David Dubrow's Blog, page 6

HiT Movie Review: Loqueesha

Loqueesha is a movie heavily freighted with controversy before it was even released. So I couldn’t wait to watch it and then review it for Hollywood in Toto:

Loqueesha’s low budget makes itself known early on: the lighting is drab, most of the scenes are shot close up, and the few bits of green screen are so terrible that they should have been left on the hard drive. (It’s the 21st century, so I can’t say “cutting room floor” anymore.) None of the actors looked happy to be there, and delivered their lines with an awkward kind of affect that accurately reflected the script’s leaden dialogue. Unnecessary, expository scenes involving radio execs took the viewer out of the story, and montages of average people listening to Loqueesha’s sage advice on the radio fell flat. Sometimes you have to decide that the baby is ugly early on so you can stop putting it in front of the camera. Nobody in production had the wit to do that.

You should read the whole thing.

Antifa Apocalypse, Zombie Apocalypse: What’s the Difference?

For Bridges Unabridged, author Ann Bridges’s website, I wrote about the difference between a zombie attack and an Antifa mob:

The differences, however, are somewhat significant. While zombies don’t feel fear or pain, you can frighten off or injure an Antifa terrorist to make him stop attacking you. Antifa members can be stopped without the use of lethal force, unlike zombies, who can only be deanimated through decapitation or massive brain injury.  A viral zombie can turn you undead with its bite, whereas the worst you’ll get from an Antifa terrorist is Hepatitis or AIDS. There are no recorded instances of a normal person having been transformed into an Antifa member by having been bitten by a smelly, entitled anarchist wannabe.

From combat tactics to journalist Andy Ngo’s mistakes, it’s a must-read piece!

Cultural Overtones: The Inside Story

I had to scrap a draft of a piece for the first Appalling Stories anthology because I couldn’t develop an ending that would both satisfy the reader and not descend into cliche. It involved a middle schooler who was being bullied by Syrian immigrants, and when the school refused to intervene because of the bullies’ protected social status, the boy’s father goes to the main bully’s house in a bad neighborhood to address the situation himself. My original conclusion had him knock on an unresponsive door, dejectedly go back to his car, and get mugged and stabbed by an aggressive panhandler. It was ugly and brutal and ended the story, but not well. Anything like the father meeting the parents and developing a rapport, or meeting the parents and finding that they’re bad people, or meeting the parents and bullying them himself, or going home and angrily bullying his family would have been too hackneyed. The story just got away from me, which is why I like to use an outline for the vast majority of my fiction.

With the deadline looming I scrambled to come up with something, and seeing my kid watch television shows produced long after my childhood gave me an idea. The notion of SETI searching for extraterrestrial radio communication fascinated me, and I’d always wanted to write a story about what would happen if we actually received television signals from an alien planet. Combine this with every parent’s fear of his kid becoming alienated from him because of a rapidly-changing culture, and you’ve got something most of us can relate to. That’s how Cultural Overtones was conceived. In a way it’s about Elvis and rap music and teenage rebellion, and in another way it’s about something a lot more disturbing.

Being a parent is a full-time job that requires mindfulness as well as love and affection, and you have to make smart decisions about what to let slide and what to address. What happens when you go on autopilot?

You’ll see. Below the fold is an excerpt from Cultural Overtones.

Susan scrolled her Facebook feed, skipping the 30-second avocado toast recipe videos and political memes to find the vacation pictures her sister had texted about last night. Every photo had to get a Like and a comment or Zooey would get mad. Not outwardly mad, just icily silent for days.

Does every family measure affection with Facebook Likes?

The toaster oven dinged, and as Susan moved to pry out the bagel half with a butter knife, the video screen set into the refrigerator door unmuted at her proximity.

