Author: Eric

The 31 DAEs of Halloween 2022: A Recap

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This Halloween hangover has got legs, I can already tell. How is it that the spooky season has once again slipped through my fingers? Fake blood was spilled by the barrel. Vampires fed and the virginal shed, copious amounts in both cases. Every moon was just as full as your kid’s goody bag. And what a costume they’re wearing, might I say! Verily, I applaud you for raising your children right. While a certain breed of seasonal-affective lunatic, no doubt adorned in tinsel and stinking of eggnog, likely sprung from their long autumn’s nap and began decking every available hall the moment the clock struck November 1, I instead find myself in a rather ruminative mood. Continue reading “The 31 DAEs of Halloween 2022: A Recap” →

Movie Review: “Watcher” (2022)

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“Have you noticed anyone watching you in your apartment?”

“No. But maybe I’ve gotten used to having eyes on me.”

“Do I just sound paranoid?”

“Let’s just hope you never find out. The best outcome might be having to live with the uncertainty. Better than getting raped and strangled with the words, ‘I told you so’ on your lips, right?”

In the days before the proliferation/ubiquity of social media made it perhaps a little too easy to discount and compartmentalize all your online relationships like so many flea market baubles, ostensible friends would sometimes invest excessive amounts of time trading back and forth stock answers to a procession of pre-made, painfully generic, minimally insightful personality surveys via email. That was how you talked with girls (bored co-workers, listless former classmates, etc.) in a non-threatening way back then. I’m not actually sure how people do it now. This was innocuous, first date, “getting to know you” stuff almost without fail, though I do recall one particular question, or, rather, answer, that cut through the static and has stuck with me lo these many years. Continue reading “Movie Review: “Watcher” (2022)” →

Steelers Thoughts #20 (11/25/21): Wish You were(n’t) here

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Pittsburgh Steelers single-game tickets went on sale some time back in May – I refuse to research the exact date, but it was, at any rate, a different time/world – right around the time Americans everywhere were predictably overreacting to the news that widespread vaccine distribution was primed to deliver unto us something approaching normalcy after well over a year of communal plague. We now know how that all played out. Only a little over half of eligible Americans took said vaccine while the remaining late-adopters couched their decisions in terms of personal freedom over public health and safety. Having prioritized my own faith in science and common sense over my knowledge of contrarian human nature, I sat, dumbfounded, and bore witless witness. Whichever side of the fence you reside, the intervening months have surely brought their challenges, so I won’t belabor shopworn arguments any further (except perhaps in an aside).* My own overreaction manifested in perhaps the only way possible for an inveterate concert freak who’d barely left the house in fifteen months. Continue reading “Steelers Thoughts #20 (11/25/21): Wish You were(n’t) here” →

Movie review: “Halloween Kills” (2021)

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“Let him burn! Let him burn!”

Anyone using “Evil Dies Tonight” as a trigger for the Halloween Kills drinking game will either end their evening in a coma or the local morgue. This has been a public service message…

How quickly we forget the unassuming, self-contained majesty of John Carpenter’s Halloween – its brutal simplicity; its penetrating suspense; its authenticity of time, place, and, especially, tone; its utter lack of fat – even, it seems, in the ostensible act of paying it homage. Filmmakers of all skill levels, including Carpenter himself (off and on), have for decades chased the horror classic like a Holy Grail, as if its singular qualities could somehow be bottled and reproduced, let alone quantified. Continue reading “Movie review: “Halloween Kills” (2021)” →

Movie review: “Glengarry Glen Ross” (1992)

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“I’ll cut you in on the $82,000 sale I just made!”

“Bruce and Harriet Nyborg? You want to see the memos? They’re nuts. They used to call in every week when I was with Webb and we were selling Arizona. Did you see how they were living? How can you delude yourself?”

“I got their check!”

“Yeah? Well, forget it. Frame it. It’s worthless.”

“The check is no good?”

“Yeah. If you want to wait around, I’ll pull the memo. I’m busy right now.”

“Wait a minute! The check is no good? They’re crazy?”

“You want to call the bank, Shelley? I called them. I called them four months ago when we first got the lead. The people are insane…they just like talking to salesmen.”

