Netflix: the price isn’t the problem

Netflix is raising its prices again, in case you haven’t heard.

I’ve had several Netflix memberships over the years. None of my flirtations with Netflix has lasted more than a year at a stretch. For me, the problem is not the price (even with the latest price increases). Netflix is still pretty cheap, in the big scheme of things.

The problems with Netflix are the selection and the quality. Invariably, the movies I want to see aren’t available on the service. And I’m not talking about either obscure art films, or movies that are still playing in the cinema. I’m talking about older mainstream movies that were popular upon release, but are long past their cinema days. The same with series that weren’t produced by Netflix. 

What Netflix has in spades are low-budget series and B-movies that I don’t want to see. There is a lot of content there, but too much chaff and not enough wheat.

-ET

‘The Empire Strikes Back’ comic magazine: 1980

In the spring of 1980, I was eleven years old going on twelve. I was a huge Star Wars fan, part of the original generation that discovered the movies as kids.

Like many kids of that era, I couldn’t get enough of the Star Wars story. Seeing the movies in the cinema wasn’t enough. 

And for that we had Star Wars comics. Marvel put out a big Star Wars edition for the first film in 1977: more or less a retelling of the movie in graphic form, and simplified a little for young readers.

My parents bought me the comic version of the first film in 1977, and I read it from cover-to-cover, many times over. When the comic for The Empire Strikes Back came out in 1980, my parents gave me that, too. I also read this one many times, even though I’d seen the movie!

Thinking about all the hours of pleasure I (and so many other Gen X kids) derived from a single comic book makes me long for simpler times, of course.  We did not have as many entertainment options in those days. The Internet was still almost 20 years in the future. Video games, still crude, were only beginning to become a thing.

But there is also something to be said for the unprecedented creative impact and economic power of the Star Wars story in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

The glory had faded a little by the time Return of the Jedi, the third movie, came out in 1983. But between the release of the first and second movies, 1977 – 1980, Star Wars was a cultural colossus. To put it in contemporary terms: combine Taylor Swift with the Super Bowl, and then multiply that by a factor of five.

Looking at that comic, I feel something else, too; and this one is personal. I feel fortunate that I had two parents who loved me, and provided me with more than the basics of food and shelter. As I’ve noted before, I was very blessed in my formative years. I have little to complain about.

-ET

Audrey Hepburn’s languages

I study multiple languages, and I worked for many years as a professional translator. I love foreign languages, and I love learning them.

Nevertheless, I don’t have much interest in the online “polyglot” community, as it has come to exist on social media platforms like YouTube. 

Nor will I ever create one of those cringeworthy YouTube videos in which a language learner displays his or her various languages for the virtual claps of fellow language learners.

(On that note: I am particularly dismayed by the “polyglot” YouTuber who employs randomly chosen native speakers as unwitting”props” in public spaces.)

I am far more impressed with people who combine multilingualism with a full slate of personal and professional interests. Foreign language study should be a part of every well-rounded, well-educated life. But not the sole focus of it…and certainly not an excuse to engage in constant public preening.

This is why I’m genuinely impressed by the linguistic achievements of the late Audrey Hepburn (1929 – 1993). Her first language was Dutch. She also spoke fluent French, English, and Italian. She was proficient in Spanish and German. 

Watch the above video, and you’ll see what a natural multilingual she was. You’ll also note that, unlike so many of today’s YouTube polyglots, she did not make a big deal of her attainments. She did not say, “Hey, watch me speak X language now!” Rather, she used the languages she had learned in a situationally appropriate and unpretentious manner.

-ET

‘Salem’s Lot’: then and now

I was poking around on YouTube when I discovered the above trailer. Apparently Max (formerly HBO Max) has created a new screen adaptation of ‘Salem’s Lot, Stephen King’s 1975 novel about vampires taking over a small town in Maine. 

