David Dubrow's Blog, page 11

A Tale of Three Movies

The best things come in threes. Everyone knows that.

—

Alien: Covenant is both a prequel and a sequel. It’s a sequel to the execrable film Prometheus, which was the best screenwriting example ever seen where the plot only moves forward only because every character makes a series of unbelievably stupid decisions. It’s also a prequel, because it continues the story of how the alien from the eponymous Alien science fiction movie franchise got its genetic start.

Despite this, it’s an entertaining movie, the greater son of a lesser father. Michael Fassbender puts in his usual terrific performance, investing the dual roles of androids named David and Walter with both credibility and pathos. Billy Crudup as the unready, less-than-assertive captain of the deep-space colonization vehicle Covenant makes you believe beyond a shadow of doubt that his character couldn’t do a whole lot right if his and his crew’s lives depended on it, which is a more difficult role than you might think. Everyone else fills their trope-positions admirably, so not much else to say there.

The mythology behind the story and the character motivations all made a certain amount of tragic, disturbing sense, and the mysteries that the captain and his crew seek to unravel are compelling; you want to see what happens next and what’s going to happen afterward. There are some dumb parts, but not many. You like science fiction? You like the Alien franchise? You like blood and monsters? Take a look at Alien: Covenant.

 

I saw a lot of online praise for Mandy, starring Nicolas Cage as a man who gets revenge on the religious cult that murdered his wife. While the film was, for the most part, a fun watch, I’m surprised at how many plaudits it got. The story’s as pedestrian as they come; in fact, I can’t believe it hasn’t been protested out of circulation for use of the “they killed my wife so I’m going to kill them” trope. Most movie reviewers are male feminists (heh): aren’t they horribly offended by this movie? Where’s the woke backlash?

Much has been made of Cage’s excellent portrayal of Red, the protagonist, which is also strange: Nicolas Cage is great in every movie he’s in. Sure, he’s been in some terrible movies, but they’re not terrible because of him. He elevates them to watchable status simply because of his performance. Who’s more entertaining on screen than Nic Cage? Nobody. He’s both character actor and leading man in one package.

If you plan to watch Mandy I hope you like magenta, because you’ll be seeing quite a lot of it. It’s the director’s favorite filter. The film starts off extremely slowly, so much so that my wife fell asleep during the first forty minutes in and had to be nudged awake to see Cage get strung up with barbed wire. At that point it moves briskly enough, but I kept waiting for it to get to the really good part.

It didn’t. Still, it was decent, and I liked it. There’s enough blood and guts and dumb violence to get your motor running, if that’s indeed the thing that turns the ignition for you. And some funny parts. And a lot of weirdness.

The Cheddar Goblins commercial wasn’t as incredibly amazing as touted, but it was funny enough and did what it was supposed to do, more or less.

 

Over three years ago I reviewed Darren Aronofsky’s Noah, which purported to tell the story of the Biblical Noah. It was not a good movie, nor was it consistent with Biblical tradition. But I did kind of like it because it was a fun, if stupid way to spend some time.

Aronofsky’s second Biblical movie, Mother!, is a horrible, unwatchable mess from beginning to end, the kind of film that should end Aronofsky’s career the way Heaven’s Gate did to Michael Cimino. But because we live in a time where virtue-signaling and pleasing the right critics is far more important than decent filmmaking or entertaining an audience, we’ll no doubt be treated to yet another Aronofsky movie in the future. Maybe it’ll be better than Mother!.

It would have to be.

The movie metaphorically retells the Bible in around 120 minutes, though the runtime feels more like 120 days. It stars Javier Bardem, one of the few anti-Semites that Hollywood hasn’t run out of town yet, and Jennifer Lawrence, who thinks that hurricanes are the planet’s way of punishing people for voting for Trump. Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer are also in it, which is a shame because they’re both great to watch, but wasted in this bilge. Lawrence spends the entire film sporting the same bovine, open-mouthed mien that’s intended to express everything from shock to horror to sadness to joy, depending on the stimulus. She’s the titular Mother: Mother Earth. Bardem is supposed to be God. I’m sure he thinks he’s apt enough to play the role.

The exclamation point at the end of the title represents the chaos of the last quarter of the film. Just so you know.

Reasonable people often disagree about Biblical exegesis, but this is an interpretation of the Bible as told by the wokest Environmental Science associate professor who ever shared a spliff in the quad. It’s really not at all worth watching, not even as a curiosity.

Going Home Again 2: Lord Foul’s Bane

Some time ago I talked about rereading Michael Moorcock’s Elric series, or at least the first seven books of it. Today I’m going back to the well to discuss my reread of Lord Foul’s Bane, the first book in Stephen R. Donaldson’s series The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever.

