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The Drunken Odyssey

~ A Podcast About the Writing Life

The Drunken Odyssey

Monthly Archives: October 2015

Episode 177: Horror Movie Poetry Night 2!

30 Friday Oct 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Episode, Horror, Poetry

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Carrie, Evil Dead 2, House of 1000 COrpses, Satan, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Devil's Rejects, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, The Mouth of Madness, The Omen, Tron, Weeki Wachee

Episode 177 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

Horror Movie Poetry Night 2This week is a live show for Horror Movie Poetry Night 2, starring The Drunken Odyssey All Stars, brought to you several days early for your Halloweening pleasure.

Photos by Racquel Henry.

Photos by Racquel Henry.

On this occasion, The Drunken Odyssey All-Stars included:

  • Tom Lucas (The Mouth of Madness)
  • Teege Braune (The Creature from the Black Lagoon)
  • Anna King (House of 1,000 Corpses/The Devil’s Rejects)
  • Mark Pursell (Rosemary’s Baby)
  • Genevieve Anna Tyrrell (The Exorcism of Emily Rose)
  • Vincent Crampton Satan
  • Susan Fallows (Carrie)

Special thanks to Writer’s Atelier for granting us a venue!

Writers AtelierIf you live in Orlando, check out WA’s website here for information about its workshops and events.

_______

Episode 177 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

The Curator of Schlock #109: Shocker

30 Friday Oct 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Horror, The Curator of Schlock

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Shocker, Wes Craven

The Curator of Schlock #109 by Jeff Shuster

Wes Craven’s Shocker

(This movie had better be shocking)

Shocker1 I picked up Wes Craven’s Shocker a few years ago in a double pack with Wes Craven’s The People Under the Stairs. I liked that movie back in the early 90s along with Child’s Play and Candyman, the last gasps of 80s horror before we entered a decade without any real horror movies. Wes Craven’s Shocker had escaped me somehow until I had bought that double pack. Was I pleasantly surprised? I’m guess…

Wes Craven’s Shocker is about a psycho serial killer that goes around murdering families. Pretty harsh stuff and the police are finding it impossible to capture the guy.

Our hero of the film is a college football player named Jonathan Parker (Peter Berg) who bumps his head and I guess develops a psychic connection with the serial killer.

Shocker5When Jonathan goes to sleep, he dreams about the killer murdering his adoptive family. Turns out it wasn’t a dream! His foster dad is the lead detective on the investigation and the serial killer wanted to send Detective Don Parker (Michael Murphy) a message: Stop hunting me or I’ll kill your family. Oh wait. I just did kill your family. Hahahahaha! I’m that evil! (That taunt may not have been in the actual movie.)

So Jonathan managed to see the killer’s face in that dream he had, notices the guy has a limp and that the guy owns a dilapidated TV repair shop. They figure out the killer is a man named Horace Pinker (Mitch Pileggi). Pinker manages to murder every single arresting officer sent to the shop save for Detective Don Parker. Pinker then tracks down Jonathan Parker’s girlfriend and murders her. Then he writes Happy Birthday, Jonathan in her all over the walls of his apartment. Like I said, this guy is really evil.

Shocker4Pinker is trying to murder another family when Jonathan uses his dream/psychic powers to track Pinker down. The police follow him in close pursuit.

Shocker3Jonathan and Pinker have a fight to the death on a rooftop, but the police break it up so I guess it really isn’t a fight to the death. While awaiting death row, Pinker does some weird ritual to a television demon (just watch the movie). Oh, it turns out Jonathan is adopted and Pinker is really his father. Pinker murdered Jonathan’s mother too. Jonathan has had a pretty sad life up to this point, but he gets to watch Pinker get the electric chair so hopefully that will help ease his pain.

shocker2Except that Pinker is now pure electricity and he can posses anyone he comes into contact with. I guess they shouldn’t have allowed him that final devil-worshiping ceremony in his cell! Eventually, Pinker jumps into a satellite stream allowing him to murder random people in their living rooms just by jumping out of their TV sets. You know, why did they show Pinker murdering people in their living rooms when he could have been murdering TV characters instead. Imagine if he had murdered Gilligan or Captain Kirk, leaving the characters on those shows to do nothing but mourn. Pinker had the ability to ruin all of the classic TV shows. Now that would have truly made him a monster.

Five Things I Learned from Wes Craven’s Shocker

  1. Keep your gun drawn when hunting a serial killer.
  2. Never give mouth to mouth to a serial killer.
  3. The ghost of your dead girlfriend can save your life from scary electricity man.
  4. Electricity man can possess easy chairs.
  5. If Pinker were to have murdered Jay Leno on live TV, would the real Jay Leno be dead or just the television version? So, I guess I learned nothing! Happy Halloween, folks!

