Del and Mladen review ‘Cosmos’
Image courtesy of Gravitas Features.
“Cosmos” Starring Tom England, Joshua Ford and Arjun Singh Panam. Directed by Eliot and Zander Weaver. 128 minutes. No rating available.
Del’s take
I spent the better part of my senior year in high school hanging out at my friend David’s garage. David was whatever you called a computer geek in the 1970s, and his garage was a trove of junk – boxes and bundles, cables and capacitors, all of it lying on the floor, hanging from the walls, spilling out of containers and littering the desktop where his ham radio sat. It had the class-action lawsuit smell of dangerous carcinogens and looked like a Jawa sandcrawler that had been ransacked by Imperial stormtroopers. We loved it.
“Cosmos” has a similar feel. It’s chock full of computer equipment, radio gear and bins with batteries and cables and God knows what, but it’s really about three guys and their niche interest – astronomy – and I will warn you front and center: It’s not for everybody. Most of the movie takes place behind the steamed-up windows of a Volvo stationwagon, and no, get your mind out of the gutter. It’s about bonding, friendship, and every other box that must be checked before a movie can earn the Steven Spielberg stamp of approval.
I can go two ways with this review. I can talk about “Cosmos” being a set piece with glacial pacing until you are thrown into the tacked-on, hair-raising final 5 minutes. Or I can talk about the fact that it was written, directed, lighted and photographed by two young brothers in one month for a total cost of $7,000. Avenue No. 1 leads to a C+ rating. Avenue No. 2 is a solid A. I am trending to No. 2 because “Cosmos” is blessed with something most movies don’t possess these days:
Love.
I’m talking about the intangible love endowed by creators who care about what they are doing, a love that can’t be articulated but somehow becomes obvious after the few minutes. “Cosmos” has a heaping helping of love, and that counts for a lot.
The story is about three astronomy buffs who head into the English countryside one night to hunt for a passing asteroid. Yet there’s tension – Roy (Arjun Singh Panam) was laid off from his engineering job just as a satellite he designed is lofted into orbit. His friend Harry (Joshua Ford), who worked for the same evil company and is the leader of their ad hoc stargazing group, the Astro-Nuts, replaced Roy with Mike (Tom England) when Roy stopped turning out. Mike is a radio astronomer and the misfit of their geeky troika.
During the night Mike sends a message into outer space and strange happenings commence – the message returns, a void is detected orbiting the Earth, and Roy and Harry hash out their differences – with an assist from Mike, who aspires to be a fully fledged member of the Nuts. To say anything else would spoil the movie.
Sound boring? Not to a SETI fanatic sporting a 5-inch reflector with a tracking motor and a crosshairs-illuminated spotting scope, hence the caveat: This movie is not for everyone. For those who might have hung out with me and David in his Jawa junk bin of a garage, it’s a gem.
But about that last 5 minutes. Ahem, guys: You totally abandoned the movie’s voice when you tacked on that last 5 minutes. And the payoff was, shall we say, a letdown? Only a person who has had an asteroid named after him or her could appreciate the payoff.
The two guys who made this movie are brothers Eliot and Zander Weaver, a pair of movie-loving Brits in their early 20s who said to hell with college, we’re making movies! “Cosmos” was shot mostly in a garage in a month with the bros doing all the work, and again, the total funds expended were $7,000. I expect that’ll attract the attention of a few beancounters.
Their talent for moviemaking is obvious: “Cosmos” has the look and feel a movie costing 10 times as much. Acting and direction are excellent, dialogue is excellent – it’s a well-done film and my jaw thudded against the desk when I read that $7,000 figure.
So I’m giving it an A, just because I want these guys to keep making movies.
Mladen’s take
Del claims to be only one of two people on the planet who are perpetually skeptical about what they read on the Internet. But, he accepts the claim of the Brothers from Britain that “Cosmos” only cost them $7,000, or is that pounds, to make? If the latter, “Cosmos” was an $8,750 production. That’s a difference of 22 percent. Can I trust the souls, motivation, and marketing of the Brothers and their allegedly low-budget Indie attempt to make a serious movie as does Del or is “Cosmos” a feint? Maybe the movie is designed to dupe utopians such as Del, who go on to praise it, and, as word spreads, gets the Brothers a big budget for a much bigger movie bankrolled by Hollywood, Bollywood, or some Asian studio laundering money for the Chinese Communist Party or Kim Jung‑un.
“Cosmos” is a decent movie, whether you subscribe to Del’s Avenue 1 or Avenue 2 perspective, and nothing more. It succumbs to all the tropes you expect in movies: tension among characters; a dangerous and spooky outdoors; and some type of looming malfunction that risks everything the protagonists have accomplished.
Of those tropes, the first is the least objectionable. People are stupid. Who knows what triggers their moods and feelings and reactions and whatever other phenomena our yoga‑practicing society now identifies as maladies. When this “Cosmos” character dislikes that “Cosmos” character, though the latter had nothing to do with the former’s misfortune, I shrug and wonder when the story will get interesting again. A character’s backstory is never interesting when the genre of the film is sci-fi or war. When creating a movie about a radio signal from outer space, which was done well in “Cosmos,” or the invasion of Okinawa, I prefer the sole focus to be the actor’s response to the imagined scenario. That the person being portrayed by the actor is a father or mother, abused as a child or spoiled, or struggling with the death of finance matters nothing to me. When you have aliens responding to a signal from Earth that was sent 20 years earlier, I’m in for the ride for the duration of the movie. The hook is detecting the signal and what comes next. There’s no reason to distract the viewer by introducing the trifling, pathetic concerns of unsatisfied lives. We’re Homo sapiens and unsatisfied with everything. Move on. Show me what happens next without interfering with the story by shifting to a memory of getting fired from a job or whatever.
Introducing a frightening forest scene to the film as two of our heroes move in separate directions to plant antennas was a mistake. The locale for the film is the U.K. outside a large city with SETI‑like satellite dishes and their control station nearby. We’re not talking the Congo rain forest here. What were the dangers that our trekkers faced? Attack by a rabid raccoon, a deranged rat, the Queen’s Yorkshire terriers? Oh, no, there’s a dip in the terrain. Damn, don’t walk into that tree. Shit, was that a velociraptor pack? The effort to portray physical danger in the movie was silly. It still sticks in my craw.