Though published in the 1970’s, the Thomas Covenant series still holds up as a classic of heroic fantasy, in large part because it reversed the common tropes of swords and sorcery novels by creating a horribly unlikable, impotent anti-hero as the protagonist. In this way Donaldson went further than Moorcock, who at least portrayed his anti-hero Elric as a powerful magician; by contrast, Thomas Covenant is a profoundly weak man who only uses power when physically forced to by others or, at the end of his physical and spiritual rope, to save a place that he himself considers imaginary.

As a protagonist, Covenant is as flawed as he is original. Before the events of Lord Foul’s Bane he contracts leprosy and as a result loses two fingers from his right hand. His wife divorces him, taking their infant son. His home town ostracizes him, terrified of the disease. Leprosy has become the single most important factor of his life, because if he gets injured, the injury may reawaken the leprosy in his bloodstream and cause him to quite literally rot away. Blindness, gangrene, loss of limbs: it’s horrible. And, at the time of the novels, incurable.

During a defiant trip to town he is knocked unconscious and awakens in a fantasy world called The Land where he’s considered the second coming of The Land’s greatest hero, Berek Halfhand. His wedding ring, which he stubbornly refused to take off after the divorce, is a talisman of powerful magic in this new realm. Everyone he meets is prepared to honor if not worship him. The Land’s greatest enemy, Lord Foul, gives him a message to take to the Lords of Revelstone, The Land’s leaders, warning them that he, Lord Foul, has returned after thousands of years to destroy everything.

Covenant rejects all of it. He doesn’t believe in The Land. He thinks it’s all a dream. And when he’s cured of his leprosy by a magic substance called hurtloam, he can’t handle the feeling of his nerves, once dead from leprosy, becoming reawakened. He rapes the young girl taking care of him and reluctantly goes to deliver Foul’s message to the Lords, guided by the mother of the girl he raped.

So we’re already in very strange territory: a leper rapist protagonist. He’s deliberately unlikable, cowardly, and weak. And yet we can’t help but understand him. He’s not a good man, but he’s not evil, either. We see incredible things through his eyes, but he’s almost never moved to take action. Can he save The Land? Can he save himself?

As fascinating as the book is, it’s not perfect. Reams have been written about the author’s use of terms like hebetude, desuetude, roynish, cymar, and hundreds of other words that most of us have never heard of. While many of Donaldson’s archaic and/or otherwise obscure terms can be divined through context, they take the reader out of the book. Much is made of Covenant’s “self-despite,” and the book’s main protagonist, Lord Foul, is called The Despiser. The problem is that a term like self-despite doesn’t have the same punch as “self-hatred”, which is what the author means. We’ve all experienced moments of self-hatred, usually after polishing off an entire pint of Ben & Jerry’s. But we don’t suffer from self-despite. It’s not even a case of elevated diction: it’s wrong word choices, and the entire series suffers from it.

But not too much. The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant are too good not to read. Or reread. I myself have read it a half-dozen times since picking the series up in the mid-1980’s. Covenant’s personal quest, his weakness, the characters he meets, the places he goes: they’re all unforgettable, and the first book in the series, Lord Foul’s Bane, is the best. Donaldson introduces us to the semi-animist concept of Earthpower and then goes to show us how it can be used to do both great and awful things. Creatures like ur-viles, Waynhim, and Cavewights are vivid and disturbing, and the secondary characters are drawn in realistic terms, even if they speak in stilted, archaic English.

Lord Foul’s Bane is a gigantic book in both scope and ideas, and it deserves better than a surface discussion. It’s very much a polarizing work with many detractors. If you want to have a sad laugh, check out the Goodreads reviews of it; you’ll find many, many people who find the book…problematic. We’re not invited to love or even like Thomas Covenant. That’s not why he’s there. He’s an icon of human weakness, both a victim and a victimizer, and his adventures reflect the parts of us that we wish weren’t there. As both a teenager angry at the world and an adult who tries to practice gratitude every day I can still find much to love about this book. It’s not to everyone’s taste, but you should give it a try if you haven’t already.

A Quartet of Movie Reviews

Sometimes I see movies. Sometimes I enjoy them.

And sometimes I don’t.

—

If you’re looking to be bored for long stretches of time, I can’t think of a better sci-fi thriller than Alien Invasion: S.U.M.1. It stars Iwan Rheon as the titular character S.U.M.1, and by the end of the film you’ll be quite familiar with the sight of his naked backside. The story is that an alien race known as the Nonesuch has wiped out most of the human population on Earth; the rest live underground except for soldier-types like S.U.M.1, who do solitary 100-day tours of duty inside concrete towers, looking for human survivors to save and Nonesuches to flee from. Between the silly plot, terrible storytelling, and risible dialogue, I found this film to be a gigantic waste of time. The only sympathetic character was the white rat Doc, who, unfortunately, didn’t make it. (They never do.) The movie’s no doubt supposed to be a gritty tale of isolation and mental anguish, but it failed to build up to anything worth paying attention to. I pray Doc finds a better agent.