_______

Photo by Leslie Salas

Photo by Leslie Salas

Jeffrey Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, and episode 131) is an MFA candidate at the University of Central Florida.

McMillan’s Codex #10: David Cage, The Would-Be Spielberg Part 2

28 Wednesday Oct 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in McMillan's Codex

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CT McMillan, David Cage, Heavy Rain

McMillan’s Codex #10 By C.T. McMillan

David Cage: The Would-Be Spielberg, Part 2

Videogames take after movies for story and gameplay. Developer Hideo Kojima understands the need for a separation between the mediums and uses film for storytelling outside of gameplay. David Cage of Quantic Dream, however, has sought to combine them. His three games are styled after the point-and-click genre where players navigate environments to initiate instances of action or conversation. Cage is so confident in his work he refers to them as “movies,” wants them to be judged as such, and he is going to get his wish.

When I started writing online I began as a film critic. With 80+ reviews under my belt I will treat Cage’s games as movies and review each one in a format similar to my critiques.

* * *

Heavy Rain (2010)

Depressed and destitute after a car accident, Ethan discovers the Origami Killer has kidnapped his son, and tries to get him back. Meanwhile, private investigator Scott tracks down the parents of the victims to bring closure to their tragedies. On the police side, FBI agent Norman is paired with the local police to assist in the apprehension of the Killer. Caught in the middle, Madison seeks to help Ethan with her true motives unknown.

Heavy Rain 1Unlike Indigo Prophecy, Heavy Rain (HR) is not strung together with random elements that do not belong together. It is a combination of noir and crime drama in a believable realm of reality. HR bills itself as a mystery from the perspective of its four characters that play a role identifying the Killer. In that respect it succeeds, but not without significant issues that drastically affect the overall immersion.

Cage is French, and when a foreigner writes a story in a place foreign to him, it usually does not turn out well. Clearly, Cage wanted to tell an emotional story with the theme of fatherhood and used advanced facial capture technology to better convey the emotions of professional actors. But the performances and flawed setting deter any possibility of sympathizing with what is going on. Furthermore, the twist come the end is a bold-faced contrivance that makes no sense and contradicts the entire plot to the point of deception. It comes off as a twist for twist’s sake, hastily shoved in because Cage did not know how to end his magnum opus.

I get the feeling he watched Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone, and The Departed and was inspired to set his story in an eastern seaboard location–specifically, Philadelphia, though it is not directly mentioned. It is obvious Cage has never been there. It comes through mostly in the individual locations. In a grocery live chickens are stocked next to unpackaged meat and fish, there is a carousel in a random park, a car mechanic keeps cars long term in an underground garage with multiple floors, and everyone has a studio apartment. It is as if Cage did not know how some things work in America and replaced them with elements from France. A sense of verisimilitude is important in all fiction, especially when the story takes place in an alien environment, but if you cannot achieve that with a realistic setting, why bother writing at all?

Heavy Rain 2The inconsistencies in setting would not be so bad if the characters were believable. Of the four main actors, two are Americans while the others are Brits who cannot voice-act or put on an accent to save their lives. Ethan is supposed to be the protagonist, but comes off as robotic and petty. He is weak, whiny, and not at all the kind of hero players would like. No, he does not have to be John McClane, but Ethan needed to feel like a proactive and devoted character. Norman and the other cops put on an unintentionally hilarious Boston accent that does not fit with the setting. I do not know if the actor playing Norman was just having fun or Cage told him to do his best impression of Mark Wahlberg.

The other actors do not help the situation, either. I have a feeling Cage employed locals. As a result, two-thirds of the cast is more Francophone than the concept of surrender. Being foreigners, they could not act in a second language, dramatically hindering their performances and taking you right out of the experience. The worst by far were the children and a few female actors. The end goal of the story is to rescue a child, but the kid is so terrible you want him to die. Also, possibly due to the facial capture, the characters’ eyes do not move for most of the time and when they talk, it looks like they have something questionable in their mouths.

The performances are not so much the fault of the actors as it is the person who wrote the script. Unlike Kojima, Cage saw things in movies and tried to emulate them with no understanding of what they mean or how they work in their own context, compounding the inconsistencies in HR.

