CNN's Hero of the Year: The Oklahoma Atheist

Religion can result in awkward situations for nonbelievers.  If asked, I suspect that most Americans would say religion is a personal choice, but in too many instances, "none" is a choice they wouldn’t accept.  I've never been religious, and in most circumstances, I'm comfortable acknowledging this, but there are instances, around certain family members for example, when I convince myself that it's best just passively to pretend that I'm a Christian because telling the truth wouldn't accomplish anything productive.  Afterwards, of course, I berate myself for not politely stating that I don't share their religious beliefs, consequences be damned.  But religious beliefs are so deeply held by many Americans that it's often perceived as an affront when one professes not to share them.  Two basic reactions result: horror and a desire to save the misguided atheist's soul.  Acceptance that it's just one legitimate choice among many, not a cause for horror or pity, is much rarer.  I wonder, however, how religious Americans responded when an Oklahoma woman who lost her home to a tornado told CNN's Wolf Blitzer that she's an atheist.

 

Most people in her situation, myself included, would probably take the easy way out and just pretend that they had thanked the Lord.  This woman, however, admitted on national television that she did not  because she's an atheist.  I applaud her not only for her courage in owning what is still a very unpopular position in American, but in the way she did it.  When Blitzer asked if she had thanked the Lord for saving her, she giggled nervously and said she's an atheist and then, rather than launching into an anti-religious tirade, which most in her position would have been tempted to do, she added that she didn't blame people for thanking God.  I hope that if there was any horror or pity among religious Americans watching the broadcast these were reactions to what the woman endured from the natural disaster and not to her lack of religious beliefs.

 

What I can say with confidence is that she's a much better ambassador for atheists than most nonbelievers who have publicly expressed their views about religion.  She was non-threatening.  She was not speaking as a polemical academic or an evolutionary biologist trying to convince Christians of the illogic of their beliefs.  She was speaking as a wife, a mother, and an American who had lost her home.  It's normal people like this woman who will make atheism acceptable, not writers like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins with their reasoned critiques of religion.  One reason commonly cited for the rapidly growing acceptance of homosexuality among a majority of Americans is increased exposure to homosexuals in their daily lives:  their friends, neighbors, co-workers, and family members.  I'm not attempting to equate the situation of atheist Americans--who are living with the consequences of a choice--with the civil rights struggle faced by gay Americans--who are persecuted for their biological differences--but I do believe that what has made homosexuality more acceptable for Americans can work in the same way for atheists.

This exposure, however, must be the right kind of exposure.  It must come from people like the Oklahoma atheist--outing myself as an atheist to my extended family would be counterproductive because they already think I'm a bit odd.  I'm hoping that the Oklahoma atheist's courage will inspire other Americans to profess their atheism in non-threatening ways.  She has my vote for CNN's hero of the year.

Prometheus Mapping Balls Soon to be a Reality

I'm always interested to learn about examples of sci-fi technology becoming real.  Remember the balls used in Prometheus to map the cave containing the decapitated Engineer and the alien eggs?  Referred to as "pups," they fly around the cave emitting red light and the data they send to a computer on the Prometheus is used to create a 3-D map.  An inventor named Francisco Aguilar has created something very similar.  Known as the Bounce Imaging Explorer, the device is a baseball-sized throwable probe containing several cameras and other data collecting instruments.  Aguilar designed it for use in disaster zones where rescue workers can throw the high-tech balls, which will take pictures and measure the presence of poison gases and send the data to a synched phone or tablet that will generate a panorama of the area with environmental warnings.  He hopes the device will make the jobs of first responders a bit safer. 

       

Oblivion: Flawed but Enjoyable Near-Future Sci-Fi

 

Although I love most science fiction, my favorite is near-future sci-fi set on a recognizable Earth, so I eagerly anticipated the release of Oblivion.  It has received a lot of attention from science fiction fans because it's a rare instance of an original sci-fi movie that wasn't adapted from a novel, comic, or video game or an entry in a famous franchise. Unfortunately, it wasn't as good as I'd hoped, but I still left the theater happy.

 

It's set in 2077, after a war between humans and a race of aliens.  The aliens first softened up the humans by destroying the moon and letting natural disasters wreck the planet.  Then they invaded. Humans were ultimately able to defeat them, but only by using nuclear weapons, leaving Earth uninhabitable.  Most of the population has moved either to a space station or a colony on Saturn's moon Titan, but small teams have stayed behind to oversee the harvesting of Earth's remaining water. The story revolves around Jack Harper who works as a technician servicing the drones that protect the harvesting machines from the remaining aliens, referred to as "Scavs."  While he's out on a mission to locate missing drones, a space ship crashes, and he's able to save one member of the crew, a woman named Julia, who had been appearing in his recurring dream and who causes him to question everything he knows about Earth's recent history and his own identity.

