reminiscing about the fence

A poem about the periodicity of
celebrity ogling.

i had a dream about Chappell Roan


full stop.


okay not about her, but one in which
she appeared.

pretty sure it was her.
i feel i should be throwing confetti in the air.
blow a kazoo


and it wasn’t a sex dream,
don’t believe me?

and there wasn’t any reactive,
MS Paint-quality nudity.
calm down –
it was actuated by a photo
i saw of her without
too much makeup on

standing alone in profile on a press go-around
with a wallpaper of watermarks like you’d see
in the background,
no wig, dyed hair luminescent
and wearing what some call a ‘normal’ top
with thong straps,

staring straight ahead like i was the skeez
peering over her property line,
standing at that precipice with my hands on its ledge

when really i’m thousands of miles away
on a screen

*

how, then
to describe my dreams?

in repetitious themes.
always searching for something the most
difficult, illogical way i can

so just like the rest of person
& animal kind.
i had the ‘A’ tattooed on my hand –
the sign for ‘Awake’, to help with lucidity –
but i still close my eyes at the bottom of a hill
looking up –
Kate Bush can run if she wants to, i’m not with her group

or driving through a backwood overhung
so i can get to something parochial and dumb,
like a locker with a combination i can’t remember
at the middle school i went to more than twenty years prior

you following?
because it’s the last day to hand in the essay
worth 80% of my grade?
just like the all-nighters i would pull in university,
and of course there’s no parking
’cause it’s Activity Day
so everyone can see me coming up the roadway
but it isn’t vice-versa with their skinwalker outlays
and the halls are empty;

all these fucking corridors look the same –
Chappell ain’t here, she would’ve just started Primary;
there’s no receptionist, no aids –
a challenging intention
devolves into simple wandering,
and so it goes again and again.

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Dub’s Take: Hard Target 2 (2016)

A spoiler-free mini movie review.

3 out of 5

In 2009, when working at Blockbuster, I had to recommend movies to strangers. But my tastes are eclectic & subtitled and, sometimes, it was easier to suggest something I knew customers liked already instead of a personal favourite. One of those well-rented titles was “Vicky Cristina Barcelona”. One shift, I suggested it to a middle-aged woman, and she opposed because “Woody Allen is a child molester.” Oh, okay then. I wouldn’t have picked it because it’s crap.

Which leads us to today’s sidebar: even if someone has been exonerated of a crime, it doesn’t mean the court of public opinion ever really adjourns. Regardless of one’s feelings toward Robert Wagner; Depp and/or Heard; Kevin Spacey; or Allen, these people continue to work, and it’s up to each viewer’s own moral barometer whether they support these endeavours as their careers progress.

And so it goes that Robert Knepper (T-Bag on “Prison Break”) finds himself on that shortlist. Seeing Knepper’s name on the cast for Netflix’s recently-added direct-to-video sequel didn’t dispel me from watching it the same way I avoid a Woody Allen movie now: Knepper was great on Prison Break for its entire run playing an unrepentant asshat, so I assumed his presence in “Hard Target 2” would amount to him being a grade-A asshat here as well. And he is, even if his performance falls victim to some obvious ADR.

HT2 has great casting. Along with Knepper, we have Van Damme’s substitution in Scott Adkins; Bizarro World’s Kate Beckinsale: Rhona Mitra; and Boba Fett himself, Temuera Morrison as Knepper’s lackey. Adkins is awesome – maybe not a thespian (he’s better with tongue-in-cheek material, like his appearances in “Metal Hurlant Chronicles” & “John Wick 4”) but he’s been doing this a long time and at least looks like he’s enjoying himself.

Sadly, though, it’s with a heavy heart I report Miss Mitra’s femme-fatale in a leather tank-top isn’t given much to work with in the way of juicy lines or mindful direction. However, she’s vindicated in the film’s best scene, starting with her slow-motion dual-wielding mini-crossbows in front of an explosion, and ending with her pontificating on her character’s own awesomeness with a “Scarface”-sized pile of cocaine in the background. It’s great.

Most of Hard Target 2 is great. It’s nice when that happens. But there is a creepy guy in the cast. Up to you.

Poster sourced from imfdb.org. Yessir, that was Adkins in a fat suit playing the German in John Wick 4. Do you feel it’s time for mainstream Hollywood to give him more substantial roles? How do you feel about Kevin Spacey dipping his toe back into acting? Do you have anything good to say about more than 85% of Woody Allen’s output in the last thirty years, or are you done with him, too? So many questions – let me know what you think in the comments below!

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Dub’s Take: The Wild Robot (2024)

A spoiler-free mini movie review.

3 out of 5

“The Wild Robot” was emotionally touching enough to earn my tears: that alone is worth a minimum star rating. But I thought I would be getting a wholesome, feel-good family film for general audiences, without any intercalated adult ‘baggage’ – would you believe producers found a way to sexualize one of the villains here, too? But I don’t have the word count to go over everything.

