Author: allen0997

Insidious: Chapter 2 ~ A Capsule Movie Review

Insidious, Chapter 2

Insidious: Chapter 2 ~ A Capsule Movie Review By Allen Kopp 

Insidious, released in 2010, is a solid horror film with some genuinely creepy moments (the “woman” at the ironing board, for one). When a small boy named Dalton Lambert goes into an extended coma for which there is no medical reason, his parents, Josh and Renai Lambert (played by Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne) call in a psychic. The psychic, named Elise, discovers that Dalton is in a place called “the further,” which is a kind of spirit realm. The spirits in the further like nothing better than to latch on to a living person because they want to “possess” that person. Since they are dead and are not in a very nice place, they covet life. Josh’s mother (Barbara Hershey) reveals that the problem really began when Josh (Dalton’s father) was a child, at which time he was targeted by a spirit from the further. Josh and his mother believe, however, that Josh was rid of the problem forever with Elise’s help. Not so. When Josh goes into the further to bring Dalton, his son, back, he brings back more than he bargained for.

Insidious: Chapter 2 picks up the story a short time after the events in Insidious. It has the same director, writers, and cast as Insidious, so it has the same feel and tone. Ordinarily I’m opposed to sequels on principle, but that didn’t keep me from seeing this one.

When Josh goes into the further to bring back his son, the same terribly twisted sprit that had targeted him as a child latches on to him again, a female spirit who wants him to kill his wife and children. In life, she had forced her own son to act and dress like a girl named Marilyn and she bid him to become a serial killer. (“If she knows you’re here, she’ll make me kill you.”) This mother and son make Norman Bates and his mother look like a Sunday school story.

Josh’s wife, Renai, and his mother, Lorraine, know that he is not the same as he was before he went to the further to bring back Dalton. What are they going to do? They can’t get Elise, the psychic, to help them because she was killed in the first movie. (She is in the sprit world, however, and knows what is going on.)

All in all, Insidious: Chapter 2 is a worthy sequel to the original, if you like this sort of thing. It is completely implausible and absolutely far-fetched, so you will have to “suspend disbelief” to enjoy it. The terribly sophisticated and those who are too grounded in reality aren’t going to like it or be taken in by it. They seem to forget what the movies are for. If movies were exactly like real life and the ugly present, they would be so dreary that nobody would ever want to see them.

Copyright © 2013 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

The Maid’s Version ~ A Capsule Book Review

The Maid's Version cover

The Maid’s Version ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp 

Daniel Woodrell is one of the best current American writers. He is from Missouri and his characters are country people, poor white trash and small-town people. His novels are darkly realistic, spare (averaging about 200 pages), and are so much fun to read because they are so good and so different from a lot of current fiction that is bloated and pretentious. My favorite books by Daniel Woodrell are Tomato Red and The Death of Sweet Mister. I went to one of his book signing events in St. Louis and came away with signed copies of both those books. Daniel Woodrell in person is about what you would expect him to be from his writing. There’s nothing flashy or pretentious about him. You wouldn’t know by looking at him that he’s a celebrated writer.

Daniel Woodrell’s latest book is The Maid’s Version. It is the fascinating story, set in the fictional Missouri Ozarks town of West Table, of an illicit love affair that leads to tragic consequences. The maid of the title is one Alma Degeer Dunahew, an uneducated woman who is employed as a domestic in the home of one of the leading citizens of the town, Arthur Glencross. Arthur lives in a fine house with his wispy wife and two children and is president of the bank.

Alma has a difficult life. She lives in what is described as a shack. Her husband, named Buster, is a drunk and isn’t very reliable. She has to take care of three boys (one of whom, Sidney, is sick) out of her meager earnings. She also has a younger sister named Ruby, a vivacious girl who is popular with the men and who doesn’t much care whether they’re married or not. Ruby’s unlikely love affair with Arthur Glencross forms the emotional core of the novel. Arthur claims to be in love with Ruby but is terribly afraid that people will find out he is carrying on with her. Their meetings are furtive and passionate. Ruby is also in love with Arthur, so the secrecy is fine with her.

We learn at the beginning that Ruby, along with thirty-nine other people, dies tragically in a fire and explosion at a dance at the Arbor Dance Hall in 1929. (The unidentifiable victims, including Ruby, are buried in a mass grave in the town cemetery, marked by a black angel.) For decades people speculate about what, or who, caused the fire. There’s plenty of blame to go around, but nobody seems to know for sure. Was it a hellfire-and-brimstone preacher who wanted to teach people a lesson about the wrath of God, or was it St. Louis gangsters? Any theories that people have are all unproveable.

