Upon a Dark Horse

*as always, the spoilers galore*

I'm not going to lie, Dark Horse kind of wrecked me for a while.  Not so much in the sense that I was left crumpled on the floor weeping, but I was unsettled for about a week after.  If you've ever seen a Solondz movie, you might understand why.  He has a knack for crafting dark, depressing comedies, all set in the same bleak, sitcom-esque suburbia, that tends to leave the viewer chuckling uncomfortably and shifting in their chairs at the antics therein.  I had only seen Happiness before this, and Dark Horse, while nowhere near as uncomfortable as Happiness, is still an awkward, if compelling watch.

The story centers around Abe, a perpetual man-child who lives with his parents, in his childhood bedroom cocooned with Lord of the Rings action figures, Absolute Vodka posters and Doctor Who merchandise.  He drives a ridiculous yellow hummer to his dad's office, where he pretends to work at a job his dad gave him, in a career he seems to have just about zero interest in.  He's over-weight, under-socialized and going nowhere.  In short, he is failing to thrive.  Not that you could tell it from the way he carries himself.  Abe acts as if he is both the most interesting and inspiring person in the room at all times, while simultaneously blaming the people around him, especially his father and his brother, for all the things wrong in his life.

And this is where I started to resonate uncomfortably with the movie.  The most interesting part about Abe in this movie, is he KNOWS all this.  It's just rather than confront the problem, he drowns himself in nostalgia, optimistic teenage pop aimed at young girls, and gets very upset at even the merest hint of a question about what he's doing with his life.  Sadly, I am familiar with this state.  The most interesting and resonant moments for me personally were the scenes where it has become clear in some fashion that he hasn't been on top of some perfectly normal, easy and necessary thing and his immediate reaction is to get huffy about it, blame everyone else, and then stomp out of the room, tears in the corner of his eyes.  I have been that guy, and good god is it uncomfortable to see that portrayed so accurately on a giant screen in front of you.  Fellow man children (recovering and otherwise) beware, this movie may speak to you a little more directly than you would want.

His relationship with Miranda, while extremely awkward and painful to watch in just about every way, is also by far the funniest part of the movie.  His obliviousness to her emphatic and repeated signals of disinterest is entertaining, if creepy.  Honestly, he's basically a stalker, but you'd never be able to explain that to him in a million years.  But it quickly becomes clear that Miranda is just as much a mess as Abe is, which is the only way it's possible to understand her acceptance of his proposal a week later. But compared to Abe's "oblivious and rolling quickly downhill" kind of mess, we get the sense that Miranda might turn out okay once she stops taking so many meds and starts respecting herself a little more.  She also has a lot of the best lines in the movie.   Her reaction to their first kiss.  "Oh, that wasn't as bad as I expected it to be." kind of sums up everything about her feelings for Abe.  She's settling for a guy she's known for 2 weeks, lives with his parents, pays very little attention to her, and somehow manages to make it sound like this is a sensible and beautiful decision for her life.  Amusingly, that's what it turns out to be for her.

What really interesting about this set-up, is that it takes one simple thing to ruin everything, and it takes about 2 minutes:  Abe gets called on his shit.  His father, gently but firmly calls Abe into his office and basically fires him, but with a purpose.  He points out, quite rightly, that Abe has never wanted this job, Abe doesn't like the business, Abe is drifting along, self-soothing his lack of achievement with his childhood, his consumerism and Katy Perry, and his dad just wants to help push him out into the world and help him find a career he might truly find rewarding.  What he doesn't realize is Abe's world is held aloft by a thin, but oft-reinforced illusion:  that Abe is doing great at his job, is an awesome person that girls want to be with, and has a brighter future just around the corner.  And when his dad, in attempted kindness, attempts to point out that Abe is in fact suffering, the whole thing falls apart.  And again, I can relate.  It's extremely difficult to look back at the last ten years of your life and realize you haven't made a lot of life decisions that you're proud of.  The enormity of that wasted potential is too big to look  directly into, and Abe basically flees in blind terror.  And then things get worse.