The adventure during the last, oh, 10, 15 minutes of “Cosmos” is contrived because it was triggered by a cliché technology trope. No need to introduce a spoiler, but here’s a clue: Pay attention to the Volvo wagon’s headlights, which were on during much of the movie with the engine off, and then ask why the vehicle’s power supply wasn’t the answer to the problem facing three aerospace engineers. Oh, of course, the movie included the obligatory loss of cell phone or walkie-talkie communications and even a wild‑ish car ride to help pace the movie’s melodrama.
Yes, you should watch “Cosmos,” though it’s a B-. Those moments when the movie focuses on the discovery of the alien radio signal, pinpointing its locale, and corroborating its authenticity are very good. Much of the rest is spittle. If you want to watch low-budget, A‑level sci-fi, catch the time travel piece “Primer.” Pay attention to the brief dialogue about two-thirds into the film while the time travelers are hiding in a motel room to avoid meeting themselves.
Mladen Rudman is a former journalist and technical writer. Del Stone Jr. is a former journalist and author.
Image courtesy of CJ Entertainment.
“Parasite” Starring Song Kang-ho, Jang Hye-jin, Choi Woo-shik, Park So-dam, Cho Yeo-jeong, Lee Sun-gyun and others. Directed by Bong Joon-ho. 2 hours, 12 minutes. Rated R. Hulu, Amazon Prime.
Del’s take
Maybe it’s a sign of the times that for two years running a movie about class structure has won the Academy Award for Best Picture, or maybe it’s just a reward for classy moviemaking. No matter. “Parasite,” the 2019 Best Picture winner, earns that accolade and then some with its darkly hilarious and stingingly critical look at the way money makes monsters of us all.
In the past, South Korean director Bong Joon-ho used fantasy elements to illustrate the dehumanizing aspects of Western – and now Eastern – culture and its fixation on accumulating wealth at the expense of the planet and its people, but in “Parasite” he brings the argument closer to home with ordinary folks, in this case the Kim family, jumping through extraordinary hoops to escape their poverty and maybe even climb the lower rungs of the ladder to success.
The Kims – father Ki-Taek, mother Chung-sook, sister Ki-jung and brother Ki-Woo – are living in a semi-subterranean roach trap where they fold pizza boxes to earn a living, open their windows when the fumigator comes down their alleyway, and wile away the hours dreaming up scams so they may, in the words of the “Good Times” TV show theme song, begin “movin’ on up to the big time.” An opportunity finally comes their way when Brother Ki-Woo connects with a friend who recommends him for a private teaching job. The wealthy Park family needs a new tutor for their teenaged daughter, and before the movie has finished they will also need a new driver, housekeeper and art therapy teacher for their son – all provided by the Kim family after a bit of slyly funny subterfuge, disinformation and Machiavellian maneuvering.
But karma catches up with the Kims and their machinations pile up like logs stuck in a flume. At that point “Parasite” takes a left turn from a “I Love Lucy”-style farce about a family of ne’er-do-wells creating their own misfortune to a razor-sharp satire about the inequalities of class and how those inequalities can drive some people to madness.
“Parasite” is perfectly acted and written, and I would rate it one of the finest black humor stories ever set to film – up there with “Dr. Strangelove” and “Being There.” It delivers many of its lessons through dialogue. In one scene, the wealthy Parks are having what they think is a private conversation about Mr. Kim and his odor – he smells like old radishes, or the people who ride the subway, Mr. Park muses, to which Mrs. Park replies that she hasn’t ridden the subway in ages. In another scene young Ki-Woo is asking his father if he has a plan for dealing with their latest predicament and the elder Kim replies that indeed he does have a plan, and it is the best plan of all, which is to have no plan because plans fail and leave the planner disappointed and fearful.
As the movie progresses along the trajectory of its increasingly bizarre resolution it becomes impossible not to watch and remains with the viewer long after the closing credits roll. Suffice it to say the Kims might yet climb out of their below-ground-level living conditions but not in the way they planned. Remember: The best plan is to not have a plan.
It took me the first third of the movie to become invested in “Parasite” but once I did I became a huge fan. I think it’s one of the best movies made this century and I will add it to my DVD collection. It’s on Hulu for subscribers, or you can watch it pay-per-view on Amazon Prime.
I give it an A+.
Mladen’s take
Del gives “Parasite” an A+. I give it an A-. The bout of graphic violence at the end distracts the movie. It’s not that the violence is unwarranted. It’s that it should’ve been done with more finesse and less blood.
Del, who’s ordinarily good at summing a movie, misfired on this one. “Parasite” is about both class warfare in the traditional sense – the wealthy pissing on the poor – and interclass warfare between the considerably less well off. To me, that was the movie’s strongest component and lead to its funniest, most satirical scene.
The Kim’s infiltrate the wealthy Park family by shitting on others who are poor or one lost job from tumbling into poordom. One of the Kim shat-upons is the Park’s housekeeper. The Kims connive a way to get her fired so that Mama Kim can take over as the maid. One event leads to another and pretty soon the fired housekeeper and her husband are threatening to expose the Kim con on social media by pressing the “send” button on a cell phone. The kerfuffle that comes along is a hoot. The Kims and the housekeeper (six people) fight up bomb shelter stairs and in a sprawling living room with cell phone imagery and its distribution on the World Wide Web as the prize.
“Parasite” is director Bong Joon-ho at nearly his finest. I’ve watched four of his films. “Snowpiercer” is superb. “Parasite,” along with “The Host” and “Okja” are merely excellent. But they all share a backbone: Mankind is deranged.
Obviously, Bong isn’t the only filmmaker to tackle social injustice. From 1927’s “Metropolis” to 2020’s “Nomadland” the ugliness of our species is well notated. The important part about the message in “Parasite” is that it shows snobbery, greed, selfishness, and disillusionment are the globe’s real currencies. South Korea’s won, the euro, America’s dollar, Brazil’s real, and whatever the fuck Bitcoin is, are just tools that magnify humanity’s flawed, odious character.
I watched “Parasite” with some pleasure. It reinforced what I’ve long known and witnessed almost daily as a newspaper reporter. We the people know what’s going wrong with society. We know what it would take to correct the errors of homelessness, hunger, and medical care rationing based on access to wealth. But we ain’t gonna do nothing about them.