The Maid’s Version isn’t told in linear style. It moves back and forth in time and from one character to another, making it seem a little disjointed and more challenging to read that it might otherwise have been. (Some of the brief sections throughout the novel are glimpses at the lives of people who died in the fire and of how they came to be at the dance.) All the pieces come together at the end, though, and we learn, finally, the truth of how the fire got started and what made it so much worse than in might otherwise have been. The explanation is ironic but completely plausible.

Copyright © 2013 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Ballroom Dance

Ballroom Dance image 2

Ballroom Dance ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp 

I needed a class for physical education credit. I had always considered myself more the “brainy” than the physical type and loathed the very concept of physical education, the effort, grunting, and humiliation that were a part of it. Of the classes that were available to me, swimming was out of the question. You had to dive from the high dive to pass the course and I’d rather face a firing squad. Archery, I had heard, was no fun at all after you shot your first arrow into the air and, if that wasn’t bad enough, threatening to shoot one of your classmates in the face was grounds for dismissal. Weight lifting class had its charms, I was sure, but it wasn’t for me.

When I heard about ballroom dancing, I knew it was probably as good as I could get. It was held indoors for one thing, but the most attractive thing about it for me was that you could wear your “street clothes.” You didn’t have to change your clothes in a roomful of strangers into “gym clothes” that you would never wear in a million years if you had a choice and then, when the class was over, take a communal shower with the same group of strangers before you could go on to your next class. (This is what hell really is, I’m sure!)

I signed up and hoped they weren’t already filled up. Finally, here was a class that might be a lot of fun where I could actually learn something that might be useful in later life. (If anybody ever needed a person who knew how to do the tango, that person was going to be me.) I found that I was looking forward to the class, a sensation I hardly recognized in myself.

When I arrived for the first class, I was thrilled to discover we had a real “dance studio” in the physical education building. It was an enormous, low-ceilinged room with a gleaming wooden floor like the basketball court. One entire wall was one long mirror with a bar for holding on to. You could dance while seeing what you looked like to other people. (I’m not sure that’s a good thing.)

It was a large class of about eighty people, all looking for an easy physical education credit the same as I was, I assumed. And there was to be no same-sex dancing because we were about evenly divided up (by design) between male and female. None of these girls would be able to dance with other girls because they didn’t like the boys, as they had done in high school. (If you prefer to dance with members of your own gender while people of the opposite gender are standing by, it doesn’t look good and people begin to talk.)

Our teacher’s name was Miss Bobbie Alma. She possessed the warmth and charm of a concentration camp commandant. She was middle-aged, skinny and angular, with no curves anywhere. She wore her hair in a tight roll at the back of her head called a French roll. Her ears stuck out farther than any woman’s ears I had ever seen before. (You didn’t dare laugh.) In her boxy gray skirt with matching jacket and black oxford shoes, she was as graceless as a stevedore. (An older “boy” in the class, who had been in the military, would confide to me later in the semester how he wanted to get Miss Alma alone long enough to remind her she was a woman.)

“All right, now, listen up, you people!” she yelled. “I’m only going to tell you this one time! You are here for one reason and one reason only! That reason is to learn the art of ballroom dancing! This is not a place for cutups or jokesters! If you are not prepared to take this class seriously, then please leave now! Does everybody understand? Are there any questions?”

“What will be on the final?” a tall girl with a receding chin and frizzy hair asked. (I had found that in every class, no matter what it was, somebody always asked about the final on the first day of class. Wasn’t there going to be plenty of time—the entire semester—to worry about that?)

“You will have two tests in the course of the semester that will comprise most of your grade!” Miss Alma said. “You will have a mid-term exam and a final exam! This is one class where you will never wield a pencil! Your tests will be danced! I will be the sole judge of whether or not you have applied yourselves and have learned the steps the way you are supposed to learn them! Do I make myself clear?”

“Yes, ma’am,” the girl said meekly, although she wouldn’t have needed to say anything because the remarks were not addressed to her personally but to the class at large.

