Eric Robert Nolan graduated from Mary Washington College in 1994 with a Bachelor of Science in Psychology. He spent several years a news reporter and editorial writer for the Culpeper Star Exponent in Culpeper, Virginia. His work has also appeared on the front pages of numerous newspapers in Virginia, including The Free Lance – Star and The Daily Progress. Eric entered the field of philanthropy in 1996, as a grant writer for nonprofit healthcare organizations.
Eric’s poetry has been featured by Dead Beats Literary Blog, Dagda Publishing, The International War Veterans’ Poetry Archive, and elsewhere. His poetry will also be published by Illumen Magazine in its Spring 2014 issue.
Union Station has long been synonymous in my mind with sunny days and warm nights. It was a frequent destination in my 20’s, when I visited various Mary Washington College alumni for reunions of one kind or another.
The last of those arches you see to the left of 2015’s Christmas tree was my “smoking spot” after disembarking from an Amtrak train. The spaces out front would occasionally serve as a staging area for a party weekend, as Sanjeev Malhotra would pick me up, then ready himself for several days in which he would endeavor, with varying degrees of success, to keep me out of trouble.
I was always used to seeing the Capitol Dome shine upon my arrival like a vast, upright egg; it was an image in a poem or two I scribbled down to commemorate my adventures.
Things were different Wednesday. 2015’s strangely mild new winter wasn’t quite cold, but it was blustery, cool, a little wet and quite gray. That is indeed the Capitol Dome that you see in the third photo, but I discovered it darkened and under renovation. And that slate sky’s color differed little from the dark monument marble you see in the foreground. I need to spend a day in DC after a kinder climate finds it, I think.
I like the shot I got of that woman feeding the pigeons.
I wanted to love “The Hallow” (2015) more than I did. It has all of the attributes of a film that I’d love. It’s a creatively conceived, independent horror film, beautifully shot on location in the forests of Ireland. It portrays a family under attack in a gorgeously scenic isolated location at night. It’s got highly original story antagonists — grotesque monsters who seem birthed from Irish folklore and science fiction both. They’re rendered quite nicely with some great special visual and sound effects, and are truly frightening.
Yet, at times, my attention wandered. I’m not sure why. Maybe it was because the pacing was way off, maybe it was the story’s bland parent-protagonists. Maybe it was because the modus operandi for the monsters was confusing at first. I get the sense that “The Hallow” might have been more enjoyable had it been just slightly shorter.
It was still good, though. I’d give it a 7 out of 10.
If you do watch it, then continue to watch through the credits. There’s a really neat coda that adds a new and interesting level to the story.
My take tonight on “The Man in the High Castle” (2015) is again cheerfully redundant; I concur with all of its glowing reviews. I’d give “Season 1” a 10 out of 10, even if I hesitated over a couple of small criticisms. I was leaning toward a 9 over my quibbles, but I can’t get this hooked on a show and look forward to it so much without giving it a perfect rating.
First, it was a terrific television drama in all of the ways I was expecting — it’s an intelligently written and competently directed adaptation of what seems like a truly great science fiction classic. (No, I haven’t read Philip K. Dick’s award-winning 1962 book.) The drama is actually better than I expected.
Second, it also surprised me by being good in some unexpected ways. It’s nifty genre-buster, for one. I recommended it last night to a friend because it has some military-sci-fi elements. But it’s far more of an espionage thriller. It’s a dystopian sci-fi story, but not a futurist one; our negative utopia here exists in an alternate-history 1962. It’s a mystery, as our central plot thread involves mysterious newsreels being transported by the American resistance and sought after by the Axis counterintelligence agencies. And I suggest that the episodes taking place in “the Neutral Zone” (a kind of “no man’s land” between the eastern Nazi territory and the Japanese-annexed East Coast) work just fine as a horror-thriller. The psychotic “bounty hunter’s” pursuit of his various quarry is easily more frightening than many psycho-killer horror films that I’ve seen via Netflix.
The “world building” here has depth. It’s easy for a dystopian-fictional work to just portray New York with Nazi symbols, statues and flags, or California streets with Japanese-language signs. But this show goes to great lengths to (quite successfully) show a range of people and how their personalities are shaped by this alternate universe.
We see heroic resistance fighters and callow American collaborators; frightening Nazis and those with regret; terrifying Imperial Japanese secret-policemen and officials trying to preserve the peace. Conflicts exist among factions and personalities everywhere — divisions and power struggles within the Nazi ranks, threats between the Imperial kempeitai and mobster yakuza, and a brewing possible war between the Axis victors of World War II.
All of this is tightly plotted, with various characters’ actions affecting the missions and safety of others — it really reminded me of Tom Clancy’s novels that way. It’s all kind of brilliant.
The acting is top-notch. Alexa Davalos (Juliana Crane) isn’t just a pretty face, she’s an extremely talented performer. So, too, are Rufus Sewell (Oppergruppenfuhrer John Smith) and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa (Nobusuke Tagomi). All three give great performances.
Honestly, there are too many terrific things about this program to name. It’s just a damn good show.
My only complaints were forgivable. When characters drop personal mementos and those serve as clues to their identity, it’s an eye-rolling deus ex machina. This happens not once, but twice. We also learn far too little about the nature of the mysterious (and plot-driving) newsreels. The entirety of this ten-episode “Season 1” is so lacking in closure that this feels like an incomplete story arc. To make matters worse, there seems to be little information about if or when Amazon will produce another season.
Anyway … I think I spotted an Easter egg. Alexa Davalos is a dead ringer for the equally beautiful Sherilyn Fenn, who played the enigmatic Audrey Horne on “Twin Peaks” 25 years ago. When interrogated by the Kempeitai, she reports that she was looking for her sister in “her favorite places,” which include “Twin Peaks.” That … can’t be a coincidence, can it?
I am a bit late to the party here, but I just wanted to share the recently released (and pretty damned cool) cover to “Miranda’s Rights,” Book Two in Lily Luchesi’s Paranormal Detectives Series.
“Writing is…. being able to take something whole and fiercely alive that exists inside you in some unknowable combination of thought, feeling, physicality, and spirit, and to then store it like a genie in tense, tiny black symbols on a calm white page. If the wrong reader comes across the words, they will remain just words. But for the right readers, your vision blooms off the page and is absorbed into their minds like smoke, where it will re-form, whole and alive, fully adapted to its new environment.”
… when I travel through Union Station this week, I’ll damn sure scope out the locations where “Manhunter” (1986) and Ridley Scott’s “Hannibal” (2000) were filmed. Because I’m a different kind of nerd.
Not gonna ride the carousel and touch some girl’s hair, though. That would be taking things too far.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 