I don’t know. Maybe it’s time that I stop watching films with dire portent or those that feature potent dissection of social ills. Maybe it’s time that I re-watch “E.T. The Extraterrestrial,” “The Princess Bride,” and “The NeverEnding Story” and then stop watching movies all together because they seem to be ever more disturbingly prophetic.
Mladen Rudman is a former journalist and technical writer. Del Stone Jr. is a former journalist and author.
Image courtesy of Signature Entertainment.
“Sea Fever” Starring Hermoine Corfield, Dag Malmberg, Jack Hickey, Dougray Scott and others. Directed by Neasa Hardiman. 95 minutes. Unrated. Hulu, Vudu, Google Play, Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, YouTube.
Del’s take
Oh goodie. Let’s distract ourselves from the pandemic by watching a movie about a pandemic.
Not a pandemic per se but a parasitic infection that threatens to wipe out the crew of an Irish fishing trawler plying the chilly waters of the North Atlantic. That’s the gist of “Sea Fever,” a pretty good little monster movie from director Neasa Hardiman. If films speak to the times, “Sea Fever” is the voice of our COVID-19 consciousness, transposing our empty streets and restaurants with the vacant horizon of the open ocean.
The plot is familiar to fans of “Alien,” “The Thing” and even “The Shining.” Lonely, friendless PhD student Siobhán (Hermoine Corfield) has booked passage on the Niamh Cinn Óir, a rust bucket Irish fishing trawler, to study the behavior patterns of aquatic fauna. The Niamh Cinn Óir is owned and operated by the husband-and-wife team of Gerard (Dougray Scott) and Freya (Connie Nielson); and a crew of four others. Life has not been grand for Gerard and Freya, and they need a good haul this trip or they’ll lose the trawler.
On the trip out they detect a large mass of fish which unfortunately lies within a government-declared exclusion zone. It would be a terrible thing if they accidentally drifted into that exclusion zone and caught a hold full of mackerel, thus saving the Niamh Cinn Óir from receivership and preserving the crew’s livelihoods. Well gosh darn it, guess what happens.
Sometimes exclusion zones exist for more reasons than bureaucratic capriciousness, especially in movies that isolate a small group of people and pits them against a seemingly unbeatable antagonist. It is at this point “Sea Fever” becomes a metaphor for the COVID-19 pandemic as the fishing trawler crew battles a weird aquatic parasite that threatens to kill them all.
But “Sea Fever” operates on a second level, one that addresses the pandemic of loneliness that has infected the world since the invention of digital technology. On her first field study, Siobhán is forced to step out of her reclusive shell and interact, if not befriend, the crew, especially after they discover she’s a redhead (apparently redheads are considered bad luck among Irish fishermen). As the movie progresses along its somewhat predictable trajectory, Siobhán becomes more and more human as her environment descends into science fiction nightmare.
Somehow indie directors always manage to find strong actors to fill their roles and “Sea Fever” is no exception. All the performances are very good but my favorite was Olwen Fouéré as Ciara, the boat’s cook, who carried herself with a chafing blue collar dignity that seemed to perfectly capture the soul of the part. Another strong performance was delivered by Ardalan Esmaili as the boat’s principled and skillful engineer. Weakest was Dougray Scott, whose character hovered somewhere between effective leader and simpering cad. He seemed incapable of communicating the moral ambivalence of a man caught between financial necessity and obeyance of the law.
My gripes with “Sea Fever” are that it wraps up with an anticlimax that feels rushed and out of character for protagonist Siobhán, and the crew’s attempts to resolve their problem seem truncated and drama-less. What would Ellen Ripley have done had she been aboard the Niamh Cinn Óir? That might have elevated the tension considerably.
Still, “Sea Fever” is, as I said, a pretty good little monster movie and your time will not have been wasted, if monster movies are your bag. As American movies become more and more templated by the MBAs working in Hollywood these days, it’s nice to see a movie that still has character and a beating heart.
I grade “Sea Fever” a B or maybe even a B+.
Mladen’s take
Desperation. Superstition. Science. And, a cnidarian. Say it with me, “cnidarian.” I adore that word. It wasn’t in my plain old lexicon of the English language. I had to look it up in my Oxford Dictionary of Science. Cnidarian. Cnidaria is a phylum of aquatic invertebrates that includes hydra, jellyfish, sea anemones, and coral, by the way.
In “Sea Fever,” the crew of the fishing vessel Niamh Cinn Óir become the victims of a cnidarian unknown to humanity. First, the oversized spineless predator whose centrally placed orifice is both mouth and anus, attacks their boat and then it attacks them with its eye-eating larvae.
Where Del sees a SARS-COV-2 angle to “Sea Fever,” I see a straight-up Nature will always kick Man’s ass statement in the film. Humanity believes it controls the planet. The planet disagrees. That disagreement takes many shapes. Climate change. Water shortages. Invasive species. A snowstorm in Texas that has Tumbleweed Cruz abandoning the state he represents in the U.S. Senate to flee to warm and socialist Mexico.
Though the encounter with the cnidarian drives the plot of “Sea Fever,” the story is also about society-induced desperation. The boat owner, who’s married to the captain, has to land a good catch to earn euros to keep the vessel. With that thought plaguing the couple, the captain takes a risk and then the boat owner takes a risk. Both prove fateful.
There is superstition aboard Niamh Cinn Óir. Marine biologist Siobhán, on the boat to conduct field research that her PhD advisor ordered her to do, has red hair, which, as Del points out, the crew consider bad luck. But, there’s also the superstition of religion. There is prayer for a safe journey. There is prayer for a good haul of fish. There are prayers for the dearly departed. And there’s the belief that God will yet protect the crew.
There is science aboard the boat. Siobhán, applying her knowledge, figures out enough about the big cnidarian to give the crew somewhat of a fighting chance to live.
But, in the end, neither God nor science are much help. What mattered was one person sacrificing for another.
“Sea Fever,” as Del claims, is a pretty good little monster movie. I would amend that observation with, “pretty good little sci-fi monster movie.” Though not laden with science, the movie has moments of science-y jargon – “cnidarian” for example – and “bioluminescence” and “holopalegic” and a portable, computer-powered microscope, and talk of water filtration system design. There was the hypothesis that the cnidarian normally parasitizes whales (the fishing boat was in an exclusion zone that existed to protect cetaceans and their calves) and might have mistook the passing shadow of the vessel as a sign of its normal prey.
