David Dubrow's Blog, page 9

A Message to the Covington Kids

I hold no illusions that what I write here will be read by the Covington High School students mired in the latest case of social media-fueled media malpractice. It’s really a message to my son, who will have to learn these lessons eventually; the sooner he takes them to heart, the better off he’ll be.

Hey guys:

I’m not going to pretend that I understand what you’re dealing with now. I’m assuming, however, that if you were attending the March for Life to protest the horror of abortion, you’ve got good parents who are guiding you along the path to being decent adults. At your age I didn’t care about any issues outside of my personal desires, so I salute you.

Obviously the attendant ugliness isn’t what you expected. It’s bad that it happened, but it’s worse if you don’t learn anything from it. Here are the biggest takeaways:

Adults lie. You probably knew this already, but it’s particularly galling when thousands of adults are lying about you, what you’ve done, what you’ve seen, and what you believe. There’s a big difference between white lies and lies designed to destroy you, and you’re being subjected to the latter, and it sucks. It’s disillusioning. Nathan Phillips lied to the media about what he did to you and what you did. He has a history of lying about his service record and previous encounters with white people. You’re being lied about by politicians, news reporters, entertainers and their brain-dead fans, and it’s absolutely crazy, but here we are. They’re lying about you not because of anything you’ve done personally to them, but because of what you represent: the millions and millions of people who hold different values. You’ve become proxies for President Trump, his voters, and anyone who stands against abortion. They hate you (and us) so much they’ll lie about you to ruin your lives. So yes, adults lie.

Only your family has your back. It’s absolutely shameful that the diocese and school immediately and publicly rushed to judgment against you, despite that these are some of the adults who know you best. Any apology at this point is too little, too late: the damage has already been done. Their primary interest isn’t in protecting or even educating you: they live first and foremost to maintain their jobs. Students come and go, parishioners move elsewhere, but the school and the church live on. They don’t have your back. Not even the strangers who are outraged on your behalf have your back, at least not for long; we’ll move on to a different outrage next week. Only your family has your back. Don’t trust your teachers or clergy to protect you. Trust your parents. Trust your family. They’re the ones who will see you through this.

Entertainers are, for the most part, scum. I understand the desire to lionize actors, musicians, and comedians. They entertain us and it’s natural to like them for it. It’s hard to dislike someone who makes you laugh. Just remember that they’re doing a job, nothing more. They have no special skills outside of that job. They don’t have the wisdom of the brilliant people they sometimes portray, and for the most part, they lack curiosity, education, and ethics. Hollywood is a town that’s known worldwide for rampant sexual assault, pedophilia, substance abuse, and institutionalized prostitution. So when you see something like this:

Consider the source. John DiMaggio is the actor who does the voice for Jake the dog in Adventure Time. And now he’s hoping you’ll die. He doesn’t even know you. He hasn’t bothered to inform himself as to the particulars of the incident. He’s representative of the majority of the entertainment sphere. So don’t make the mistake of elevating entertainers. They’re not good people just because they’re on screen. In fact, most of them aren’t good people at all. Don’t you have something better to do than give the people who hate you your time and money and attention?

Most adults are cowards. While you’ll find a lot of air time devoted to attacking you for just being there and wearing MAGA hats, you won’t find a lot of air time devoted to attacking the Black Hebrew Israelites. Which is weird, because they called you “faggots”. If white nationalists had called black kids faggots, you can be sure that every gay rights organization on the planet would have jumped on them with both feet. But they haven’t, because the Black Hebrew Israelites scare them. Because they’re cowards. Anyone in media who doesn’t denounce this racist, bigoted group the Black Hebrew Israelites is either a coward or someone who agrees with them. Note also that the majority of people who called for you to be beaten up or even murdered weren’t saying they’d do it themselves. They asked other people to do it, because they’re cowards. Like Reza Aslan.

This is all very cynical, I know, but it’s also the truth, and it’s something you’re living right now. I wish you the best of success in everything, particularly your lawsuit.

Appalling Stories 2: The Inside Story

For Appalling Stories 2: More Appalling Stories of Social Injustice, the book’s subtitle preceded the content. I chose to interpret it this way: my contributions needed to be more appalling in this second volume. I wanted to push the envelope without devolving into a tiresome description of disgusting circumstances, which is typical in so-called “extreme horror” stories. Appalling Stories 2 isn’t extreme horror, though many of the events described therein are pretty horrible.

