… in Salem, Virginia. It had such character that I had to snap a photo.
This shot was taken from Calhoun Street; the front of the building is a storefront facing Main.
Tag Archives: Eric Robert Nolan
A short review of “Split” (2016)
For much of its running length, I was considering writing a review for “Split” (2016) that rated it a perfect 10. (I am an unabashed fan of M. Night Shyamalan, no matter how reviled he is by other Internet commentators.) I love the way he frames his shots, I love his dialogue, I love his stories, and I love the strange way he can make a slowly paced film nevertheless absorbing.)
And “Split” looked nearly perfect. James McAvoy handed in a tour-de-force performance as Kevin, a man with dissociative identity disorder (DID). (Yes, I am aware of the clinical controversies connected with whether the disorder even exists — I was a psychology student many, many years ago. I think we should suspend whatever disbelief we have for the purposes of enjoying the movie.) McAvoy plays his role to perfection. His “Dennis” persona is particularly frightening, and “Barry,” one of the “good personalities” he portrays, is surprisingly endearing and sympathetic.
Playing off McAvoy wonderfully are Betty Buckley as his gentle psychiatrist and Anya Taylor-Joy as one of three teenaged girls kidnapped by his nastier personalities. The talented Taylor-Joy was also perfect in her role. (I last saw her 2015’s “The Witch” and she was also in last year’s “Morgan;” I’m gaining the impression that this promising young specializes in cerebral horror-thrillers.)
I would rate “Split” an 8 out of 10. It suffers a bit, I think, from two missteps toward the end. One, this taut psychological thriller takes an ill-advised turn into dark fantasy. I thought it was amazingly good as a thriller grounded only in the real world — it was far less so with the later jarring story elements. (I do realize why Shyamalan made this creative decision, and you will too, after watching it and then reading up on it.) But I still think that this would have been a perfect film if the majority of it focused on McAvoy’s personalities either aiding or misleading his psychiatrist, with Taylor-Joy’s fate hanging in the balance.
Two, this film seemed to suffer from the too-many-endings syndrome that people often associate with Peter Jackson’s “The Lord of the Rings” movies. We seem to have one denouement that works quite well, then a second that should have been re-shot and re-scripted. And then there’s another plot strand finally addressed … but it is played so subtly that I’m not even sure I got it. And this isn’t even counting the significance of the movie’s final line, which works as a fantastic framing device.
About that line … if you’re a Shyamalan fan, then you simply must watch the film until it’s very end, as the camera pans through the coffee shop. You’ll love it.
“This Windy Morning,” by Eric Robert Nolan
“This Windy Morning,“ by Eric Robert Nolan
The gales cry,
their sounds rise,
so strangely like
the wailing of children.
The gales
have ripped a rift in purgatory.
Along the low hill’s haze
and indistinct palette of grays,
the thinning slate shapes
are either columns of rain,
or a quorum of waifish wraiths.
Condemned but inculpable
are those little figures —
long ago natives maybe — in an ironic,
insufficient sacrament:
this obscuring rain’s
parody of baptism.
If that faultless chorus
should never see heaven,
they will ever be wind without end
their lamentations ever
shrill within rare
arriving spring downpours.
Always will the squall
imprison their calls.
You and I should refrain
any temptation to breach
these palisades of rain —
lest we be greeted by each
iron-colored countenance:
the sorrowing slim nickel
of an infant’s visage,
little boys’ graying faces,
the silvering eyes of the girls.
© 2017 Eric Robert Nolan
[Note: I began writing this yesterday morning, which was, at a sensory level, just like the fictional morning described. Southwest Virginia indeed has some unique weather, affected, as I’m told, by its sprawling mountain ranges. (They circle the Roanoke metro area.)
The rain yesterday was abrupt and shrieking. I posted on social media that I’d experienced “that eerie moment when the wind sounds strangely like the wailing of children.” So hence the poem that I finished (?) tonight. I think a lot of my friends will find it funny; they certainly were laughing at my poet’s melodrama yesterday. One said it was a nice turn of phrase, too — and that it could be the start of a story.