Between trying to stay alive while a gelatinous, tentacled predator treats them as a larder for its babies and keeping themselves from going berserk under the pressure of looming infection, the crew has to struggle with a bigger question. Is it ethical to return to port when some, if not all, of the crew are nurseries for a novel parasite that could, or is it would, infect landlubbers? Poof, see you later, humanity.
The problem with “Sea Fever” is that it added baggage that didn’t need to be in the film. Too much time was used to set up Siobhán as a loner and it was unconvincing. Del mentioned that the cook carried herself “with a chafing blue collar dignity.” Chafing she was, but it was me who got chafed. The cook went from a semi-pleasant grandmotherly type to an old crone who wanted to kill my beloved Siobhán. What would be the point of killing the one person who had the technical know-how to help people stay alive?
Regrettably, I find myself in the unforgivable situation of agreeing with Del. “Sea Fever” is a B. But for a couple of tweaks, including more encounters with momma cnidarian, this movie would have easily catapulted to an A.
Mladen Rudman is a former journalist and technical writer. Del Stone Jr. is a former journalist and author.
Photo courtesy of Feddacheenee via Creative Commons
Photo courtesy of Feddacheenee via Creative Commons.
—
You are … a radio star. …
You are … a radio star. …
Video killed the radio star.
– The Buggles, “Video Killed the Radio Star,” 1979
Stealing a quick glance at the AM dial on my car radio and then returning my eyes to the road in front of me. Traffic is light this night, with only a handful of taillights slipping past me on Beal Parkway. My tiny Pontiac, 2 years old but new to me, is riding roughly on worn-out tires. In the days ahead comes a visit to the discount tire place down on 98 next to the Dairy Queen.
My whole life lies in front of me.
Years later I will hear Billy Corgan sing “1979” and know he is singing about this night, because it is October 1979 and I have owned this car only two days after landing my first full-time job four months ago and suddenly everything is changing, in every way. I have transportation, a way to escape the claustrophobia of my former life. I have money – money enough to beef up my savings, to buy a movie ticket and pay for a car. I am young and strong and the world is singing to me about everything, not just dead radio stars. I have love to look forward to. I have the astonishment of discovery, the new world that seems to be shaping itself before my eyes, represented by this amazing music I am hearing on the radio – The Knack, Blondie, New England on the FM dial – and I can’t put it all to words but I know something wonderful is happening to me.
I am changing. I can see farther now. My heart is swelling with excitement.
The future. Infinite possibilities.
Cool air rushes into the car. Fall is here and winter is coming. But who cares – I have a car! I can go places. I can do things. The world is limned with possibilities.
The music – thank God for the music. After the long, hot summer of the ’70s, when the stuff coming out of the radio became awful with hard rock, folk, and the horrible disco that lasted only a few years (thank God), a transformation had begun. “My Sharona” and “Heart of Glass” coincided with my emancipation from childhood. They had become my anthems.
So I drive on Beal with only a few other cars and I dream and I know where I am going because I have wanted to go there and now I can – the place where everything I care about is focused. Everything ahead of me, so grand and inexplicable that the fact it cannot be described makes it all the more wonderful. I made it, sort of, and now it is OK, and I think about that, too, when I hear “Video Killed the Radio Star.”
The song reminds me so much of that time, and those are happy memories for me – the glorious, delirious freedom when I didn’t own a damn thing but a crappy Pontiac Astre and the clothes I had just bought from Gayfer’s. I had money but I was always broke. My friends were always broke, and it was a glorious day when Steve’s parents gave him an American Express card and we were able to buy pitchers of beer and a couple of dozen raw oysters at that tired old beach bar next to the Ramada on Okaloosa Island on a gray winter’s afternoon, when the only thing keeping us warm was the candle in the glass holder wrapped in fake fishnet.
Video killed the radio star. When I saw the computer at work, the one with all the wire stories, the news of the entire world, I told myself that if people had one of these things in their homes they’d never buy another newspaper.
And guess what?
Here I am, now, today. Close to the age when Medicare and Social Security become real things to plan on for me, not something I might have heard about on a talk show or read in a magazine story. The music has faded, which suits me because I hate what passes for music these days. I have lots more money than I did in those days but I am still always broke. My car is much nicer than my Pontiac, which I called Blue Thunder. In fact, I have not even bothered to name this latest thing, which could mean I have gotten lazy in my old age or maybe I have just lost the wonder.
Not sure about that. Not sure at all. I still hear echoes of the magic from all those lifetimes ago. I still feel a slight quickening of the heart when certain dreams float to the surface of my thoughts.
It never occurred to me that I am the radio star.
The Buggles were wrong. Video didn’t kill the radio star. He’s still there, waiting for the right time to put on that sparkly jacket and stand in front of the microphone. Or maybe he will appear on a thoughtful night drive on some lonely road.
So tonight, as I came across “Video Killed the Radio Star” and my life flashed before me, I felt inspired to write this about a night long ago, in a beat up old car, when anything seemed possible and the world was filled with wonder.
And you know what?
I’m still the radio star.
—
Author’s note: Contact me at [email protected]. To read more of my opinion and humor pieces, visit delstonejr.com . I also write fiction – horror, science fiction and contemporary fantasy. If you’re a fan of such genres please check out my Amazon author’s page. Print and e-books are both available, and remember: You don’t need a Kindle device to read a Kindle e-book. Simply download the free Kindle app for your smart phone or tablet.
Video
Image courtesy of Paramount Home Entertainment.
“Crawl” starring Kaya Scodelario, Barry Pepper, Morfydd Clark. Directed by Alexandre Aja. 127 minutes. R rated.
Mladen’ take
The film “Crawl” is a model of efficiency and efficacy. In the first, oh, 10 minutes, the audience is introduced to the fact that our heroine Haley is a good swimmer who wants to be gooder; that there’s tension in her family; that a powerful hurricane changed course unexpectedly and is heading for South-ish Florida; that first responders will be unable to help if you’re stranded; that Dad isn’t answering calls or texts; and that the family’s dog faces peril. Hell, even the film’s title is efficient because much of the action takes place in a “Crawl” space beneath a home “Crawl”ing with particularly vicious alligators.
