Category Archives: Movies

The Fever (Or: “Dabid Reviews ‘Gremlins 2: The New Batch’”)

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There’s a particular psychological phenomenon that has happened to me throughout my life that I’m not sure others experience in themanner that I do. I call it “The Fever”.

In essence, I am overcome by The Fever when my mind fixates on some particular specialized interest—usually brought about by some newly revealed or released toy/collectible—and I can no longer function except in ways that help feed the breadth of my knowledge of or interest in whatever my brain has fixated upon collecting.

The Fever cannot be reasoned with, circumvented or fought against. It can only be extinguished by being allowed to run its natural course until abatement, which can be anywhere from minutes to years.

From playing tedious LEGO video games to add enthusiasm to purchasing LEGO Indiana Jones sets(inspired by movies I’d never seen at the time) to reading thousands of old Marvel comics to learn about the significance of characters I’m happily buying expensive resin Bowen statues of to watching 80s He-Man and She-Ra cartoons in the modern day to justify buying “ultimate” retro-styled figures based on shows I never watched, The Fever is an “ailment” that has helped me to expand my knowledge within my sphere of interests to virtually unrivaled capacities.

My most recent bout of The Fever occurred while I was out hunting for the new NECA Gargoyles figures of Bronx and Demona at Target. This quest brought me to the specialty collectibles section on the back wall at Target, which is an area filled with various collector-aimed (and often pricey) items from a plethora of brands.

There was no sign of Demona and/or Bronx, but while slowly scanning the shelves (which takes a while since I’m largely blind now), something else by NECA called an “Ultimate Gamer Gremlin” caught my eye. While I had only seen the original Gremlins movie once in my life and never the sequel, seeing this excellently executed action figure immediately caused me to become overwhelmed with a need to know everything about this franchise—and toy line—that I had previously ignored.

It turns out that NECA has been pushing out Gremlins figures for the better part of two decades now, but not being enamored with ugly/creepy/horror toys, I was oblivious to the many, many NECA Gremlins collectibles released.

After doing as much internet research on the toys as possible, my next destination was an Amazon site search for any Making Of books or novelizations that could explain the property to me textually. None are in print or available on Kindle. So I had to fall back on what I didn’t want to do: actually attempting to watch the movies.

When your brain primarily only processes motion as a shadowy blur and you can no longer see the left hand side of the screen at all, trying to take in what is happening in a film is not the relaxing recreational activity it once was. So watching movies is no longer my preferred choice for fueling my collecting-related obsessions.

Having previously viewed the first Gremlins about 15 years ago and the sequel never, I opted to first stream Gremlins 2: The New Batch, a critically panned and fan-despised sequel.

Opening with a bonafide Looney Tunes cartoon, it turned out that the film was in fact all-out insanity with a barely coherent plot. Upon finishing the movie, my wife declared it one of the worst things we’d ever seen… but I wasn’t so sure.

While I couldn’t necessarily discern what was going on on-screen to the same extent as my wife, I felt like there was definitely something there in this film. That the director had made deliberate choices to subvert what viewers wanted and to throw it into their faces.

While the original movie is iconic and beloved, it’s also a pointless romp with nothing to say—suitable material for this admittedly needless follow-up to parody and make into a full-blown mockery. As a self-hating sequel made with the clear intent to satirize itself, the Gremlins “franchise” and sequels as a whole, I view this movie as a rousing triumph.

The bold decision to include such absurdities as a Vegetable Gremlin, Bat Gremlin, Spider Monster Gremlin and sex-changed Lady Gremlin (her name is Greta, according to her first official action figure ever, which was released this past winter) makes this film quite a bit more toy-etic than its predecessor.

Coupling these wild varieties of Gremlins with bombastic scenes such as the Gremlins attacking a film critic who blasted the first movie and a segment with Hulk Hogan threatening the Gremlins speaking directly to the audience made for a movie experience like none I’d had before

The human characters are milquetoast and poorly written, but I think that kind of works for the type of story being told here: an unnecessary one that directly calls out within itself that profit and merchandising is its sole motivation.

As a whole, the sheer lunacy factor of Gremlins II and its own self-hatred make it a movie I’m glad to have experienced. Taken as a serious movie in a vacuum, my grade for Gremlins 2 would have to be an ‘F-‘, but as a parody/satire it earns a conditional ‘A’ from me.

And thankfully, I managed to do enough reflection and research to stall out The Fever long enough that it ran its course before I spent a fortune buying random Gremlins merch. (Although I’d totally still buy a NECA Bat Gremlin if it didn’t cost an unbelievable $200+ on the aftermarket.)

Shawshank Redemption (or: “Dabid’s Movie Reviews & Analysis I”)

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I saw a movie this week that most people my age have already seen—about two decades ago or more. But for me, it was a totally new experience: The Shawshank Redemption. Several of my friends have cited as being contention among their favorite movies of all-time, and I’ve even had a still-sealed limited edition Steelbook of the movie sitting on my shelf for many months.