“—this morning on CNN’s New Day we’ve got Carl Monnet in studio. Carl’s the author of The Cygnus Tapes, the runaway best-seller that blew the lid off of the biggest cover-up in human history. Now, almost twenty-five years later, he’s here to talk about—”

“Oh, come on,” she muttered, scraping margarine across the bagel’s browned surface. The proximity sensor was supposed to show the fridge’s interior when someone got close, not activate the volume controls, but it hadn’t had a software update in months. At least it still kept food cold.

“—so even as we’ve been broadcasting our television waves into outer space for close to 80 years, the Cygnians have been doing the same with their television-analogues for, well, we don’t know how long. What we do know is that their star, Beta Cygni, is 380 light-years away, so even if they’re listening, they won’t receive our signals for at least three hundred—”

She chewed, swallowed, and activated Siri. “Set reminder for two PM to update fridge software.”

“Okay,” said her phone. “I’ll remind you.”

“—still learning more and more, but even though the Cygnians have three sexes, they’re a lot like—”

“Who’s that guy? He looks familiar,” Emma said, drifting in to put an ice cream-crusted bowl in the sink.

Susan looked up, gaped at her daughter’s outfit, and inhaled bagel crumbs. Trying to control the coughing spasm, she said, “You…you are not going out dressed like that.”

Great. Now I sound like my mother. The circle of life is complete.

“What?” Emma asked, turning up her palms. “What’s wrong?”

“You know what’s wrong.”

Emma folded her arms. “Everyone dresses like this.”

“I don’t.”

Rolling her eyes, Emma said, “No, but you’re—”

“I’m what.” Susan sharpened her stare into a glower. “Old?”

Emma eased her tone into something more conciliatory. “Well, uh, no, but you’re just not into it. You know, the culture.”

Lifting an eyebrow, Susan said, “Cygnian culture. TV shows from space aliens.”

“Well, yeah.”

Susan pointed at the fridge’s video screen with her chin. “Well, that guy, he’s the world’s foremost expert on—” she made finger quotes. “’The culture.’ Cygnian culture. And you don’t see him going out wearing pasties and hot pants.”

“They’re not pasties. And Cygnian males don’t dress like that anyway.”

Pushing her plate away, Susan said, “Human females don’t, either. At least not you. You’re fifteen years old, and you’re not going out dressed like a hooker, for Christ’s sake.”

Emma’s pink-lipsticked mouth pointed down at the corners. “Dad doesn’t mind.”

“One of the many reasons why you see him only one weekend a month, Emma.”

—

You can read the rest of Cultural Overtones, plus twelve other entertaining stories, in the anthology Appalling Stories: 13 Tales of Social Injustice.

Flash Fiction: Sportswomanship

“You gu—ah, you ladies fought hard. Closest game of the season,” Coach said, keeping her tone carefully bland.

“Yeah,” Megan muttered. She leaned her pink-haired head against the lockers behind her. “We only lost by nine goals this time.”

Coach’s glassy, bloodshot eyes flicked to Megan and tightened at the corners. “We’ll go over the tape—the, ah, video—tomorrow before practice. See what we can improve on.”

Kelley figured if Coach had been on her fourth vodka-soda of the day instead of her fifth, she might have gotten salty at Megan’s crack, but between Coach’s level of inebriation and Megan’s stardom, she must’ve decided to drop it. Coach could go from maintaining drunk to angry drunk at the drop of a hat.

“What we can improve on?” Megan thrust out her jaw and sat up. “We can’t—they must’ve been using HGH or something. They’re cheating!”

Swallowing, Coach couldn’t help but glance at the new players before saying, “You…that’s a serious charge. We could—it’s not good for the team.”

“I could get Congress to look into it. I know some people,” Megan said. “Chuck Schumer, Alexandria Ocas—”

“No! We know why—” Coach coughed, looked away, and peered at the goalie, sitting apart from everyone with her head down. “Ashlyn.”

Oh, crap, Kelley thought.

“Yeah?”

“Anything to add?”

Ashlyn shook her head. “I…they spent most of the game on offense.”