I’ve never written what I’ve considered a “horror poem” before. (“The Writer” in 2013 was never intended as such, anyway.) But the genre is alive and well, at least in the small presses. Horror poetry is frequently requested in the calls for submissions you can find on Facebook’s various “Open Calls” pages, anyway. (And if you’re an indie writer, those pages are great to peruse anyway.)
I hope you enjoyed the piece.]
Photo credit: By Huhu Uet (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons.
A baffled review of “Lucy” (2014)
Everything you’ve heard about “Lucy” (2014) is correct — it’s exactly as trite and nonsensical as its multitude of unfavorable reviews have described it. Maybe this was intended as some sort of weird, meta, inside joke by writer and director Luc Besson … after all, it’s a movie about increased “brain capacity” that is, ironically, really dumb.
I can’t imagine why Scarlett Johansson and Morgan Freeman would sully their reputations by starring in this film. Although, sadly, even the wonderful Johansson is not at her best here. She seems to try to portray increased intelligence by delivering some of her lines like a robot. (Seriously, she reads some of her lines like a speedy automaton, and it’s a bad creative decision for her performance.)
I could go on and on about the silly things in this movie. So could you, if you’ve seen it. But it’s a lot more fun listening to the surly wise-asses over at Cinema Sins. Their trademark “Everything Wrong With” video for “Lucy” is particularly harsh. At one point they call it “an aggressive dickhead of a movie.” Here’s the link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3rZmnJ66Po
There is one overriding problem I need to address myself … and that’s how its premise seems to relate so little to the events of the story. We begin by understanding that the titular Lucy is affected by a drug that increases her brain capacity. Before the movie reaches its halfway mark, she appears to gain omniscience. (She doesn’t need to actually learn anything — she simply knows virtually everything already. This is evinced by her ability to translate foreign languages instantly, with no books or instruction at all.) She also appears omnipotent by the film’s end. Her powers become literally godlike. And I’m not talking about Thor or Odin from the Marvel Cinematic Universe — we’re talking the all-powerful, Old Testament God of Abraham.
Why? Why should increased intelligence, no matter how incredibly vast, give her power of matter, space and even time? If she were as smart as a thousand Stephen Hawkings, she still shouldn’t be able to do the things she does in the movie.
Believe it or not, I’d rate this movie a 4 out of 10. (That’s far kinder than the other reviews I’ve read.) I managed to have fun with this movie by rewriting some of it in my head while I watched. Instead of Lucy benefiting from a drug that increases her brain capacity (which borrows a bit from 2011’s excellent “Limitless,” anyway), I pretended that I was watching a movie in which Scarlett Johansson became God. (Think of 2003’s “Bruce Almighty.”) Honestly. I swapped out the plot device in my head, and imagined a different movie. That made it fun — watching Scarlett Johansson as a wrathful God was strangely satisfying, especially when she wreaks havoc on the bad guys.
And speaking of bad guys … that is actually one thing that this otherwise clueless movie manages to get right. No, I’m not kidding — the Taipei gangsters that serve as the story’s antagonists were performed to perfection by their actors. The villains were repulsive and terrifying, and they aroused more interest in me than the good guys. Min-sik Choi was terrific as the homicidal patriarch of the Taiwanese crime syndicate. Even better, though, was Nicolas Phongbeth as the cherubic-faced, vaguely androgynous, sociopathic lieutenant. If they were vanquished in this brainless movie, it’d be nice to see them resurrected in a James Bond film or a season of Fox’s “24.” It’s weird seeing a movie so bad do one important thing so successfully.
There are really only two reasons why anybody should see “Lucy.” One is morbid curiosity. Two is if they are a learning to be a screenwriter, and are looking for a feature-length example of what NOT to do.
“I don’t want to wait / For our lives to be over …”
No matter how many letters I write to Hollywood, I’m still waiting on that “Wolf Creek”/”Dawson’s Creek” crossover movie.
I’m starting to worry it might not happen.
Throwback Thursday: the Launch of Image Comics (1992)
I talked about Todd McFarlane’s “Spawn” in last week’s Throwback Thursday post; these are some very early issues of a few of Image Comics’ other titles when the company launched in 1992. I remember snapping them up in earnest when I was 19 years old — as I said last week, it was exciting for a comics fan to see a new company challenge the “Big Two,” Marvel Comics and DC Comics, with a new superhero universe.