Not that it isn't fascinating to watch, train wrecks are hard to look away from, but it's more or less a series of vicious punches to the stomach from there.  He basically retreats almost entirely to a fantasy world where his dad's secretary (Marie) is a worldly, sensual Elizabeth Taylor type, helping him become a man, and where he argues with phantom versions of his family.  Which would be sad enough to watch, until you realize it's all a coma dream.  Abe got in a terrible accident the moment he stormed out of his dad's office.  And between that and complications from the hepatitis he picked up from Miranda, he is slowly dying.  It's a little hard to tell what's real and what's fever dream in the last few minutes.  Does he kiss Marie at the end?  Does his skin really turn yellow?  It doesn't matter, because he doesn't make it.  His fiancee' ends up with his brother (happily by all appearance), and it ends on another fantasy scene of Abe and Marie Dancing to some gentle swing music, which turns out to be the kind of thing Marie has been dreaming about all these years.  Ouch.

Those of you who don't identify quite as strongly with Abe, will probably not find this as much of a downer.  It's dark, it's funny and in a lot of ways, doesn't take itself too seriously.  Solondz's world is cartoony and unrealistic in a way that lets the viewer examine really uncomfortable characters without getting dragged down too much by them.  Still, if you're in your mid-thirties, have a bedroom full of action figures and Doctor Who posters, have been stumbling along for years at a job you never really wanted, trapped by your insecurities and increasingly aware that all the little lies you've been telling yourself to prop up your self-esteem are starting to wear thin, this movie may wreck you a little bit.

Which isn't to say Dark Horse is intended to be a morality tale, that's just how it looked through the lens of my own damage.  Regardless, whether you're looking for a lesson on how NOT to be a geek-culture enthusiast, or simply like to watch uncomfortably damaged people make a slow-motion mess of their lives, Dark Horse is worth a watch.

Undead on Arrival Delivers the Gory Goods

I posted this on my Goodreads account on August 15.  My friend Justin Robinson wrote this book and honestly it's amazing.  Cross-posting here.

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I picked up this book last night, started in on the second chapter, and didn't stop turning pages until I was finished, if that tells you anything about how much I liked this book.  It's a classic noir murder mystery set in the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse, chronicling the tale of Glen Novak attempting to solve his own murder before being devoured by the zombie plague he has been purposely infected with.

I'm not normally into noir or murder mysteries (I enjoy them, but I've never focused on them particularly), but this one was great.  The writing wastes zero time.   It is, in the truest of sense of the phrase, all killer no filler.   The setting is a small coastal town in California that's managed to work out a semi-stable sense of order within it's walls, although one that turns out to be completely illusory.  The tensions in the town are well balanced between the ever-present worry of an undead swarm and the political tension between the town's power players: the wealthy elitists on the hill, the religious tribe in the town, and Novak's smaller contingent of free-thinking, free-loving, free-maiming pragmatists.  And the basic tension that kept me turning the pages, was wondering what was going to destroy Novak first:  his bite, the undead, the bloody political machinations of the town, or the way he kept making bruised, enraged enemies with his fists.

If you're not into bloody depictions of gore and horror, then this may not be the book for you.  Novak isn't really the kind of guy who fucks around, and once his death warrant is signed, less so.  But, if that kind of thing is up your alley, Jesus does this book deliver.  The zombie (or "geeks") mythology is well-designed, the action sequences are frequent and fun, and Glen's desire for bloody revenge eventually snowballs into a blood-soaked, body-stacked finale that left me wanting to smoke a cigarette.  Or to take up smoking 5 years previously so I could close the book, light up, take a long drag and slowly exhale while saying, "Oh yeah, that hit the spot."

If you like zombies, if you like murder mysteries, if you light tight, well-crafted stories that don't waste your time, pick this book up immediately.