“So it’s defense’s fault you’ve been a sieve all season?”

“No, but—” Ashlyn glared at the new players, opened her mouth to say something else, and closed it.

“You’re benched,” Coach said. “We’re signing on a new goalie to start.”

Ashlyn’s face crumpled into tears, but she nodded and resumed her focus on the locker room’s tile floor.

That’s it.

“Look,” Kelley said, standing up. “We all know what the problem is.”

Blinking, Coach frowned. “I don’t think—”

“It’s these new players!” Kelley gestured at them. “We can’t play like this!”

Three of them looked up from their smartphones and scowled, but the rest didn’t seem to notice.

“What the hell are you talking about, Kelley?” Coach said. “Since we signed them, we’ve had more shots on goal, closed the point gap to single digits, and—”

“But they’re not women!”

The newest player, Colina, stood up, looming over the other players. Cornrows glistening in the fluorescent lights, stubbled cheeks dark with anger, she folded her arms under her falsies and growled in a gravelly falsetto, “Sounding kind of a lot like hate speech there, Coach. Might have to file a grievance with the league.”

Coach’s eyes filled with terror. “No! Please! She…she didn’t mean to—”

Kelley kicked the lockers behind her. “I did mean it! This…it’s completely nuts! The only reason why we’re losing this season’s because we’re the last women’s team in the whole league that has some actual women playing!”

Dumbstruck, Coach opened and closed her mouth like a beached fish while Megan got up and put a hand on her shoulder.

“Kelley,” Megan said in an overly calm voice, “you know that’s not true. Colina and, um, Johna and Georgea and the rest…they’re women just like you and me and Ashlyn.”

Colina nodded at this, while Johna and Georgea got up, opened their lockers, and began taking off their uniforms.

“See? Look! They’ve got…they’ve got dicks! Women don’t have penises!” Kelley turned to the other players, looking for allies, but found only stony stares and closed mouths.

“Women have penises, too,” Megan said, and swallowed audibly when Johna and Georgea trooped to the women’s showers. “It’s 2019. Stop being so, so…”

“Hateful,” Colina finished for her, helpfully, and put her huge, callused hands on her hips. “I’m as much a woman as any guy—er, woman here.”

“Oh, my God!” Kelley cried. “Are you kidding—”

“Enough!” Coach screamed, pulling away from Megan. “Kelley, you’d better leave before you make this worse for yourself. You’re already in trouble with the commission.”

“What’re you gonna do, bench me like Ashlyn?”

“No. Have you arrested for hate speech. We still have laws in this country, you know.”

Kelley glowered from the scowling Megan to the towering Colina, shook her head, and stormed out. “I quit. Find a tranny to fill my spot,” she shouted over her shoulder.

“I am so sorry that this happened to you,” Megan said to Colina, eyes bright.

“It’s okay,” Colina rumbled. “I think I’m having my period right now.”

As the other players got up to stroke Colina’s arms, murmuring words of encouragement, Coach backed out of the locker room, went to her office, and filled her water bottle to the top with Smirnoff.

“Prost,” she murmured, and drank deep.

###

(Special thanks to R.M. Huffman.)

The Culture War Part 3: Your Allies

In the third and last part of my Culture War series for Hollywood in Toto, I discussed who’s fighting the Culture War, and who isn’t:

You might feel alone in this fight, or that the conservative side of the Culture War is horribly disorganized. Your feelings are correct. Since Andrew Breitbart’s passing, few conservative leaders have risen to take up his banner. The problem is that anyone who breaks ranks to get to the front lines gets shot by his own men. Conservatives are famous for not just leaving their wounded on the battlefield, but knifing those who move too far ahead.

One reason for this is that the vast majority of conservative media, what’s referred to as Conservative, Inc., is not the least bit interested in moving the conservative agenda forward. They’ll feed you red meat all day long, but that’s as far as they’ll go. It’s as far as they can go.