The Killer has slain seven children in two years and the FBI only now sends a liaison to the local police. In the real world, the Bureau would have taken over after maybe the second or third victim. Even in Twin Peaks Agent Cooper showed up within a matter of days upon discovery of Laura Palmer’s corpse. There are some issues of wording as HR was probably written in French and later translated. Where characters are likely referring to an abandoned lot, they say “wasteland” or awkwardly call someone a “bastard” or “ugly bastard face.” Either the actors did not realize what they were saying or Cage yelled at them whenever they questioned his writing. The cop paired with Norman is Blake, the obvious “bad cop” archetype. He chokes witnesses, habitually hinders the investigation even though he seems to want to solve the case, thinks every suspect is the Killer, and has no concept of how to conduct standard police procedure like interrogations. Blake is so blatant in how bad he is, he makes the Bad Lieutenant look like Serpico. In a scene where Norman chases a suspect, the latter attempts to kill him before Norman gains the upper hand. In questioning, Norman finds out the suspect ran and tried to kill a cop because he was late for a parole meeting. Even in the real world criminals are not that stupid.

Two years before the events of HR Ethan is an architect with a wife and two sons. When his eldest son dies in a car accident, he is left divorced and his last son hates him. However, not only did Ethan throw himself in front of the car to save his son, putting him in coma, the accident scene was ham-handed and not at all fatal. The car was barely going 40 and in the shot of the impact, it stopped right as Ethan leaps out. Cage saw this, tried to edit around it, and failed. Even though Ethan sacrificed his safety to protect his son, his passive-aggressive wife still hates him and made sure he got the short end of the stick come the separation for no reason except bad writing. It does not help that said kid had it coming as he wandered out of a crowded mall, walked across a busy street, and then proceeded to run back after Ethan calls for him, disregarding the oncoming traffic. Clearly nobody taught him to look both ways or he was dropped as a baby.

The worst travesty of HR is how it handles the character of Madison. In no instance is her character not playing nursemaid to Ethan or else put in sexual situations, exploiting herself.

In her first scene she is almost gang raped in an apparent nightmare that never comes into play later. Where Madison is the focus of a scene she is supporting Ethan by mending his wounds and even buying groceries. In her two bigger roles she is strapped to a gurney by a crazy surgeon and does a strip tease for a club owner in exchange for information. This would be the crux of my contempt if the rest of the story did not already have enough to complain about.

Heavy Rain 3To close out this post, I find it necessary to explain the twist because of how bad it is. It is a lesson all fledging writers must learn, but it requires giving away the game’s only spoiler. At this point if you somehow still want to play HR, skip to the final paragraph for the conclusion.

Scott’s whole arc is he is tracking down the parents of the Killer’s victims to bring closure to their grief and build a case. He collects items the parents received after their child was abducted like a shoebox of origami figures, a gun, and a cellphone that apparently they forgot to show the police. One of his biggest leads is the son of a construction tycoon who was caught taking a kid from a park. The police did not investigate because the father paid them off. As Scott goes after the son, there is an attempt on his life where he is put into a car and driven into the river. When he gets out Scott goes to the father’s mansion and after beating him, the father confesses his son was obsessed with the Killer and wanted to emulate him. That is where the arc seems to end before it is revealed Scott was the Origami Killer the whole time.

Dun! Dun! Duh?

If that sounds stupid it is because it is. It contradicts the entire character’s purpose and comes off as a complete bold-faced lie that screams lazy and half-thought-out. The biggest give away is the game’s character thought mechanic where the player can listen to what the character is thinking. Every time you listen to Scott’s thoughts, it is never related to being the Killer or what he has done to his victims. I guess he conditioned himself to think a certain way at different times like a sleeper agent from the MKUltra Program. Furthermore, I get he is probably contacting the parents to tie up loose ends, but why now? Why after two years of killing is Scott finally getting around to covering his tracks? For a guy who was a former cop and planned a comically elaborate scheme for his victims, he is not very good at hindsight. Also, why would Scott go after the son of the construction tycoon when his obsession with the Killer could prove a valuable diversion? The revenge angle makes sense, but I would assume avoiding apprehension is more important.

Scott’s whole motivation for being a murderer is pretty weak in the first place. When he was younger, his brother was caught in a sewer pipe of rushing water. He tried to get help from his alcoholic father, but he was too wasted and Scott’s brother died. From there he vowed to search for a better father by kidnapping children and subjecting their fathers to a variety of trials to test their commitment. The thing that makes this more stupid is Scott started killing two years before the events of the game and he is middle aged. You would think by then he moved on 40 years after his brother’s death. Vietnam veterans still struggle with trauma, but how does the death in a family compare to the biggest mistake in American history, that affected an entire generation of young men? This is why Batman does not make any sense as a vigilante.

 Heavy Rain is an improvement over Indigo Prophecy. It is far more cohesive and easier to follow, but the inconsistencies in the setting, characters, and the incompetent plot twist was such a contrivance, by the time it is over you feel as though you have been lied to and wasted your time.

_______

CT McMillan 1

C.T. McMillan (Episode 169) is a film critic and devout gamer.  He has a Bachelors for Creative Writing in Entertainment from Full Sail University.