I saw the original TV miniseries when it aired back in November 1979. I was 11 years old, in the sixth grade. There were some scenes in the 1979 original adaptation that were genuinely creepy–especially to the 11-year-old me.

When I started reading Stephen King’s novels in 1984, ‘Salem’s Lot was the one I started with. About five years had passed since my viewing of the miniseries. And I was then a sophomore in high school instead of a sixth-grader.

I read ‘Salem’s Lot in about three days. I found the book an absolute page-turner. (I seem to recall doing poorly on a geometry test, because I was reading ‘Salem’s Lot when I should have been studying!)

I’ve reread the book several times since then. From my more critical (and more jaundiced) adult perspective, I can see some flaws that I didn’t notice back then. But no matter. ‘Salem’s Lot is still a humdinger of a story, at the end of the day. 

‘Salem’s Lot has a modern (1970s modern, anyway) feel to it.  You don’t get the sense that you’re reading a story set in a remote location in 19th-century Europe, like Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). ‘Salem’s Lot therefore seems like a story that could happen. (If vampires existed, that is!)

Moreover, ‘Salem’s Lot is a real vampire story. Not a fake, teen girl romance tale masquerading as a vampire story, like that Twilight nonsense. (Don’t even get me started on Stephenie Meyer’s high crimes against the vampire genre.)

The 1970s/80s paperback version of ‘Salem’s Lot that I read in 1984

The new Max film version of ‘Salem’s Lot looks scary, based on the trailer. I will doubtless get around to seeing it a some point, but this is one that can wait, in my case.

‘Salem’s Lot, great story that it is, is one that has been with me for 45 years now, in one form or another. I watched the original TV miniseries at age 11. I read the novel for the first time at age 15. I’m now 56, and I know this story so well that I cannot help anticipating all the major plot points before they occur.

But such are the vagaries of age, and of rereading books, and watching their screen adaptations over decades. If your history with ‘Salem’s Lot is less extensive than mine (and it probably is), you’ll  want to rush to the new Max version of it. A younger version of me would have felt the same way.

-ET

View ‘Salem’s Lot on Amazon!

‘The Walking Dead’ and creative process analysis

The Walking Dead debuted on AMC in 2010. As most readers will know, The Walking Dead was a series about…the zombie apocalypse, of all things.

People die, come back to life, and prey on the living!

The Walking Dead was immensely popular from the get-go, among both critics and viewers.

But that didn’t last, as we’ll see shortly.

In one sense, the creators of The Walking Dead did not create anything new. The Walking Dead was not the first zombie tale available to viewers.

Since 1968, the filmmaker George A. Romero (1940-2017) had churned out movies in his “dead” series. These included Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Diary of the Dead (2017).

While Romero’s movies enjoyed a strong cult following, they never really achieved mass appeal. Many horror movie fans liked them, but not much of anyone else did.

The appeal of The Walking Dead, on the other hand, extended far beyond the relatively small audiences that are usually drawn to extreme horror.

The Walking Dead was similar to Romero’s movies. But also very different.

The Walking Dead had plenty of flesh-eating zombies, just like the George A. Romero’s films. The Walking Dead was violent and intense, just like the films of Romero.

But unlike Romero’s films, The Walking Dead was also focused on quality scripts and character development. The Walking Dead was as much a drama series as a horror series.

And the drama was top-notch. Many viewers cared more about the characters and their struggles than they did about the zombies.

Herein lay the difference. 

As a result of this difference, The Walking Dead attracted millions of viewers who had never had any interest in the horror genre—and certainly not in the gruesome zombie sub-genre of horror.

I was amazed at how many of my female friends, in particular, became diehard fans of the show. Women who, in high school, would have scoffed at the idea of reading a Stephen King novel.

Even my mother enjoyed the first few seasons of The Walking Dead. And my mom had never had any interest in horror movies. (She’d always hated them, in fact.)