 

Oblivion tells an engaging story, and the settings alone made the viewing experience worthwhile for me.  Most of the action occurs in post-apocalypse New York, so we get to watch Harper riding his motorcycle over the remains of the Brooklyn Bridge and flying his ship over the ruins of Manhattan. He explores sunken buildings looking for missing drones and wanders through a ruined football stadium. Outside the city, he even finds a fully-furnished lake house surrounded by lush greenery where he goes to relax.

 

Although Harper enjoys his work as a drone tech, his nights are made restless by dreams of meeting Julia at a set of coin-operated binoculars on top of the Empire State Building.  All of his pre-invasion memories have been erased as a matter of national security, and the dreams lead him to wonder about his lost memories.  When he finds Julia amid the wreckage of the space ship, he realizes he has been dreaming of an event that actually occurred.  Predictably, Harper and Julia were romantically involved in the past, and their story is the movie's biggest flaw: it's overplayed.  Director Joseph Kosinski doesn't trust that viewers will remember the coin-operated binoculars, so he shows them what seems like a dozen times. He sends Harper and Julia to the ruins of the Empire State Building to reveal the exact nature of their relationship and then they fly off to the lake house for an overnight getaway.  All of this might have worked in a longer movie where everything was more developed, but it just left me annoyed and wanting Kosinski to get on to the good stuff.  

 

Because he wastes so much time on the love story, more interesting aspects of Oblivion are left underdeveloped.  While searching for a missing drone, Harper and Julia meet a large group of humans who have been living underground since the invasion, but although they end up playing a central role in the film's plot, Kosinski reveals very little about these people or how they have been surviving underground.  Moreover, the plot is also unnecessarily convoluted.  Kosinski reveals the truth about Harper's missing memories in a way that leaves viewers confused for most of the movie's second act.

 

Despite these problems, however, it is worth bearing with the muddled narrative.  When it finally begins to make sense, what initially seems like a fairly pedestrian humans vs. aliens scenario becomes a much more interesting story about humanity's struggle to survive a confrontation with an advanced alien race that uses its superior technology in devious ways. Moreover, despite a final cheesy scene in the lake house, Kosinski does bring Oblivion to a satisfying conclusion. 

 

At times, it had me thinking of Len Wiseman's Total Recall remake, which, despite its many flaws, handles its love story much more effectively by developing it in the brief pauses between action sequences.  Granted, Wiseman is also too busy having his characters being chased to slow down and reveal anything about them, and like, Kosinski, leaves his film's most interestings elements underdeveloped.  Cheesy love stories and endless chase sequences are equally nauseating, but Wiseman left me feeling a bit sicker than Kosinski, who at least tried something original and made an effort to develop his characters.  I'm hoping, however, that this summer's other big sci-fi movies will be much lighter on the chases and romance.  

 

 

 

Rob Zombie's Bizarre Take on the Salem Witches

Responses to Rob Zombie's movies are always polarized.  Not surprisingly, critics revile them, but many horror fans have similar opinions while others love everything he does.  Although I hated his Halloween remake, my opinion of Zombie's movies falls close enough to the latter group that I highly anticipate their releases and have to see them on opening night.  Unfortunately, his latest, Lords of Salem, has such a limited release that it played at only one local theater that is about a thirty minute drive for us, so Vicki and I skipped the opening weekend hoping it would be playing at a closer theater in the coming weeks.  We soon learned, however, that it would be gone the next weekend, so we endured the drive and saw it on a Wednesday night.  We walked away highly satisfied but amazed that it was able to receive an R-rating and that it is having even a limited theatrical release.

 

One of the reasons I like Zombie's movies so much is because they are made by a horror fan for horror fans, and this is especially true of Lords of Salem.  Whereas his earlier movies could find a potential audience in anyone who appreciated The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, or 70's horror in general, LoS probably won't appeal to many viewers who lack an appreciation for European horror and its tendency to favor intriguing visuals over narrative coherency.  As Zombie himself has acknowledged in interviews, LoS is a bit of a departure for him as it relies on psychological horror and lacks most of the brutality of his other films (although there is a cast-iron skillet to the head murder scene).  

 

It does, however, preserve his interest in familial relationships, which feature prominently in all of his movies.  This time it's the relationship between 17th century witchhunter Reverend Jonathan Hawthorne and his last living descendent in present day Salem, Heidi Hawthorne. Heidi, who hosts a late night radio show, is sent a vinyl recording of a discordant instrumental by a band known as The Lords. After playing the record, Heidi begins experiencing visions and nightmares of naked witches performing black masses and other blasphemies.  The events unfold slowly over the course of a week, and the first hour or so of the movie is a tightly structured linear narrative that could be mistaken for a mainstream psychological horror film.  We learn that modern day witches are in communication with their 17th century sisters in darkness who were burned at the stake by Heidi's ancestor and that the strange recording is part of their plot to drive Heidi mad and implement the curse that the burning witches cast on Reverend Hawthorne.  However, as Heidi descends further into madness, the narrative unravels and the linear structure collapses into the irrationality of a nightmare.