On Top of It #4: Dancing with the Woman Who Tried to Sell Me

26 Monday Oct 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in On Top of It

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On Top of It #4 by Lisa Martens

Dancing with the Woman Who Tried to Sell Me

A week ago, my oldest aunt remarried. This meant I would have to see her mother, my maternal grandmother. My mom and her sisters whispered to me. Could we be in the same car? How would we interact? We couldn’t be at the bridal shower together.

I hadn’t spoken to my grandmother since I graduated from college in 2010. I had quietly studied, quietly paid my bills, quietly worked and wrote papers—and then when the time came to receive my diploma, my grandmother decided to dig up a twenty-year-old skeleton: I had been in foster care as a baby, as my then-teenage mother hadn’t felt fit to raise me.

“You should let me go to her graduation ceremony instead of you,” my grandmother had told my mom. She felt that my mother was undeserving. She was claiming me—claiming something I had achieved without her.

This was the last in a long series of straws—there was her affair with painkillers, which became obvious when she had driven me out to Deer Park and became too high to drive back, and then there was her racism, which caused her to slap me if I spoke in Spanish, and then there was the casual way she would tell strangers that I didn’t know my Latino father, that he was a bastard who had abandoned me, and that he was lazy.

So after I graduated college, I stopped talking to my grandmother. I didn’t argue. I simply told her I didn’t want to speak to her anymore. There was no fighting. The fighting had happened when I was a child, and her psychosis was stale now. Her daughters had given up trying to intervene or get her off drugs. She would not stop, there was nothing to save. Her daughters’ tears had no impact except to push her further into denial, so they stopped crying. My mother complained.

“She wakes up in the middle of the night and sees things. She just walks around, then she doesn’t remember it.”

There’s a strange power my grandmother she has over her four daughters—Once I stopped talking to her, my mom started lying about being on the phone with me. “I’m talking to my friend Janet,” she said. I was upset the first time, then became hard.

The second time I graduated, I received my MFA. My parents flew in to see me graduate. My dad took me out for drinks the night before the ceremony. I had a cold and didn’t want to stay out late—We ended up going to Harlem and Brooklyn, with my dad complaining I couldn’t keep up with him. Then he told me about how my grandmother received custody of me after I came back from foster care. There was a stipulation that she could not transfer custody of me to anyone else except my own parents.

“This pissed her off because she had a family lined up to sell you to, and then she couldn’t.”

I didn’t drink after he told me that. I didn’t want to cry. Sell me? The more troubling part was that my body and mind didn’t reject the idea. It seemed plausible. The idea that she would want me for the sake of wanting me was what struck me as odd—the idea that she would want me to sell me to someone made sense. It moved through my heart like a lump of fat.

My grandmother and I have the same shoe size. We both have small feet and a petite frame. She had expensive shoes and bags, gifts from lovers, that she had given to me when she felt she was too old for them. I wore a pair of her shoes to my aunt’s wedding. They were red Cole Haans . . . more of a dark maroon than a true red, since I remembered from her first wedding that red was bad luck.

My baby cousins, three boys, were all over me during the ceremony. They all wanted to be the ring bearer. Then, after the “boring part” (the actual ceremony), they all wanted to throw rocks at the fake waterfall outside the hall, and of course they wanted me to watch.

“Chi-chi, I got it in there! Did you see? I’m going to do it again!”

“Cousin Lisa, look at this big rock I found!”

“Chi-chi, do you have a ball?”

As I watched the boys play in their little suits with pink and purple pocket squares, I wondered how high or drunk I would have to be to smack one of them for counting in Spanish, or to tell one of them that their father was a lazy bastard. I wondered what kind of place I would have to be in to drive them out to the edge of Long Island and then take too many pills to drive back—Instead leaving them scrambling for quarters for a pay phone. It was not a good place.

It was time for the reception. The three boys walked in together, all claiming to be ring bearers. The one who was actually the ring bearer graciously shared the credit. They put on cheap shades and top hats and danced.

My grandmother’s face had many more lines on it than I remembered. She was looking down, around, down, smiling, looking down, up, up, around—She didn’t seem like that cruel woman. I was afraid, actually, that she would fall down. I asked her if she wanted me to fix her a plate from the cocktail hour.

“Just a glass of red wine.”

I got her a glass, even though I didn’t want to. I was complicit in her substance abuse.

Then it happened—She saw the shoes I was wearing and commented on them. Somehow, through her haze, she recognized them. She took my hand to dance, and I did. I started dancing with the woman who tried to sell me, while wearing her shoes.

It lasted for only a moment, and then little hands reached up to grab my dress, to save me from thinking too much. The boys were bored, and they wanted to leave the reception hall. There was a rock that was left unthrown, maybe, or they wanted to sneak into the room where all the girls had put on their makeup. Our long eyelashes and pink cheeks were mysterious to them.