***

The “secret sauce” of The Walking Dead was the well-written drama and character development mentioned above, interwoven with the expected tropes of the zombie genre. The combination of the drama and the horror made The Walking Dead a favorite of anyone who loved a good story.

But then things deteriorated. During the fifth and sixth seasons, the taut storytelling and character development of the first few seasons were replaced with repetitive violence and gore—an insidious temptation in anything zombie-related.

This trend hit a nadir in the first episode of the seventh season. The seventh season’s initial installment began with an act of sadistic human-on-human violence that was well…over the top.

This was the now famous—or infamous—“bat episode”. The villain Negan brutally killed two of the show’s main characters with a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire.

I watched it, and hated it.

I wasn’t alone. Millions of other viewers hated it, too.

As more than one critic pointed out, The Walking Dead had degenerated into “torture porn”.

George A. Romero’s zombie films had also wallowed in the excesses of human depravity and cruelty.

This, too, is a common trope in zombie stories. It’s a natural outcome of the genre’s premise. As the world descends into post-apocalyptic chaos, the surviving humans give in to all the evil impulses that society ordinarily keeps in check.

That theme has its place, but it can easily be overdone—even in a zombie apocalypse story.

George A. Romero’s movies overdid it.

And now The Walking Dead had overdone it, too. In a big way.

***

But why?

Here’s my theory: The Walking Dead’s producers, writers, and showrunners had lost sight of what made the show so darned great in its first few seasons.

Or maybe they never identified it to begin with….

***

Over the years, I’ve followed numerous rock bands, novelists, and movie producers whose creative careers rise and fall with the following trajectory:

  1. The creator comes out of nowhere with a sequence of masterpieces. This might be a run of near-perfect albums, page-turning novels, or edge-of-the-seat movies.
  2. Then one day, the creator releases something that “isn’t quite up to their usual standard”.
  3. Then the next thing is equally lackluster.
  4. And the next thing. And so on. Nothing is ever quite the same again.

***

Such a creator may continue to ride the coattails of their previous work in the marketplace, but the glory days never return. After the debacle of Season Seven, AMC continued to milk the cash cow of The Walking Dead for four more seasons (plus a slew of spinoffs).

But for most of us, the magic of those first few seasons was gone.

What is the cause of this observable and so often repeating phenomenon? A rock band, novelist, or filmmaker shouldn’t be subject to the age-related declines that are so inescapable for athletes.

Nor is this phenomenon limited to artists. It can happen to restauranteurs, self-employed tradespersons, and corporate employees.

***

This is the other side of quality control.

Just as you need to understand what you are doing wrong when things go badly, you also need to understand what you have done right when you hit one out of the park.

Or hit a bunch of them out of the park.

***

How do you know that?

You analyze your process. You identify your secret sauce, and keep on doing what works.

It wouldn’t have been difficult for the writers, producers, and showrunners of The Walking Dead to get together and say: “What makes our show so successful is strong dramatic storytelling, combined with the horror elements of the zombie genre. So let’s keep doing that!”

But that isn’t what they did.

-ET

Classical music in small doses 

Amadeus, the biographical drama about the life of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, was one of the most critically acclaimed movies of the mid-1980s. Starring F. Murray Abraham, Tom Hulce, and Elizabeth Berridge, Amadeus brought the famed 18th-century composer and his times to life.

Amadeus remains one of my favorite movies of all time. But when I saw it for the first time, as a teenager in the 1980s, I was inspired: I had a sudden desire to learn more about classical music, or at least about Mozart.

This was more than a little out of character for me at the time. As a teenager, my musical tastes ran the gamut from Journey to Iron Maiden, usually settling on Rush and Def Leppard.

So I read a Mozart biography. I was already an avid reader, after all. Then it came time to listen to the actual music. That’s when my inspiration fell flat.

I found that Mozart the man was a lot more interesting than his music. At least to my then 17-year-old ears. Nothing would dethrone rock music, with its more accessible themes and pounding rhythms.