I and other ambitious collectors also grabbed these off the shelves because we naively expected they all would one day be very valuable. (Investing in comic books is a little more complicated than that — they’ve generally got to be in extremely good condition to fetch high prices.)
The first Image comics were a mix of good and bad. If memory serves, Jim Lee’s “WildC.A.T.s” was very good; Rob Liefeld’s “Youngblood” was less so, but was at least interesting. The art and writing for Jim Valentino’s “Shadowhawk” was truly mediocre. That didn’t stop me from buying a few issues, though — the novelty of these new books just gave them too much appeal.
There were a lot of creative things going on with early Image titles. Some of the new characters were pretty neat. I remember being partial to Youngblood’s “Diehard” for some reason, along with the WildC.A.T.s’ “Grifter.” (The former has the red, white, and blue full bodysuit; the latter has the trenchcoat and pistols.) And I definitely liked WildC.A.T.s’ “Warblade.” He’s the guy below with the ponytail and the shape-changing, liquid-metal hands. He was a favorite of mine despite the fact that he seemed to borrow a trick or two from the newly iconic liquid-metal terminator. (“Terminator 2: Judgement Day” had hit theaters a year earlier.)
Image comics were quite different than those produced by Marvel and DC. (As I explained last week, Image was formed by artists who revolted against their prior employers’ unfair, work-for-hire payment policies — their new company gave them complete creative control over their characters.) Despite the popularity of Image’s new books, however, they sometimes appeared to have been developed without some needed editorial oversight.
The violence and gore was often far more graphic. And Image’s creative decisions ranged from the inspired to the strange to just being in questionable taste. (It all depended on your disposition, I guess.) WildC.A.T.s, for example, portrayed Vice President Dan Quayle as being possessed by an unearthly “Daemonite.” (Damn, those Daemonites were wicked-cool bad guys, and Lee Illustrated them beautifully.) Shadowhawk’s signature move was breaking the spines of criminals. He was also HIV-positive, the result of some gangsters’ reprisal — they captured him and injected him with infected blood. The character thereafter spent some of his history trying in vain to locate a cure for AIDS. (This was 1992, just after the epidemic became fully entrenched in the public’s anxieties in the 1980’s.)
My interest in these titles eventually waned, though I did still pick “Spawn” up when I had the money. The Image universe was densely crowded with new characters, and it was just too much information to sustain my interest. (Seriously, look at the first couple of covers below.) I spent far more money on DC’s various “Batman” and “Green Lantern” titles. And if I wanted edgy comics, I had discovered the various incarnations of Matt Wagner’s “Grendel” that were available through Dark Horse Comics. Those boggled the mind.
But Image comics did burgeon into a great success, even if these early titles have since been retired. “Spawn,” of course, is still being produced. And today the company’s wide range of books includes Robert Kirkman’s “The Walking Dead.” It’s hard to imagine either of the Big Two picking up Kirkman’s gory epic masterpiece … so I suppose we have Image to thank for the TV show.
Stop by The Bees Are Dead.
If you haven’t caught up with The Bees Are Dead lately, now is a good time to do so. B.A.D. featured a particularly potent piece today by Stephen Jarrell Williams, “In the Desert.” It’s a surprisingly effective poem despite its deceptively simple language, and I recommend it highly.
You can also find an outstanding example of prose poetry in Darren C. Demaree’s “Trump as a Fire Without Light #86.” (This is actually one of my favorite poems submitted to B.A.D. so far, and I have no doubt that many readers both here in America and abroad will relate to its poignant social commentary.)
Be sure to peruse Wren Tuatha’s “The Trees Tell Our Future” too. It’s a beautifully evocative poem that has stayed with me long after I read it for the first time.
Towers Shopping Center, Roanoke, Virginia
Clearly this shopping center lies along the path of The Beam.
Only Stephen King fans will get that joke.
There are at least two cool places to grab lunch there — McAlister’s Deli and Firehouse Subs. Unless I’m mistaken, we don’t have those chains in New York.