_______

Lisa Martens

Lisa Martens (Episode 22) currently lives in Harlem. In her past 10 years in New York, she has lived in a garage on Long Island, a living room in Hell’s Kitchen, the architecture building of CCNY, and on the couch of a startup. She grew up in New York, Costa Rica and Texas, and she’s still not sure which of these is home. She completed her MFA in Creative Writing from CCNY. Her thesis, What Grows in Heavy Rain, is available on Amazon. Check out her website here. Follow her on Instagram here.

Episode 176: Tom Lucas!

24 Saturday Oct 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Episode

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Aimee Bender, Dallas Woodburn, Eraserhead Press, Fiction, Leather to the Corinthians, New Bizarro Author Series, Pax Titanus, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, Tom Lucas

Episode 176 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

In this week’s episode, I interview bizarro fiction writer Tom Lucas,

Tom Lucas

plus Dallas Woodburn writes about how reading Aimee Bender’’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake changed her life.

Dallas Woodburn

TEXTS DISCUSSED

Pax TitanusLeather for the CorinthiansThe Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

NOTES

Horror Movie Poetry Night 2The Drunken Odyssey: A Podcast About the Writing Life presents another evening of verse inspired by that most poetic of film genres: horror!

Featuring

Mark Purcell
Teege Braune
Anna King
Vincent Crampton
Genevieve Anna Tyrrell
Tom Lucas
Susan Fallows
& your host, John King.

Absinthe ceremony to follow?

October 28, 2015

Writer’s Atelier (336 Grove Avenue, Winter Park, FL)

See facebook event page here.


Episode 176 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

McMillan’s Codex #9: David Cage, The Would-Be Spielberg Part 1

21 Wednesday Oct 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in McMillan's Codex

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Tags

David Cage, Indigo Prophecy

McMillan’s Codex #9 By C.T. McMillan

David Cage: The Would-Be Spielberg, Part 1

Videogames take after movies for story and gameplay. Developer Hideo Kojima understands the need for a separation between the mediums and uses film for storytelling cutaways between gameplay.

David Cage of Quantic Dream, however, has sought to combine them. His three games are styled after the point-and-click genre where players navigate environments to initiate instances of action or conversation. Cage is so confident in his work he refers to them as movies, and wants them to be judged as such, and he is going to get his wish.

When I started writing online I began as a film critic. With 80+ reviews under my belt I will now treat Cage’s games as movies and review each one in a format similar to my critiques.

* * *

Indigo Prophecy (2005)

After discovering a dead man at his feet and the murder weapon in his hand, Lucas goes into hiding to find out what happened to him. Homicide detective Carla conducts an investigation and finds there is more to this simple murder than she once thought.

Indigo Prophecy 1IP’s first two scenes are quite good: being a murderer having to clean up evidence. Then the perspective shifts to Carla and you must solve your own crime before the story spirals into oblivion. An element of fantasy becomes apparent at the beginning because it is obvious Lucas was possessed and committed the murder without his control or knowing. That would be fine until aspects from other inspirations turn the whole affair into a mess. To make it easier to comprehend, I will go through the plot step-by-step.

After Lucas flees the crime scene he wakes up at home and has a vision of a cop at his door. A short time later the policeman arrives and knocks at the door. He demands to be answered, but the door is locked and Lucas cannot find the keys … while inside his own apartment. Apparently in this universe, doors lock both ways.

Later at his job, Lucas has a vision of his coworker Warren spilling coffee and also reads his mind. When he is called to fix a network error, he hallucinates giant green ticks that chase him around the office. He avoids them with acrobatics before the man he killed appears and the hallucinations end. The bugs show up one more time and are never explained.

After confessing the murder to his priest brother Markus, he gives Lucas the address of a psychic named Agatha. At her house, he shows her cuts on his arms in the shape of a snake with two heads. She is shocked and performs an séance where Lucas sees himself before the murder and the hooded man who possessed him. Agatha says she has nothing more to say when she obviously does.

Indigo Prophecy 2Back at his apartment, Lucas receives a mysterious call before his apartment attacks him. Books, boxes, various items, and furniture hurl towards him. With nothing left, the apartment tears itself apart until Lucas falls through the floor and realizes he is hanging from his balcony.

He goes back to Agatha and finds her dead with the police on their way. When they close in, Lucas unlocks hidden Matrix powers and fights off the cops, sending them flying with Kung Fu and dodges bullets. He sprints into traffic, police helicopters above, and escapes by jumping onto a moving subway train.

On the run, Lucas goes to his brother’s church where the ghost of Agatha tells him the Mayan Oracle of Quechnitlan possessed his body to kill for reasons she leaves out, again. Then the statues of angels come alive and attack him, which turns out to be a hallucination. When he comes to, Markus advises Lucas to turn himself, but decides to find the Oracle.