“And let me warn you about something!” Miss Alma continued. “This is one class where absenteeism will not be tolerated! You must make every effort to be present at every class! If you miss a class, you will not be able to catch up! If you miss a class, you must meet with me in my office and tell me why you missed! If you miss two classes without a very good reason, I advise you to voluntarily drop the class! If you miss three classes, whatever the reason, you will automatically be dropped from the roll! Do I make myself clear? Are there any questions?”

When nobody said anything, Miss Alma gave her famous rallying cry: “Men on that side, women on this side!” (She said these same words every class.)

Rather clumsily, we gathered according to gender on either side of the room, with an empty column of about fifteen feet separating the male group from the female group. Miss Alma selected an unlucky “volunteer” from among the “men” and proceeded to show us some waltz steps. After about ten minutes of this practical demonstration, she instructed us to “select a partner” and “listen closely to the music.”

It was not a time to select a partner for suitability or desirability. We had about ten seconds. I tapped the nearest girl on the shoulder (anybody would have been all right except Miss Frizz who had asked about the final). The girl turned around, gave me an appraising look, and fell into my arms. I’m sure she felt as silly as I did and as everybody else did.

In this way, we learned the waltz, the foxtrot, the cha-cha, and (my favorite) the tango. After we had done the dances for a while, we became more confident and less self-conscious. I’m sure I was never anything less than solemn and mechanical, kind of like a dancing robot (no joy, no feeling), but I learned the dance steps and performed them with a stolid precision.

I didn’t miss any of the ballroom dance classes. I was afraid to. I was nervous at first about having to dance in front of a lot of other people (I had never danced before), but after a while the nervousness went away. I never deluded myself that I was a good dancer. I was an adequate dancer, which was all that was needed.

I managed to go the entire semester without angering Miss Alma. When I had to come into direct contact with her, I called her bluff and didn’t let her know I was afraid of her, which, I found out, is the only way to deal with her type. I never crossed her, never did anything to attract her attention in a bad way, and tried very hard to do exactly as she said. (If I had put that much effort into all my classes, I would have been a better student.) I somehow wanted ballroom dance to work for me because it was unlike anything I had ever done before. I ended up, not with an “A,” but with the next best thing.

Of course, when the class was over and I no longer needed to know the dance steps, I forgot them. I received the physical education credit I needed for the year, which was all I ever wanted in the first place. I was on my way. To what, I didn’t know. Certainly not a career as a professional dancer.

Copyright © 2013 by Allen Kopp   

by allen0997

Dysfunctional Family Story ~ An Anthology

Dysfunctional Family Story, An Anthology

Dysfunctional Family Story:
An Anthology 

Table of Contents: 

Brownie Mix by Alex Bernstein

Doodles by Clara Ibarra

Recall by Steve Rodgers

Mr. Fatty is Dead by Allen Kopp

Carter’s Grove by Kevin G. Summers

Chunky Monkey by Rebecca Daff

Compound Fracture by Elizabeth Glass

My Family is More Redneck Than Yours by Angie Ballard

Available for purchase on Amazon in print or Kindle version:

http://www.amazon.com/Dysfunctional-Family-anthology-misc-authors/dp/1492118915/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1377190062&sr=8-1&keywords=9781492118916

by allen0997

The Moon, August 2013

The Moon, August 2013

The Moon
Volume II Issue 8
August 2013 

Table of Contents: 

Cozycow by Nia Holdon

Where You Aren’t by Lyn Lifshin

Day Before the Day of the Longest Light by Lyn Lifshin

Walking Back from Ballet, June 17 by Lyn Lifshin

Mickey Lolich by Gary Every

Metamorphoses by B.Z. Niditch

Record Set by B.Z. Niditch

Malevich’s “White on White” by B.Z. Niditch

desperate character by t. kilgore splake

ashes by t. kilgore splake

That Music by Margaret Boles

Possibility of Perfection by Margaret Boles

The Beauty Box by Allen Kopp

Cat Scratch Fever by Allen Kopp

Irrigation by Thomas Michael McDade

The eBooks are available now through Amazon, Apple’s iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, Kobo and Google Books.

by allen0997

Blue Jasmine ~ A Capsule Movie Review

Blue Jasmine

Blue Jasmine ~ A Capsule Movie Review by Allen Kopp 

At age 78, Woody Allen is still making movies. His latest is Blue Jasmine, with Cate Blanchette as a Blanche Dubois-type character with an unhappy past and an uncertain future. She is Jasmine (née Jeanette) Francis, a former Park Avenue society lady who has taken a long fall. She tries to bolster herself up with bluster, pills, and booze, but she’s not fooling anybody, least of all herself.