I was really looking forward to Hereditary. Who doesn’t like Toni Collette and Gabriel Byrne? Nobody I want to know. Yes. What? Anyway, it starts out terribly dark and depressing and disquieting, and none of the characters are particularly likable but it’s okay because the visuals are so darned creepy, and then something inexpressibly awful happens 40 minutes in and I spent the rest of the film deciding if I should turn it off or not because it stopped being the least bit enjoyable and became a litany of dreadful things happening to people I didn’t care about. The supernatural elements would have been more interesting if they’d been fleshed out better. The horrific images would have had more punch if I disliked the characters less. Director Ari Aster said, “I wanted the film to function first as a vivid family drama before I even bothered attending to the horror elements,” and I believe him, because we got a lot more of the family drama than the horror, which made neither genre work. This was no Ordinary People or Terms of Endearment, and it wasn’t The Conjuring or The Amityville Horror, either.

About eighteen years after its release, I finally got to see Battle Royale. It’s an uplifting (kidding) tale of a bus filled with Japanese high-schoolers that gets taken to a deserted island. The high-schoolers are then given weapons and told to kill each other, and the winner of this disgusting game is allowed to live. Plenty of books and movies owe a lot to this film (looking at you, Hunger Games) in both story and visuals. Great care was taken to make us like these kids, and to see them fight and die and try to save each other is more wrenching than you might think. There’s a lot of blood and gore, but it’s not as sickening as subsequent Japanese horror efforts tended to get. Battle Royale is the OG of this bizarre genre, and if you want to get your tragic nihilist violence boner on, give it a look.

For a second helping of Japanese horror, I bring you the movie Tag, known as Riaru Onigokko in Japan. Completely and utterly incomprehensible, it tackles alternate universes, the nature of reality, video games, and identity in the same way that Jackson Pollock addressed realism in painting. I defy anyone to make sense of anything that happens in this film. As is typical for Japanese productions, the special effects were terrific, especially when showing some unbelievably horrific stuff. I didn’t like the movie, but I didn’t not like it. Some of the visuals are had to forget. Does that make it a successful film? To quote Rudy from Season One of Survivor, I don’t know.

Interview With Yours Truly

The terrific site Apocalypse Guys was kind enough to interview me on subjects ranging from my Armageddon series to the first thing you should do for disaster preparation:

COULD THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO SURVIVING A ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE BE USED AS A PRIMER FOR LEARNING MORE ABOUT BASIC SURVIVAL SKILLS OR IS IT PRIMARILY GEARED TOWARDS THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE?

The book focuses on dealing with a zombie-caused end of the world, but I describe contingencies like dealing with toilets when the water shuts off, scavenging food from abandoned buildings, hardening your home’s security against intruders, finding shelter on the fly, and other subjects. One big difference between the zombie apocalypse and a basic survival situation is that the world won’t come back from a zombie apocalypse any time soon. So money and consumer electronics, as much as we love them, will become worthless in a very short time.

Click the link to read the whole thing, including a sneak peek at The Holy Warrior and the Last Angel!

Your Defense of Zina Bash Should Be Bashed: A Guest Post by Paul Hair

On September 4, Zina Bash sat behind soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing in the clown show we affectionately refer to as the U.S. Senate. Social Justice Warriors immediately accused her of being a white nationalist/white supremacist because, as she sat there for hours upon hours, cameras caught her touching her index finger to her thumb. (Spoiler alert: the OK symbol is not a white supremacist symbol. At all.) Conservatives rushed to her defense by saying there was no way she could be a white supremacist because she has Jewish and Mexican heritage, thus eliminating the possibility that she’s an icky white person. So went the latest incident of conservatives advancing identity politics; so went the latest incident of conservatives advancing the progressive agenda.

The progressive conspiracy theory that Zina Bash is some sort of white supremacist is so outlandish it deserves to be treated with nothing more than ridicule as another example of how insane progressives have become. It should have been an easy win for conservatives. So, of course, they screwed it up by playing the progressive game. They defended Bash by bashing white people; by making her racial/ethnic heritage the highlight of her defense. “She’s not white—that most evil of races—thus she can’t be a white supremacist. QED!”

The issue of Bash’s heritage was, and is, irrelevant. If she was 100% Anglo, Celtic, Nordic, or any other European heritage, what she did with her fingers is still a non-issue. It’s a sign of how appallingly unserious we’ve become that this kind of thing must be said. The progressive accusation against her was vile. Attempting to defend her with a “She’s not white!” defense is nearly as vile.