Almost 40 years later, I still prefer rock music. In fact, I still mostly prefer the rock music I listened to in the 1980s.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, 1781 portrait
**View Mozart biographies on Amazon**

Recently, however, I took another dive into classical music.

Classical music, like popular, contemporary music, is a mixed bag. Some of it is turgid and simply too dense for modern ears. Some pieces, though, are well worth listening to, even if they were composed in another era.

Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” is one such piece. For the longest time, I mistakenly assumed that this arrangement was written for the 1986 Vietnam War movie, Platoon, in which it is prominently figured.

I was wrong about that. “Adagio for Strings” was composed in 1938, long before either Platoon or the Vietnam War.

“Adagio for Strings” is practically dripping with pathos. It is the perfect song to listen to when you are coping with sadness or tragedy. This music simultaneously amplifies your grief and gives it catharsis. You feel both better and worse after listening.

“Adagio for Strings” was broadcast over the radio in the USA upon the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945. It was played at the funeral of Albert Einstein ten years later. The composition was one of JFK’s favorites; and it was played at his funeral, too, in 1963.

Most of the time, though, you’ll be in the mood for something more uplifting. That will mean digging into the oeuvre of one or more of the classical composers.

While the best-known composers (Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, etc.) all have their merits, I am going to steer you toward Czech composer Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904) instead.

Dvorak was born almost a century after Mozart and Beethoven, and longer than that after Bach. To my philistine ear, Dvorak’s music sounds more modern, while still falling within the realm of the classical.

Antonin Dvorak

I would recommend starting with Symphony Number 9, Aus der Neuen Welt (“From the New World”). This is arguably Dvorak’s most accessible work, and my personal favorite at present. Symphony Number 9 contains a lot of moods. It takes you up and down, and round again.

This is not the story of an older adult turning away from the pop culture of his youth for more sophisticated fare. Far from it. Dvorak is not going to replace Def Leppard on my personal playlist. Bach and Mozart have not supplanted Rush and AC/DC. 

But time has made me more musically open-minded. Almost 40 years after I was inspired by the movie Amadeus, I have, at long last, developed a genuine appreciation for classical music.

But that is a qualified appreciation, for an art form that I still prefer in measured doses.

-ET

Original story idea vs. execution: which is more important?

The other day, one of you emailed me to get my take on an age-old debate in writing, filmmaking, and storytelling circles:

Which matters more…the big, highly original idea, or the execution of the story, regardless of its originality?

Many writers fret constantly about people “stealing their ideas”. They put off writing because they “don’t have any original ideas”. They worry about forgetting ideas.

So which is more important? There is evidence for both.

Star Wars took off in 1977 partly because it was such an original idea. Here we had the rough equivalents of cowboys and samurai warriors in space. There had never been anything like that before.

In 2013, I first read about The Americans in the television and movie review section of a magazine. The highly original premise of The Americans— deep undercover Russian spies in Reagan-era America—instantly intrigued me.

The Americans intrigued a lot of people. The Americans ran from 2013 to 2018. During that time, the Cold War period drama received high marks from reviewers and viewers alike. The series has a 96% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The Google composite review score is 4.8 out of 5. That’s pretty close to unanimity, at a time when people widely disagree about almost everything.

Nevertheless, it is easy to imagine The Americans having become nothing more than a Tom Clancy-esque knock-off for cable television. Why didn’t that happen?

The Americans is, indeed, based on a highly innovative “big idea”, what movie and fiction folks like to call “high concept”. But it is in the execution that The Americans really shines: the depth and arc of the characters, the nuts and bolts of each episode.

Plenty of stories succeed in the world of books and film without being very “high concept” at all. Consider the success of Downton Abbey. There is no high concept in Downton Abbey. It is little more than a soap opera set in Edwardian England, in fact.

When I watched the first episode of Downton Abbey, I didn’t know what I was going to think of it. But I was blown away. Not because of the “big idea” (there was none), but because of the execution: characters and individual episodes. The success of Downton Abbey is all in the execution.

