point out some of the religiously-motivated ideas that led to scientific discoveries, the article is useful.  My penchant for the big picture goes a bit broader, however.  The entire worldview in which the scientific process was born, and thus its underlying presuppositions, are religious.  Science and religion are the dogs and cats of the thought world but I’ve seen dogs and cats live happily together.

Science has always been with us.  Early peoples weren’t benighted troglodytes.  They observed, hypothesized, drew conclusions.  Science as we understand it, however, began in the Middle Ages in Europe, drawing on observations from earlier thought in the Arab world.  The context in that Arab world was solidly Muslim.  The Middle Ages in Europe were solidly Christian.  None of this discounts the contributions of Jews to the whole, it’s merely an observation regarding the larger cultural outlook.  Many of the principles of science even today (for example, that people are categorically different from other animals) are based on those religious worldviews.  We seldom go back to question whether we might’ve gotten something fundamentally wrong.  Meanwhile, the dogs began to chase the cats.

College as a religion major involved a lot of discussions about basic presuppositions.  Then questioning them.  Not much of this went on in the classroom (Grove City was, and is, a conservative Christian school).  The wonderful thing about higher education is the bringing together of people with different outlooks.  It was those after-hours conversations that helped form my questing nature.  I’d already started asking bigger questions when I was a child, annoying my parents and, I suspect, sometimes vexing clergy.  A single human mind is too limited to grasp it all, but it seems to me to deny religion a place at the table is to leave out massive amounts of human experience.  Of course, economics, the dismal science, seems well on the way to eliminating the study of religion in higher education.  And we will have lost, if this happens, a large piece of the bigger picture.

Photo credit: NASA

Monster v. Alien

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“Horror” is a faulty genre category.  Nobody quite knows where its boundaries lie.  Take Predator, for instance.  I recently watched it for the first time although I’d known about it since I was in seminary.  I am not a fan of tough-guy movies, so it took the fact that it’s sometimes coded as “horror” to get me to watch it.  Horror is often defined as a genre that has to have a monster.  Check.  We got your monster right over here.  The monster’s an alien but so is, well, Alien.  An action-adventure, sci-fish movie with a monster—is that horror?  I knew I had to see it for the sake of completion.  I’d heard of Predator vs. Alien (haven’t seen), and enough people comment on Predator that I was beginning to feel hopelessly outdated.  Or even more hopelessly outdated.

I presume the rest of the world saw it long ago, but I didn’t even know the plot.  A group of tough-guys are duped into a covert operation that allows for many explosions and bodies flying through the air.  Then they have to get out of the jungle alive because there’s an alien sportsman on the loose.  Apparently he likes earth for a good challenge since he won’t hunt somebody who’s unarmed.  He wipes out Arnold Schwarzenegger’s team—and to the film’s credit, the Black guys don’t die first.  There’s time for that, of course.  As they tromp through the jungle shirts come off because the guys are all ripped, of course.  One of the team, Billy, decides to fight without a gun so when it’s down to just Arnold and the alien the predator decides fisticuffs will settle this in a manly way.  When Schwarzenegger’s trap mortally wounds said predator, it sets off a bomb that allows for the biggest explosion of all.

So is this horror?  Hulu thinks so.  Schwarzenegger apparently thought it ended up as sci-fi horror—which is a thing.  It’s a thing because horror is a poor genre.  It’s ill-defined.  You kinda know when you’ve just seen a western or a romance.  But lots of horror films are disputed.  Critics repeatedly opine that The Shining isn’t horror.  Neither is The Exorcist.  Of course, both always wind up near the top of horror list movies.  Horror movies don’t win academy awards, as a rule.  Still, “horror” fans seek movies out that others classify as drama, or even action-adventure.  Horror is close kin with science fiction, another disputed genre.  The two are often quite distinct, however.  So, did I watch a horror movie this weekend?  I honestly can’t say.