Unfortunately, there is nothing unusual about this latest failure of conservatism. Progressives have such a tight hold over every aspect of culture that not only do their own adherents think the thoughts they want them to think, but most conservatives think the thoughts they want them to think too. Thus, it’s standard operating procedure for conservatives to boast of how “We hate identity politics!” right before they form a working group to figure out how to appeal more to “non-white, non-cis, non-males.”

As long as conservatives continue following progressive rules and playing the progressive game, they will continue losing. And the failed defense of Zina Bash serves as the latest example of everything conservatives are doing wrong.

–Written by Paul Hair

Cover Reveal: The Holy Warrior and the Last Angel

The third book in my Armageddon trilogy, The Holy Warrior and the Last Angel, finally has a release date! I can’t say exactly when it will be, but think about jack-o-lanterns and fright masks and you’ll be in the ballpark.

This is it: the conclusion of an epic tale of angels, demons, faith, and the occult at the end of the world. Whatever you think is going to happen won’t, I can guarantee you that.

With that in mind, I’m giving you a sneak peek at the new cover.

 

Having all three books: The Blessed Man and the Witch, The Nephilim and the False Prophet, and The Holy Warrior and the Last Angel would look great on any virtual bookshelf!

The Shape of Water: A Discussion

After watching Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water, I’m not at all surprised that it won a Best Picture Oscar.

It was terrible.

Big-budget films can have an awfulness all their own, quite different from their low-budget counterparts; regular readers of this site know that I’ve seen more than my share of horrible low-to-no-budget movies, so I know the difference. In this case, with The Shape of Water, the movie’s biggest flaw, outside of its dreariness, was how completely cliched the story was. If you’re looking for a cinematic exercise in virtue-signaling where we, as a woke nation, can look back at a fictional 1960’s America and shudder in horror, you’ll love this film. Every tired, hackneyed trope Hollywood has ever shat out shines bright and proud in The Shape of Water, which tells you everything you need to know about the kinds of people who nominate and vote for the Academy Awards.

To talk about it I need to spoil it. Which isn’t a problem because this movie’s as rancid as week-old fish.

The story’s familiar enough: woman meets fish in secret scientific facility, woman steals fish to live in her bathtub, woman fucks fish, woman and fish live happily ever after and as it turns out woman is part fish herself so it’s all good and not at all disgusting.

As this is a character-driven movie, let’s take a look at the main characters.

Elisa: the protagonist. She can’t speak, but she can masturbate in the bathtub. A lot. She’s the typical Hollywood handicapped character: a saintly figure that can do nothing but good. As such, she goes through no development or maturation during the film. She doesn’t need to. You can’t improve on perfection.

Strickland: the antagonist. The polar opposite of Elisa in that he’s irredeemably evil and incapable of development because when you’re as malevolent as he is, there’s no saving you. He’s also racist and sexist. And, of course, he’s a Bible-thumper, because Hollywood knows that Christians are Bad People.

Giles: the gay friend. As Elisa’s bestest, gayest buddy in the whole wide world, he exists only to show the audience how homophobic Americans were in the 1960’s. Fired from his job as an artist for an advertising firm (Mad Men!) for reasons unclear but probably having to do with his homosexuality, he develops an attraction for the owner of the local diner. The diner owner, about thirty years younger than Giles and not gay, is of course evil for refusing Giles’s advances, and turns out to be racist to boot because he won’t let a black couple sit at the lunch counter.

Zelda: the black friend. Normally, mature black women act as the moral center of these kinds of movies, but in The Shape of Water, we don’t need a moral center: Elisa the protagonist is the moral center. Instead, Zelda exists to show the audience how racist Americans were in the 1960’s, particularly Bible-thumping Americans. Oh, and she occasionally translates Elisa’s sign language for other characters. All of the good people know sign language. All of the evil people don’t.

The Asset: the fish/amphibian creature/love interest. Looks almost exactly like Abe Sapien. Eats eggs like Abe Sapien. Is not Abe Sapien, according to del Toro. Has magical powers. And a hidden penis.

All the male characters who aren’t fish are homosexuals, Russian spies, stupid, cowardly, or evil. Go figure.

The visuals were dreary, the special effects amazing. That’s where the budget went.

I understand that it’s supposed to be a fairy tale. A dark fantasy. But if it is, why include the bizarre scene of Strickland fucking his creepy wife? Or the Russian spy subplot? The theme/tone was uneven at best.

For comparison, let’s take a look at some previous Best Picture Oscar winners: Casablanca in 1943, The Bridge on the River Kwai in 1957, A Man for All Seasons in 1966, The Godfather in 1972, Amadeus in 1984, Schindler’s List in 1993, Million Dollar Baby in 2004, and The King’s Speech in 2010.