Lucas goes to a museum to speak with an expert on Mayan culture and says a real oracle controlled him to commit a sacrifice. When the two leave through a parking garage, random cars try to kill them. Even though Lucas saves the day, the expert dies after saying the Oracle makes sacrifices to find the Indigo Child, a pure soul that has never been reincarnated.

In a dream sequence, Lucas is in a jungle confronted by the Oracle. He reveals Lucas was able to resist his control and have power because he possesses Chroma, which is never explained. It is also revealed the Oracle works for the Orange Clan, an illuminati cult. They want the Child to control the world, as it is consumed by a blizzard that was never brought up until now.

When Lucas wakes up, the Oracle has killed Markus and kidnapped his ex-girlfriend. He goes to an abandoned theme park where she is being held and dies trying to save her. In the following scene, however, Lucas is alive and meets Carla in a graveyard, where he convinces her to help fight the Orange Clan. Keep in mind she does not know a thing about any of the magic or sci-fi stuff.

Indigo Prophecy 3The reason Carla believes him is why IP’s mess of a story works: consistency. For all its disparate elements Cage wanted to include because he never heard the phrase “Kill your darlings,” the actual narrative is not entirely affected by the lack of cohesion. The story adheres to a three-act structure with identifiable plot points. None of the characters have arcs and it makes liberal use of convenience, but on story alone it succeeds. The trick is to not think about it too hard. The sheer randomness is enough to deter most viewers unless you regard it in terms of a Sci-Fi Channel or Cannon Films movie, especially at the heel-turn into insanity:

After Lucas finds the Child at an orphanage, he has a Matrix fight with the Oracle on the roof. While fleeing from helicopters he hides in an abandoned building where the Agatha ghost is waiting. It turns out, she was an AI monster from outer space (insert Ultron reference here) that was guiding Lucas to acquire the Child to use against the Orange Clan and control the world. Also, the AI monster was also responsible for resurrecting Lucas and saving him a few times.

Disregarding the stupidity of it all, the actual plot kind of makes sense and follows a consistent structure. It is built on nonsense sure, but by the conclusion it all comes together in a complete form. Does that make Indigo Prophecy a good story? Absolutely not, but it is good in a schlock way. (Jeff Shuster might like it a lot.) It is worthy of good-bad status and a riot to behold with friends and recreational substances.

_______

Charles McMillan

C.T. McMillan (Episode 169) is a film critic and devout gamer.  He has a Bachelors for Creative Writing in Entertainment from Full Sail University.

Buzzed Books #34: Killing Auntie

20 Tuesday Oct 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Buzzed Books

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Andrzej Bursa, Killing Auntie

Buzzed Books #34 by C.T. McMillan

Andrzej Bursa’s Killing Auntie

Killing Auntie

The college years can be confusing, especially when you are trying to work out new boundaries with your family, create your adult identity, and, you know, commit murder.

 Killing Auntie, by Andrzej Bursa, is about Jurek, a university student who lives with Auntie in a nondescript city in Poland. From a first person perspective we learn his life is rather uneventful with regular lectures, daily routines at home, and visits from loathsome relatives. One day, Jurek decides to bash Auntie’s brains in with a hammer and discovers that disposing of her corpse is rather difficult.

 Killing Auntie existentially takes after Dostoevsky, Camus, and Monty Python. While Jurek is trying to get rid of the body, he ponders the motivation behind his deed, yet cannot bring himself to really care. The reason for the killing is never really explained outright. What he tells the reader is contemptuous of those human beings who share his world, using their flaws as simple descriptors like his other aunt’s myopia, his teacher’s withered frame, and his grandmother’s near perpetual hunger. The purpose of the murder is as elusive as his own purpose for being alive.

In the beginning we learn of Jurek’s feelings toward the routine mundaneness of his life. He is dissatisfied about going to school and the uneventful predictability of living with Auntie. Thus, the swing of the hammer.

Jurek is fully conscious that he is a murderer, at one point shouting that fact in the streets in a drunken stupor, and even confessing to a local priest. He thinks nothing of the moral or ethical consequences, though. Jurek examines his case philosophically, but he is not an adept philosopher, as we find out when his girlfriend comes over to visit. When she attempts to flee, he tells her,

I do not intend to justify my crime with the commonness of crime in our times. The fact that we all, day after day, gouge eyes, break arms and hearts, that we all hide corpses in our homes, does not excuse me from rightful punishment… I do not mean to defend myself. If only because I do not feel guilty.

This explanation did not persuade her to stay.