Forewarning

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The Devil’s Advocates series, as you learn from pitching and writing one, promotes alternative views on horror films.  Adrian Schober’s treatment of The Omen doesn’t disappoint.  Each time I read one of these little volumes I’m always amazed at how many ideas can be packed into such a small space.  Schober’s take on the film is that Damien’s role is left intentionally ambiguous.  There was disagreement between the screenwriter (David Seltzer) and the director (Richard Donner) on that point.  Donner wanted it to be left up to the audience whether Damien was the Antichrist or not.  Seltzer, not being a believer himself, wanted to be clear that the boy was evil.  As portrayed in the final film, however, Damien seems awfully vulnerable, in retrospect.  (I rewatched the movie before reading the book.)

I’ve seen The Omen a number of times.  It has never been my favorite movie and I actually read the book (a novelization) before I ever saw the film.  Having grown up as a fundamentalist, I believed that we were in the end times (which only really seemed likely starting in November 2016).  The movie had to wait until I was an adult (I read the novelization when the film first came out).  I can see the ambiguity now, having read this book.  There remain, however, some things difficult to explain about the presentation—how Fr. Brennan knows Katherine is pregnant and that Damien will be the cause of her miscarriage.  The extreme coincidence of both the priest and the boy having the same birthmark that looks like 666.  And that someone would go through the trouble of burying a jackal and Thorn’s actual son in an obscure Etruscan cemetery just in case the Ambassador ever got suspicious and wanted to check it out.  

Interestingly, different markets altered the ending, enhancing the ambiguity.  The final scene had originally been shot with three coffins rather than two, and that changes things, doesn’t it?  Movies are, of course, subject to interpretation.  Any form of media is.  The fact remains that many viewers flocked from theaters believing Damien was the Antichrist.  Schober’s book would give pause, however, about rushing to conclusions.  The idea for the movie was suggested initially by a marketer who was a true believer in premillennial dispensationalism (essentially the worldview of Keith Jennings in the movie), and some Catholic officials objected.  Different Christian sects have very different interpretations about the end of the world.  And this movie is subject to different interpretations.  This brief book might just change your mind.

Finding Books

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This is a public service announcement to those who try to find books that aren’t issued by one of the big publishers.  I’m not shy about saying that my books all fall into that category.  One of the things I’ve noticed is that books feed out to different internet venues at an odd rate, before they’re published.  Some publishers use what they call New Book Announcements (NBAs) to get the metadata out to wholesalers, distributors, and other vendors.  Sometimes a book comes to public light in strange ways.  I’ve had my eye on a book that a friend pointed out.  I don’t know how they heard about it, but I went searching for it and found it on Barnes & Noble’s website, but not Amazon.  Well, that’s not quite true.  It is on Amazon, but not in North America.  Amazon China and Amazon Singapore have it, but you can’t find it here.  Yet.

I noticed a similar thing with The Wicker Man.  An anxious author, I kept searching for it online when I didn’t hear from the publisher.  It was first announced at German booksellers.  Eventually it got around to English-speaking sites, and eventually (it took a few months after publication), it became available in “all channels.”  Although, several websites still only list the hardback which retails for more than a dollar a page.  Now that’s inflation!  Even $40 for such a short paperback is a lot, but that’s why I’m looking for anything but an academic publisher for the next book.  But there’s a larger issue here.

Like old Joe, I sometimes can’t remember things.  I have an elaborate and Byzantine set of reminders that fit my neurological profile (mostly).  For books I want to remember to look up after they’re published (I can’t generally afford to buy them right away, so this takes advanced planning), I have an online list.  That online list is associated with a bookseller and I can’t easily add to my list until the book appears on said seller’s site.  I suppose I could write it down in my zibaldone, but will I recall that I wrote it there?  (Those little notebooks get filled up pretty quickly.)  It would just be easier if information on the internet could feed out instantaneously.  If, say, Amazon Singapore could let Amazon USA know that a book that is publishing in the United States can be listed—well, wouldn’t that make sense?  Systems are complicated.  So complex, in fact, that architects must be hired to keep them in order.  Or maybe books could be announced when they’re actually available? What? Lose the buzz?  In the meantime I’ll put a bookmark in this page and hope that I remember to look it up when the time comes.