This is the kind of film that wins the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2017: a paean to moral preening and the evils of religious white men. It sucked.

Bake Me a Cake Redux

The first story I wrote for the Appalling Stories anthology was titled Bake Me a Cake. A writer friend of mine gave me the idea: what would happen if a mom and pop bakery was asked to make The Aristocrats of cakes? The story was loosely based on the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, where a gay couple asked a Christian baker to make them a gay wedding cake. The baker refused to make them a wedding cake, as the tenets of his faith don’t allow for gay marriage, but he did say he’d bake them any other kind of cake. Then the gay customers sued him. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court:

In a 7-2 decision, the Court ruled on narrow grounds that the Commission did not employ religious neutrality, violating Masterpiece owner Jack Phillips’ rights to free exercise, and reversed the Commission’s decision. The Court did not rule on the broader intersection of anti-discrimination laws, free exercise of religion, and freedom of speech, due to the complications of the Commission’s lack of religious neutrality.

Now Masterpiece Cakeshop is being sued again:

On the same day the [Supreme Court] agreed to review the Masterpiece case, an attorney named Autumn Scardina called Phillips’ shop and asked him to create a cake celebrating a sex transition. The caller asked that the cake include a blue exterior and a pink interior, a reflection of Scardina’s transgender identity. Phillips declined to create the cake, given his religious conviction that sex is immutable, while offering to sell the caller other pre-made baked goods.

It gets better, though:

In the months that followed, the bakery received requests for cakes featuring marijuana use, sexually explicit messages, and Satanic symbols. One solicitation submitted by email asked the cake shop to create a three-tiered white cake depicting Satan licking a functional 9 inch dildo. Phillips believes Scardina made all these requests.

This is a clear case of harassment, of religious bigotry, and spiteful, disgusting abuse of the legal system to destroy someone’s business. I talk about the culture war quite a lot in this space, and this new case is just another attack by the social justice left to eliminate all resistance to their bizarre attempts at social engineering. There’s no compromise with them. There’s no working things out. They’ll never stop attacking normal people until every last person on this planet enthusiastically embraces every little thing they do. Live and let live isn’t an option any longer.

Below the fold I’ve included an extended excerpt of my story Bake Me a Cake. Tell me it wasn’t prescient.

—

Marty pressed a tiny fondant eyeball into the face of the third fleeing pig, squinted at its placement, and straightened to his full, unimpressive height.

The sound of his vertebrae crackling and popping back into place inspired Agnes, working nearby, to ask, “Somebody making popcorn in here?”

“Ha ha,” he replied. The magnifying lenses in his glasses gave him an owlish sort of appearance, so he swooped over to her and gave her a peck on the cheek. “Hey, that’s coming along nicely. I like the snaggly tooth on Mr. Big Bad, there.”

Agnes frowned at the piece. “Not too scary for the kids?”

“No. A little danger makes it exciting. They’ll love it.” Marty pushed his glasses up onto his forehead. “So we got the Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf pretty much done. Now we just have to make a house of sticks and we’re squared away.”

“Well, half a house of sticks. Mr. Big Bad’s huffing and puffing here.”

“Fair enough—”

The chime on the front door rang.

“You get it,” Marty and Agnes said in unison.

“Rock-paper-scissors?” he asked, even as she started to move her right fist up and down. At shoot he chose rock.

“Ha!” Agnes crowed. “Paper covers rock.”

“You always win.” Shaking his head in mock outrage, Marty left the workroom.

Two men stood at the display case, giggling and whispering to each other. The tall, thin one, wearing a three-day growth of beard and a checkered scarf around his neck, carried a Starbucks cup in one hand and a spiral notebook in the other. His companion was considerably shorter and rounder, sporting a pair of Nantucket reds and a T-shirt that showed an illustration of a young Harrison Ford looking at the sky with an ecstatic smile on his face. Beneath Ford’s upraised chin were the words, Han Shot First.

Putting on his bland sales smile, Marty moved behind the case and said, “Hi. Welcome to Cake Boat Cake Shop.”

The taller man peered at him, lifted the coffee cup, and took a noisy sip. “Why’s this place called Cake Boat? Is it because of all of the seamen?” His voice was high, affected.

His companion laughed and tried to conceal it by coughing into his fist.

“Ha ha,” Marty said. “Ah…it’s a holdover from my time in the Navy. I’d made a birthday cake for a fellow squid, and the skipper came into the mess deck and said, ‘Get that thing outta here, Slumjinsky! This’s a navy ship, not a cake boat!’ So when I left the service—”

“Yeah. Okay. I get it,” the taller man said, with a brief head-shake. “Anyhoo, my name’s Charlee with two e’s, and this is my fiancé Ethan with one e, and we’d like a cake. A special cake for our special day.”