Is this homicidal nihilism or narcissism, or ennui? Jurek is dispossessed from the world, thinking nothing of school, other people, friends, or even his girlfriend. Nothing matters apart from basic needs as he runs out of food and complains that the apartment is cold. The only time he puts real thought into anything is how to mail the corpse after butchering it, referring to it as if it were an object of inconvenience.

The book features grotesque slapstick. The first gag is Jurek trying to flush severed fingers down the toilet, but they kept returning to the surface. When he resorts to burning the corpse in the stove, he gets bored, reads a book, falls asleep, and wakes up to find the house full of smoke. When cremation failed, Jurek decides to mail the corpse elsewhere. This offers him another opportunity to see his grim handiwork:

The sheet covering the corpse was pulled half way off… On the right side I noticed a shallow but wide wound as if a bite had been taken out of it… I bent over the corpse again and put my hand under the sheet. When I took it out, it was holding Granny’s false teeth.

The humor provides interesting breaks between Jurek attempting to get rid of the body.

Killing Auntie has a lot to say on the developing mind of a youth exploring what life means on his way to adulthood. It was a compellingly outrageous read. Jurek’s detached, nonchalant voice felt authentic, and fit well within the satirical aesthetic that is simultaneously a comedy and a philosophical examination.

This wicked 110-page novel was written in 1956, one year before Bursa died. Kudos to New Vessel Press for bringing this lost Polish classic to the attention of English readers in its Rebel Lit series.

_______

CT McMillan 1

C.T. McMillan (Episode 169) is a film critic and video game blogger.  He has a Bachelors for Creative Writing in Entertainment from Full Sail University.

On Top of It #3: Don’t Let EL James Ruin Fanfic

19 Monday Oct 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in On Top of It

≈ Leave a comment

On Top of It #3 by Lisa Martens

Don’t Let EL James Ruin Fanfic

I’m not a fan of the Twilight or Fifty Shades franchises, but I can appreciate that Fifty came from fanfiction, because I think there is a great community around fanfiction, and it’s constantly dissed and ignored, no matter how much it grows. But EL James, why are you disrespecting Mom?

For those who don’t know what I’m talking about:  For the 10th anniversary of the Twilight series, Meyer has released a gender flipped version of the book called Life and Death. In this one, the dude is the teenage mortal with perpetual derp face, and the vampire is a chick.

But this wasn’t what Twilight fans were expecting. For years now, Meyer has been working on and off again on a retelling of the Twilight story from Edward’s point of view.

If this sounds familiar, it’s also the premise of Grey, the new Fifty Shades book told from the perspective of, that’s right, Christian Grey.

EL James, what are you doing? I enjoy some erotic, awkward fanfiction as much as the next person. You got very lucky (as someone who has read parts of the book and has experimented with bondage, I can safely testify that you got very, very, VERY lucky, and that maybe your editor is neither familiar with American English slang nor with sex), but why are you hurting your mom? You’re a millionaire now. You can come up with your own bad ideas, and people will read them. Or, at the very least, start stealing ideas from people who are more low key.

To be clear, I’m not telling you to steal ideas. You just seem to be doing that anyway, so you should be smarter about it.

Do you like the Twilight series anymore? Have you forgotten where you came from? You were basically Tina Belcher with a Blackberry. You blew up, a lot of very dissatisfied women bought your book on Kindle so they wouldn’t have to admit to owning it (until it became so popular that it became cool to hold a copy in public), and now here you are, still taking ideas from Stephanie Meyer, and ruining her release because of it.

And for everyone harping on and on about how Shakespeare shouldn’t be converted into modern English and how Amazon is the death of publishing, loosen up and read some goddamn erotic fanfiction. I’m tired of going to AWP conferences and seeing pompous assholes scoff at it.

Fifty Shades happens to be a terrible example, and I can understand how it’s more ammo for your arsenal, but there is also a lot of good writing and a very open, non-judgemental community out there.

Besides, your kids probably wouldn’t even be reading if it weren’t for Tumblr or Wattpad.

_______

Lisa Martens

Lisa Martens (Episode 22) currently lives in Harlem. In her past 10 years in New York, she has lived in a garage on Long Island, a living room in Hell’s Kitchen, the architecture building of CCNY, and on the couch of a startup. She grew up in New York, Costa Rica and Texas, and she’s still not sure which of these is home. She completed her MFA in Creative Writing from CCNY. Her thesis, What Grows in Heavy Rain, is available on Amazon. Check out her website here. Follow her on Instagram here.

The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare On Film #9: Much Ado About Nothing (2012)

18 Sunday Oct 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in The Rogue's Guide to Shakespeare on Film

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Joss Whedon, Much Ado About Nothing, William Shakespeare

Rogues Guide to Shakes on Film 2

#9: Much Ado About Nothing (2012)

Joss Whedon’s remarkable follow up to The Avengers was, a bit surprisingly, Much Ado About Nothing.