People like to ask writers, “Where do you get your ideas?” I never know how to answer this question. Even my dental hygienist asked me once. I replied, “In the dentist chair,” which elicited the hoped-for laugh. A novel has to have more than one idea. You can get away with just one in a short story.

For the story Her Bodies, Her Choice, I didn’t come up with the idea myself. Rick Canton, a friend of mine who I used to work with on the website The Loftus Party provided the central concept. On Twitter he asked a prominent feminist, “Why’re you so excited for abortion? Do you eat aborted babies or something?” I’m paraphrasing, but that’s the idea. He’s since been kicked off of Twitter for similar offenses. But his question planted the seed: feminists eating fetuses. Disgusting. Horrifying. Compelling. But I had to flesh it out. It had to make sense, it had to entertain, and it had to fit within the theme of the Appalling Stories anthology. The story I eventually came up with takes this idea and runs with it, turning it into a dreadful, far-reaching conspiracy. It even includes a description of a photo I saw in a book on witchcraft decades ago: a woman’s skeleton, freshly disinterred, with huge, heavy screws at her knees and elbows. They’d screwed her bones together to keep her from rising from the grave. That’s how much they feared her, even in death.

My other story, The Deprogram, came as a result of watching the 1982 movie Split Image, starring James Woods and Brian Dennehy. In it, a young man enters a Bhagwan-style cult and his desperate parents try to get him out. The same author who gave me the idea for the Bake Me a Cake story in the first Appalling Stories anthology suggested I watch it, though I can’t remember the context. The movie wasn’t bad, everyone played to type, and it provided fertile ground for a story: in a social justice future, people would have to be brainwashed to accept ludicrous notions like gender being a social construct instead of a biological fact of nature. Political correctness not just run amok, but extended into its necessarily oppressive and unpleasant future, where certain ideas are criminalized and rebelling against the accepted mode of thinking is punishable by government-issued lobotomy. But it had to be realistic. Like the previous story, it had to make sense and fit the theme.

You, the reader, will have to decide if either story was appalling enough, or even more appalling than the previous volume. And I’m not talking about the writing.

Sickbed Reviews

My 2018 holiday season was delightfully uneventful until a gastrointestinal ailment struck me down on the first of the year and hasn’t entirely let up even today. I will spare you the details.

So what did I do during this time of illness? Watched TV, of course. Too sick to do anything else. Let’s go over what I saw.

Diablero: A Netflix series that can be summed up as the Mexican version of Supernatural, complete with demons, humor, demons, family, demons, and tortillas. I was attracted to it because of the setting (Mexico City) and the style, which was entertainingly colorful and frenetic. Despite that it’s a Mexican production, it follows the new American horror tradition of Us vs. Evil, where demons are defeated by techniques and weapons instead of faith, and all the clergy are fallen or otherwise criminal. Despite this, it’s a fun show. The acting’s fine, the characters are likable, and the story’s got punch. Its attempts to integrate Aztec gods into Christian theology were less successful, but worth watching anyway. I’d like to see a season two.

Travelers Season 3: I’ve talked about Travelers before (having watched the first season during another illness; go figure) and how much I liked it. Season 2 was good: expanded the mythology, deepened the characters, included an overarching plot that was dark and disturbing. Season 3 was great until the last couple of episodes, where they ruined it such that I’m not sure I’m going to bother looking for a season 4. This is your spoiler alert. What they did with season 3 is turn the reason why the Travelers came into a global warming screed. They had to time-travel to the 21st century because this is when global warming becomes too horrible to stop. Which is stupid. Really stupid. I enjoyed the show before because it didn’t poke us with the standard Hollywood issues. Now it has and the bloom’s come off the rose. Not only that, but the screenwriters continued to write themselves into corners and then cheat their way out of it, starting with the first episode and ending with the last, where they’re essentially going to return to an earlier save point in the space-time continuum. Disappointing across the board.

The Frozen Dead: There’re not a lot of new ideas in The Frozen Dead, but it works pretty well and you wind up liking all the characters, which is a rarity on television shows. Set in the French Pyrenees, it starts with the murder of a horse and gets pretty dark from there. The madman in the asylum: is he pulling the strings? Is the lead detective drinking too much? What about the nosebleeds? And the wealthy industrialist? You get the picture. Comparisons to Hannibal Lecter are fair, but won’t get in the way of your enjoyment of the show. Think of The Frozen Dead as a frozen pizza: they’re always pretty good, they satisfy your hunger, and there’s always one around if you want a no-trouble meal. At six episodes long, what have you got to lose?

