Dave-El's Book Report: Houses of the Unholy

As is my frequent want here in these posts of Dave-El's Book Report, I will extoll the talents of writer Ed Brubaker and artist Sean Phillips with their series of graphic novels.  

Brubaker and Phillips have carved a successful niche noir crime novels that are engaging and challenging.

I am almost a broken record about how much I enjoy their output.

But today's post....?

Well...

Houses of the Unholy may well be a rare misstep in the Brubaker/Phillips bibliography.   

Natalie Burns is a young woman leading an aimless life, putting some cash in her pocket as a bounty hunter.  

She encounters FBI Agent West who seeks to draw her into his investigation into a sinister conspiracy involving a satanic cult. He's following a trail of dead bodies which are connected to Natalie. 

They were all people from her childhood and they were all caught up in a twist web of allegations involving satanic activities in their home town. 

Via flashbacks, we explore Natalie's childhood where she and some other kids attending a summer camp got caught up in the hysteria of grown ups who just knew the counselors were into some kind of devil worshipping shit. 

Brubaker is tapping into the "Satanic Panic" of the 1980's where God fearing Americans just knew the Devil himself was literally lurking around every corner waiting to pounce.

There are charges, investigations, arrests and trials to root out the truth of this evil lurking ever so close to their precious children. 

The children are told to tell only the truth of what happened at the camp. 

The children also understand what salicious "truth" their parents want to hear. 

The whole thing blows up when under the cold light of day, there's clearing nothing there.

But not before the head counselor, her reputation destroyed, kills herself.

The guilt and grief over her role in this debacle as a child wrecked Natalie, akways on the move, avoiding connections with people, moving as far away as she can from those terrible days.

But now this FBI agent wants to pull her back in. 

Some of the kids from that time convinced themselves there really was a dark and terrible power in the haunted woods outside their summer camp. 

And as adults, they are determined to gain that power for themselves.

Well, it sounds like we got ourselves a real firecracker of a plot, don't we?

But do we have a story?

 People flit in and out of both the present and past narratives to service the plot but leave little impression. 

Agent West is little more than a plot device to get Natalie Burns into the plot.

About a quarter of the way near the end, we're informed Natalie has a brother who we did not know about before and is needed to help Natalie with the next step of her journey. 

His fatal fate at the hands of the satanic conspirators should've landed harder but hey, we just met the guy.  

I think that perhaps Houses of the Unholy may have been better served by a longer structure of being serialized as a comic book series, allowing more time to invest in the characters. Instead everything is compressed into a single graphic novel. 

The book still has flashes of the brilliance we expect from a Brubaker/Phillips production but I think Houses of the Unholy is not the best representation of their work. 

The next time I do a Book Report post, we will delve into the life and time of one Sir Patrick Stewart.

Val Kilmer

 The wrong people keep dying.

God damn it, now Val Kilmer's dead?

Really?

Dead of pneumonia at age 65.  

Geez! 

Val Kilmer had a long and varied film career, ranging from comedy (Real Genius) to drama (he played Jim Morrison in The Doors).  

Of course I saw him in Batman Forever where he took on the role of the Caped Crusader.  He lacked the sly wit and unhinged intensity of Michael Keaton but I thought he did really well as Bruce Wayne/Batman. 

A very funny and off beat movie Kilmer was in was Top Secret!, a film from the fine folks who gave us Airplane!  Val played Nick Rivers who is a rock star/super spy fighting Nazis. It's basically every Elvis Presley movie distilled to it's most absurdist form. 

Here is a clip where Val gets his Elvis on.

In 2014, Val Kilmer had throat cancer and while he recovered from that, it still left a major impact on his health. 

Kilmer was able to pull it together for a cameo as Iceman in Top Gun Maverick.  

One of Val Kilmer's strangest roles ever was perhaps in this SNL Digital Short with Andy Samberg and Katy Perry in a perky little number about friendship. Kilmer is a mad scientist who wants to be friends too!

The homeless drug addict was Matt Damon.

Anyway, Val Kilmer is dead now and life is just unfair. 

Rest in peace, Val.  

Greenland Is Just Not That Into Us

So last week J D Vance and his wife Usha visited Greenland.

Ostensibly Usha was there to go see a dog sled race. 

J D decided that sounded like fun and decided to go.  

Greenland's government reminded the Vances that no one invited them. 

After some staffers went from door to door to find someone, anyone who wanted a photo op with the Vances and were uninfomly told to fuck off, the couple wound up cooling their heels at the United States Air Force base.  

Where J D Vance decided to engage some charm with a 3 point presentation.

• Greenland sucks!
• It sucks because Denmark who owns Greenland sucks!
• Greenland would not suck if it were part of the United States!

There were some objections to these cogent arguments from Greenland and Denmark. 

• Greenland does NOT suck!
• Denmark does NOT suck! 
• You know who sucks? The United States sucks SO hard!!!