A Different Legion

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Religion and horror can play well together.  They can also be unevenly matched.  Although Legion has been on my list since shortly after it came out, my impression after having watched it is that the angels are strangely corporeal.  Their fights are physical with very little supernatural involved.  I suppose that’s why it’s generally classified as “action,” but the premise is one that suggests a bit more supernatural would’ve been welcome.  The writing suffers from any number of ailments, and the ending leaves you wondering just how good God is supposed to be in this telling.  I suppose a plot synopsis might help.

A pregnant waitress in a remote diner is nearly at term.  The Archangel Michael has come to earth in Los Angeles (get it?) and has armed himself to protect this unborn baby.  He comes to the diner where the owner and his son, his cook, and four customers are holed up against what they think is a demon attack.  Michael eventually reveals that the arriving hordes are not demons, but humans possessed by angels.  God has decided to wipe out the human race again, this time with angelic mercenaries.  If the waitress’s baby survives, however, the world will be saved.  So there’s lots of shooting, and although a white guy dies first, the only two Black characters are the next victims, of course.  To kill angels, it turns out, you have to shoot them.  Who knew?  In the end, which pits Gabriel against Michael, it’s revealed that God was testing the loyalty of his angels by giving them this task.  Mindless obedience, God thinks, is wrong.  If people have to be killed to prove it, so be it.

The theme of the messianic baby stays intact but goes nowhere.  At the end it’s unclear if the angel attacks are still going on, but the waitress and her boyfriend, along with the baby, drive around heavily armed, ready to fight.  Did the angels get the message that they are being tested by God or are they, like many Republicans, simply following the “leader”?  Seeing the title and knowing nothing of the story, I had assumed this was a movie about demons.  The “Legion,” of course, is angelic but there’s not a lot transcendent about them.  Even the use of wings (which are bulletproof), makes this feel like Dogma without the humor.  I knew religion would be involved in this horror, but I didn’t know how poorly it was played out.  Still, it would fit into Holy Sequel, if it ever happens.

Filming the Void

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Once you move away from major studios, it turns out that Lovecraftian horror is rather prevalent.  Seeing that The Void was rated higher than many offerings on FreeVee, well, why not.  It was compared to the intellectual works of Benson and Morehead, but to me it matches more closely with Older Gods.  Like many movies in this genre, The Void isn’t easy to follow and having commercial interruptions doesn’t help.  (In movies made for television, directors know to offer cues at specified times to allow for a break.  I’m not sure that those at FreeVee, or Tubi, or Plex, or their ilk, or even Hulu, know how to do this well.)  So there are these mysterious cultists—somehow “new religionists” just doesn’t seem to cut it—who apparently want to bring about the apotheosis of their leader in a rural setting. 

Meanwhile a local sheriff finds a young man fleeing from a couple of guys who are killing people and takes him to the hospital.  This hospital, however, is being closed down and there’s only a skeleton crew there to handle emergencies until it can be decommissioned.  Once the guys trying to kill the young man arrive, the hospital is surrounded by the cultists.  By the way, there will be spoilers—just saying.  It never is adequately explained how these killing guys know who these cultists are, unless it happened so fast that I missed it.  In any case, all trapped in the hospital there’s the problem with a monster that has tentacles (Lovecraftian) that takes over the body of a nurse, then a tries to get a state policeman.  Lots of axes and gunfire, and the numbers in the hospital are reducing.

It turns out that the kindly old doctor is the leader of the cult and he’s trying to raise the old gods so that he can bring his daughter back to life.  The sheriff, who’s been the protagonist all along, knocks said doctor into the eponymous void, leaving only two people alive in the hospital.  It’s not really explained where the cultists, who made it into the hospital, went.  Nevertheless, this is a good example of horror and religion (which is ironically Lovecraftian).  The doctor’s unconventional religion is the cause behind the hospital mayhem, and, apparently the killings being conducted by the interlopers are attempts to stop it.  As a horror film it’s effective, if a bit disjointed.  It seems that there’s still a lot to unpack from films that try to bring Lovecraft’s ideas onto the silver screen, major studio or not.