In Order of Disappearance: A Norwegian crime thriller/comedy starring Stellan Skarsgård as a man who drives a snowplow. I know, I know. Thing is, it’s good. Funny, exciting, exactly what you’d want from a movie like this. Vegan crime bosses, Serbian thugs, and stoic Stellan in the middle, dealing with the murder of his son. The more I tell you the more I’ll spoil it, so just take my word for it that it’s a movie you should see, and you’ll have a good time. That’s why we watch movies in the first place, isn’t it?

Last 2018 Post

Between extensive Christmas prep and getting out there and having a good time, I skipped last week’s blog post. Apologies.

2018 was a remarkable year in many respects, both good and…less good. Despite the day-to-day frustrations and unmet expectations that occur in every 24-hour period, I work hard to practice gratitude. Sometimes I’m less successful in the moment, sometimes more. My wife and son are both healthy and active, so as far as that story goes, I could just close the book and say it’s all good. Anything that happens outside of that is gravy. Frosting. Sugar on top. Pick your culinary metaphor.

That’s the story. Here’s the plot.

Over this year I released two books. The first was The Holy Warrior and the Last Angel, the third novel in my Armageddon trilogy. Nobody wants to hear how difficult writing a book was, but still, this one was pretty damned hard. It was so hard I had to take breaks to produce other books while I was writing it. Part of the difficulty was psychological: it was comfortable working on the same project for several years, and who wants to leave the Comfort Zone? The other part was just wrapping up everything in a way that made sense, satisfied the reader, and examined the themes of faith and humanity I wanted to explore. It’s up to the reader to determine its quality or lack of. The second of 2018’s books was Appalling Stories 2: More Appalling Tales of Social Injustice. The sequel to 2017’s Appalling Stories, it continues the anti-PC, ripped-from-the-headlines theme, and showcases a number of authors’ short fiction work. Nobody else is doing anything quite like it, and I’m proud of Appalling 2.

Me, fresh out of the hospital

In January, my story A Haunting in Pennsylvania was published in Creators Unite Magazine, the Woman Power Issue. It’s neat when someone illustrates your writing and I’m pretty happy about that. In February, I wrote an evergreen piece on firearms in America. In April I watched the “important” horror film Get Out and confirmed, once and for all, that most movie reviewers are completely full of shit. In May, the horror site The Slaughtered Bird shut down; I enjoyed writing for them. June was a rough month for me: I spent the last week of May horribly ill, culminating in an 8-day hospital stay that I described here. While my hospitalization was a learning experience, it was still less than pleasant. I reviewed The Last Jedi in July, which got some notoriety in certain circles of Star Wars fandom. In August I reviewed David Angsten’s terrific novel Night of the Furies, and when you’re done reading this post, you need to run to Amazon and pick up Angsten’s entire Night-Sea Trilogy if you haven’t already. I tried to go home again in September with a review of Lord Foul’s Bane. October turned out to be a busy month: my story Dear Dad was published in Cinder Quarterly, the literary magazine from Taliesin Nexus, and I reviewed the wrenching film Gosnell: The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer. It’s the hardest film I’ve ever watched. In November I invented the term Thanksgivingtime. You’re welcome.

Not much else happened that I’m prepared to talk about. We got a black kitten earlier in the year. He’s been good luck for us and is a fine little fellow. For Christmas I got a sous vide machine.

What’s coming in 2019? I’m working with Ray Zacek on a satirical book that I hope to have out in the first quarter of the year. Still working on a science fiction adventure series that I’m sure you’ll enjoy: something a bit lighter than my previous fare. I doubt I’ll have it ready by 2019, but who knows?

Thank you, as always, for reading. May the coming year bring you blessings and favor from God, who is all good all the time. May you be as fortunate as I in both family and fortune, and may you remember from where it all springs.

The Haunting of Hill House

At the time of this writing, the Netflix miniseries The Haunting of Hill House carries an 8.8 rating on IMDB. It’s a ten-episode adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s novel of the same name, and tells the story of a family who moves into Hill House to flip it, finds ghosts inside, and is traumatized for decades afterward. Critics called it “essential viewing,” “often stunning,” and a “non-stop thrill ride.”