Gee, I wonder why Greenland does not want to be a part of the United States?

And miss being part of all this?

Chaos? Cruelty? What's not to love about the USA right now?

Why wouldn't Greenland want to be a part of this great nation?

Could it be they don't want to lose their 37 hour work week or the nearly 3 dozen days a year of paid time off every one gets or the year long maternity leave or the universal health care or the safety from mass shootings? 

C'mon, Greenland! Join the United States of America and not have any of that! Free from socialism! YAY!!

Why can't Greenland respond to our charm offensive and just give us what we want? 

Why would Greenland have a problem with that? 

Tuesday TV Touchbase: The Joe Schmo Show

Today is April 1st which is April Fool's Day, a day known for pranks and deceptions. So appropriately enough, today's Tuesday TV Touchbase is about a television show centered around an elaborate prank.

One genre of TV that you will not typically find on the Touchbase is so called "reality TV" or "reality competition shows". 

But during that time in the evening when Andrea and I seek to kill our last remaining brain cell with ubiquitous reruns of Big Bang Theory on TBS, it was impossible to avoid promos for a show called The Joe Schmo Show. 

The premise of this series is that a person is selected to compete in a reality TV show, completely unaware that all the other contestants are actors playing archetypes of reality show stars and the show is scripted to center around that person who is not an actor. 

In this case of this season of The Joe Schmo Show, that person was Ben Frisone from Baltimore, Maryland.

This is NOT the first go 'round for The Joe Schmo Show; the series ran for 2 seasons on what was then the Spike TV channel and returned for 1 more season in 2013.  

For this 4th iteration of  The Joe Schmo Show, Ben has been selected to compete in a reality competition series called "The Goat USA", an American version of a show that is very popular in South Korea.  😏

(No, it's not. The whole thing is made up!) 

Ben has to compete in a series of stunts and challenges to win the grand prize of $100,000. 

Ben has no idea he is the only person on the show who is NOT an actor.

The only person other than Ben who is using their real name is the host of "The Goat USA", British TV presenter Cat Deeley. 

In addition to the actors pretending to be competitors, there is also a back room of directors and writers watching everything and making changes on the fly in case Ben doesn't do what they expect him to do.  

Now I will be honest, I did not watch this show but I was intrigued enough by what I knew through my powers as "Media Man"* to want to see how this plays out.

*"Media Man" has the power to described the plots and premises of movies and TV shows he has not seen before. 

So I watched the season finale of a TV show I had not previously watched.  

I was able to pick up the basics of what had gone before pretty quickly.  

"The Goat USA" has an actual goat and Ben is "the goatkeeper" who has formed a bond with the goat.

Speaking of forming bonds, Ben is really close to Maya, the "gamer girl" archetype. In the B-roll  confessional, actor Natasha Mercado who plays Maya seems a bit worried about how Ben is going to react when the scam is revealed. She kind of likes the big lug and it seems he's quite fond of her as well. 

Well, this is gonna be quite awkward, ain't it? 

Of course, the end of competition on "The Goat USA" ends with Ben and Maya as the two finalists.  The other competitors will vote for which of the two will be the final winner by "the festooning of the baubles" on the horns of a giant goat head.

Of course "the festooning of the baubles" ends in a tie which is not allowed. According to the rules, in the case of a tie, the final arbiter of who wins is...  the goatkeeper. 

To quote Ben, "That's some messed up shit!" 

In a big dramatic moment, Ben select Maya as the winner of "The Goat USA"!

Then slowly and carefully, host Cat Deeley begins to raise the curtain for Ben to finally see the truth. 

• There is not a show called "The Goat USA". 
• Ben is actually on a show called The Joe Schmo Show.
• And everyone around him is an actor.
• Yes, even Maya. 

And Ben's reaction is well.... kind of anti-climatic.

Yes, he's gobsmacked by the revelation that this whole thing was a big fake out but he seems to roll with it with a large degree of equanamity.  And perhaps the reveal that "The Goat USA" is a fake is the first thing about "The Goat USA" that really made sense. 

It is a profoundly absurd show and there was a point earlier where Ben wondered if this was some sort of prank on him. The writers had to really scramble to get him away from that line of thinking. 

Ben is a really nice guy and these actors have come to genuinely like him.  So the roll out of the reveals is incremental as the actors tell Ben how much they really like him so please don't kill us.  

It also helps to ease the blow that Ben is going to get $200,000 instead of $100,000.  Yeah, that's more money but still seems anti-climatic. If the producers had found $50,000 more in the budget, then Ben's prize could've been described as a quarter of a million which would've been more dramatic.  

The show ends with a montage that shows Ben and the cast hanging out afterwards.  So yay, they're still friends.

At least for that photo shoot.  

That is that for this week's Touchbase 

Until next time, remember to be good to one another and try to keep it down in there, would ya? I'm trying to watch TV over here.