An example in the book world would be Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. Jonathan Franzen is inconsistent as a writer. (He takes an average of about 6 years to write each book.) He is eccentric as an individual. But he scored a home run with The Corrections in 2001.

I remember getting my hands on this book over the Christmas holiday of 2001. I sat down and read it cover-to-cover, over a period of about 48 hours.

There is no high concept in The Corrections, either. A highly autobiographical novel, The Corrections is a fictionalized adaptation of people and events from the author’s life. But the world that Franzen creates in this book, while mundane, pulls you in. It pulled me in, and it pulled in millions of other readers, too.

***

On the opposite side of this coin are the high concept stories that fall flat because of poor execution.

We have all been bored by stories with incredibly high stakes: literally the end of humanity, in some cases. They bore us because of flaws in characterization, pacing, or depth.

This shows up in a lot of 2- and 3-three star Amazon reviews, that begin with phrases like, “I really wanted to like this book, but…”. Others outright say, “Great idea, but poor execution.”

For me, The Expanse fell into this category. This was true of both the book(s) and the Syfy series.

The premise of The Expanse did intrigue me: neither a near-future alien encounter tale, nor a space opera set in deep space, The Expanse is set a few centuries from the present, within our solar system.

But when I actually dug into the first book, it left me cold. The characters were flat, and there were too many of them. The narrative was unfocused. I had the same reaction a few years later, when I tried the Syfy series. I just couldn’t get into it.

Some of you will disagree with me, of course, but I’m not the only one who found the execution of The Expanse lacking. And I am not someone who dislikes science fiction. I loved the original version of Battlestar Galactica in the 1970s, as well as the “reimagined version” in the 2000s (though with some reservations).

Battlestar Galactica, whether in the hands of Glen A. Larson in the 1970s, or SyFy in the 00s, featured good execution.

But was Battlestar Galactica high concept? Highly original?

20th Century Fox certainly didn’t think so. In 1978, 20th Century Fox sued Universal Studios for allegedly ripping off Star Wars. The lawsuit claimed that Battlestar Galactica had filched more than thirty distinct ideas from Star Wars.

Whether you accept this notion or not, there is no doubt that the original BSG rode the coattails of Star Wars, which was then a monolithic phenomenon of popular culture.

And the rebooted BSG wasn’t original at all. It was based on the 1978 series, which owed much to Star Wars.

***

I’m therefore going to come down on the side of execution over big, original idea.

There are so many stories that we’ve all seen time and time again:

The rough-edged police detective who chafes against “the brass”, but will go to any length to catch a criminal…

  • The star-crossed lovers…
  • The ex-green beret whose daughter has been kidnapped…
  • The sympathetic vampire
  • Aliens/zombies/other monsters disrupt human society…
  • and so on…

Nevertheless, both novelists and filmmakers continue to find fresh new angles on these old ideas…new ways to execute them.

Join Amazon Prime – Watch Thousands of Movies & TV Shows Anytime – Start Free Trial Now

***

For example: I recently enjoyed the final season of Bosch on Amazon Prime Video.

Bosch is based on Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch novels. The Harry Bosch novels are about a big-city homicide detective, Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch.

I don’t think that Michael Connelly would mind me saying: that’s a very old idea. Nothing original at all in the “concept”! But the Harry Bosch novels represent some of the best genre fiction out there.

Why? Because Michael Connelly’s execution of the character of Harry Bosch, of the murder cases, is so darn good.

Originality, in other words, might be overrated. To be sure, there is a place for it. (It is also a bad idea to jump on literary bandwagons; but that’s a separate topic for another day).

It is probably better to focus on the superlative execution of a “good” story idea—even if it’s been done before—versus waiting around for one superlative idea to come the writer’s way.

Ouija: Origin of Evil

I’ve written multiple horror novels, and I have an interest in things that go bump in the night.