Like the horror film Get Out, I can’t help but wonder what Hill House‘s fans actually watched, because what I saw was horrible, tedious trash filled with every narrative cliche imaginable.

The performances were unremarkable, but the speechifying from just about every character was notable for its appalling self-indulgence. Once, twice, or more per episode, one character or another would just launch into a bland, affect-less speech that ate up time in a presentation that was six hours longer than it needed to be. You could walk the dog, wash your hands, and grab a fudgsicle from the freezer and still not miss anything during those endless speeches. They just went on and on and on.

What didn’t help was that every one of the characters was entirely unlikable. Substituting bickering for conflict, they sniped at each other endlessly, making them generally unpleasant to watch. Hugh Crain as the patriarch was an ineffectual buffoon, played with all the intensity of a doorknob by both Henry Thomas and Timothy Hutton (who tried to put me out of a job once; I’ll tell you about that some day). Carla Gugino as his wife Olivia pranced about the house in robes and wedges, too substantial to be fragile, too irritating to be tragic. The other characters, their children, filled their roles exactly the way they were written: unable to evoke even the slightest pathos.

Thematically, it follows today’s standard horror trope of Us vs. Them, not Good vs. Evil. The protagonists were motivated by survival rather than moral imperative, and the antagonists weren’t all evil: they’re just eking out undead existences in a haunted house. Christianity is specifically derided as being of no more importance than Buddhism. There’s no God, there’s no Devil, there’s just people and ghosts. Despite that the story’s about the spirits of dead people annoying/haunting/killing the living, the idea of an afterlife isn’t addressed. And, most importantly, there’s no reason given for anything that happens in the movie. Why is the house haunted? I don’t know. Why does anyone who dies in the house haunt it? Got me. Why couldn’t any of the characters do the right and moral thing by having the house torn down? Because ghosts, that’s why. Enjoy the show. There’s lesbians in it. And family drama.

I’d be tempted to write off the massive wave of love for this waste of time as paid studio shills, but I’ve seen enough people rave about it on social media to convince me that the appreciation for The Haunting of Hill House is genuine. Which is unfortunate, because it shows that the gap between garbage and quality has become so wide that it’s pretty damned difficult to accept media recommendations anymore.

Get the Greek Is Free!

Get the Greek: A Chrismukkah Tale remains my favorite piece of writing: a comic short story of one man’s attempt to end the commercialization of both Christmas and Hanukkah. As the best things in life are free, I’m offering it for the low, low price of $0.00 from today until December 22! Here’s an exclusive excerpt:

Judah Maccabee spat a curse, reached out to slam the laptop shut, and threw both hands in the air instead. Rivka kept telling him it was a waste of time watching World Jews Tonight. Why do you want to raise your blood pressure with all that bad news, she would ask. Earth’s a billion miles away on a whole other plane of existence, for cat’s sake.

“Because it matters,” he grumbled in response to her imaginary carping. “I didn’t die watching my own guts spill out on the hills of Elasa so Jews could put up Hanukkah bushes in December. They might as well burn offerings to Apollo.”

Rivka called out from the kitchen, “Did you say something, dear?”

Shaking his head as much to clear it as deny he had spoken, he replied, “Ah, no, honey. Just watching the news.”

“Well, dinner’s almost ready. Florence and Chaim’ll be here in five minutes.”

He fumbled around the surface of the desk, frowning. Where did I—

“Your sunglasses’re in the top right drawer,” Rivka supplied helpfully.

So, as my belated Hanukkah/early Christmas gift to you, click the link and get your free copy of Get the Greek before December 23!

Appalling Stories 2 Is Live!

Appalling Stories 2: More Appalling Tales of Social Injustice is live at Amazon for only $2.99! This is the spiritual sequel to the top-selling short story anthology Appalling Stories, and carries on the tradition of ripped-from-the-headlines short fiction written to entertain, amuse, and even horrify. 

In Appalling Stories 2, we sent out a call to writers to produce stories appropriate to the theme, and were amazed at the number of submissions. After a lengthy and occasionally blistering winnowing process, we settled on the ten best stories for this volume. From hilarious cautionary tales to science fiction yarns, from searing satire to supernatural horror, it’s a smorgasbord of fiction that represents the new counterculture, not the focus-grouped, watered-down PC trash that’s infested the literary market.