“Crawl” has been graded by IMDB viewers as a mediocre horror movie. They’re wrong. This film is an A-, though it misfires here and there. For example, the first couple of gators to attack Dad and Haley hiss, which is OK, and grumble‑moan like they have larynxes. During courtship, bull gators do generate low-frequency sonic vibrations through the water to show-off their manliness to breed and designate territory. But, in “Crawl”, the gator sonics happen in a largely dry, for the moment, “Crawl” space when, I imagine, the gators were thinking about something other than mating. Don’t misunderstand. The gator grumble‑moans were nothing like the shark in “JAWS IV” (or was that “V”?), breaching and then roaring. Still, making the gators make intimidating noise to add menace to the movie was a tad contrived. Also, the film’s depicted family strife is unneeded and the occasional pep talk from Dad for his daughter Haley’s benefit when her tenacity, spirit, resourcefulness, guts, or hope flag amid heavy rainfall, a flooding house, and death‑by‑gator of a childhood friend languorous. And, yes, there’s the questionable decision to leave the house after Haley and Dad finally escape from the reptile‑infested “Crawl” space to reach a boat by wading a couple of hundred feet through murky, hip-high water.
The boat, by the way, was parked at an inundated gas station and convenience store. It was to be used as the escape vehicle by three people who wanted to steal the store’s ATM. Can you guess what happens to the robbers? The fate of the trio is an example of the many times that “Crawl” excels as creature feature horror.
Del will complain about the jump-out-of-your-seat moments in this movie, but I loved the hell out of them. The gator busting through a staircase. The lightning bolt that illuminates a big‑ass meat eater, jaw agape, behind Haley. And, there’s suspense. Lots and lots of suspense. Reaching from a somewhat safe perch across flood water strewn with floating debris that obstructs your view to get your dead friend’s Glock – he was a sheriff’s deputy – for protection. The dog swimming through a long, darkened hallway to reach Dad. All delightful.
“Crawl” also provides a solid dose of gore. Water turning red as gators bite and thrash their human prey. A death roll. A gator gripping Dad near the elbow, snapping his arm in half and then tearing it off. Floating corpses. Wait to you see how Haley dispatches a gator that has taken hold of her. Dad, too, before losing his arm later in the movie, whacks a gator after trapping it in a clever way.
Sit back, if you can, and enjoy “Crawl”. It’s a masterful little film with likeable characters facing cold‑blooded, almost plausible, threats.
Del’s take
“Crawl” is a two-hour and seven-minute wet T-shirt contest, which explains why Mladen likes it so much.
Me? I can take it or leave it. I have nothing against standard-issue potboilers, even if they’re shameless cash grabs, in this case by the studio and a slumming Barry Pepper, who usually chooses more artistically meritorious projects. But schlock is like Hooters chicken wings – to enjoy them one must be in the mood for them, assuming one can focus on the wings and not the breasts. Maybe I wasn’t in the mood for a serving of grease delivered by a perky coed.
As Mladen explained, the protagonist, Haley, travels two hours south of Gainesville to look for her dad as a cat five hurricane approaches. Dad isn’t answering his phone and Haley’s sister up north fears the worst. Haley and Dad are especially close; she’s a college swimmer and he was her coach throughout her youth. But now she’s having doubts after losing a relay, and somehow that means Dad is a monster, or something like that. You know … something conflicty.
As she treks to the AWOL Dad’s seaside abode she passes a flooded alligator farm. These are the Special Super Intelligent Mind-Reading Alligators from Mars or something based on what happens later in the movie. She finds Dad in the crawl space beneath his house, clawed to damn near bloody ruin by … well, OK. I should let you watch the movie to find out, but, Psssttt! It crawls.
What follows is a string of predictable pitfalls, emotional ups and downs and cliché after soggy, growly cliché. I will give “Crawl” credit – in most of these movies the protagonist is a crack shot who always dodges the falling asteroid and ambles into the sunset with the girl – or boy – slung over his or her shoulder. In “Crawl,” no such immunity is granted, and since it’s a father and daughter there will be no ambling into the sunset. Well, maybe an AARP lecture or two.
No, Mladen, I didn’t object to the jump scares. What I did object to was the stupidity – like helicopters flying in a cat five hurricane. Like people strolling the flooded streets in a cat five hurricane. Like a one-armed guy able to bludgeon his way through a roof with his bare hand.
If you go into “Crawl” with sufficiently low expectations you’ll enjoy it, because it’s a decently entertaining movie with not bad special effects. But that’s all we’re talking here – entertainment. Not art.
I give it between a B- and a C+. Make it a B- because the hurricane actually looked somewhat realistic (although heads up, moviemakers: We just had a cat five here in the Panhandle and there’s tons of footage on YouTube if you’d care to educate yourself about what a storm like that looks like).
Mladen Rudman is a former journalist and technical writer. Del Stone Jr. is a former journalist and author.
Image courtesy of Florida Memory.
This is the Fourth of July I remember.
It is the sepia-toned America of my youth – large cars with tailfins, puffy thunderstorms over Crestview and foil peeled off a Salisbury steak TV dinner. Television stations start their morning broadcast with a noisy rendition of the national anthem.
It is sidewalks and bicycles with fenders and clown-like horns with big, rubbery bulbs. Mom throws us out of the house in the morning and tells us to go play, so we wander the neighborhood, looking for our friends, drinking out of outdoor spigots when we get thirsty and working on our sunburns that will be sponged with vinegar that night.
It’s riding our bicycles into the billowing white cloud behind the mosquito sprayer and peeking through the front window at a green TV screen, because the next-door neighbor is the only person on our street with a color TV and we think it’s amazing.
Or standing on the weedy shores of Cinco Bayou at the foot of Cinco Bridge as water skiers jump over ramps and carry beautiful girls on their shoulders, and if you wait until dusk some guys of questionable sobriety will show up in a boat and launch fireworks they brought back from Alabama.
It’s beauty contests on the beach and cooking burgers on the nasty grills at Wayside Park on the island and marveling over the giant shark hanging tail-first from the fishing pier with its guts spilling out while people pose for photos.