Time Flees

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I can’t speak for all early risers, of course, but for me the absolute worst thing about this useless tradition of switching to Daylight Saving Time is the loss of morning light.  I’m in favor of keeping DST all the time, as the US Senate has voted to do.  The only reason this is still an issue is to give the House yet something else to fight about.  How dysfunctional are we, really?  This one’s a no brainer!  Look, I start work early every day.  I jog before work because I’m too tired afterward.  In late February to early March I can get out and back before seven.  (In the summer before six!)  Then DST happens.  I’m plunged into another month of waiting until seven to be able to jog.  DST is just one of those ridiculous things we just keep doing because we don’t have the will to change it.  We’d rather fight.

I’ve been thinking a lot about time lately.  How we think of it, how we divide it.  We sometimes lose sight of the larger picture.  If relativity is right, the stars we see at night are, many of them, long gone.  We’re seeing light trudging through the near vacuum of space, or maybe dark matter, and thinking how we’ve got to get to our meeting on time.  How we need to be at work from 9-2-5.  How somebody with money owns that portion of our time.  There’s a reason that DST starts on a weekend.  Time.  We can’t grasp it but we can waste it.  What are we waiting for?  Some of us are seeking the truth.  Even so we know that Morpheus was right—time is always against us.  It’s a limited commodity, but even that language cheapens it.

Those of us of a philosophical bent allow ourselves time to ponder such things.  We call time a dimension, but what does that really mean?  Theoretically it can be traveled along in either direction (again, pending relativity) but we only experience it in one.  So what do we do?  We interrupt its flow because during a war during the last century it was deemed that industry could be more productive if it were light an hour later.  Maybe we should just all agree to shift our perception of time ahead by an hour permanently.  That’s forward thinking.  And who knows, it might just save us all a lot of time.

Look Out Beneath

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Rainy weekend afternoons were made for monster flicks.  That’s what I was thinking when I settled on The Devil Below.  I was also thinking, “this is free on Amazon Prime.”  The best word  I can think to describe it is lackluster.  Sometimes I’ll see a movie and a couple weeks later will have trouble remembering what it was about without severe prompting.  This may fall into that category.  We’ll see.  In any case, Arianne—is she Ariadne?—researches and leads groups to inaccessible locations for a fee.  She can find anywhere.  A group of “scientists” want to find a coal mine in Kentucky that caught fire (like Centralia), and explore it for possible high-grade anthracite.  What they don’t know is that monsters live in the mine and they escape from time to time.  The former mine owner has formed a ragtag group of helpers who keep the monsters at bay.  They don’t ask for help.

So far, nothing really stands out.  What makes this movie worth discussing is the dialogue about religion and science that the scientists have.  Unfortunately the writing is poor and that means the dialogue isn’t very sophisticated.  For example, one of the geologists argues that intelligent design isn’t opposed to science.  What said scientist doesn’t know is that intelligent design was intentionally invented by creationists as an alternative to science.  Its roots are clear and unambiguous.  This member of the team doesn’t believe they should really be doing this—the mine is behind an electrified fence and the locals keep trying to chase them off.  And he’s talking about God while there’s, well, devils below.

It’s never really explained why these creatures are considered devils, unless they live close to “Hell,” being underground and all.  We don’t get many clear views of these monsters but they eat what they can get, which makes you wonder what they survived on before miners showed up on the menu.  In the end, all the scientists get eaten—it turns out that their leader was actually working for big industry, not a university, as he’d claimed—and you don’t feel too bad for them.  Arianne survives and decides to stay with the locals to fight the monsters.  There’s some faith talk among them as well, which makes me wonder if the writers maybe had a hidden agenda.  Although the article does score a Wikipedia article, many of those involved, including the writer and the star, don’t have their own entries.  And who has the time to mine the internet for more answers?  There you might find the devil below, I suppose.

Boo-Boo

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After an unfortunate encounter with a paper-cutter in which one of my thumbs didn’t fare so well, I sought a bandage.  This led me on a reverie since the bandage I found was in a box that I’d brought home from my mother’s apartment.  Mom was a practical woman and I’m sure she would’ve approved, although the item was selected in a moment of grief that still hasn’t completely dissipated.  As my wife was binding my wound the thought recurred that my mother wouldn’t be needing these physical assuagements any longer.  Like all of us, if cut she bled.  She’s beyond that now.  A person’s affects linger and contain pieces of their memories.  This particular box was plastic and therefore reusable—which is precisely what Mom did.  She taught me how to bandage myself and I’ve used that knowledge many times over the decades.  It’s something I don’t need YouTube to figure out.  Time is a gift.

When writing about recent times, I recently learned new vocabulary regarding decades.  For example, the first two decades when I was culturally aware were the seventies and eighties.  Together they’re known as the xennial period, named, presumably, after “generation X.”  (I’m a very late boomer, as well as a late bloomer.)  I found that fascinating.  Then I was reading something that made reference to the “noughties.”  This delightful word is the British term for “aughts” or “aughties”—the years between ’00 and ’09 of any given century.  We hear plenty about the “twenties,” “thirties,” and so on, so I became curious about the correct term for the second decade of a century.  Either “tens” or “teens” is acceptable, but it seems that in formal writing this should be transcribed by numbers. I guess teen ages are always difficult.

Our divisions of time demonstrate our preoccupation with both mortality and round numbers.  More and more people are living the entire way through a century, from aughties through nineties.  For most of us, however, we can, if things go well, use our birth decade as a rough guide.  I’m not likely to make it through the fifties, but it isn’t impossible.  If I do I guess I’ll need to upgrade my WordPress account because my daily posts will have used up my allotted memory by then.  In the meantime, I do need to buy some new bandages for the time in between.  When I do I’ll put them in a simple plastic box, and I will remember the gift of time I shared with my mother.

The Third

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I don’t know what possessed me—and I use that verb intentionally—to suggest Shrek the Third for weekend viewing.  Apart from a Rosemary’s Baby and Exorcist mashup scene, it is a bad movie.  I’ve been watching bad movies over the past few months, and developing an aesthetic for them, but I just can’t warm to Shrek the Third.  The first two movies were quite good, and sequels frequently struggle.  I’m trying to put my finger on why this one leaves such a bad taste in a viewer’s mouth.  For one thing, it’s the writing.  Not as snappy or crisp as the first two, it drags with politically correct emotional adjustment as Arthur tries to learn to be king and Shrek reconciles with being a father.  What happened to the histrionics of Lord Farquad?  Or the cluelessness of the fairy tale creatures with no leader?  Instead there are hugs and reassurances.

Not that hugs and reassurances are bad, but they’re not Shrek material.  Sudden character shifts don’t help either.  The real thing, however, seems to me, to be the music.  Many movies patch in contemporary songs to set the mood.  The first two Shreks did this remarkably well, with one narrowly edging out two in several places.  The Third lacks this artistry.   The pop songs chosen just don’t fit.  They tank the mood time and again.  Music is important.  It can make or break a film.  In this case it’s only one problem.  To me even the animation seems rushed.

There is an aesthetic to bad movies.  I guess I was hoping to find it here (I’d seen it before, years ago).  Maybe badness in movies is harder to make good when they’re animated.  There’s an intentionality about everything when you know everything on screen was planned to appear exactly as it does.  Good bad movies entertain.  There’s a reason we come back to them, even knowing they’re not great.  As someone who’s written for his entire literate life, I tend to think that good writing can redeem most movies.  We can put up with low budget effects if the writing is strong.  There’s a reason Casablanca is a classic, despite the low budget.  The Third has the tag line, “The best Shrek yet.”  Considering the bar set by the first two, that was a boast not likely based on anything like facts.  Or taste.  I’ve got to wonder, however, when big budget animations start going off the rails, when is it decided to simply let them go and hope that a classic will emerge?

Verb Choice

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I can’t remember who started it.  Somehow, though, when I watch movies on Amazon Prime, the closed captioning kicks in.  I generally don’t mind this too much since some dialogue is whispered or indistinct.  I also presume some kind of AI does it and it makes mistakes.  That’s not my concern today, however.  Today it’s word choice.  Humans of a certain stripe are good at picking the correct verb for an action.  I’ve been noticing that the closed captions often select the wrong word and it distracts me from the movie.  (Plus, they include some diegetic sounds but not others, and I wonder why.)  For example, when a character snorts (we’re all human, we know what that is), AI often selects “scoffs.”  Sometimes snorting is scoffing, but often it’s not.  Maybe it’s good the robots don’t pick up on the subtle cues.

This isn’t just an AI problem—I first noticed it a long time ago.  When our daughter was young we used to get those Disney movie summary books with an accompanying cassette tape (I said it was a long time ago) that would read the story.  Besides ruining a few movies for me, I sometimes found the verb choices wrong.  For example, in Oliver (which I saw only once), the narrator at one point boldly proclaims that “Fagan strode into the room.”  Fagan did not stride.  A stride is not the same thing as a shuffle, or a slump.  Words have connotations.  They’re easily found in a dictionary.  Why do those who produce such things not check whether their word choice accurately describes the action?

So when I’m watching my weekend afternoon movies, I want the correct word to appear in the closed captioning.  Since the nouns generally occur in the dialogue itself, it’s the verbs that often appear off.  Another favorite AI term is “mock.”  Does a computer know when it’s being mocked?  Can it tell the scoff in my keystrokes?  Does it have any feelings so as to care?  AI may be here to stay, but human it is not.  I’ve always resented it a bit when some scientists have claimed our brains are nothing but computers.  We’re more visceral than that.  We evolved naturally (organically) and had to earn the leisure to sit and make words.  Then we made them fine.  So fine that we called them belles lettres.  They can be replicated by machine, but they can’t be felt by them.  And I have to admit that a well-placed snort can work wonders on a dreary day.

A Different Zone

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I haven’t read Stephen King’s The Dead Zone yet, but it’s on my list.  That’s why I was a little reluctant to watch the movie.  It was free on Amazon Prime, however, and I reasoned to myself that I’d seen The Shining and Carrie before reading the books.  Indeed, my earliest introduction to Stephen King was through movies.  (Well, I did read one of his short stories in high school, but the novel side of things came later.)  When the opening credits revealed it was directed by David Cronenberg I wondered what I was in for.  I didn’t know the story, but I hadn’t heard of this as a Cronenberg body horror spectacle either.  It was quite cold outside and I was nodding off, so why not.

The thing is, it’s not always listed as horror.  That’s a faulty genre designation, as is sci-fi.  There’s one futuristic scene in the movie and it lasts for just over a minute.  Does that make it sci-fi?  Also, I  realized, it deals with clairvoyance and for similar reasons the X-Files are also listed as science fiction.  Paranormal, it seems, is permanently ruled out of the realm of possibility by assigning it an improbable genre.  Well, back to the zone.  I figure the title will be better explained by King, but there is a brief scene explaining what a dead zone is.  The story follows Johnny Smith, a schoolteacher who becomes clairvoyant, although it manifests itself only after a car accident and a coma.  The main purpose of this, at least through the movie lens, is to prevent a Trump-like populist from being elected president.  That is the horror part, I guess.  And it’s becoming clear to me that writers were warning about these things since the seventies.

Unlike many of my weekend movies, I’d actually heard of The Dead Zone before.  There are some horror tropes present.  It begins with Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” and has a few other horror references tossed in.  Still, it’s a very human story.  The movie probes the difficulties of a life with special abilities.  Johnny never gets over the woman he was going to marry before his coma, and he feels for those whose futures he sees.  The movie is fairly slowly paced and it drops a few threads, again, likely found in the novel.  In the book or movie debate I generally go for book first, but that often leads to disappointment on the silver screen.  Maybe this was the right order to go this time around.  Once I read the novel I guess I’ll know.  Or at least have an opinion.

Web Dark

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I know, I know.  My hours are odd, but I’m not the only one awake at this time.  So home alone one weekend—hands slapping sides of face, mouth gaping open—I decided to go grocery shopping at six, when the store opens.  It was a frosty morning and I hadn’t yet shaken the chill from getting out from the covers and throwing on clothes before the thermostat fully awoke.  I checked the store website.  Hours: six to eleven.  Off I drove.  Not trusting any kind of authority, really, I was glad to see several cars in the parking lot.  I gathered my reusable bags and approached.  The sliding doors weren’t welcoming that morning.  I tried the other side since sometimes they lock the south doors until later.  Same results.  Then I saw the hours: seven to eleven.  Trust no one.

I had an hour to wait and the car was still cold.  I drove back home, pondering the unreliability of the web.  At least with a phone book you could take a big, thick tome in and point to the ad—“it says six a.m.!”  Websites are, of course, not always updated.  Maybe the six a.m. opening was a pandemic thing.  (I’m still waiting for the web to tell me the pandemic is over.)  Somebody, however, didn’t bother to update the website.  And I was shivering.  Steam coming out of my ears would’ve been welcome to warm my fingers at this point.  Now, I know that neglected things fall apart.  Abandoned houses can have trees growing through them, for goodness sake.  But if you’re a colossal food chain can you not pay to have your website updated?

Broken links lie scattered like glass shards across the internet.  The other day I tried to check out an independent small publisher only to land on the entry page to a porno site.  The publisher had gone under and the domain name sold.  Look, all I want to do is get groceries and get back home so that I can get my weekend activities underway.  I may be on my own for the day but that doesn’t mean I’m planning to waste my time.  Instead I have to go back home, back the car into its slot, unlock the back door (which is friendly), put my hands on the radiator for a few minutes, and then turn around, go out, and try again.  I suppose I could use the time to surf the web, but honestly, I don’t really trust what I might find there.

A Little Flat

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I remember hearing about Flatliners when it came out.  It was during an era when I wasn’t watching many movies and the idea of a movie all about dying bothered me.  Well, I’m older now and I watch movies because I write about them.  So I gave Flatliners a try.  It wasn’t bad—a cut above what I often end up watching on a lazy winter weekend afternoon.  In case your memory’s rusty, here’s how it goes: five med school students decide to experiment with controlled death and resuscitation.  They do this to find out what’s after death.  Confident in both science and their abilities, they one-by-one undergo the procedure to see what awaits beyond.  The experience is different for each of the four that does it.  It can be pleasant, or not.  More not.

Then the experiences from the beyond begin to break through into their alive lives.  But not the good stuff.  The word that these scientists use is, interestingly, “sin.”  The sins of their pasts come back to them.  One of them realizes that to free himself from this haunting, he has to make amends to a person he offended as a child.  The apology—and forgiveness—works.  Eventually the four pay the price and, perhaps, are a bit wiser for it.  This isn’t a great film but it does raise a number of issues that demonstrate how religion and horror relate.  Death is a religious issue, no matter how secular someone is.  As the definition of life becomes more complex, its cessation becomes more fraught.  Here medical students are grappling with their very vocation.  They ease suffering and prolong life.

I suspect one of the reasons the movie failed to make it big was that the “sins” are unevenly repaid.  An accidental death from a childhood of bullying is the worst.  A past of womanizing seems to have a relatively light, and predictable outcome.  And what is the sin in discovering a war veteran parent’s addiction to an opioid?  In a sense it’s classic Sunday school—you get punished for your wrongs.  Some suffer, however, from mistakes that others made.  Or for which others egged them on, and in which others participated.  And for us vegans, even egging someone on might be a sin.  The value of the movie seems to be less how it’s executed and more about the potential for discussion that it raises.  Death is no stranger to cinema, and it can’t fail to make the living curious.  That seems worth talking about.