The members of Conservative, Inc. have hidden behind the façade that they are all fighting on the same side, bound by a shared ideology. This is not true. Conservative websites are exactly like beverage companies, and most of them are as good for you as a daily Big Gulp of Squirt.

There’s a lot more to it, so click through and read it all.

Movie Review: Being Frank

For Hollywood in Toto, I reviewed the movie Being Frank:

Starring comedian Jim Gaffigan, Being Frank is a dramedy that is hard to forget, for all the wrong reasons. It’s impossible to convey how horribly both the writer and director fouled up the tone of this film. Not only was it aggressively unfunny, but it toyed with serious issues like a nine-year-old plays with matches, and the viewer will have to carry the charcoaled remains in memory for some time.

The story is a compelling one: Philip, the teenage son of strict, emotionally distant father Frank (played with near-malevolent glee by Gaffigan), sneaks away for a wild Spring Break vacation, where he finds that his dad actually has an entire second family, complete with wife, house, and two other kids. This discovery, and the antics that follow, comprise the remainder of the film.

What do the filmmakers do with this premise? Click to find out!

The Culture War Part 2: How to Fight

In Part Two of my essay series for Hollywood in Toto, I describe how to fight the Culture War:

The reason why progressives are so terrible at comedy, memes, or simply making normal people laugh isn’t just because they’re full of hate. It’s because once you become the establishment, you stop being funny.

With control over culture, education, news media, and entertainment media, the progressive left is the very definition of the establishment. You can’t be funny once you start taking yourself seriously, and the left takes itself very, VERY seriously. Your material can be clever, but your audience will see right through you. We can’t laugh WITH a finger-wagging scold, but we can laugh AT one. That’s the point of comedy.

What’s the one thing a scold can’t stand? It isn’t defiance. Scolds expect defiance. In God in the Dock: Essays on Theology, C.S. Lewis said, “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

You want to fight well and effectively? Read the whole thing.

The Culture War Part One: The Sheer Size of It

In my latest piece for Hollywood in Toto, I ask the questions nobody else is asking about the Culture War:

What are the victory conditions for the Culture War? What would winning look like? Everybody wants to fight it (or, let’s face it, look like they’re fighting it), but very few define what it means to win.

We know what the War on Drugs is supposed to accomplish: end the use of illegal drugs. The War on Terror is supposed to end the use of terrorism as a tactic, even though nobody got very serious about fighting it and our leaders refuse to name the enemy. But what about the Culture War?

Is the Culture War supposed to drive leftists completely out of show business? Partially out of show business? Is the culture like a cruise ship, something that can be guided to a safe port of call? Who’s the captain, then? Who’s qualified to lead? Maybe victory in the Culture War means something more modest: less progressive messaging in mass media. Perhaps it includes national television channels thinking twice about putting that drag queen child Desmond on the air. Or broadcasting wholesome entertainment the way they used to. A reboot of Emergency! or some such. Randolph Mantooth is still alive, after all.

If you’re going to call it a war, then you have to determine how to fight it, why you want to win, and what winning means.

Read the entire thing here.

Some Thoughts on HBO’s “Chernobyl”

Against my better judgment, I watched the Chernobyl miniseries. With universal rave reviews, how could I not? It’s the first program of HBO’s I’ve seen since the first season of Game of Thrones.

There’s not a lot I can say about the production, sets, acting, and costumes that everyone else hasn’t said a hundred times before. It’s a riveting, enjoyable program, particularly if you acknowledge it as a fictionalized account. The illusion is shattered by familiar if beloved actors in the principal roles who speak with English instead of Russian accents. I understand that this was addressed in podcasts related to the show, but it took me out of the program a number of times. Stellan Skarsgård makes a far better snowplow driver than he does a Communist party apparatchik, despite his talents. When I saw Jared Harris I couldn’t help but think of his role as the horrifying David Robert Jones in Fringe.