I cannot stress this enough: Wild Robot contains a vast amount of dialogue about death & dying, played mostly for laughs. Characters commiserate whether or not they’re about to croak on a minute-to-minute basis. A family of possums ask if they’ll be “murdered” before one of them is killed off-screen. For my 36-year-old self, it was extremely noticeable.

Sidebar: back in grade school, I wrote a play for a class Christmas concert. My first draft was rejected because the teacher didn’t like the bad guy telling the good guys he was going to “kill” them. But one of my favourite Xmas movies is “Home Alone”, and they spoke similarly in that movie, didn’t they? Worse, even: Joe Pesci says he’s going to bite Macaulay Culkin’s fingers off, and it was rated PG.

Obviously Home Alone isn’t germane to that teacher’s holiday movie marathon, but the real takeaway was that every parent has a different idea of what’s appropriate for their child and what isn’t – in their experience/opinion. I understand that Wild Robot’s story transpires in the untamed outdoors, and that finding your place in the circle of life – how & while you can – is a theme of the film, but there’s a difference between an effective implication of danger versus the definitiveness of death.

The only reason to keep regurgitating something in scripted lines is to underline to the audience how important it is. Today’s prepubescents can’t be so uneducated that a nice family movie already containing potent scenes of peril should have to push nonexistence to the front of their consciousness, too. Certainly the film’s trailers didn’t foreshadow it.

Wild Robot has one shot where the heroes are looking for survivors of a snowstorm, and silently, it conveys that what they found isn’t good. It’s less than ten whole seconds, but does a better job of communicating grief to an impressionable group, without forcing anything, than the other 90 minutes do. A shame, that.

Poster sourced from impawards.com. What do you think? Imagine this scenario: you have two family movies (not Wild Robot). Both movies have a main character die off-screen, and both will inevitably inspire a difficult conversation between (a) parent(s) & their child(ren). In one movie, the death is constantly referred to non-stop in the dialogue after it happens, reinforcing that this person is no longer around. The other movie implies the other characters’ sorrow & grief through facial expressions & behaviour, though their true, vocalized emotion is ultimately left up to audience interpretation. Which movie would you rather have incited the conversation with your child? Let’s talk in the comments below.

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Dub’s Take: Despicable Me 4 (2024)

A spoiler-free mini movie review.

NO STAR RATING

Poppy Prescott gives me impure thoughts.

You’ve heard of Disney animators slipping naughty easter-eggs into their features. These were blink-and-you’ll-miss-‘em moments you’d catch on repeat viewings: there was no way anything more than a few milliseconds of indiscretion could make it passed pre-2000 executives; a ratings board; test audiences; and any other stop-gaps preceding a theatrical release.

But Disney doesn’t ride today’s market solo anymore, and – speaking generally – the competition is becoming more shameless for your dollar. This isn’t to say modern family movies are inundated with sex & violence: I’m not that out of touch. But you can crack a specially-worded joke in a diplomatic way and still keep your coveted PG rating.

Case-in-point: “Despicable Me 4″‘s Poppy. As voiced by Joey King (who just headlined Netflix’s “Uglies”), Poppy is a bratty, overprivileged redhead, sporting a skirt; braces; freckles; and a lisp, and who blackmails & uses Gru… for a heist! Poppy’s age isn’t explicitly stated but I trust my ten-second Google search that labelled her 14.

King’s voice work is chipper and snotty: just how it needs to be. But Poppy doesn’t speak until three-scenes-in, after she’s already thrown Gru knowing glances that communicate, as per the plot, that she knows his secret identity. But all I saw in these lingering shots were Alicia Silverstone from “The Crush” or Drew Barrymore from “Poison Ivy”: villains from a special androcentristic subsection of 90’s erotic thrillers that revolved around psychotic, hypersexual adolescent homewreckers.

My post-secondary discipline was live-action film – not animation. The closest my practice ever got was having to re-record dialogue when a covert HVAC system went off in the background of a shot. In that case, the intention of the scene had already been established. We just did the audio again: somewhere quiet, and hopefully to the same level of emotion as the video. What I want to know then is whether DM4’s visual creatives told King about their non-verbal goals for Poppy before she recorded the dialogue, or if King found out what they did at the premiere while everyone around her made the same lewd joke about what they were seeing.

There’s no way an innocent kid in the audience is detecting a sexual undercurrent in their new Minions movie. That’s just for us mature adult credit card holders.

Poster sourced from impawards.com. If you even care at this point, the overall movie was fine: the Minions do their thing; voice-leads Steve Carell & Will Ferrell do their thing; and there’s a madcap energy that keeps the pace moving even when the comedy fell on the ears of the wrong demographic. If I had to give it a proper star rating, I’d throw it a 2 out of 5. Anything to add to the conversation? That’s what the comment box below is for!

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