You can buy an alligator at a tourist trap for a dollar, a real alligator, and Tower Beach serves the best burgers on the planet – buns heated on the cooktop and smeared with grease, exactly the way they should be – and the PA system thunders “I can’t get no satisfaction” while girls with lacquered hair and guys with slicked-back Vitalis curls gyrate to unfathomable rhythms.
And then at night it’s standing in the driveway with a Tasco reflector and gazing at the moon or a wobbly image of Mars or pale Saturn with its strange rings. You have to smear Off cream on your arms and legs because despite the fogger that left the neighborhood smelling like a chemical factory, the mosquitoes are tougher than a little DDT and they’ll eat you alive.
This is the July Fourth I remember.
The best July Fourth ever.
About the author:
Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone’s stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra’s Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone’s comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled “December” for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman’s Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone’s novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild’s award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”
Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida’s best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.
As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn’t look a day over 94.
Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, Ello and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .
Image courtesy of Gravitas Ventures.
“Assimilate” Starring Joel Courtney, Calum Worthy and Andi Matichak. Directed by John Murlowski. 1 hour, 33 minutes. Not rated.
Del’s take
It was a tweet that led me to the Refinery 29 list of 130 best new movies on Netflix, and from that I made my own list because I don’t see myself watching sappy holidays flicks where the man and woman fall in love despite their political differences (The very idea bludgeons my suspension of disbelief).
That’s how I tumbled onto “Assimilate,” which shares a common trait with “Spiderman.” How?
The two are part of an endless cycle of recycling.
How many versions of “Spiderman” will Hollywood make before they finally leave it alone? Same goes for “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” the 1956 classic about the Red Scare. “Assimilate” is, what, the fourth of fifth iteration of that movie? I’ve lost count.
Far be it from me to criticize – I watched the whole damn thing. But honestly: Hollywood, do you need a new scary sci-fi horror movie idea? I’ve got several available if you can lay off the sequels and re-imaginings and revisions.
“Assimilate” takes place in a small town called Multon, Missouri, which looks pretty nice to me – neat and clean, with lots of well kept homes, sparse traffic and a lack of crime that allows you to leave your doors unlocked at night. And it’s those qualities that make Multon a living hell for Zach (Joel Courtney), Randy (Calum Worthy) and Zach’s crush, Kayla (Andi Matichak).
Zach can’t leave because his father lost the use of his legs in … well, I don’t remember the movie explaining that detail. But Zach must stay to help his mother take care of his dad. Randy can’t leave because he’s a loser. Kayla IS leaving and the threat of her absence might prompt Zach into revealing his decade-long crush on her … but the monsters upend that timetable.
Zach and Randy are passing the summer making a vlog about how boring their town is, which they somehow expect people to watch. The video from their cameras provides footage throughout the movie but we’re not talking found-footage; “Assimilate” is mostly live action, thank God.
Strange things begin to happen in Multon as (a) weird little bugs appear and (b) even stranger, floating spore-like organisms take to the Missouri skies, except only WE can see them. That struck me as odd – why two possible catalysts for the invasion we know is already taking place?
People begin taking on the flat affect of a telemarketer (unless it’s Candi, who calls me at least once a month to discuss how I could improve my credit score) and soon Zach and Randy are asking themselves who can be trusted, especially after Mrs. Henderson evolves from horny sex addict to prudish schoolmarm in a single evening. Kayla joins their ranks after her own father becomes robotic and unearthly.
What follows is the usual “Body Snatchers” process whereby the protagonist(s) try to make others aware of the danger and when that doesn’t work, escape themselves.
I mean, what can I say? It wasn’t awful and I don’t have many gripes – the dual-threat thing, yes. That was unnecessary. Oh, and they kept saying they would rescue Kayla’s little brother from the pod people but leaving him with the pod people. The ending departed from most, but not all of the earlier versions, if that’s a virtue.
Other than that, “Assimilate” was nothing more than a 2019 refresh of a 50-something-year-old classic featuring young actors who might be recognizable to the current generation (Courtney starred in the JJ Abrams movie “Super 8” and Worthy was the goofy sidekick in Disney’s “Austin & Alley”). It broke no new ground, but neither did it salt the earth of its predecessors.
I watched it on Netflix and didn’t hate it, hence a C+ grade.
Stone is a former journalist and author.
Image courtesy of Lionsgate Home Entertainment.
“John Wick Chapter 3 – Parabellum” Starring Keanu Reeves, Halle Berry, Ian McShane, Laurence Fishburne, and Asia Kate Dillion. Directed by Chad Stahelski. 130 minutes. Rated R.
Mladen’s take
John Wick and I are a lot alike, if the essence of freshly released film, “John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum,” is the yardstick. John’s life and work in “Wick 3” are hampered by all sorts of rules, procedures, constraints and layers of management. I face those same obstacles daily.
Of course, there’s a difference between being a celebrity assassin in a wildly popular movie franchise and my often frustrating effort to keep health insurance for my family, a roof over our heads, and our cars running. I am leashed to others. Wick is not, unless he chooses to be. What the director chose for John in “Wick 3” was to leash him to the memory of his dead wife, which, thankfully, leads from one glorious scene of hyperviolence to another. But, that choice also produced a couple of chinks in the armor of the formidably entertaining Wick saga.
“Wick 3” is merely a good movie and the weakest in the franchise because of two problems, one with the story and the other with an important character.
“Wick 3” should’ve been more like its two predecessors, an intimate tale of personal redemption or, at least, a movie with a good excuse for all those heads getting blown apart and dogs attacking men’s groins. In Wick 1 we see John addressing very personal slights – a dead puppy and a stolen muscle car. I can sympathize with both. In Wick 2 he’s a hesitant, duty-bound killer honoring a marker. In those movies, John wanted out of the assassin racket. In “Wick 3,” he wants back in to stay alive to remember his wife, but changes his mind later. That wishy washiness is unbecoming of the planet’s most accomplished hitman. In Wicks 1 and 2 we see that it’s the world’s fault for keeping John a servant of the High Table, the gang of 12 thugs running Earth’s underworld. Bad people don’t leave John alone, so he has to defend himself, his property and his memories to impose order. Because of his do-rightness he, himself, is rendered ex communicado persona non grata for whacking a mob boss inside a hotel. In Wick 3, the HOTEL is punished by being “deconsecrated.”