Jasmine’s husband, Hal (played by Alec Baldwin), is a high-flying business entrepreneur. For the years that he is wildly successful, he and Jasmine live a fairy tale life. When Hal’s business dealings begin to unravel, though, he is found to be a cheat, a fraud and a liar. He has swindled investors out of millions. To make matters worse, he has been cheating on Jasmine with a whole string of other women. When he tells her he is in love with an “au pair girl” who is practically a teenager, Jasmine calls the FBI and informs on his dirty business dealings. He goes to prison and she loses her standing in society, not to mention her jewels, cars, furs, houses, etc.

With no money and no prospects, Jasmine goes to live with her odd, toothy sister, Ginger, in San Francisco. (For some inexplicable reason, men find Ginger wildly attractive.) Ginger lives in a modest apartment and is humbly employed as a bagger in a food store. She is divorced from her husband, Augie, and is the mother of two overweight boys. (When Augie and Ginger were still married, Jasmine’s husband, Hal, “invested” all their money for them and lost it.)

Ginger has a Stanley Kowalski-esque (yet another A Streetcar Named Desire parallel) boyfriend named Chili. He is crude, wears sleeveless T-shirts, has tattoos, and is prone to violence. He and Jasmine clash from the beginning. He sees that Jasmine looks down on him and Ginger. Jasmine believes that Ginger could find a better man if she only tried. (When Ginger attempts a romantic interlude with another man at Jasmine’s urging, it doesn’t work out and she goes right back to Chili.)

Jasmine eventually meets a man at a party named Dwight. He is apparently the kind of “good” man that she had been hoping to meet to take her out of her dreary existence. He works in the State Department, seems to have plenty of money, and has just bought a beautiful house that he wants Jasmine to decorate for him (she lied that she is a decorator). Dwight plans on marrying Jasmine until a chance meeting with her former brother-in-law, Augie. Augie is still bitter about the money of his that Jasmine’s husband lost and spills the beans to Dwight about all the sordid details of Jasmine’s life that she had kept hidden (and all the lies she told). After Dwight learns the truth about Jasmine, he no longer wants to marry her.

Blue Jasmine packs more of a punch than a lot of Woody Allen’s more recent movies. For my money, it is much more interesting than the highly acclaimed Midnight in Paris. Jasmine is such an interesting, complex character, as are Ginger, Augie, and Chili. I’m sure the similarities to Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire are not accidental (Jasmine as Blanche, Chili as Stanley, Ginger as Stella, Dwight as Mitch). What better starting point could there be?

Copyright © 2013 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Gaia’s Misfits Fantasy Anthology

 Gaia's Misfits, a Fantasy Anthology

Gaia’s Misfits: A Fantasy Anthology

Summer 2013

Edited by T.J. Lantz

Published 2013 by Happy Gnome Publishing
Copyright © 2013 Happy Gnome Publishing
All rights reserved

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Sir Dudley Tinklebutton and the Dragon’s Lair by T.J. Lantz

Pallbearer by Erica Hildebrand

Jenny and the Imps by Robert Lee Frazier

All Swords Melt by James S. Dorr

Did You Hear the One About…by Dianne Arelle

On the Face of It by Allen Kopp

The Tilting Table and the Exothermic Lawn Gnome by Laurie Gailunas

After the Rain by Rob Rosen

*  *  *

Collection is available for Kindle at this Amazon link:

by allen0997

The Butler ~ A Capsule Movie Review

The Butler

The Butler ~ A Capsule Movie Review by Allen Kopp 

The Butler is a panoramic view of recent American history seen through the eyes of a White House butler, Cecil Gaines (played by Forest Whitaker), who served under eight presidents, from Dwight Eisenhower almost through the present day. Cecil’s wife, Gloria, is played by Oprah Winfrey. Gloria is frequently lonely and unhappy because Cecil’s job at the White House takes up so much of his time. They have two sons, Louis and Charlie, and a nice house in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Cecil has a better life than he ever expected to have, considering his humble beginnings and his lack of an education.

As a child Cecil lives with his family on a cotton plantation in Macon, Georgia. When his father is unjustly shot and killed, the family takes Cecil into the house as a house servant. They teach him all things connected with serving at table. He finds this work much easier than working in the cotton fields.