Much Ado Poster

If a superhero movie demands that characterization needs to be squeezed in with an eye-dropper between pyrotechnical explosions and sublime, seizure-inducing battles between IMPOSSIBLE BEINGS, Whedon squeezes in characterization about as well as anyone. Yet his work adapting Shakespeare demonstrates a capacity to let characters think and feel and act in recognizable ways that are precisely as rich and complex as Shakespeare intended.

Much Ado 3

Whedon’s contemporary setting offers us a relatively tasteful world, yet it is filmed in black and white that both semiotically nods to the sense of the oldness of the source material and also—and this is huge—places the comedy in a neutral context.

So many film adaptations of Shakespeare’s work are too eager to pour on the opulence, as if material luxury was necessary to match the exquisite language of the bard, a habit that I have privately nicknamed architecture porn. Carlo Carlei’s 2013 film of Romeo and Juliet is egregious in this regard.

Whedon’s film is serious about Shakespeare without ever being pretentious, or using Will’s cultural cachet as a form of self-aggrandizement. All of Whedon’s choices are meant to serve the drama.

Amy Acker as Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing.

To people unfamiliar with Shakespeare’s comedies, the chief difference between a comedy and a tragedy might be anticipated in extreme levels of humor or seriousness, but such an emotional binary is seldom demonstrated by Shakespeare’s plays. Hamlet happens to be wickedly funny, and Romeo and Juliet, with Mercutio’s wit, has its hysterical moments. Some Victorian productions of that play uncrossed the stars for those lovers with a happy ending. (Repulsive, no?)

The real difference between comedy and tragedy in Shakespeare’s plays is almost entirely what happens in the last act. Comedies end in marriages, and tragedies end in piles of corpses. Until then, the stories could go either way.

Much Ado 4

Much Ado About Nothing is a paradoxical title, because in one sense what is considered nothing is really the destruction of a woman. To be publicly jilted and shamed for a scandal on her wedding day in Shakespeare’s time is about as bad as it would be today. Shakespeare makes us feel that, and so does Whedon and his excellent cast.

Much Ado 6

This Much Ado is also distinctly American, which in this case is not a detriment.

Much Ado 2

As a director Whedon’s focus make us feel this world so powerfully. I suspect the film was shot in sequence, for the acting begins fairly well and grows better, more comfortable with Shakespeare’s words, as the story progresses.

Kenneth Branagh filmed this play in 1993, and while watching his Benedict verbally spar with Emma Thompson’s Beatrice is dishy, most of the actors don’t even  seem to be in the same movie. The acting styles clash. Keanu Reaves out-acts Denzel Washington. Michael Keaton stole the movie as the zany comic relief Dogberry, sort of a Dickensian recycling of Beetlejuice cartoonishness. (That isn’t a slam.)

One impressive side-note about Joss Whedon’s film is that the score is by Whedon himself. The music never resorts to the pomp that is too often heaped onto Shakespeare films (I am looking at you Patrick Doyle). Instead, the music skirts melodrama without ever being trite or clichéd or flimsy. The music is beautiful, and never quite predictable. The touch is light, but suggestive of darkness.

Much Ado 5

The year before The Avengers came out, Kenneth Branagh directed Thor. Perhaps Whedon directed Much Ado over territorial spite. Or maybe he happens to love Shakespeare. Having seen this film a few times, I would have to guess the latter.

Now that he’s no longer on The Avengers franchise, perhaps Whedon will try another play out for the screen?


NOTE: This review originally appeared in a slightly different version in the other Drunken Odyssey Shakespeare blog, Shakespearing, on November 16, 2014.


1flip

John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

Episode 175: The 5th Annual Flash Fiction Spooktacular!

17 Saturday Oct 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Episode, Horror

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Catherine Carson, Danita Berg, Flash Fiction, Flash Fiction Spooktacular, Litlando, Peg Martin, Raymond McKee, There Will Be Words, Tom Lucas, Will Garland

Episode 175 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

Flash Fiction Spooktacular Jesse Bradley

Jesse Bradley (Photo by Patrick Greene)

In this week’s episode, I share a recording of a Halloween show in Jesse Bradley’s prose reading series, There Will Be Words, in which I was a reader.

Flash Fiction Spooktacular Banner

Besides moi, the show featured

Raymond McKee

Will Garland

Danita Berg

J. C. Sevcik

Peg Martin

Catherine Carson,

and Tom Lucas.

Flash Fiction Spooktacular JC Sevcik

JC Sevcik (Photo by Patrick Greene)

NOTES

Check out Michael Hearst‘s new album, Film Music and Other Scores, Vol. 1.

Film Music and Other Scores

Episode 175 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

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