On top of blacklisting a hotel, “Wick 3” offers other tidbits of bureaucratic and legalistic nonsense such as the notion of “fealty” to the High Table and the High Table’s dispatch of an “adjudicator” to settle its score with John and anyone who has helped him. “Wick 3” begins to meander, including a dip into mysticism, as a result. Of all the characters flowing through “Wick 3,” the adjudicator is the most frustrating. She is supposed to be a prim and proper bad ass representing the High Table’s interest, which is to keep everyone in line to make sure crime and profit go uninterrupted by rule breakers such as John. Instead, the adjudicator is a meek, stiff, uncharismatic, unintentionally droll and unconvincing enabler of the High Table’s will. Yes, the adjudicator’s flimsiness is somewhat offset by the strong female character, Sofia, in “Wick 3,” but damage to the story had already occurred by the time she’s introduced. The High Table and the adjudicator, instead of seeming to be all powerful, just seemed to be on their way toward stepping into John’s line of fire which, I suspect, will be the plot of “Wick 4.”
“Parabellum” is a dead language’s phrase for “prepare for war.” When you go see “Wick 3,” prepare to be disappointed. “Wick 3” lacks the emotional grit and gristle of Wicks 1 and 2. “Wick 3’s” bad girl is particularly unsatisfying and the film’s High Table assassin, campy. The weak motivation for “Wick 3’s” hyperviolence renders it something approaching gratuitous. I hope “Wick 4” corrects that weakness or Wick world-building will go the way of Star Wars. “Wick 3” gets a B from me. See it in a theater with vibrant projection and good sound.
Del’s take
Once upon a time there was a little movie about an undercover cop who infiltrated a car theft ring to bust the ringleader. That little movie, “The Fast and the Furious,” made the late Paul Walker a star and provided Vin Diesel with a hit on his resume.
So they made a sequel.
Then another.
Then another, where they rebooted the series.
Then another.
And another, ad finitum.
Each of those sequels required more action, bigger plots and higher stakes than its predecessor, until now Lamborghinis are being chased by nuclear submarines and Ferraris tossed from cargo planes as the “Fast and Furious” crew saves the world from (name your favorite apocalyptic nemesis).
In other words, silly.
Unfortunately that’s the trajectory being followed by the John Wick saga. What started as a personal and, dare I say, charming story of revenge by a man whose puppy got shot and his car stolen, is slowly evolving into something I no longer recognize – a bastard child of James Bond and “The Matrix.”
I don’t like it. I want the old John Wick.
That’s not to say “Parabellum” is a bad movie. It’s just not what I expected, and as Mladen pointed out, it deviated in ways I don’t think will work.
(FYI: Mladen is nothing like John Wick. I’ve never seen him chop off a person’s head with a samurai sword and he doesn’t even like dogs.)
The plot careens along as Mladen described it. I’ll further explain it picks up where the second movie left off, with Wick and his pit bull running for their lives after the ruling elite of the assassins’ guild, something called the High Table, excommunicates him and puts a price on his head. Every other phone on the street is ringing with the news that Wick’s bounty stands at a cool $14 million, which makes you wonder how all those killers manage to operate without putting each other in the unemployment line. There are THAT many. Think about it next time you’re in a crowded grocery store.
The methods of death are inventive and graphic. If I had to choose a favorite it would be Wick slapping a horse on the ass and the horse kicking an assassin into a wall, dispatching him to that great Died of a Horse Kicking paddock in the sky.
Mladen described the action as hyperviolent and he’s not exaggerating. Apart from a few slogs through muddy pacing in the second act, the movie is almost nonstop violence with people getting shot, chopped, sliced, diced, kicked, burned, or having their genitalia ripped out by vicious German Shepherds.
It was cool to see Keanu Reeves on the screen once again with Laurence Fishburne, and it was disappointing that Halle Berry’s role was so small. For Christ’s sake, she’s an Oscar winner. Put her to work.
Maybe she could have done a better job than Asia Kate Dillion as the Adjudicator, who came across as Mladen described: devoid of menace. And Keanu? Well, what can I say? Keanu was Keanu. He’s never had a lot of dialogue in these movies and “Wick 3” is no exception.
My big gripe is with the direction the movie took, with its emphasis on the worldwide mystery cult of assassins and all their rules, talismans and functionaries. It was like watching a tiger team of GS-12s stumble upon a cache of Uzis. It carries the Wick saga farther afield from its humble origins, from a man with a grudge who has payback on his mind into some kind of mystical figure fate has anointed with special powers. Maybe they should change his name to Neo Wick.
The action is exquisitely choreographed and the special effects spot on, but beware: “Wick 3” is a bloodbath, and it’s probably not what you were expecting after having watched the previous iterations.
There’s a sequel coming and I’ll likely see it. But it may be the last time I bump into John Wick in a movie theater. I like my action movies smart, not silly.
I give it a B.
Mladen Rudman is a former journalist and technical writer. Del Stone Jr. is a former journalist and author.
Image courtesy of Lionsgate.
“Fast Color” Starring Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Christopher Denham, Lorraine Toussaint and Sanniya Sidney. Directed by Julia Hart. 100 minutes. Rated PG-13. Hulu.
Del’s take
“Fast Color” is pitched as a superhero movie but it is unlike any superhero movie you’ve ever seen, and I would venture to say it is not a superhero movie at all but a story about three women battling forces, both seen and not, that isolate them from the world but bind them as a family.
It is also one of those quiet, semi-science fiction dramas that slip into and out of the stream of pop entertainment garbage so noiselessly that it will not be noticed unless somebody draws attention to it.
As I watched “Fast Color” I thought of Zenna Henderson’s series of books about The People, immigrant aliens who arrive at Earth after their own world is destroyed. I also thought of the Tim Robbins movie “Code 46,” which also came and went without much fanfare but was a fine, overlooked gem of a film.
In “Fast Color,” Ruth (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) is a mother on the run, pursued by Bill (Christopher Denham), a government scientist eager to exploit Ruth’s psychokinetic abilities to cause earthquakes during the seizures that wrack her body. Ruth flees to her mother Bo’s (Lorraine Toussaint) home where Ruth’s daughter Lila (Sanniya Sidney) lives. Bo is raising Lila because Ruth is broken, a poetic way of saying she’s been struggling with substance addiction and other issues. Bo and Lila also have powers – they can take things apart and put them back together. But something that’s broken? It can’t be fixed – not by their telekinetic powers, at any rate.