With a foreword from Christian Toto, editor of HollywoodInToto.com, Appalling Stories 2 is the perfect antidote to today’s aggressively woke times. Check out the book that Daniel Greenfield of

Appalling Stories 2 Cover Reveal

Obsidian Point is proud to reveal the cover to the new counterculture short fiction anthology Appalling Stories 2: More Appalling Tales of Social Injustice.

 

From the back cover:

The virulent disease of political correctness has infected the body politic from nose to toes, and even the field of literature isn’t immune. The best way to inoculate yourself against this Social Justice Warrior-carried malady is to read entertaining, old-school fiction that neither pulls punches nor takes prisoners.

That’s where Appalling Stories 2 comes in. The spiritual sequel to the top-selling anthology Appalling Stories, this new collection brings you ripped-from-the-headlines tales of short fiction written to make you laugh, make you cry, and even make you think. Just a little.

In these pages you’ll read stories of humanity’s terrifying First Contact with extraterrestrial life, the horrifying secret behind today’s radical feminist movement, what happens when the wokest man you know discards the last of his White Privilege, and more. From a far-future history of America’s decline to disturbing tales of gun control gone wild, you’re sure to find something that will stick with you long after you’ve closed the book.

And the best part is that you’ll be making an SJW so mad when you tell him/her/zir what you’re reading.

This edition features a foreword by Christian Toto, editor of Hollywoodintoto.com.

And, as an added bonus, here’s a sneak peek at the table of contents:

Appalling Stories 2 is coming soon in both print and Kindle format, so watch this space for details!

Don’t Quit Twitter Just Yet

Don’t quit Twitter in a snit.

I know this is pretty rich coming from the man who loves to talk about how destructive social media is to our culture, but hear me out. If you’re quitting a social media platform because you recognize the harm it’s doing to your psyche, your productivity, and your relationships, you’ll find no greater cheerleader than me. You’re doing the right thing for yourself. It’s like quitting smoking, but for your very soul. So good on you for making yourself healthier. The rest of this piece isn’t for you.

If you’re quitting Twitter for political reasons, read on.

Everybody on conservative Twitter is upset about Twitter banning radio talk show host, online raconteur, and combat veteran Jesse Kelly for no explainable reason. And then they un-banned him. Go figure. In the surprise, dismay, and anger over his ouster, what hasn’t been said enough is this:

If you’re not a progressive, Twitter hates you. It wishes you would die. Failing that, it wants you to go away and never come back.

So Twitter is enemy territory. Like every other big tech company. You know this. But you should internalize it. Civil War 2.0 is happening right now.

Say I’m wrong about Twitter hating you. Maybe it really is a neutral platform devoted to the principles of free speech, despite all evidence to the contrary. If you’re not a progressive, Twitter is still enemy territory, because if you express the wrong thought to the wrong person, an angry progressive will report you. And he’ll encourage all his progressive buddies to report you. With enough complaints, you’ll be kicked out. Do you know how many tweets get reported in a single day? You’ll be kicked out on volume alone. The banners behind the scenes all think Orange Man Bad, and it’s easier to just flip the ban switch on you, you reprobate. Quantity, not quality. You see, you’re a normal person: you have a job. A calling. You log on to Twitter to talk to online buddies, share memes, mess with easily-upset people (progressives), perhaps make professional relationships, maybe sell something. You have a life outside of political Twitter.

Progressives don’t. So while you’re trying to have a good time on Twitter, there are literally thousands of angry progressives who have made it their life’s work to get rid of you. You can’t compete with that. Reporting people, banning people, eliminating ideas that upset them: it’s what they do. You bake bread for a living. They sit on Twitter and report people all day long. There’s no possible way to compete with that.

But it doesn’t mean you should quit. There are at least three good reasons to stay.

