David Dubrow

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Reminiscence and Analysis: Omen III

March 4, 2015 by David Dubrow 4 Comments

I must’ve been twelve or thirteen when I first saw Omen III: The Final Conflict.  I watched it with my older brother (the same brother with whom I’d watched Kolchak: The Night Stalker when I was too young staying up too late on Friday nights) on a Sunday evening.  We’d recently gotten cable TV, and my dad had sprung for subscriptions to both HBO and a local cable channel called Prism.  I think it must have been a package deal to get both, because Dad wasn’t into movies very much.  He liked baseball, and Prism broadcast all the Philadelphia Phillies games that the local TV stations didn’t or couldn’t due to blackouts.

We loved Prism, not least because, unlike HBO, it showed rated R movies during the day.

I can’t remember if I’d seen The Omen before watching Omen III.  Probably not, but it didn’t matter at the time.  The synopsis in the cable guide told us everything we needed to know: Adult Situations, Adult Language, Violence.  (Horror, 108 mins.)  I also can’t recall if my younger brother watched it with us or not.  I hope not, because it had some pretty disturbing stuff for an adult, let alone a kid.  Now that I’m the parent of a little boy, media management has become a concern.

The beginning of the film was brilliant: they wrote and filmed a commercial for Thorn Enterprises that Damien didn’t even like.  He poked holes in it.  It was a great way to show Damien’s intelligence, power, and amorality.  The previous ambassador’s bizarre suicide was another great piece of moviemaking: how many people shoot themselves under the nose?  I assume the effects guys measured the angle of the bullet to determine where it would go from the gun under the desk and said, “Well, it should go here.”  Truly disgusting brain splatter.  Very shocking.

Harvey Dean’s character had some depth.  Rather than have him just ignorant of his boss’s true nature, he knows that Damien Thorn is the Antichrist.  Consider the kind of person who knowingly works for the personification of evil.  He’s conflicted about ordering the deaths of the potential Christ-child babies, but does it anyway.  And when it comes time for him to pay the piper and have his own son killed, he refuses.  It’s all too much for him.  He wasn’t a sniggering caricature of an evil henchman, but a man who’d chosen the wrong side and paid for it with his life.  And soul.  There’s an unexpectedly poignant moment late in the film when his wife learns what he’s been doing and who his boss truly is.  She confronts him, holding his own baby son, with a monstrous series of crimes.  She’s broken and horrified and scared for her baby, and we feel for her.

There is still a part of the film that I can’t watch: the burned face of Dean’s baby when Damien uses the hell hound to implant horrible suggestions into Dean’s wife’s mind.  It showed the true, unadulterated evil of Damien Thorn in a way the other scenes did not.  His foiling of the monks’ plan to kill him was self-defense, but the baby-killing went way too far.  The method of the baby’s death was no accident; Damien had quoted Genesis 22:2 when telling the shocked Harvey to kill his own son, saying, “Then God said, ‘Take your son, your only son, whom you love–Isaac–and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you'[emphasis mine].”

The screaming monk swinging from the cable, swathed in burning plastic, was also disturbing.  As a youngster, the sex scene seemed more brutal than in later viewings of the film.  What was worse was that they killed the kid.  They wrote that the monk, a good guy, should accidentally stab a child to death.  Very brutal.  The kid was doomed, an apostate of Hell, but still, how often do boys get murdered in movies?

Damien praying to his own father Lucifer and cursing Jesus Christ was an extraordinary soliloquy.  It combined fury and loathing and even self-pity as he, the son of the Devil himself, describes the glory of suffering.  This insight into true evil was riveting and imaginative, making you understand Damien, if not sympathize.  Later, the juxtaposition of the monks’ exaltation at the star alignment heralding the rebirth of Christ with scenes of Damien in agony over the same event show us that in the end, Damien isn’t a man.  He is a figure, a supernatural creature.  A thing born of a jackal.

Note also that Damien only once or twice refers to Jesus Christ by His title: Christ.  He speaks to and of Him often, but uses the term “Nazarene,” denying Him His kingship as the Messiah.  In Damien’s mouth, Nazarene is a pejorative.  It works.