 

LoS is filled with eerie images of witchcraft and devil worship.  Some of the most effective appear as Heidi is walking her dog through a cemetery.  She stops to rest on a bench and sees a zombie-like figure approaching her while walking a goat.  She then enters a chapel where she has visions of a priest forcing her to fellate him while his eyes turn black and black liquid oozes from his mouth as he praises Satan.  Bodies of dead witches appear randomly in the background of scenes in Heidi's apartment, a monstrous baby with tentacles shows up in her bedroom, and in a climactic scene she enters an abandoned apartment where other infernal creatures impregnate her with a demon seed while she looks at a buzzing neon cross on the wall.  The last half hour gets so bizarre that it's difficult even to describe, which might explain how it was able to get by with an R-rating: the MPAA representatives tasked with rating it were probably so shocked and confused that they probably overlooked the multiple shots of topless witches and didn't realize that they were seeing bishops masturbating penises.

 

I often complain that the only horror movies that get funded are sequels, remakes, or imitations of well-known franchises, but as I was walking out of the theater after seeing Lord of Salem, I had to admit to myself that the state of the American horror film is actually in much better shape if a movie like Lords of Salem could get made and have a wide enough theatrical release to play in Columbia, SC, even if it was in only one theater and for only a week.  It won't appeal to casual horror fans, but any fan of 70's European horror who would revel in the opportunity to see a movie made in the same style on the big screen should make every effort to catch Lords of Salem during its limited release.  

 

 

Evil Dead Remake: An Entertaining Splatter Fest

I'm usually opposed to remakes for the obvious reasons, and there are some I'll always refuse to see (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) because the originals hold such a special place in my heart I can't bear to see them tampered with, but I do have to admit that there are instances when remakes use new film technology or draw on recent events to update the story in ways that that preserve the spirit of the original while also taking it in new and interesting directions.  This was the case with Alexandre Aja's remake of The Hills Have Eyes, which ties the mutations of the film's killers to nuclear testing and includes an especially eerie scene in a small test neighborhood populated with mannequins.  Although Rob Zombie's first Halloween remake was terrible (Zombie, of all people, should know that Michael Myers is much more horrifying when there is no explanation for why he kills), the sequel is one of the best horror movies of the past ten years.  Zombie preserved the original story's theme of family, but added his own disturbing twist, and the Michael Myers of his Halloween sequel is one of the most brutal killers to stalk the screen.  It was because of remakes like these that Vicki was able to convince me to give the Evil Dead remake a chance, and I'm glad she did.

It tells the same basic story as Sam Raimi's original, but differs in the details.  In a welcome change from the standard horror movie plot, the characters come together in a cabin in the woods not to get drunk, high, and laid, but to help their friend Mia break her heroine addiction, so they are much more likable than the standard zombie fodder (I should add here that this was also the case in Raimi's original, whose characters are couples out for a weekend of fun, but never become annoying to the point where we cheer for the zombies).  While suffering from withdrawal, Mia starts screaming about an awful smell in the cabin, and as her friends try to find its source, they discover a trap door leading down to a basement, where they find dead cats hanging on the walls and, of course, the Book of the Dead, bound in stitched skin and tied shut with barbed wire.  Without telling the others, one character finds the book, and despite warnings to the contrary, reads it and summons the sleeping demons.

 

Through a re-creation of the original film's infamous rape-by-the-woods scene, Mia is the first to become possessed, which enables writer/director Fede Alvarez to liken drug addiction to demonic possession and leave his other characters convinced that Mia's acts of pissing in her pants and claiming, "You're all going to die tonight," are extreme symptoms of withdrawal.  These moments also invoke William Friedkin's The Exorcist, and initially had me thinking more of this film than the original Evil Dead.  However, when the gore fest begins, the spirt of Raimi's original is alive and well, but whereas the gore in the original is often unintentionally funny owing to its low budget, the remake's is gut-wrenching.  In fact, this Evil Dead is probably the goriest movie I've ever seen in a theater.  The bloodbath contains two different scenes in which characters must perform self-amputations to save themselves.  Without spoiling anything, I can also add that it features the chainsaw gore that viewers have come to expect from Evil Dead movies, and it has a satisfying ending that sets up for a sequel in a way that doesn't leave you feeling cheated.

 

My only minor complaint is that the remake lacks the well-developed mythology about the Book of the Dead that helps make the original films so enjoyable, but this small problem is more than compensated for by the buckets of gore that leave you wanting a shower.  Evil Dead reminded me of how much fun it can be to see a horror movie on the big screen, and the only reason not to see it is if you can't stomach the gore.  I know promoters like to claim that horror movies make viewers vomit or run screaming from the theater, and I'm always skeptical of these claims, but I have heard a similar claim about Evil Dead from a less biased source:  one of my high school students said a girl sitting next to him threw up in her popcorn box.