Every time you Tweet, you’re bothering the Twitter higher-ups. They’ve crafted contradictory, arbitrary, and unbelievably stupid Terms of Use, and they feel they have to put up the typical progressive facade of playing by these dumb rules, because if they tell you what they really think and feel, there’s no way anyone would ever do business with them. So they haven’t kicked you off yet, and it bugs them that you’re still there. Twitter is the enemy, and it’s always a good thing to upset the enemy. Stay on for that.
You’re not alone. Every other normal person feels the same way as you do RE: Twitter’s horrible management. It’s one of the things that makes you a normal person. Post links, laugh at Alexandria Occasional-Cortex’s latest gaffe, watch another clip of “Dear Diary” Jim Acosta getting spanked at a press conference, etc. Fill up the space with what you want, and take in what you like. One of the greatest things Rush Limbaugh ever did for conservatism was getting so popular. He showed us that we weren’t alone, that there were far, far more of us than we’d hoped. With Twitter being enemy territory, your fellow soldiers need battle buddies. Don’t quit because Twitter kicked someone off that you like.
Every normal person Twitter bans further exposes Twitter as a hostile place fit only for SJW-approved speech. Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s CEO, is currently under scrutiny for lying to Congress. That’s not a tiny thing. By staying on, you’re forcing Twitter to both enforce its own capricious free-speech rules to maintain its facade, and daring them to ban you (which it will eventually), which is an untenable situation for any company. They can’t claim to be a neutral space for free speech and satisfy the Twitter progressives’ endless hunger for normal peoples’ scalps. You can mouth conservative bromides about #MuhFreeMarkets all you like, but social media companies do have to follow certain laws. If you have to bake the cake, they have to publish your tweets. Until they don’t. Then you get to call them hypocrites. Which doesn’t stick because a hypocrite has ethics, and Twitter progressives don’t. But it’s fun to point it out.

We’ve already ceded Hollywood, the news media, and the education system to the progressives. Are you going to void the social media field, too?

Three Things to Watch at Thanksgivingtime

All sports except for boxing and MMA bore the living tits off of me, so football is never my choice for screen entertainment during Thanksgivingtime. No, Thanksgivingtime isn’t a word like Christmastime is, but it should be. Yes. Anyhoo, if you’re looking to watch something during Thanksgivingtime, here are a few recommendations.

The Endless: An indie film of no fixed genre, The Endless tells the story of Aaron and Justin, two men who claim to have escaped a UFO-style cult ten years ago, and are having trouble adjusting to today’s world. When they get a package from the cult they left, they return to the compound to see how things have fared over the last decade. What’s great about good indie films like The Endless is that they’re imaginative in a way that corporate-produced Hollywood genre movies can’t quite match, with rare exceptions. You’ll find a lot of sticks-with-you visuals and terrific bits of storytelling in The Endless, and the mistakes it makes don’t distract from the overall quality of the production. There’s weird stuff, there’s funny stuff, there’s even some family stuff, and it works, for the most part. Trust me. I’m not wrong about a lot.

American Vandal: If you’ve seen multi-episode true crime shows like Making a Murderer or The Keepers, you have to watch American Vandal. It’s a pitch-perfect parody of true crime programs, from the close-up profile interviews and hours of B-roll to the multiple plot lines and red herrings. The first season deals with the investigation of a prank in which someone spray-painted penises on the teachers’ cars in a local high school’s parking lot, so you know where the humor is going. It’s both an eerily realistic dissection of the high school ecosystem and a deconstruction of the true crime genre. Season two addresses a different crime, this one committed by someone called The Turd Burglar. Social media and its attendant dangers/pitfalls get skewered here, with both hilarious and disgusting results. Both seasons are engrossing and incredibly well made.

First Reformed: Horribly flawed but impossible to look away from, First Reformed is a Paul Schrader movie that focuses on Ethan Hawke as Reverend Toller, the priest of a small church known more for its history than its holiness. Toller is a man with a haunted past and a terribly grim present, and he’s too conflicted to like but too human to hate. Everything’s bleak and stark and cold and meticulously placed, making it a visual masterpiece that you have to watch in awe. The performances couldn’t be better, adding to the film’s visual perfection. And yet the story’s muddled, the plot’s unclear, and the message is hackneyed. It tackles the issue of faith imperfectly at best, and misses the mark on deeper themes. What bothered me most was the ending, summed up by the director himself: “I don’t know what the ending is.” I’m not a movie director, but I am a fiction writer and an adult, and I say that that’s unfair to the audience. If we trust you with our time and attention, you owe us a proper story. I’m not saying that every ending has to be cut-and-dried, but if you don’t know how it ends and you made it, you’re betraying our trust. Don’t do that. I’ve written my share of open-ended endings, but I always knew how they do and should end. You may feel differently. Watch the movie and let me know what you think.

Happy Thanksgiving! And start using the term Thanksgivingtime so I don’t look like too much of a ding-dong.