As Jews, we knew that demonic and vampiric bad guys in the movies could be turned by crosses (Richard Benjamin showed how useless the Magen David was against vampires in Love at First Bite), but we didn’t feel left out.  Judaism doesn’t have demons like Christianity, so things like the Antichrist and hell hounds were part of their mythology.  We could be frightened by it in fictional representations, but at no point did any of us say, “Hey!  That’s exclusionary!  You’re not being inclusive!”  It was a strength of the film that we were as caught up as much as any Gentile: after all, we’re talking about Armageddon here, and Jews will die at the end of the world, too.  The weird crucifix in Damien’s secret chamber was disquieting because we knew it was meant to be profane, especially when we saw what he was doing with it. Thorn’s Herod-style killings of the babies born during the star alignment lacked any deeper meaning for us when we first saw it (I didn’t learn about Herod until later in life when I read the New Testament), but the end was cathartic.  The good guys won, despite the terrible price.  We could rejoice in the death of the Antichrist and the horrible Armageddon he represented with clear hearts.

Looking back, it’s easy to see how different the film is from today’s efforts.  Even though the monks were bumbling and even foolish at times, they were the good guys.  And they represented the return of Jesus Christ.  No bones about it.  No pedophile priests, no new chapters of the Bible revealed to show how evil the Catholic church is.  Damien was the son of the Devil, and the priests, as incompetent as they were, fought to save the Christ child.  The religious iconography was relevant and poignant, including the vision of Christ at the end.  Even Jews could be moved.

The end was rushed, especially the last confrontation.  It didn’t make sense.  I’m not sure if some elements had been edited out for time constraints or if it was written that way in the beginning, but getting Damien to the place where he’d be killed should have been a lot more difficult than it was.

Despite its flaws, the 80’s hairstyles and terrible grating American accent Neill was obliged to adopt, The Final Conflict still holds up today.  If you haven’t seen it in a while, give it a look.

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Filed Under: antichrist, christ child, demons, horror, horror movies, judaism, movies, omen 3, prism, religion, sam neill, the final conflict

Movie Review: Interstellar

January 28, 2015 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

I don’t know if I’m a Christopher Nolan fan.  I really liked The Prestige and loved Inception.  His Batman trilogy was the best effort made yet to capture Batman on film, but I was never really into Batman, and the Eastern martial arts stuff seemed sort of lame.  Still, I had high hopes going into Interstellar.

It’s his best yet.  Terrible movies come out all the time and people like them.  Mediocre ones get lots of Oscar attention, even when few people outside of the Academy have seen them.  Interstellar reminds us that truly great films can and do get made.  You can click on the IMDB link to get a description of the plot and learn who the cast is, but really, if you have the time, just see it.  I’ll describe some of the more general aspects of the film, and then afterward discuss plot elements that give the story away.
  • Matthew McConaughey: He did extraordinary work in this film.  Across the board the acting was great to middling, but in McConaughey’s case, he simply was Cooper.  At no point in the film did you get the feeling that this was a man playing a role.  You simply witnessed the remarkable experiences of a brave man doing the best he could in unbelievably difficult circumstances.  How often do you see that in a film?  Especially a genre film?
  • Family Life: It’s easy to go high-concept and get the audience’s waterworks going when it comes to family themes in a movie.  As sophisticated moviegoers, we’ve seen it all before.  This was different.  There was a level of complexity and anguish brought to this story that’s rarely seen in science fiction; the concept of time-debt was used here very well and was reminiscent of Dan Simmons’ classic Hyperion novels.  It added tension to an already taut story.
  • Immersion: There is simply no illusion a talented special effects crew can’t create with current technology.  While the effects weren’t necessary for the plot, everything looked as though it belonged: spacecraft gliding through space, the lander on the water planet, the camp on the ice world.  It was all just there.  No imagining necessary.  It looked perfectly real.  Even the robots were awesome; a lot of work was put into them to make them characters but not mascots.  
  • Our Future: Near the beginning of the film was a moment that showed you very clearly that this was not only set in the future, but that the future is a bleak, even terrible place.  You’ll know it when you see it; it’s jaw-droppingly ugly.  The Earth’s peril is both existential and philosophical, which makes McConaughey’s journey that much more important.

I don’t want to talk in hints, but if you haven’t seen this film, I would hate to spoil it for you.  Just watch it like I did, with wide eyes.  Five out of five stars.

*SPOILERY BITS*
READ NO FURTHER IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN INTERSTELLAR
  • Matt Damon: Unfortunately for him, Matt Damon’s become such a star that he’s no longer a believable character any more, no matter who he plays (unless it’s Jason Bourne).  He did a good job, but he’s a little miscast, because he took me out of the film a little.  I knew he was squirrelly from the beginning: he talked way too much.  Also, anyone who tells you to NOT check or double-check something is a bad guy.  He had some of the best lines in the film, with his alternately pathetic apologizing and disturbing questions of the man he was trying to murder.
  • Bootstrapping: There’s a massive plot hole that the whole film is based on, and I can’t seem to get my head around it.  Everything that happens, from the wormhole appearing to Cooper saving himself via the tesseract is based on a recursive time loop.  If the future humans were the ones who sent the wormhole back in time to save us from a doomed Earth, how did those future humans survive to do it?  There should have been no future humans alive to save us.  The only way to explain it is to go into fifth-dimensional physics and play around with multiple universes, but if that’s the case, then why bother?  There’s an infinity of doomed Earth you’d have to save.
  • If B then A: It’s possible that the future humans sent the wormhole back in time not to save themselves, but to save Plan A humans.  The future humans could simply be the descendants of Plan B, who were going to survive anyway because Anne Hathaway unfroze their embryos on the new planet she’d found.  So what they did was save Earth’s population by sending the wormhole and tesseract back in time for Cooper to fly through and find.  
  • Me, Me, Me: I almost never geek out about movies, but I just dug this one.  Probably because I saw it with my brother; it was the first time we’d seen a movie in the theater together in over a decade.  He read the novelization and told me it was just a scene-by-scene novelization of the movie; no great revelations there.
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Filed Under: christopher nolan, interstellar, movie reviews, movies, science fiction, tesseract, time debt

Movie Review: Resurrect Dead

January 21, 2015 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles is a mostly fascinating documentary about some bizarre tiles set into the streets of major cities across the United States and in South America.  The tiles always say something like this, with minor variations:

TOYNBEE IDEA 
IN MOVIE 2001 
RESURRECT DEAD
ON PLANET JUPITER

Who put them there?  What do these tiles mean? Why are so many of them in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania?

The documentary does its best to answer these questions, and as much as possible, succeeds. One of the most interesting elements of the story is Justin Duerr, a primary Toynbee Tile researcher: obviously troubled, he focused a great deal of energy into finding out the truth about this mystery, and it was only during a (likely) imaginary encounter that Duerr found closure regarding it.

The mystery unfolded throughout the film, allowing the viewer to become part of the revelations in a way that made it immediate and striking.  My only criticism is that the movie went on a little too long.  Would I have tried to uncover the mystery of the Toynbee tiles differently?  Yes.  But that’s what made the movie so interesting: the researchers were real people working on a project in their own way.

Whether you’ve heard of the Toynbee tiles or not, you should definitely see this film.  4 out of 5 stars.

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Filed Under: bizarre, city life, movie reviews, movies, surreal, toynbee tiles

Friday Is a Day of Work

January 16, 2015 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

The holidays, with family visits, school vacations, and all the work that goes along with them, were extraordinary this year, if tiring.  On top of that, my younger brother came in from Europe for a week-long visit; it was the longest we’d spent together in about twenty years, and I cannot wait to see him again.

Despite that, I’m glad to return to my writing desk.  What follows are three micro-reviews of movies my brother and I saw.

  • The Avengers: As I get older, I find myself less and less fetched by superhero films, even ones depicting what used to be my favorite superheroes.  Unfortunately, The Avengers succeeded only in disappointing.  The lack of a central character resulted in a chaotic, plotless mess; Joss Whedon, who can be very occasionally entertaining, failed to bring the story elements together into a comprehensible whole.  All in all, the film was too self-conscious and required that you’d already watched the Thor and Captain America movies before it.  Hawkeye was fun, but under-used, and Black Widow took the typical female Whedon role: an ass-kicking woman smarter than everyone else.  Robert Downey Jr. was great as usual.  Tom Hiddleston was so good as Loki again that it almost made me want to watch Dr. Who.  2 out of 5 stars.
  • Anchorman 2: I loved Anchorman and had middling hopes for the sequel, which were borne out by a series of improv pieces that went on way too long.  There were a few very funny parts, including the musical number, the visit with Veronica and her boyfriend Gary, the first minute of the dinner scene at Linda’s house, and the final battle.  The rest of it just wasn’t terribly funny.  It was clear that on some shoot days, certain actors were more on the ball than others.  For whatever reason, Steve Carell seemed to be phoning it in, and in the scenes with Chani, Kristen Wiig (in her tighty-whiteys) always stole it.  It’s extremely difficult to recapture the magic with an original sequel to an original film, and Anchorman 2 failed.  Still, the funny bits were memorable enough to carry it to 3 stars out of 5.
  • Man of Steel: I really, really wanted to like this film more than I did.  As a mixture of Moses and Jesus, Superman is a transcendent figure, a true super hero sent to Earth to help mankind.  Henry Cavill was excellent: hit all the right notes, looked great, achieved dignity in the blue suit with the red boots.  And yet…it was a mess.  General Zod wasn’t crazy enough to be a true villain; he just seemed like a massive dick.  There was too much Russell Crowe and not enough Kevin Costner.  Amy Adams wasn’t a convincing Lois Lane.  Diane Lane was good, but didn’t get anything interesting to do.  The fight scenes between the Kryptonians and Supes eventually became tiresome.  Krypton, however, seemed like a real place with real people, unlike the Richard Donner Superman film.  Still, it was a Superman movie, so it gets 3 out of 5 stars.  

Usually, I’m a Marvel over DC guy when it comes to superheroes, but Superman beat the Avengers handily.

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Filed Under: anchorman, anchorman 2, comedy, joss whedon isn't that great, man of steel, movie reviews, movies, superhero, superman, the avengers

A Trio of Brief Horror Movie Reviews

November 26, 2014 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

Yesterday I was struck down with norovirus.  Every terrible symptom that comes with this illness played havoc with my body in ways Tomás de Torquemada would learn from (and be disgusted by).  So, when wracked with agonies, what can you do except watch horror movies on Netflix?

These reviews have spoilers in them.

The first one I watched was Dead Snow.  It’s a testament to how desensitized I’ve become watching horror films that the unbelievable amounts of gore in it did not cause me to run to the bathroom, vomiting down my shirtfront.  I was doing that anyway.  Despite that it was subtitled, a lot of the dialogue worked.  There were some memorable moments: Erlend’s end, the one guy whose name I never learned sewing his spurting neck wound closed, rappelling with intestines, and Martin getting his peepee bitten by a nuthunting zombie after having sawed his own arm off to prevent infection.  If you like gory, foreign, funny zombie films with people named Vegard, Turgåer, and Erlend in them, this is the movie for you.  4 out of 5 stars.

After an attempt at a nap during a particularly bad wave of nausea, I turned on The Taking of Deborah Logan, mostly because it was the first movie recommended in the list and I felt too awful to think about picking something different.  Overall, it wasn’t bad, but it had little to recommend it.  The problem with this film and the one I watched after it was the same: the characters were mostly unlikable from the beginning to the end and I didn’t care what happened to them.  Except for the kid, because, well, it was a kid.  With cancer.  The creepy bit with Deborah Logan sort of opening her face near the end and swallowing the kid’s head was effective.  The old lady T-and-A was unusual.  I’m trying to find things to say about this movie, but can’t, which shows you how unmemorable it was.  It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t good, either.  2 out of 5 stars.

Terrorphoria’s post on the movie You’re Next had intrigued me, so as I lay on the sofa, trying not to writhe in agony from muscle cramps and gut spasms, I put it on.  People who know about movies, especially horror movies, call it “mumblegore” and I don’t give enough of a damn to Google the term to find out what mumblegore is or what other films exist in the mumblegore oeuvre.  I assume it has nothing to do with Harry Potter.  In it, a bunch of people who are absolute putzes get attacked by men in animal masks.  One person has the wherewithal to fight back, and she does, killing all the bad guys because that’s just what women do in violent situations: they use their brawn, innate brutality, and hardcore fighting skills to defeat trained soldiers in hand-to-hand combat.  Yes, I know she spent time on a survivalist compound, whatever that means.  In any event, there were some funny moments to it, and some disturbing ones, but the filmmakers didn’t care enough about the viewers to put forth enough effort to make us care about what was happening.  It was just an exercise in brutality.  3 out of 5 stars.  One of those stars is because Barbara Crampton was in it.

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Filed Under: barbara crampton, dead snow, deborah logan, gore, horror, horror movies, movie reviews, movies, what the fuck is mumblegore, you're next, zombies

The Cabin in the Woods Sucked

October 8, 2014 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

There are some movies you just like right off the bat, and some movies that you think you should’ve liked and didn’t.  There was just something about them that was off-putting in some way, and you need to dig deeper to figure out why.

Star Trek Into Darkness was one of those technically competent but off-putting films, but the reason was simple: it was a 9/11 Truther allegory.  I’m disgusted that I paid to see it.

The Cabin in the Woods was another.  This discussion is predicated upon the reader having seen the film; if you haven’t, what follows won’t make much sense.

On the surface, it was a black comedy/horror film, exposing traditional horror movie tropes, making fun of them, and turning them upside-down.  Lots of people liked it: it got a 7.1 out of 10 on the IMDB scale, and a 91% fresh rating from Rotten Tomatoes.  In today’s “we’re all so over everything” post-modern culture, it was hailed as an achievement in meta-filmmaking.

In reality, it was a thumb in the eye from Hollywood to every horror fan.  Few of us go to the movies to have our intelligence insulted by pseudo-intellectuals, but that’s what The Cabin in the Woods did.  The writers, Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard, are as culpable as anyone for the shallow, lifeless tripe Hollywood foists upon an undiscriminating public, but with this ha-ha-wink-wink film, they try to distance themselves from the mess they helped create.

The slasher movie archetypes they lampoon as necessary to the ritual weren’t created by Hollywood: they’re high-concept.  The Scholar, the Whore, the Virgin, the Athlete, the Fool: they’re people we can all identify with, because all of us have been one or more of them at one time or other.  They work, and it can be argued that most films of any genre contain these characters.  So the attempt to mock them as overdone tropes falls short.

As for the formulaic nature of slasher films, which is the largest target of TCitW, we only have Hollywood to blame.  The lack of imagination, the attempts to appeal to the widest audience possible through bowdlerizing material, and the sheer number of remakes shows even the most casual observer that Hollywood has run out of ideas.  Last summer’s box office take was down, and it can’t all be blamed on the economy.  If you put out the same, already-done crap over and over again, eventually we’ll stop going to the movies altogether.  But until we do, don’t make us out to be the idiots for going to see your movies.

These Ancient Ones that demand the ritual be performed in a certain way, you see, are us: the stupid movie-going public.  If the Whore isn’t killed, if the Athlete doesn’t die horribly, then the ritual fails, and the Ancient Ones destroy the world.  That’s the filmmakers’ way of washing their hands of the mess Hollywood created.  They’ve fed us crap for so long they think we expect crap, and if we don’t get crap, we’ll complain.  Think about the sheer chutzpah of that, the superiority inherent in that way of thinking.  That’s what galls me: they blame their own lack of imagination on us.

They’re not that clever.  And we’re not so stupid.

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Filed Under: critical analysis, don't insult my intelligence, horror, joss whedon, movies, the cabin in the woods

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Elf on a Shelf Follies, Part 2:
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Me: What did you write?
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Me: What if he says it's none of your business?
8yo: *eyes grow dark and glittering* Then I'll...touch him.
Me: Ah. Mutually assured destruction, then.

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One of the biggest mistakes the United States has ever made since WWII was recruiting for clandestine and federal law enforcement organizations at Ivy League schools. The best talent pools were/are available from local law enforcement and military veterans, with their maturity and, most importantly, field experience. We've been reaping the costs of these terrible decisions for decades, culminating in a hopelessly politicized, sub-competent FBI and CIA.

Watching Fauda seasons 1 and 2 again in preparation for season 3 to be broadcast, one hopes, in early 2020. Here's my back-of-the-matchbook review of season 2.

Every day I try to be grateful for what I have, even in the face of the petty frustrations and troubles that pockmark a day spent outside of one's living room, binge-watching Netflix. We live lives of ease in 21st century America, making it enormously difficult to do anything but take one's countless blessings for granted. Holidays like the just-passed Thanksgiving are helpful reminders. There's a reason why people call the attitude of a thankful heart practicing gratitude, not just feeling grateful. You have to practice it. You have to remind yourself of what you have. It's the work of a lifetime.

Held Back: A Recent Conversation.
8-year-old: Oh, and Jamie was there, too. He was in my first grade class two years ago.
Me: Wasn't he held back a year?
8yo: Yeah. It's because he kept going to the bathroom with the door open.
Me: No way!
8yo: And girls saw.
Me: That's not right. They're not going to hold a kid back a whole year over that.
8yo: Well, that's what he told me.
Me: Sounds fishy.
8yo: I believe him.
~fin~

It's right and good to push a raft of politically correct social justice policies on everything else under the sun, but when social justice invades Hollywood, that's just a bridge too far, says Terry Gilliam. Sorry, Terry: you helped make this sandwich. EAT IT.

Rob Henderson's piece on luxury beliefs will have you nodding your head over and over again...unless you subscribe to these luxury beliefs, in which case you'll get mad.

I've made the Saturday bread from Flour Water Salt Yeast so often that I've memorized the recipe. It never disappoints. Never. The same recipe works well for pizza, too.

Liberty doesn't mean the freedom to do anything you want. The true definition of liberty is the ability to choose the good. Anything less is libertinism.

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