Nevertheless, most horror movies don’t scare me. 

This is because at the end of the day, a horror movie is the product of someone’s imagination. As a writer myself, I can’t completely set that aside. I can only suspend my disbelief so far. I might find a horror movie interesting, or suspenseful. But rare is the horror film that makes me look over the edge of my bed at night, wondering if something might be there.

But I found Ouija: Origin of Evil to be genuinely creepy. Continue reading “Ouija: Origin of Evil”

Cincinnati in TV and the movies

My hometown of Cincinnati isn’t exactly Paris or New York. It is therefore somewhat understandable, I suppose, that our local news media is making a big deal of the episode of The Brady Bunch that was filmed here nearly a half-century ago:

47 years ago, The Brady Bunch visited Kings Island

While I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, going to Kings Island—Cincinnati’s only real amusement park—was a “big deal”. Much of the scenery in the above clip from The Brady Bunch therefore looks familiar. 

Kings Island is still there, by the way. But it’s changed a lot since 1973.

***

A few feature-length films were shot in Cincinnati in the 1980s. Rain Man, starring Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise, comes immediately to mind. This movie was filmed in various locations in and around Cincinnati.

I’ve had lunch in the Italian restaurant Pompilio’s, in Northern Kentucky, where Rain Man‘s iconic “toothpick scene” takes place. Continue reading “Cincinnati in TV and the movies”

‘Blazing Saddles’ is a politically incorrect classic

Watch the Mel Brooks satirical Western comedy, Blazing Saddles, if you haven’t seen it before.

There is one memorable scene in Blazing Saddles in which the African American Sheriff Bart  (played by Cleavon Little) distracts a pair of Klansmen, so that his sidekick, Jim (played by Gene Wilder) can carry out a necessary mission of reconnaissance.

Jim pretends to catch Bart for the Klansmen. He grabs Bart by the collar and calls out to the Klansman, “Hey boys, look what I’ve got!”

Bart then says, in a Southern black dialect, “Hey, where the white women at?” Continue reading “‘Blazing Saddles’ is a politically incorrect classic”

‘The Stand’ (1994) now available in blu-ray/DVD

It was the late spring of 1994. Bill Clinton was in the White House. Seinfeld was the country’s most popular sitcom. (Friends wouldn’t debut until the autumn of 1994.)

I was living in Wilmington, Ohio. I had a job I liked, and I lived in a cheap apartment with wood panel walls and worn shag carpet from the 1970s. I was 25 years old. Those were good times, all the way around.

For five days, from May 8 to May 12, 1994, ABC aired a miniseries adaptation of Stephen King’s 1978 post-apocalyptic novel, The Stand.

In case you’re not aware, The Stand is one of King’s most popular books. The Stand is a good-versus-evil epic about a supernatural battle between good and evil.

Oh, but before that happens, 99% of the world’s population is wiped out by the Superflu, or ‘Captain Trips’. That was years before COVID, of course. But the end of the world is always a good place to start a story. Right? Continue reading “‘The Stand’ (1994) now available in blu-ray/DVD”

Remembering ‘Red Dawn’

80sThen80s now is one of the few accounts I follow on Twitter, because, well…I’m nostalgic for the 1980s.

Today the account tweeted this post about the movie Red Dawn (1984). In response to the poll, I gave the movie a 9. 

Red Dawn wouldn’t necessarily be a 9 if it were released today, mind you. But you have to evaluate a movie by the filmmaking standards of its era. A lot of movies in the early 1980s were pretty rough, compared to the slick, CGI-enhanced productions of today. And so it is with Red Dawn. Continue reading “Remembering ‘Red Dawn’”

Cincinnati in film

Professors on their favorite Cincinnati films

From The Northerner, the student newspaper of NKU. (I attended NKU as an undergrad from 1986~7, then as a grad student from 2002~4, by the way.)