After a few years he leaves the Georgia plantation and ends up in Washington, D.C., where he lands a job in a hotel as a servant. He is well liked and does his job well. An older man whom he befriends at the hotel recommends him for a job at the White House. When he goes for an interview, he is hired, much to his surprise.

Cecil is so good at his job at the White House because, besides being so accommodating to those he serves, he is nearly invisible. He doesn’t talk about anything he might overhear and doesn’t express any opinions. No matter which political party the current president represents, Cecil remains the same: polite, respectful, and unobtrusive. (“May I do anything else for you, Mr. President?”) There is no political message in this movie. Political ideology is never mentioned.

A subplot in The Butler involves Cecil’s older son, Louis. When he grows up, he becomes involved in the Civil Rights movement in the South. Eventually he becomes more radical and a member of the Black Panther political party. He ends up in jail several times. He clashes with his parents, particularly his father, about his political views. The younger son, Charlie, goes into the army and to Viet Nam. He tells his brother, Louis, “You fight your country. I want to fight for my country.”

Don’t let the naysayers or the Oprah detractors keep you from seeing The Butler. While it’s not the greatest movie ever made or maybe even one of the best movies of the year, it is definitely worth seeing. It’s a little slow in places and probably longer than it needs to be, but the overall impression is a favorable one.

Jane Fonda alert: I don’t like her either and am offended by her presence wherever she is, but she only has a couple of minutes on-screen as Nancy Reagan near the end of the movie. Take a little during nap during her one brief scene and forget she’s even there. Don’t let it spoil the whole movie for you.

Copyright © 2013 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Brave New World ~ A Capsule Book Review

First Edition Cover
First Edition Cover

Brave New World ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp 

Brave New World was written by British writer Aldous Huxley in 1931. It is the influential and highly regarded novel (number five on the Modern Library’s list of the 100 best books of the twentieth century) about a utopian earth hundreds of years in the future where all people are created in a laboratory. Viviparous birth (where the mother carries the child and delivers it alive) is passé and vulgar. People are divided into castes: alpha, beta, epsilon, etc. The lower castes are created to be inferior mentally and physically so they will be well suited to performing menial jobs. There is no family and no marriage. Neither are there any moral restrictions on sexual activity—the motto is: “Everybody belongs to everybody else.” The state relies heavily on conditioning and “hypnopaedic” learning (homilies and truisms are delivered to the brain of the learner while he/she is asleep) to make sure everybody is conforming in the way they are supposed to. Those who express subversive thinking or engage in subversive activity are exiled to “an island,” in some cases Iceland. What happens to them on the island can only be imagined because we are never told.

Most diseases have been eradicated, as has any unhappiness or discontent. Nobody is allowed to be alone because solitude breeds unhappiness. If there is ever the slightest trace of depression or sadness in a person, it is made to vanish with the application of a drug called “soma.” There is no God and no religion; old copies of the Bible or religious books are considered pornographic. Henry Ford is the one man who is looked to as a sort of god. The current state of things finds its germination in his methods of mass production and conformity.

One character named Bernard Marx stands out from the others. It is believed that a mistake was made when he was created in the test tube that made him different from the others. (Being different is the one unforgiveable sin in this world.) When he goes on a vacation to New Mexico with his “girlfriend” Lenina (if you’ve seen the Diane Keaton character in Woody Allen’s Sleeper, you know what Lenina is like), he meets a strange young, blond-haired man named John, who lives on an Indian reservation with his alcoholic, bloated mother, Linda. (Linda had been impregnated by a government official and abandoned on the reservation; the result of her impregnation was John.)

Bernard becomes enamored of John (if it’s a sexual attraction, it’s never explored) and takes him and Linda back to London with him. John, who apparently is quite good-looking, is drawn to Lenina, as she is to him. When she makes herself freely available to him sexually, he is shocked and repelled.

John, who is referred to as “the Savage,” finds himself completely at odds in the strange new world in which he finds himself. His “humanness,” his moral code, is bound to get him into trouble. While he was not accepted on the reservation because he wasn’t like the Indians, he finds himself even more ostracized in the civilized world. After a while, he seeks to get away from it all. He is famous by now, though, and people won’t leave him in peace. It does not end well for him, or for his mother.

Brave New World is a highly accessible, not-very-long, twentieth century English classic. It is a “classic” in the truest sense of the word, meaning that it’s the “best of its class.” Its influence can be seen in countless other books and movies. People will still be reading this book for a long time to come.

Copyright © 2013 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997