A salesman is, in practice if not by strict definition, an unwelcome stranger, a wraithlike apparition that materializes at inopportune moments in our lives to proffer offers we should refuse, then stubbornly loiters at front of both mind and eyeline until, by virtue of charm, pitch, and/or dogged tenacity, they wear our defenses to ribbons or finally slink away coated in disdain. The three weeks I spent as a telemarketer after graduating college 118 years ago began in confusion, ended in the closest thing I’ve had to a nervous breakdown, and instilled in me an understanding, however necessarily limited, of the inherent desperation that fuels and informs the salesman’s mindset. Continue reading “Movie review: “Glengarry Glen Ross” (1992)” →

The Wrestling Gods watch on with Amusement, Incredulity, Popcorn

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Long term prognostication in the arena of professional wrestling is the ultimate fool’s errand, not least because of the speed, shock, and sense of thudding finality with which change tends to happen on the ground. I grew up on WWF Tuesday Night Titans and WCW Saturday Night throughout the 1980s and early ‘90s, and came of age as a fan during the legendary pre-millennium “Monday Night Wars” period where those two ancient rivals battered each other senseless for our entertainment before the former finally emerged, enemy scalps and pink slips in hand, as the industry’s de facto kingpin. It was, of course, a time of unprecedented turmoil and animus within the industry, well-documented and much-mythologized, with high profile talent defections and dramatic debuts across enemy lines a regular occurrence and the emergence and strategic deployment of game-changing personalities that made Monday nights into appointment viewing well beyond football. Continue reading “The Wrestling Gods watch on with Amusement, Incredulity, Popcorn” →

The Excesses of Whiplash Normalcy

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Overcorrection is a peculiarly human characteristic. As a strategy, or at least a physiological response, it is baked into our DNA, and, however technically unintentional it almost always is, a predictable hallmark of most all human endeavor. When a rotted tree falls across a stream in the woods and crushes a tragically mislaid beaver dam, aggrieved beavers don’t generally arise en masse and launch a comprehensive deforestation campaign to retaliate. No, they simply rebuild. Moreover, the notion that response to a given stimulus need not be measured or proportional to be effective seems to me not just inherently human reasoning but also strangely American. Certainly, we’ll be testing that theory to its breaking point in the coming weeks Continue reading “The Excesses of Whiplash Normalcy” →

Movie review: “Flash Gordon” (1980)

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“Who are you?”

“Flash Gordon! Quarterback, New York Jets!”

“Dale Arden…Your Highness. Live and let live…that’s my motto!”

“My name is Hans Zarkov. I kidnapped them both here to save our planet, Earth.”

(To Ming) “An obscure body in the S-K system; the satellite that has provided you so much amusement…recently.”

Arguably the quintessential cult movie of the 1980s, the Dino De Laurentiis production of Flash Gordon arrived already fully enveloped in, if not choked by, the shadow of the original Star Wars – a strange irony considering the rich back story and surpassing influence of both that property and its namesake hero. Legend tells that George Lucas only authored his sprawling sci-fi epic/epoch in response to being denied the rights to first adapt the story of Flash, gridiron hero turned intergalactic adventurer of Sunday comic and Saturday morning serial fame. In terms of both what was omitted and committed, we thus have one of the most consequential turns in film history. Continue reading “Movie review: “Flash Gordon” (1980)” →

Mixinformation #1 (5/9/21): AgainstZapZepRollTayTesting+…

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Yet another attempt at launching a recurring DAE series, “Mixinformation” gathers for comment and inevitable digression eleven songs plucked on shuffle from the gargantuan greater playlist that provided the strange and lively partial soundtrack to my most recent road trip from the flats of Central Ohio to the hills of East Tennessee. Some 5,000 songs can’t fill or fit comfortably into any journey of just under 400 miles, of course, but that’s kind of the point. Music at its best challenges and comforts us in equal measure, makes the open road less lonely, more romantic, easier to eagerly embrace. Its companionship is invaluable, its worth incalculable. What follows is but chapter one in a serialized love letter of sorts…

Continue reading “Mixinformation #1 (5/9/21): AgainstZapZepRollTayTesting+…” →

Armchair quarterbacking the “Temptation Island 3” homestretch

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Prolonged pandemic living has doubtless unleashed a litany of subtle, insidious changes to our collective brain chemistry. I await the scientific journal data once this 118-year collective pause/home invasion of our national psyche is definitively behind us. I’ve noticed some personal differences manifesting both significant and miniscule, and sitting alone in ye olde bunker lo these many months has allowed me to catalog them with some clarity. My general mistrust of large crowds, for example, of which I will eventually need to be broken like a horse being taught to carry a rider, is offset somewhat by the curious realization that I have over the last year almost completely forsaken serialized television in strong favor of watching movies, and this at a time when conventional wisdom insists I should be most susceptible to and appreciative of streaming’s unquestionable charms. Continue reading “Armchair quarterbacking the “Temptation Island 3” homestretch” →