That theme of brokenness operates throughout “Fast Color” – in Ruth by her moral flaws, Bo by her inability to fix Ruth and even Lila for her life of concealment, something every gay man and woman on the face of the Earth already understands. The government is broken, usually the case in movies where it is made the antagonist, and even the Earth is broken with climate change rendering water a commodity so precious America’s standard of living has descended to something that resembles the Third World.
The movie also tells us that while magic cannot fix things already broken, love may find a way. As the story winds toward its resolution we see Ruth, Bo and Lila seeking their own paths to redemption, with nary a caped crusader, death ray or dollop of the-fate-of-the-universe-lies-in-their-hands bullshit thrown in for dramatic tension.
The movie unfolds at a languid pace, which I felt was sometimes too slow, and reveals its secrets along the way requiring a patient audience. Its scope is limited and simultaneously expansive as it, like “Nomadland,” is set in the parched Southwest with its infinite horizons and empty landscapes.
The best performance of the film – and many of them are good – was by Toussaint as the suffering mother/grandmother Bo. She brought a regal dignity to the role and succeeded in avoiding the clichés and tropes of the put-upon matriarch who would suffer to spare her children.
I did not like the way Hart chose to end the film as it tended to confirm some of those clichés repudiated by everything that led up to the climax – in fact, the climax seemed more of an anticlimax and could have been reworked to provide more subtextual pop.
Still, “Fast Color” will entertain for its 100 minutes and it’s a good antidote to a lot of the nonsense that passes for science fiction in cinema these days.
I would grade it at a B+.
Mladen’s take
I enjoyed “Fast Color,” though it is incorrectly billed, as Del correctly noted.
That the streaming service, producers, studio, whoever or whatever, tried to sucker me with the claim the film is a science fiction adventure doesn’t bother me too much. “Fast Color” is a good, girl relationships movie with occasional doses of a superpower on exhibit. The superpower, by the way, comes in two flavors: controllable by its practitioner or beyond control.
The three women in the film have brains with the capability to deconstruct and reconstruct objects. When our heroines explode objects into millions of sand grain pieces and return those grains to their original uniform form, the process comes with bright, streaking stripes of color.
Best as I can tell, our heroines use the word “color” in their conversations as code for their power. “She sees colors.” “I can’t see colors.” “Does anyone else beside us three see colors?”
Bo, Ruth, and Lila have to talk carefully because they recognize that there are a whole bunch of people on the rain-starved Earth of the future who would try to weaponize their telekinesis, rather than do good with it.
Also, best as I can tell, our heroines are mortal. So, they could be snubbed by the Government if deemed a threat or some Trump-loving nationalistic fascist racist patriot citing God as his source of inspiration and authorization to cancel from the world the un-godly as he defines them.
Personally, though, had I fast color, I wouldn’t be cowering from the billions of stupid people on this planet. I’d discern ways to let those reds, greens, and blues rip to achieve world peace while I worked toward enabling the power to allow me to live forever so that I could travel to edge of the universe.
I can’t recall the soundtrack for “Fast Color,” which is good and bad. Bad in the sense that the score, at least to me, failed to add to the film. Good in that the music didn’t distract the plot. I did enjoy the song about a new day coming about halfway through the film.
“Fast Color” has a pleasantly subdued dystopian feel. The world is dry as in “Mad Max: Fury Road,” but there’s no hyperviolence among warring tribes. In fact, there’s very little violence in “Fast Color.” The director conveys desperation and dearth by showing poor pickins’ on store shelves. More effective is the unceasing reminder that the water well is going dry. Water is ladled into and out of plastic containers marked with red for maximum volume, usually about half of the actual capacity of a jug. There must be no spillage. Check into a motel and you pay for the room and the water. Faucets are useless, bathing wasteful.
However, the reason I give “Fast Color” a B+ like Del is this: Though essentially a girl movie, there’s almost no romance. The lack of romance allows me to forgive the studio for lying about the film’s true genre.
Mladen Rudman is a former journalist and technical writer. Del Stone Jr. is a former journalist and author.
Image courtesy of Del Stone Jr.
I visited Santa Rosa Mall the other day. It was sad.
Sears was shuttered. I almost never shopped there unless I needed a belt. Sears always had a large selection of belts for guys with beer guts like yours truly.
When we were kids we looked forward to the arrival of the Sears catalog. I would pore over the toy section, dreaming of the airplanes, slot car racers and train sets that rumbled across those pages.
No, we never used it for toilet paper. But our parents probably did.
Belk has been closed many years. They had cool shirts and those wonderful Polo towels I still use. But I hated their mirrors. I would try on a new pair of pants or shorts, look in the mirror and hate what looked back at me.
The food court is a pale shadow of its former self. A few restaurants cling to existence, but it’s nothing like it used to be.
I miss the bookstore, theater and arcade. I miss the crowds that thronged its concourses. I miss going into the music store and browsing the CDs while Thompson Twins and “Into the Groove” played from overhead speakers.
I grieve for the mall, and I can’t understand what has happened — not just to it but people, too. Why would people rather visit a strip shopping center, or shop online? It’s an absolute pain in the you-know-what to return a pair of shoes you ordered from an online store and they don’t fit.
I have written about what the mall could become — a “mall” of medical facilities and doctors, for instance. But one community in Bristol, Virginia, came up with a novel solution I know would work here.
Two developers are turning their town’s mall into a casino, hotel and convention center.
The casino is to be situated in one of the empty anchor stores while the remainder is occupied by hotel rooms, a children’s area with swimming pools, restaurants and retailers.
They expect this complex to bring in 2,000 jobs at the outset, growing to 5,000 with an average annual income of $46,000.
Think of it: Jobs, income for Mary Esther, more money for the state and a revival of a once thriving center of commerce. The state would have to change its laws, but that’s not an impossible obstacle.
Why not roll the dice on a casino?
About the author:
Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone’s stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra’s Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone’s comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled “December” for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman’s Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone’s novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild’s award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”
Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida’s best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.
As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn’t look a day over 94.
Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, Ello and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .