Dave’s Blog – Page 47

St. Louis Train Beating: Lessons Learned

April 1, 2015 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

This story has made the rounds for a few days now. As responsible adults, we need to dig a little deeper into both the coverage of the event and the event itself:

“When one man sat down next to a second man in a St. Louis light rail car and asked him his opinion on the shooting of Michael Brown, it was not the beginning of a discussion.

It was the start of an assault, police said.

The second man, who was white, didn’t want to answer the question. Then the first man, who was black, boxed him in the face. Two more African-American men joined in the beating, according to a police report about Monday’s incident.”

Odd that the writer, Ben Brumfield, used the term “boxed” here instead of “struck” or “punched”. Why is that? To mitigate the savagery of the attack? I’ve never heard the word “boxed” used like this outside of a specific reference to the sport of boxing, the metaphorical enclosure of someone or something, or the actual use of a physical box.

As with all violent encounters, it’s terrible that this happened, but it’s worse if we don’t learn anything from it. The biggest takeaway is that the victim was profiled before the actual attack. While this particular assault is a bit peculiar for its lack of a robbery (perhaps another chapter in the Knockout Game), it was still brutal. And unnecessary. I’m not blaming the victim when I say that if the victim had taken steps to make himself a less attractive target, I’d be looking for a different story to write about.

Before we go further, watch this video of the attack with the sound on. The audio is important. I’ll wait.

What’s striking is that the person who shot the video knew that an attack was imminent. The videographer knew that the guy was going to get victimized. So did everyone else on that train except for the victim. We’ll ignore the videographer’s sniggering and tittering other than to say that it’s particularly disgusting.

This assault started before the attacker asked to borrow the victim’s cell phone. It began in the profiling phase, when the victim sat down on the train, oblivious to his surroundings. At that moment, the attacker knew out of everyone on that train who he was going to punch. (We’ll save the racial elements for a different discussion.) Everything followed from that profiling phase, including asking to use the victim’s cell phone (who does that?), sitting next to the victim, asking the victim a racially charged question, and reacting to the victim’s non-answer. At every one of those points, the victim could have done something to change the outcome, but didn’t. He ignored them, probably scared but hoping nothing would happen. You leave them alone, they’ll leave you alone, right?

Wrong.

We have to learn from his mistakes and not do what he did. How do we do that? Remember these five easy steps:

Always carry a weapon. Always. Especially if circumstances force you to travel at night. Gun, knife, pepper spray, whatever: if you don’t have a weapon of some kind on you at all times, you’re putting yourself at unnecessary risk. Practice accessing and deploying your weapon under duress. Take your personal safety seriously.
If you’re tired, suck it up and don’t look tired. Look alert. Take visible notice of your surroundings. If I’m a felon, I’m going to go after the guy who looks tired and oblivious over the guy who looks like he’s going to be a problem every single time.
Failing that, when someone who’s obviously up to no good wants something from you, leave. Get out of there. Switch train cars. Move to a place where you have enough room to access and deploy your weapon of choice. Don’t interact with him. He’ll call you a pussy and ask if you’re afraid of him. Remember that you have more to lose than he does and get away.
If you can’t run, at least stand up. Don’t just sit there. A serious person who’s got a plan for his own defense is unattractive as a victim. Once you’re up, get that weapon out. If you think that’s extreme, remember the context: you were sitting there, minding your own business, when a person or people who gave you a legitimate reason to be concerned (that scared feeling in your gut is a legitimate reason) got into your personal space and wouldn’t let you move away. He’s already assaulted you by arresting your movement.
If after steps 2, 3, and 4, plus firm verbal demands for your attacker to back off haven’t worked, you’ll have to get proactive in your own defense. Every situation is different, obviously, but just remember that as a peaceful, law-abiding citizen, you have a legal and moral right to defend yourself.

I’m not a lawyer, so don’t take any of this as legal advice. It’s ugly. It’s scary to think about. It’s difficult. And it’s part of being an adult. Your personal defense is your responsibility. Own it.

In more situations than anyone would like to admit, being a victim is often a choice. Choose something else.

Movie Review: Truth or Die

March 30, 2015 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

Truth or Die is a movie that is extremely English insofar as the characters all have very stiff upper lips and, like an afternoon tea, there’s nothing in it to particularly discomfit or terrify you.

Which is unfortunate, because it’s supposed to be a horror film.

There are some interesting bits in it, including a fairly horrible death scene, but for the most part it’s pedestrian, boring, and not worth your time. It suffers from the problem plaguing many horror films: bad things happening to unlikable people, so it’s hard to care about any of it.

The Bad Guy: I’m one of those people who almost always roots for the bad guy in movies. Pleasantly, the best thing about Truth or Die was David Oakes’s portrayal of antagonist Justin, a psychopathic military veteran. Creepy, physically strong without being infallible, he managed to bring both menace and a tiny bit of humanity into the role. You want him to see his work done, you want him to win, but unfortunately, that didn’t happen, which was disappointing. Someone like him shouldn’t have been vanquished the way he was, but the movie had to have a happy ending, of sorts. A shame, really.
Whodunit: That was a bit of a surprise, which made it enjoyable. The problem was that the rationale for sending the postcard, while plausible, seemed very last minute. The character gave no indication of feeling that way earlier in the film, which made it too sudden, too sloppy.
Stiff Upper Lips: Paul, Chris, Gemma, and Eleanor were all quite tough. Paul’s gunshot wound didn’t seem to pain him as much as being kneecapped might a normal person, and the defiance all four seemed willing to give to Justin would have been admirable if it wasn’t so unbelievable. None of them panicked. They all found incredible steel inside of them when it was needed. I didn’t buy it.
Femme Fatale: Eleanor proved to be at least as psychotic as Justin and twice as tough, which didn’t make sense outside of a writer or producer’s requirement to have a super-strong female character. Didn’t like her, didn’t find her sexy, didn’t find her interesting, didn’t find her believable.
The End: The rationale behind Felix hanging himself was way too complicated. Did they really need that much backstory, with corporate intrigue, blackmail, gay sex, and a bizarre family code of honor to uphold? Especially when it’s all just spat out at the last five minutes?

Truth or Die gets two stars out of five.

The Prophecy’s Angels as Immature, Brutal Childen

March 25, 2015 by David Dubrow 2 Comments

Gregory Widen’s The Prophecy is an extraordinary, imaginative film that shows angels in a much different light from the celestial beings humanized by television shows like Touched by an Angel and articles in Reader’s Digest. Widen’s angels are brutal, savage, animalistic. Rather than create an angel mythology out of whole cloth, Widen mined the Bible for angelic references to show us that angels are, in their hearts, killers.

This central theme is stated quite clearly when Thomas Daggett, the protagonist, says, “Did you ever notice how in the Bible, whenever God needed to punish someone, or make an example, or whenever God needed a killing, he sent an angel? Did you ever wonder what a creature like that must be like? A whole existence spent praising your God, but always with one wing dipped in blood. Would you ever really want to see an angel?”

Physically, Widen’s angels display birdlike behavior, given that their true forms are winged, eyeless humanoids. They perch like raptors, a bizarre affectation that works very well in the film. Uziel, Gabriel’s lieutenant, scents for the angel Simon like an animal would, and their subsequent fight is extremely brutal, without human finesse or mercy. After stabbing Simon, Uziel literally digs into the wound, trying to pull out his heart.

Uziel’s autopsy scene further shows how separate the angels are from humans, from the lack of growth rings on their bones to the bizarre makeup of their blood (chemicals usually only found in an aborted fetus). Hermaphroditic, lacking eyes, they’re just different.

Later, we see the Archangel Gabriel literally tasting the shed blood on the wardrobe after Uziel and Simon’s fight, able from this to determine that it came from Simon. Not even a higher order of angel like Gabriel is exempt from this kind of base animalism. They’re not beautiful, celestial messengers of God, but are, in Daggett’s terms, “creatures.”

In addition to their bestial nature, the angels in The Prophecy are bizarrely childlike in both temper and behavior. The entire conceit of the film, that certain angels became jealous of humans for being created with souls and acquiring God’s chief affection, is essentially a gigantic, millennia-long temper tantrum. A war, with casualties and spiritual consequences that affect the spiritual future of the human race, based entirely on envy.

This is shown most clearly in Gabriel, arguably one of Christopher Walken’s greatest roles. He contemptuously refers to humans by the juvenile term “talking monkeys,” but can’t even drive a car, showing an immature helplessness. During his confrontation with Simon, Simon tells him, “Sometimes you just have to do what you’re told,” which is very reminiscent of a parent scolding a child. When Simon won’t tell Gabriel where he’d hidden Hawthorne’s soul even after being tortured, Gabriel stamps his foot and shouts in a childish fit of pique: a mini-tantrum.

Perhaps the best indication that the angels are emotional children, bereft of a father as a result of their ruinous war in Heaven, is when Gabriel tries to entice Thomas to fight alongside him: “Nobody tells you when to go to bed. You eat all the ice cream you want. You get to kill all day, all night, just like an angel!” Gabriel’s speaking ironically about the bed time and ice cream, but the language he uses still evokes images of childlike freedom. Despite his contempt for humans, he is himself beneath them in maturity and ethics.

And what of God in this war-torn universe? The only time we hear of Him is when Daggett asks Gabriel, “If you wanted to prove your side was right, Gabriel, so badly, why don’t you just ask Him? Why don’t you just ask God?”

Gabriel’s answer is poignant, and in many painful ways puts him on the same level as us: “Because He doesn’t talk to me anymore.”

War Stories: Battlefield Pankration

March 23, 2015 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

One of the projects I’m most proud of during my time as the director of video production for a small but notorious publisher was the book and video project Battlefield Pankration by Jim Arvanitis. It’s a turnkey personal defense system, including everything from pre-combat de-escalation techniques to handling weapons like sticks and knives. Jim stands out among a hugely overpopulated crowd not just for his skill, knowledge base, and devotion to fitness, but also his personal experience in actual fighting. Until you know how you’ll react to being hit in the face, you have no business teaching self-defense. Jim Arvanitis is the real deal.

I’d worked with him before on his video Secrets of Pankration, so I was pleased when he’d approached us with a new project, one that bridged the gap between MMA sport and streetfighting reality. We’d blocked out a week’s worth of shooting, put it on the schedule, and worked out the details until he arrived.

Little did I know that the project would be one of the most difficult studio shoots of my career.

The first shoot day had gone splendidly. Jim’s one of those rare authors who doesn’t need a second take. Without getting too deep into the nuts and bolts of the shooting process (a subject worth discussing in future pieces), we did the usual thing which was to shoot through lunch and end the day in the late afternoon to give the author time to rest and me time to review some of the footage. In those days I got to the office around 4:45 in the morning and left between 4 and 5 PM. I loved the work.

And then around mid-morning on the second day, Jim strained a hamstring doing a side kick and we weren’t sure if we could complete the shoot, let alone finish the day’s work. (I may have the exact details of the injury wrong, but it was definitely a leg thing.) Jim’s as tough as nails, the rub-some-dirt-on-it kind of man, but if you can’t perform, you can’t perform. It was the worst luck imaginable. Two weeks prior, we’d had to cut short another shoot because the author had rolled his ankle and could barely walk. A great deal of money and time had been invested, and a work stoppage represented a real hardship.

Pleasantly, the next day Jim was able to return to work, and things went well; you’d never know he was nursing an injury. The morning after, I had some trouble starting my edit suite (a Final Cut Pro machine), but it finally did boot after a few odd error messages. I made an offhand comment about it to one of Jim’s assistants, who happened to be a computer engineer. He told me that my edit suite was about to shit the bed (without using those exact words). Macs don’t have the same problems as PCs, and the errors I’d gotten were clear indicators that the hard drive was dying.

The next morning, it wouldn’t start at all. A large part of my job wasn’t just shooting the videos, but editing them, too. Without an edit suite, post-production ground to a halt. So in the midst of a shoot where we were already behind due to injury, I had to deal with Mac repairs as well.

In the end, we shot all the video parts, but couldn’t finish the hundreds of still photos for the book, despite very long days and few breaks.

My wife’s family lived not far from where Jim lives, so a couple months later during a vacation to Florida, I spent the day with Jim, his son Brandon, and his friend Bob to shoot the remaining photos. Jim was in the midst of suffering a nasty flu bug, but it didn’t slow him down at all. Being the friendly, giving sort he is, I caught the bug myself and spent the plane ride home trying not to die from what I called the Greek Flu. Fever, chills, coughing, you name it. It sucked.

Despite everything, we produced a great piece of work that I’m proud of. Out of the many authors I became friendly with during my time in publishing, Jim’s one of the few I’m honored to still call a friend. Even though he gave me the Greek Flu and almost killed me.

Analysis: The Rapture (1991)

March 17, 2015 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

Along with Gregory Widen’s The Prophecy, the 1991 film The Rapture is one of my all-time favorite movies. Theologically speaking, you can see some of its influence very clearly in my first novel, The Blessed Man and the Witch. Any film that deals so specifically with religion will typically have faith as one of its main themes, and this movie is no exception. What sets it apart is that writer-director Michael Tolkin also asks the audience to have faith. Sharon, the protagonist, is an unreliable character even at the best of times, and as such, we’re never sure whether to credit what we’re seeing from her perspective until the end. It takes a leap of faith, our faith, to believe in Sharon.

Sharon’s introduction to the film begins in a gray, lifeless purgatory: the tedium of her job as a telephone information operator (a task made obsolete today, which dates the movie somewhat). From there, we see her cruising the streets of Los Angeles with her swinger friend Vic in a decidedly predatory fashion, looking for couples to swap partners with. Even when they’re successful (with David Duchovny as Randy and Stéphanie Menuez), we gets hints that she finds this unsatisfying.

Later, after overhearing her co-workers discussing the Note (the Archangel Gabriel’s Trumpet) and the Boy (a prophet), she tells hew new boyfriend Randy that “Everything seems so empty.” Subsequently, she encounters some missionaries who tell her that the end of the world is coming, and she won’t go to Heaven if she doesn’t accept Jesus Christ. This echoes the Bible in Ephesians 2:8-9: “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God. Not of works, lest any man should boast.” This becomes central throughout the film: it’s not enough to be a good person. You have to believe. You have to have faith in God if you want to get into Heaven. (Remember the vampire Jerry Dandrige in Fright Night when confronted with a crucifix held by a terrified Peter Vincent: “You have to have faith for it to work.”)

Sharon’s conversion seems abrupt when she throws Randy out of her bed so she can change the sheets and scrub the sin off of her in the shower, but it’s been coming for some time. “I want my salvation,” she says to him (note the possessive pronoun). “I’m tired of feeling empty all the time.” Randy’s arguments against her search for God are facile, juvenile, and unconvincing. Writer-director Tolkin then asks us, the viewers, to have faith in Sharon for the first time: after an abortive suicide attempt, Sharon drinks herself into a stupor and sees a vision of the Pearl, a sight only the truly devout would be granted. But is this a hallucination or a true vision? Are we supposed to believe that Sharon is granted this vision so soon after accepting Jesus Christ? Yes. Because the ending makes all this true.

Years later, after she’s married Randy, had a daughter, and loses Randy to murder, she sees another vision: Randy telling her to go to the desert. Once again, we’re supposed to have faith that this grief-stricken woman’s visions are true and not a result of her questionable mental state. When she questions the nature and purpose of the vision, the Boy prophet tells her, “Don’t ask God to meet you halfway,” and this is where we get to the crux of the film: not only must you have faith, but it must be perfect faith. You have to go all the way. It’s God’s way or the highway.

Her pilgrimage to the desert with her daughter is fraught with petty humiliations, the kind that holy people aren’t supposed to suffer. We cringe for her, even though her daughter Mary has the perfect faith that God demands. Convinced beyond any shadow of doubt that the Rapture is near, Mary doesn’t want to wait for the world to end to go to Heaven. She wants to go to Heaven “the quick way.” She wants to die. Sharon’s faith admits some cracks when she says to her daughter, “Let’s give God one more chance.” This foreshadows the terrible choice she makes at the end of the film. In the throes of a heavenly vision (possibly brought on by hunger), Mary says to Sharon, “Don’t ask God to meet you halfway,” just like the Boy had.

The scene in which Sharon kills Mary is very hard to watch. Imagine killing your own child, even if that child begs for death. Sharon’s original intent is to kill Mary and then herself, but after shooting Mary, she points the gun upward and, screaming in terrible grief, empties the revolver into the sky. While she later explains that she didn’t kill herself because suicide is a mortal sin, it’s clear that in shooting the sky, she is in essence trying to shoot God for allowing her to kill her own daughter. She’s lost faith and says of God, “I don’t love Him…He let me kill my little girl and I’m still supposed to love Him.”

And then the world ends. Gabriel’s Trumpet sounds, literally shattering the walls of her prison cell. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse ride out, terrible and frightening. We are told that everyone has until the seventh blast of Gabriel’s Trumpet to accept God into their hearts if they want to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. They have to love God, and the clock is ticking.

Sharon refuses. Even when reunited with her pleading, angelic daughter in a Purgatorial space between Heaven and Hell, she will not love God. She has rejected Him. When she tells her daughter, “I love you,” Mary replies, miserably, “That isn’t enough.” This is the terrible choice Sharon makes: to spend eternity in Purgatory rather than love a God that let her kill her daughter.

If we, the audience, kept faith the way Sharon did not, the apocalypse at the end of the film would not be surprising. All of the signs were there. You just have to believe what you’re seeing.

Analysis: Event Horizon

March 9, 2015 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

On the heels of my analysis of Omen III: The Final Conflict, I have decided to write a little bit about another Sam Neill film: Event Horizon.

Despite it being 18 years old, the movie holds up well. It uses gore, shocks, and a genuinely disturbing idea to produce a combination of good science fiction and great horror. The defining theme of the film is perception, specifically sight, and uses a gothic palette to paint a gloomy, almost steampunk aesthetic.

What Philip Eisner the screenwriter didn’t count on was the direction modern culture took between 1997 and 2015, focusing inward rather than outward. After the credits, the first words we see on the screen are: “2015 – First permanent colony established on Moon.” We are nowhere near that now, and not likely to be there within the next several decades. The drive toward risk and exploration is gone, unfortunately, and can only be found among a few wealthy entrepreneurs. While this takes us out of the film a bit, it’s a temporary departure: we’re immediately thrown into Dr. Weir’s nightmare of the Event Horizon afterward. Grim, derelict, with a floating, eyeless corpse. The camera takes us through the corpse’s screaming mouth and into Weir’s eye. In fact, it’s the first we see of Weir: an extreme close-up of his eye.

The Event Horizon itself has become possessed by Hell, literally, and everything we see of it shows how it’s been poisoned. The viscera splattered about the interior from the bizarre orgy captured in bits and pieces by the ship’s log is disturbing, more so because nobody from the Lewis and Clark bothers to clean it up or even mentions it. From the ship’s cruciform shape to its head-shaped bridge, we’re meant to know that the Event Horizon’s possession represents the fall of both God and Man.

Spiked, opening and closing like a massive, fearsome eye, the heart of the Event Horizon is the gravity drive, a device that folds space. It’s only accessible through a long hallway rigged with explosives and a shorter corridor that spins in a disorienting fashion. Hell, literal Hell is in that gravity drive, waiting to be released. From the spikes inside the chamber to the bizarre engraving on the drive itself, there’s no mistaking that this thing is evil incarnate, which is one of the film’s weaknesses: didn’t anyone take a look at this thing during the architecture phase of the FTL project and go, “Yeah, that’s messed up.”? Are the humans of the future that blase? The crew of the Lewis and Clark was appropriately disquieted, at least.

Most effectively, the film’s theme, sight, puts the viewer in the role of an honorary crewmember of the Lewis and Clark. After all, what do you do with a movie except watch it? The villains all had their eyes ripped out, from the doomed captain of the Event Horizon to Weir, who blinded himself. Weir’s wife Claire, when we see her outside of flashbacks, is also missing her eyes. Justin, who had been briefly swallowed up by the Hell beyond the gate, made an unsuccessful suicide attempt by jettisoning out into space without a suit and lost his eyes as a result (the blood squirting from his face in zero-gravity). Peters falls to her death as a result of following a ghost that only she could see; her own vision killed her. When Miller asks Weir, “What happened to your eyes, doctor?” Weir responds, “Where we’re going, we won’t need eyes to see.” And at the end, when the possessed Weir has Miller at his mercy, he shows Miller horrible visions of grotesque brutality, all the while asking him, “Do you see? Do you see?” Perception, in Event Horizon, is reality. The possessed ship can make you see what it wants you to, and when it’s finished with you, it takes away your eyes so that you’ll see nothing else except the appalling torment it has in store.

Obviously, the film isn’t perfect. The Lewis and Clark suffers from the unimaginatively grungy look that many seem to think future spacecraft will invariably possess, and the characters play to type without developing in any way, shape, or form. Nevertheless, it’s a great way to spend 96 minutes, and it’s currently available on Netflix. Watch it (again).