Thick Middle

"You saw me standing alone."-- Blue Moon

Let us go back, on a shoestring budget comparable to what the unfortunate Victor Garber deals with on Frequency, sure enough he titillated us more as Garner's father on Alias, even if that series was too heavily dosed by Dan Brown's badly deployed medieval fantasy, to remember that The Seventh Sign is a tasteless Demi Moore vehicle, exploiting an actor with Downs Syndrome-- even I shall concede Mongoloid is a harsh designation, exactly why I deign to recall it to you-- as an intoning seer of doom. But did the mentally retarded actor himself have the cognition to realize he was being stereotyped as a harbinger of the Apocalypse? 
This is how the casting scouts for The Exorcist wanted to use me and others when they found us at Rusk Institute. I would have been that much less destitute in the contemporary century had I stood up to the case management staff and at least met with the production crew on its fishing expedition, before the movie made such an indelible impact that it fatally palled the decade. The movie was one of the first I transfixed myself for on whatever computer, through a streaming provider, Prime, I believe, years ago, and would have no difficulty streaming it again. I believe my generation was cursed by the film, by the novel which preceded the film, by David Foster Wallace superimposing the film in his best Oblivion short story before David Foster Wallace hung himself leaving his sorry ass to rock the noose. Didn't he bother to consider what his wife would experience upon discovering his body? We'll let this sincere testament of dread answer for why I have kept my distance from the Fox revival, not a prequel, nor a sequel, but an offshoot. Though I am unforgiving of actors in general, Geena Davis (phew) is not a lead who ever really held my interest, even giving birth to larva in her Jeff Goldblum nightmare. But I will say I admire that this particular subset of horror, as a genre, tries valiantly to take evil seriously, as Wallace does, and I do too, which is why Wallace ended badly, and you can have no doubt I'm still shrieking, mindful of the line in the sand. I'm not the Virginia Tech Asian, but my broken life form nudges closer to that shooter's break, as Maigret would have put it, on a daily basis. I could use Callum's absorption technique for Horse. The anus is faster than the stomach. Real torture, such as we find in Lear, or the MGM version of Samson, makes most viewers flinch, so horror is usually married to camp, to ensure the audience has its shields. The lupine variety which subverts our expectations best, in a playful, but ruthlessly curt fashion, is An American Werewolf in London. I have not seen it in a long time, but its beat, its tracks, its satire, and its sad sharp shooting conclusion, makes us forgive Hollywood every so often. Naughton doesn't seem to have aged well.

Costner's Blessing

"I don't want to get on your bad side!"-- the black adder, now burdened with complications of appeasement

Despite its subject matter, Mr. Brooks is not about the impact of psychological pathology on the American scene, unlike ABC's new Wicked City, which is a bit of a toss up-- and in a brevity of an aside-- this spastic's young adulthood wasn't populated with the discothèque remembrance the show attempts to evoke with nonchalance. Reviewers noted certain things about Brooks: Costner loosens up playing against William Hurt, who in the right context is every woman's prime capture if she has ambition toward a fulfilled life, and the director Evans suggests, subversively, that a successful businessman is analogous to being a serial murderer, but there are vectors in this film which come together like blades in a jigsaw, actually sending up celebrity, notoriety, their hanger's on, and what goes on beneath the surface of successful appearances. Demi Moore says something about her tabloid rep encapsulating her brass balls detective who defeats the spree menace of the Hangman killer and his badass girl, offering viewers, perhaps her fans, a sense of the cutthroat approach necessary to say on top. The fact that her cop, Atwood, is insulated by wealth in an estranged familial environment is also a veiled reference, but to what exactly? Pimping to the market is no guarantee? Photographs of women almost nude in revealing pregnancy no longer generate the chatter they did when Demi was still young, before she spent small fortunes on her plastic surgeries, and what Brooks reads in the aberrant behavior of the daughter is a third person limited narration. As an audience, we aren't offered an alternative viewpoint, loose threads to fall where they may. The police may be smart enough to figure that someone was trying to throw suspicion off the daughter, for instance, or, if she killed her father as an eventuality, how would she have planned to get away with it.

The difficulty with Brooks lies in its substrata toward the ironic, confusing us with the reflections breaking off like shards, despite Costner's diabolical pleasure with himself. Brooks neither quite succeeds as a parable about undercurrents, nor as a truism about the urban underclass, such as we are invited to wince away in Henry, portrait of a serial killer, which itself lost its nerve for the sake of its rating. I have not lost mine, I am simply so beset with inevitable unraveling that my caustic invective threatening Google's pecuniary market interests wouldn't help even if I freaked out other somewhat troubled lone wolves, and no, I do not mean I want to rant death on the heads of my perceived tormentors either. I am a failed writer, but my own acuity denies frothing, if not a hideous temper. Another way to say this is Mr. Brooks examines macro-aggression in a microscopic context, and does so unsure of its balance. To hint, with slight mystery to the nuance, why able-bodied individuals destroy themselves against the biographies of quadriplegics who've been beaten, regardless of precocious sensibilities, is unfathomable. Alcoholics can walk, and yet disease themselves into the dependence of mass material victimhood, as do addicts, and the demographics of Caucasian suicides in my age group. PBS had a seven minute segment on whites my age killing themselves due to disenfranchisement, and nothing is as bad as a cripple who has seen the institutional hell she refuses to return to, without being able to find a pathway to safety. If you can walk and drive a car, count your blessings. I am certainly past the ability of spontaneous pleasure when architecture and poverty defeat it. Then again, maybe I can write some lyrics for Louy Fierce, an intriguing possibility between ableism and reconciliation with ferocity of chronic impairment denial of wholeness.

Why did he decide to follow me? The inner voice need not be sated on that puzzling note.