“Well,” said Marty, looking from Charlee to Ethan, “we’re happy to make cakes for all kinds of, ah, special occasions. What did you have in mind?”

Charlee handed his coffee to Ethan, riffled through the notebook, and folded back the cover. “Ethan drew some sketches of what we had in mind. He’s such a good artist! So we saw your stuff in the case and the little catalog you have there, and we just know you can make our special day even more special.” Turning the notebook upside down, he proffered it.

At first glance, Marty could not credit what his eyes were showing him. It was only when he bent closer to the page that the full effect of the drawing took hold.

“Ah…um…” Marty heard himself say, as if from a thousand miles away.

“Isn’t it just fabulous?” Charlee squealed.

“Ehh…this…”

“I know, right?” Charlee enthused.

“Uhhh…”

“He loves it,” Charlee said, and planted a loud kiss on Ethan’s mouth. “Didn’t I tell you, sweetheart?”

“You…this…”

“We’d like it in chocolate because we both love chocolate,” Charlee told him.

The drawing depicted a massive, erect cock, ejaculating a river of semen into a pond in which naked male figures cavorted in various poses of physical intimacy. In detail it was exquisite, down to the veins on the shaft, the wrinkles on the nutsack, and the shit one man was taking on another’s chest. Marty could find no safe place to look anywhere on the page. The human centipede of crouching asshole eaters led the eye to a circle jerk that had simultaneously reached climax, while in the foreground a man in a priest’s cassock pressed a boy’s face into his crotch. A trio of men nearby teabagged a fourth, whose bulging mouth managed to accept all three elongated scrota at once. And there on all fours a smiling Charlee, complete with scarf, held onto the huge cock by its retracted foreskin while a fictionally muscular Ethan knelt behind him with a fist buried into his anus to the elbow.

Tearing his eyes away from the illustration and flipping the notebook over, Marty said, “What is…what kind of…”

Charlee laughed. “It’s a wedding cake, silly! We’re getting married!” He threw his arm around Ethan’s shoulders and kissed him again for quite some time.

“To…” Marty said, “to each other.” He shook his head to clear the drawing from his mind’s eye, but it stubbornly remained.

“Well, of course!”

Head still wagging, Marty said, “I can’t…”

Charlee grinned. “Of course you can. Everyone says that you’re just a magician with fondant. Price is no object.”

“No,” said Marty. “I mean, I can’t do this cake for you. I won’t. Sir, we have all kinds of other cakes I’d be happy to do, but—”

“What? What did you just say to me?” Charlee snatched up the notebook, glaring.

Lifting a forefinger, Marty said in as reasonable a tone as he could muster, “I said I can’t make this cake. I can make another cake—”

As Ethan stared daggers, Charlee hissed, “It’s because we’re gay, isn’t it. You hate gay people.”

“I don’t hate anyone, sir. It’s just that—”

“Did you call me a faggot?” Charlee asked. “Is that what I just heard?”

Marty blinked at him. “I…”

“He just called me a faggot!” Charlee shouted at the ceiling. “In this day and age!”

Ethan, who had been silent until now, threw the coffee cup against the wall, splattering soy white chocolate mocha everywhere. “Love wins! It’s time to join the twenty-first century!”

“Love trumps hate!” Charlee added.

The back room door burst open with a crash. Agnes, standing at the threshold, hollered, “Get out! Both of you! Get out before I call the police!”

“Haters!” Charlee shrieked, and ran out with Ethan in tow.

Marty looked from Agnes to the front door to the coffee dripping down the wall in hot, milky smears. “I’ll…I’ll get the mop.”

—

A loud, insistent buzzing from somewhere started to cut into his enjoyment of Alisyn Burnett OverHere, so Marty leaned forward in his easy chair to turn up the volume on the remote. “What is that, anyway—”

“I think it’s your phone, dear,” Agnes said, without looking up from her copy of Better Homes & Gardens.

“Oh. Okay, thanks.” He muted the TV, heaved himself out of the chair, and hurried to pick up his cell, which was buried under a drift of mail on the kitchen counter.

“Hello?”

“Dad? It’s me, Alan.”

“Al! How’re you doing? You okay? We’re giving you your space just like you asked—”

“Don’t worry about that,” Alan said. “Have you looked at Yelp lately?”

“Yelp? What’s Yelp?” Marty covered half the phone and called out to Agnes, “Aggie, what’s Yelp? Alan wants us to check it out.”

“How’s he doing?” Agnes asked. “Is he okay? We’re giving him his space just like he asked. Haven’t called in three days.”

“I don’t know. Hold on,” Marty said, and uncovered the phone to talk to Alan. “Yeah, we don’t know what Yelp is. Is it a weather thing?”

“No,” Alan said, sighing. “It’s not a weather thing. I know it’s probably a mistake to ask, but can you get on your computer?”

“Sure, sure. Gimme a minute.” He moved to the desk in Agnes’s sewing room, pried up the laptop cover, and waited for the screen to flicker on. “Everything okay over there? How’s that girl you were seeing? What was her name…Destiney? Britney?”

Alan sighed into the phone again. “She’s fine. You remember your password, right?”

“Yup.” Marty tapped the index card scotch-taped to the desk. “Got it written down right here.”

Though he couldn’t see it, Marty was sure that Alan was rolling his eyes when he said, “Real secure, Dad.”

Squinting, Marty hunted and pecked the password into the field. “Okay. It’s starting up. Didn’t use to be this slow, you know. I think all that security stuff you put on here’s slowing it down.”

“Dad,” Alan said, “if you and Mom wouldn’t click on like every link every one of your friends emails you, you wouldn’t need four anti-virus programs.”

“Who else’s gonna help those Nigerian princes get their money?”

“Ha ha,” Alan said. “At least, I hope you’re joking.”

“All right. We’re up and running,” Marty said.

“Good. I emailed you a link to Cake Boat’s Yelp page, so open your mail program and click on it.”

“I thought you said we shouldn’t click links in emails—”

“Dad!”

“Okay, okay.” Marty clicked, read, and frowned. “Is this some kind of a joke, Alan? Because it’s not funny—”

“No, it’s not a joke. It’s a page where people review places, like restaurants and drugstores and stuff.”

Marty hunched up his shoulders. “I don’t know any of these people! How could they…I mean…”

“I just noticed it myself,” Alan said.

“Ah…um…” Marty scrolled and scrolled and scrolled.

“Not for nothing, but what’re you running over there?” Alan asked. “A satellite office of the Westboro Baptist Church or something?”

“Ehh…this…”

“There’s like a hundred one-star reviews since noon!” Alan said. “In fact, there’s nothing but one-star reviews.”

“Uhhh…”

“And you really don’t want to see the Facebook page, trust me.”

“You…this…”

 

* 4/28/20–

I would give this place NO Stars if I could!! Its full of homophobic Christian bigots!!!!

* 4/28/20–

worst service ever. Would not recommend

* 4/28/20–

LOVE WINS HATE LOSES TUCK FRUMP

* 4/28/20–

Never ever go to Cake Boat. They push their hate-filled religion on you the second you come through the door. The old guy called my friend “a dyke who eats at the Y” for wanting a wedding cake for her gay paraplegic partner of color with PTSD, and kicked us out. There are better cake shops around, like Lily’s Sweets & Stuff on 14th and Pine. 303-720-5968.

* 4/28/20–

the owner called me a faggot and told me he shits in the chocolate ganache

* 4/28/20–

Worst service ever. It smells like pee and mothballs inside, and I saw a rat in the back. Also, they’re homophobic bigots.

* 4/28/20–

FUCK U AND UR H8 JESUS SUCKS RHINO BALLS

 

“Did you really call a guy a…a faggot?” Alan said.

“No!” Marty shouted into the phone. “Of course not! Do you really think I’d do that?”

“Well, no, I guess not, but what the heck’s going on? What happened today?”

—

Marty gave the Lazy Susan one last quarter turn, pulled the icing smoother away from the side of the cake, and cocked his head. Overall, he’d done a good job. The surface was as smooth as plaster and even all the way around. Just had to press the gold dragees into the top, and—

“Marty?” Agnes called from the front.

He glanced at the clock. Just ten minutes before opening. “Yes, dear?”

“You’d better come see this,” she said.

On any other day this would be a troubling suggestion. But after yesterday, with the horrible online comments from people who had probably never even been near the shop, it filled him with fear.

“Coming.” Wiping his now-moist palms on his apron, he pushed through the doors to the front room and moved to stand next to Agnes, who was biting her knuckle and staring out the front window. “Huh. Isn’t that…”

“Yes, that’s definitely the Channel 9 Eyewitness News truck parked in the handicapped space in front of our shop,” Agnes said.

“And that’s…”

“Yes, that’s definitely that investigative reporter girl Chelsea Gonzalez,” Agnes said.

“And she’s…”

“Yes, she’s definitely telling those angry people with the signs where to stand,” Agnes said.

“And they’re…”

“Yes, they’re definitely fixing to protest something in front of our shop,” Agnes said.

“Oh, Lord.”

“Yes,” Agnes said, and held his hand.

The protest signs that stood out the most were the Love Wins rainbow affairs, printed in bright colors and held high. They put the hand-drawn Take Your Christian Hate Elsewhere and Jesus Had Two Dads signs to shame. Preprinted EQUAL LOVE and STOP THE H8 banners were well-represented, as were numerous densely-written signs that no one standing further than a foot away could read, let alone understand. And there, way in the back, were a few Queers for Palestine and This Pussy Grabs Back signs, complete with bearers wearing pink keffiyehs and pussy hats, respectively.

“You know I didn’t say any of those things,” Marty said. “Right? I never called anyone a—”

“Cut it out,” Agnes said, and squeezed his hand, hard. “We’ve been married almost forty years. I know you better than you know yourself.”

“You’ve been saying that for almost forty years, too.”

“Mmm. Time to open.”

—

(You can read the rest of the story in Appalling Stories: 13 Tales of Social Injustice.)

How to Save Hollywood

Hollywood is in a creative slump. Not only that, but nobody goes to see Oscar-worthy films anymore, so the Academy has decided to create a brand-new category for the Academy Awards: Outstanding Popular Film. If that isn’t an acknowledgment that Hollywood is completely alienated from normal people, I don’t know what is. The film industry isn’t what it used to be. But the big studios can save it. There’s a way to bring everyone back together.

His name is Idris Elba.

First he played Roland the Gunslinger, even though he looked nothing like how the character was written. And now he’s being teased as potentially maybe possibly the next James Bond, even though he looks nothing like how the character was written. What this means is that Idris Elba, with his suave good looks and keen acting skills, can play anybody.

So while it may be a lot of work for Mr. Elba, I think Hollywood can survive, even thrive by putting him in every single movie they put out until he either collapses from exhaustion or we all stop going to the movies. Let’s see how this is going to look for this season’s upcoming films.

For remakes/reboots, nothing would be more fitting than a reboot of the heart-warming family film Mrs. Doubtfire, and who more than Idris Elba is qualified to play a man cross-dressing as his own children’s nanny?

If a more madcap-style comedy is your thing, we could definitely use a reboot of the hysterical classic Weekend at Bernie’s. You know who Bernie has to be.

And, for a serious biopic that’ll definitely show off Elba’s chops, Hollywood should definitely remake Milk.

The possibilities are only limited by Hollywood’s endless imagination!

The Alex Jones Flap: Solutions

Professional conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was recently removed from just about every social media platform in existence, including LinkedIn, but not Twitter.

Alex Jones is disgusting. He’s a 9/11 Truther, a Sandy Hook Truther, and a thousand other appalling things. Anyone who buys into his sickening brand of commentary is, by definition, a garbage person. *

But is his ouster from these social media platforms a free speech issue?

The easy response is that Instagram and YouTube and iTunes are private companies and can kick off anyone they want to. They’re not public utilities, but they’re being run like public utilities. On the other hand, by limiting content, they’re edging into publisher territory. So are they utilities or are they publishers? If a publisher declines to print your manuscript, is the publisher silencing you?

That’s the high-minded stuff. The theory. Let’s talk about practice.

In reality, Silicon Valley is a hive-mind of far-left progressive ideology from Google on down to Snapchat and beyond. This is inarguable, even if you find it troubling. The big tech companies loathe and contemn everyone who isn’t a progressive; it’s what animates them over profits. If you don’t enthusiastically toe the leftist line, they wish you’d just go away and die already. Alex Jones was a trial balloon. They’ll move on to normal people soon.

So what can you do?

You can opt out, of course. That’s one choice. One of the best things I ever did for myself was quitting Facebook, and I encourage all other normal people to do the same.  Void the field. Let the progressives have the social media platforms they built. This is preferable to the death of a thousand cuts they have in store for us.

The better choice is to treat them like Ma Bell and regulate the living shit out of them so they can’t just arbitrarily decide that you’re an unperson who spews hate speech. I’m a firm believer in free markets, but support of a free market, like support of the U.S. Constitution, isn’t a suicide pact. As long as these bizarre, anti-Western progressive panjandrums are bound and determined to de-platform everyone who isn’t a bizarre, anti-Western progressive, let them feel the wrath of normal people. It’s not a free market when one side has its thumb on the scale. They’re fighting dirty, so we have to fight just as dirty. Confound them with regulation after regulation. Put their arbitrary, hostile business model in jeopardy. Make them testify in front of Congress again and again and again and make them vomit up their dishonesty before the voting public. Progressives love regulating business, the environment, education, and everything else under or above the sun, so choke them with social media regulation until they can’t breathe.

If we have to bake that cake, you’ve got to let Alex Jones spew his stupid crap on Facebook. Regulate, regulate, regulate.

 

*What’s amazing is that Jones, as loathsome as he is, is no different from Rachel Maddow, who works for NBC. Why aren’t social media companies going after Maddow? She promulgates moronic, offensive conspiracy bullshit to unthinking drones every day herself. **

**You know the answer to that.