I have an opinion on this matter, of course. The best Cincinnati films to date are Traffic (2000), and Fresh Horses (1988).

Rain Man (1988), which tends to get the most attention, left me cold, even though I’ve liked most movies with Tom Cruise or Dustin Hoffman.

Traffic, though, is a multilayered, engrossing story about the narcotics underworld. I recently saw it for the second time, and it’s held up well over the past two decades.

Fresh Horses is a coming-of-age movie starring Molly Ringwald and Andrew McCarthy. This movie is a little dated, and a bit uneven in places; but it isn’t bad for 30-year-old teen movie from the late Reagan era.

Also, one scene in Fresh Horses features the University of Cincinnati lecture hall where I took organic chemistry in 1987, after I transferred to UC from NKU.

Rewatching ‘Platoon’ (1986)

I can still remember the first time I saw Oliver Stone’s Vietnam War epic, Platoon, in a cinema in South Carolina during the summer of 1986.

At that time, the men who had served in the war were still mostly in their late thirties and early forties. The Vietnam War was as recent to the present as the first term of George H.W. Bush, and the US-led invasion of Iraq, are recent to us today.

I was only a few weeks away from turning eighteen when I watched Platoon that afternoon. Born in 1968, I was too young to recall the Vietnam War, but I had grown up in its shadow. The Vietnam War was a constant cultural reference point—kind of like the war in Iraq is now.

Platoon was not the first movie to feature the Vietnam War; but most of the previous efforts in this regard had turned out badly. Apocalypse Now (1979) was simply weird, and completely lacking realism. The Deer Hunter (1978) was depressing and nihilistic. 

Platoon was the first major film that addressed the Vietnam War in a manner that was realistic and artistically engaging. This movie didn’t flinch from the dark side of the conflict; but this was no self-indulgent wallow in the gloom. There are characters in this movie worth knowing, and the film ends on a redemptive note.

I found the movie powerful in 1986, but I wasn’t quite sure why. At the age of eighteen, I really had no idea of the difficult choices that the real world requires of us all: between right and wrong, idealism and pragmatism, serving others and serving oneself.

This theme is present throughout the film, but it’s encapsulated in the above scene, “I am Reality”. That famous line from Sgt. Barnes:

“There’s the way it oughta be, and there’s the way it is.”

This line went over my head on that teenage summer afternoon almost thirty-four years ago. All teens see the world, and themselves, in absolute, black-and-white terms. I was no exception.

I rewatched the movie a few nights ago. At the age of fifty-one, I understand the significance of Sgt. Barnes’s line, and how the real world is many shades of gray. 

And this—to me, at least—is what the movie is all about. This is why Platoon will continue to be a classic, long after the Vietnam War generation (and we, their children), have passed into history.

Memories of ‘The Evil Dead’

I can still remember the first time I saw  The Evil Dead—sometime back in the 1980s, on VHS. (I don’t believe this 1981 film had a long run at the theaters—it wasn’t exactly date night stuff.)

The Evil Dead wasn’t like The Exorcist, in the sense that it would send your imagination running and keep you awake at night. Rather, The Evil Dead was one long series of endless jump scares.

The movie started intense, and it just never stopped. 

The Evil Dead was also Sam Raimi’s best work. There was a certain dark humor in the film. But Raimi didn’t overplay the humor element—as he would in subsequent installments of the franchise, and later movies like Drag Me to Hell (2009).

The setup was simple: A group of people spend the night in a remote cabin. They play a recording that summons evil spirits from the bowels of the earth.

One by one, they are turned into homicidal zombies. The End.

And yet—maybe horror tales (whether on the page or on the screen) are best when they have simple, readily accessible plots. I remember reading Dan Simmons’s overlong Carrion Comfort and thinking, man this is just too much plot for a horror novel

The Evil Dead was good storytelling. The special effects are primitive, by today’s standards. But the movie is still quite unnerving to watch.