Tag: parenting

born from the bits on the factory floor

A poem.

raising a kid these days is tough, making
sure they grow up and learn to pack
their own lunch, not to
mention read
the hours for Father’s Day brunch,
or their brother’s twelfth birthday dinner

before getting their Focus stuck in a trough.
“i’m sorry, i’m sorry, i’m right around the block”
as their parents & them leave the restaurant –
now they don’t read
or eat,
but they are half-a-foot taller than
he’s sitting in the bathroom at work

and if he takes too long then the stall starts
to feel like an isolation pod, and he
starts to expatiate on all the
ways he thinks his life
went wrong.

this dwelling
is interrupted by a
sudden svelting, spitting
up still gunk from the
surface of his

gut, and

it sits
in
his
mouth like
poppycock
as he opens
his legs to
the void
for
a
soft
place
to spit
it
out –

he dribbles on his own thigh as the
auto-flush engages.
“down the line it’s in their genes.”

//wd 6.20.2026

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being the beta man

A poem.

when i’m on the clock,

i’ll talk back to a manager
no problem,
if i think it’ll get me anywhere

or not in trouble
or teased by female staff


but i won’t tell the guy
sitting in my reserved seat at the
movie theatre to
move over
please.

some words are too much trouble
for too little reward,
save my father and i getting
what we paid for.

he won’t say anything either.

//wd 12.20.2025

Original photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com.

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400 Words on: Mommie Dearest (1981)

or, “An Abundant Deposit of Effective Cringe”:
A spoiler-free mini movie review.

4.5 out of 5

To paraphrase Tarantino, a movie that successfully uses a piece of music, owns that music. Likewise, 1981’s docudrama “Mommie Dearest” (or MD) belongs to its lead actress, Faye Dunaway.

Audiences are fickle. As a broad example (pun not intended), Sydney Sweeney is objectively attractive, but sometimes we need to be reminded that her place in history – as a babe – will only occupy a small space: one inhabited by the ghosts of celebrity babes past, like Farrah Fawcett or Marilyn Monroe.

Same goes for legendary performances: they only become discourse if viewers put the proverbial poster on their wall. As much as I admire Dunaway, there’s only a handful of movies out of her six-decade career I can definitively name – most from one era.

[cont’d]

Continue reading →
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Dub’s Take: The Unbreakable Boy (2025)

A spoiler-free mini movie review.

1 out of 5

Watching “The Unbreakable Boy” (aka. UB) reminded me of Ben Stiller’s 2008 comedy “Tropic Thunder”, and Robert Downey Jr’s immortal words: “Never go full retard.”

Vulgarity aside, RDJ’s line signified that actors playing overly-challenged characters weren’t likely to win audience recognition. In the Real World, compassion is everything.

That being said, and with all due respect to real-life autistic/brittle-bone sufferer Austin LeRette (“Auz-Man”), the lisping imitation from actor Jacob Laval is so off-putting – transcending ‘cute’ into piteousness – that I couldn’t set aside my disbelief.

‘Uplifting’ genre flicks like this inspire pre-viewing expectations: maybe some bullying; some falling down stairs (like in Shyamalan’s “Unbreakable”)… I will give it to director Jon Gunn that he knows how to film scenes of bones breaking, as my wife & I both flinched at each mini-disaster and ones in-waiting.

But the third-act bullying is where I was done, and not because it was too cruel. Whether-or-not how the sequence plays out on-screen is actually what transpired between Auz-Man’s older brother Logan & the school bully ‘who became one of his best friends,’ it is the soppiest, most untenable bit of Hallmark reality ever. Logan should have just kicked the shit out of him and been done with it.

Laval’s representation of Auz-Man is dwarfed by Zachary Levi (both “Shazam’s”) as LaRette’s father. I wondered whether Levi could carry a serious movie with a belied filmography…

And he can’t, instead playing the hollow-headed goof we’ve seen from him time-and-time again. Not only that, but watch how much difficulty he has with sincerity in his climactic apology scene! Sorry, Zach: you don’t have the sauce.

There was kerfuffle with the new Captain America that it didn’t delve deeper into the modern zeitgeist (like its triple-the-length prequel miniseries). Indeed, my wife was adamant her main takeaway from UB was to be inspired by Auz-Man and fly her own freak-flag high.

UB doesn’t have goals of being disposable entertainment: it wants to be an important movie about faith & resilience. So why doesn’t it study some of the dad’s autistic traits more? Why does it give a middle-aged man an imaginary friend, and cutaways of his OCD & restless leg, without exploring them beyond passive freakishness?

The Unbreakable Boy is too timid to answer the big questions it asks, but calculated against the viewer constituting their own empathy. Never go full retard.

Poster sourced from impawards.com. What do you think? Are you choked that Patricia Clarkson & Amy Acker both went underused (again)? Are you surprised the finished film went three years without a release? Do you think Zachary Levi should get another chance at a dramatic leading role? And probably the most important question of all: as a viewer, do you lose empathy for characters that demand it? Let us know in the comments below!

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Dub’s Take: Forsaken (2015)

A spoiler-free mini movie review.

2.5 out of 5

Let’s consider the contentiousness between celebrity parents & their offspring: the Voigt/Jolie/Pitt’s; the O’Neal’s; the Barrymore’s…

The public only receives as much information that’s dished; often, that doesn’t include the forgiveness intrinsic to maintaining a healthy, life-long relationship with one’s family. That’s usually something us plebs experience ourselves, in time.

Great, then, for actor Kiefer Sutherland actually wanting to work with his late father & icon Donald. Kiefer hasn’t been featured on-screen so much since the height of COVID, what with his side-gig as a country musician. I saw him live in 2019 and, while I can’t remember his music, I think all of us in attendance were awed to see Jack Bauer/David the Daywalker in the flesh.

Where their filmography choices differ, father & son’s similar acting disciplines, and uncanny biology, can be felt in their shared scenes for the 2015 western Forsaken.

Forsaken has noble intentions – no doubt about that. It has a linear, easy-to-follow man-versus-himself redemption story, devoid of texture that doesn’t serve the plot. It has wonderfully verbose dialogue, recited melodramatically by its cavalcade of character actors (Demi Moore; Michael Wincott). It has a subversive epilogue, swapping a lovesick reunion for a tearful family goodbye. There really isn’t anything thematically wrong with it.

But it’s slow. Damn slow! Characterizations & script points are blander than superior genre examples, like Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (Richard Harris’ English Bob vs. Wincott’s Gentleman Dave) and Ed Harris’ Appaloosa (the love triangle). Brian Cox as the villain is Brian Cox as the villain, doing his billowy, profane Brian Cox thing – though credit goes to director Jon Cassar for convincing the Shakespearean-trained thespian to die next to a big pile of horse shit. And it’s always a bit rocking to see close-ups of gory, chunky gibs in the last ten minutes when the previous eighty lacked such morbid details.

Although only an hour-and-a-half, Forsaken feels twice as long when its quiet moments insist on themselves, like endless wood-cutting, and rumours from the church social club. If there were fewer of those hyperrealistic pauses – so common in modern prestige television – perhaps Kiefer & Donald’s understated work here would have serviced the picture as a whole, as opposed to being ‘one effective element’ of a decidedly average film.

If you want to see peak cinematic familial synchronicity, Forsaken is a low-calorie – if forgettable – clone.

Poster sourced from themoviedb.org. As of publication, Forsaken is available to watch for free in Western Canada on CBC Gem (unsponsored). What do you think? Leave us a comment below!

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