A review of “The Walking Dead” Season 7.
[THIS REVIEW CONTAINS GENERAL, MINOR SPOILERS FOR SEASON 7 OF “THE WALKING DEAD.”] I loved Sunday’s season finale of “The Walking Dead” — it was well executed, well performed (especially by Andrew Lincoln), and well written. It was even beautifully scored. (The closing narration and montage, combined with the music, were surprisingly moving.) It had some great twists, unexpectedly good CGI, and some nice callbacks to the original comics. (One surprise we see actually occurs with respect to another major character in the books.) Towards the end of the episode, I was riveted.
The finale, however, can’t really redeem Season 7 as a whole. I would honestly rate the season a 7 out of 10. This was definitely one of the lesser seasons; I believe it would be the one I liked the least, if not for the inexplicably poor Season 2.
Maybe I was a little grumpy about “The Walking Dead” even before the season started. Like a lot of viewers, I felt that the “cliffhanger” where Season 6 left off was absolutely manipulative on the part of the writers. It pissed me off, and I went into Season 7 with reservations.
Then I was reminded about some of the smaller complaints I had about the show in the past. I strongly differ with my friends about this show’s character development — I think it’s inconsistent at best. And “The Walking Dead” seems to have so many characters that it can’t seem to decide who is a major character and who is not.
There’s a bit too much cheesy melodrama, like the schoolyard dynamics among the good kids, Maggie and Jesus, and the meanie, Gregory. (This subplot was drawn from the comics, too — but it played out there in a far more adult fashion.)
Then I had a new quibble or two — one was a lack of proper minimal exposition. We know extremely little about Jadis and the survivors in the garbage dump, despite the major role they play in the story. They seem … sort of like a cult, and sort of like a performance art group, but that’s all I could tell you about them. (The Internet tells me that some fans refer to them as either “the Heapsters” or “the Garbage Pail Kids.” I find both appellations pretty funny.)
My biggest complaints about Season 7, however, were that it was too much of a downer, and that it was too slow.
We start the season with a front seat to Negan’s gory, merciless punishment of Rick’s de facto family. And then the victimization of our favorite characters simply … continues for the length of the season, until the last episode’s climax. You see that cool image at the bottom of this blog post? The advertisement depicting bad-ass Rick and his allies getting ready to “RISE UP?” (It actually looks a lot like the posters for the “Walking Tall” films.) Well … we don’t see much of that until the final episode. I told one friend that “The Walking Dead” was disappointing me because it had grown tiresome “seeing Negan beat everyone all the time.”
And some episodes felt like filler. Yes, there were some nice “milieu” -type stories — it was actually a lot of fun expanding the show’s world, to see other settlements, like The Kingdom, The Sanctuary and Oceanside. But I think the plot needed to move forward more quickly. (For a far better discussion of these issues, check out Ryan Roschke’s excellent review over at Popsugar.)
Hey … I’m still a fan. I’m just not as satisfied a fan as I used to be. I certainly looked forward to “The Walking Dead” every week, and never missed an episode.
And this season did have its high points. Dwight emerged as quite an interesting, compelling character, thanks in no small measure to Austine Amelio’s portrayal of him. The character interaction among him, Daryl, Negan and Rick is great stuff — I find myself wishing that the lion’s share of the season was devoted to those four. I am finally starting to understand that Norman Reedus is indeed a really good actor — his performances were strong throughout the entire season, but must notably upon his return to Alexandria and his embrace with Rick.
And there were moments of nice action and horror as well — the sand-buried walkers pursuing Tara and Health spring to mind, not to mention the neat trick Rick and his group use to dispatch an entire herd of zombies on the interstate.
Let’s hope that Season 8 will pick up a bit, now that “war” is underway.
“Red Hill Mining Town?”
This is a shot of the red clay found around the Roanoke area. It’s an acidic soil that’s common around the southeastern United States; sciencey types call it a “ultisol.” The rust color results from … actual rust, if I understand correctly. It’s full of iron oxide.
I don’t think my camera phone does it justice — it’s actually redder than it appears below. I have no doubt Roanoke natives hardly notice it, but it looks strange at first to a carpetbagger.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 