While I’m quite familiar with the necessity of adjusting events in a “based on a true story” presentation to better entertain the viewer with drama/conflict, Chernobyl took a number of liberties that will linger in the imagination far longer than the facts. For example, radiation isn’t catching from person to person like a disease if you just remove your irradiated clothes and take a shower. And at the end, when the titles came up informing the audience what happened after the events of the program, they repeated an urban legend regarding the so-called Bridge of Death as fact. This suggests a desire to persuade rather than inform.

The scenes with the kid learning to shoot irradiated pets didn’t add to the plot. They just filled up time.

The writers decanted the “brilliant lady who knows exactly what’s going on at a glance” trope with Ulana Khomyuk, played without shame by Emily Watson. The producers admitted that she’s a composite character intended to represent a team of Russian scientists under Valery Legasov, but this didn’t detract from her insufferable moral/intellectual superiority. Because she’s entirely made up, her ethics are unearned, and her preaching unwelcome.

Where things start to fall down is with this Tweet:

It’s impossible to watch HBO’s CHERNOBYL without thinking of Donald Trump; like those in charge of the doomed Russian reactor, he’s a man of mediocre intelligence in charge of great power–economic, global–that he does not understand.

— Stephen King (@StephenKing) May 30, 2019

Okay, you think. King hates Trump, so of course he’s going to see things through this lens. It’s a sickness many people in public life have infected themselves with.

Series producer Craig Mazin agrees with King:

Soviet behavior didn’t arrive in Moscow via meteor. It was human behavior. The potential is within us all.

Today, I wonder… who ignores scientists? Who wraps themselves in red? Who celebrates liars? Who indulges in mindless propaganda? Who shouts “enemy of the people!”? https://t.co/1CHOgW2eN7

— Craig Mazin (@clmazin) May 29, 2019

So the show’s about Trump. And/or it’s about all of us. It’s not about the failures of communism. It’s not about a broken Soviet system.

The American left, including the people who made the Chernobyl miniseries, are completely full of shit. I know this because I was alive during the 1980’s, and even as a teenager I remember the news and entertainment media slobbering all over Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and pissing on President Ronald Reagan. They loved Gorbachev, regarding him as the perfect foil for the stupid cowboy Reagan. Remember the worshipful paeans to fictional claims of glasnost? The American left’s love for Gorbachev got so overt that Rush Limbaugh referred to each new expression of approval as a “Gorbasm”. The left had multiple Gorbasms daily.

But now, in HBO’s Chernobyl, Gorbachev’s the enemy. He was always America’s enemy. The American left loved him at the time because they hated Reagan so much. He’s only the enemy now because of the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory that’s gotten so much play of late: Trump’s regarded by the intellectually challenged as a Russian spy/stooge, so people who hate Trump are now obliged to hate Russia. The left either really did prefer Gorbachev to Reagan in the 1980’s, or they knew he was the enemy and concealed it because they loathed Reagan so much. Both are bad.

You don’t need to know these things to enjoy a fictionalized account of a real event. Just consider the source. Our self-appointed betters aren’t so great.

HiT Movie Review: Loopers: The Caddie’s Long Walk

I reviewed a documentary for Hollywood in Toto:

Loopers: The Caddie’s Long Walk is a documentary about golf caddies.

Wait! Keep reading. I swear, this movie is a lot of fun, even if you have as little interest in golf as someone like myself, who knows names like Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods, but doesn’t know a bogie from a double eagle.

It’s the hallmark of an objectively good film if it can entertain, teach, and make an uninterested observer care about the subject matter. “Loopers” does all three with style, pathos, and humor. Dryly narrated by Bill Murray, a former golf caddie himself, it’s a quality presentation that, through interviews, news footage, and even animation, shows the viewer how even the most skilled golfers from decades past to today wouldn’t enjoy half the success that they do without caddies. Caddies don’t just pull clubs: the best in the business become confidants, assistants, advisors, and even friends both on and off the course.

Click to read the whole thing!