Honestly, I avoided this movie for many years based off of the drab, monochromatic iconography I had seen for it and the false assumption that this was another gritty war movie (which I always do my best to avoid). Had I know the film would have the amount of character depth and philosophical content that it does, I would have watched it much earlier. But that’s my loss.

Even so, the fact that I am experiencing this film right now for the first time gives me the unique opportunity to share my raw thoughts, review and character analysis as part of this blog. And so, let’s take a look at this movie in the form of an analytical character study of the five characters who stood out to me the most in the film (for better or worse)…

Dabid Reviews The Shawshank Redemption Movie

Tommy

Of all the characters in this film, it is young Tommy that I hated the most, beginning almost immediately after he was introduced. From virtually the second he first appears on-screen, this movie blatantly wants us to LOVE poor, doomed Tommy—so much so that the transparent nature of Tommy’s character development is insulting to the viewers:

“Oh no, this young kid just can’t seem to get it right and keeps messing up and landing back in jail!”

“Awwwww, he wants to earn his high school diploma so that he can make a life with his never-seen-but-mentioned-once young wife and daughter! The world is against him and he never learned to read—but do-gooder Andy is here to save the day!”

“Sniff! Poor Tommy threw a tantrum because he believes he is a complete idiot that can’t even pass his GED test! But he just needs to have more faith in himself—it turns out he passed after all!”

And of course—OF COURSE—Tommy is the character who fate (okay, the script) has decreed happens to have the direct knowledge to free Andy from his wrongful lifetime imprisonment. And as a result, Tommy fulfills what was so badly telegraphed by every moment of his screen time—serving as a sacrifice to make the audience feel sad when he is brutally gunned down, murdered by the corruption of Shawshank.

I have heard that this character is played differently in the novel (which I haven’t read) that this film is based upon, and I’m glad to hear that. Because in the film itself, I cannot stand this character or the derivative way that he’s written to pull at the viewer’s heartstrings.

Brooks

While he is a relatively minor character with only a handful of minutes of screen time in the movie, the elderly inmate Brooks Hatlen is among my favorite and the best-written characters in the movie.

Kindly Brooks served his sentence in Shawshank so long that he became institutionalized and unable to cope with the reality of being paroled and living in the outside world. While he tries to adapt to life as a free man by getting a job and a place to live, he feels afraid and out-of-place in the unstructured world he finds himself in.

Brooks decides to—and does—kill himself via hanging. It’s a sad end to the sweet, grandfather-like character—but also a laudable one. Brooks decided on what he wanted from life (and death) and followed through, regardless of what anyone else would think of his decision—a decision that is a largely controversial and debated one in our society. To me, that’s one of the most admirable things a man can do, and worthy of respect.

Warden Norton

Warden Samuel Norton has to be among the best antagonists I’ve seen in a movie, because he is just so DISAPPOINTING. When we’re introduced to this character at the prison, his devotion to an intensely stringent Lawful Good style of running the institution immediately appealed to me. Here was a man who knew how to use rules and the law and protocol to brutally exact change in his inmates!

But as the film went on, I learned that the warden himself was corrupt, choosing money and power over justice and truth. Warden Norton even goes so far as to incite murder in order to keep the innocent main character incarcerated and under his control.

Ultimately, he shows his hypocritical nature and true colors by committing suicide rather than facing justice when the truth about him comes out. This hasty action to evade paying for his crimes feels wholly different to me than the deliberate choice made by Brooks, who owed nothing to anyone and carefully determined that there was nothing he wanted to live for in this world anymore. While Brooks’ decision was respect-worthy to me, Warden Norton’s feels like pure cowardice to escape from paying his debt to society and honoring the system of rules and laws he was supposed to stand for.

What a colossal disappointment of a man—and what a wonderfully easy-to-hate, truly villainous antagonist.

Red

And having discussed the two men who committed suicide for two very different reasons brings us to Morgan Freeman’s character of “Red” (Ellis Boyd Redding). Like Brooks, Red has spent the majority of his life in prison and is doubtful that he could survive in the world outside of jail.

Red jokes he is “the only guilty man” in Shawshank, but the first two times we see him appear before the parole board he gives a bottled response about being rehabilitated and shows no true signs of remorse.

After Andy’s escape, Red gives a truthful response to the parole board, citing his genuine remorse for his crimes as a youth and admitting he doesn’t know what “rehabilitated” actually means and doesn’t care. This earns Red his parole, where he lives in the same home as Brooks did and works at the same job as Brooks did.

But whereas Brooks chose to die, Andy gave Red something to live for—a promise to fulfill. Red ultimately chooses life and to go on living as a result of this promise, rekindling hope in his heart for himself and his place in the world.

Andy

I don’t have much to say about Andy himself, but I do love that he functions as a sort of savior in the movie. (Technically Andy is a “white savior” since he is white, but I don’t think that’s relevant to the story being told here.)

Seeing the brutality and corruption and despair that goes on in Shawshank, Andy spends his decades in the prison enacting to make life better for all of the inmates while working toward his own escape. He creates an unthinkably unlikely library for the inmates to enrich themselves with intellectually, tutors Tommy to achieve necessary educational goals and even acquires the evidence necessary to end Warden Norton’s evil reign over the prison.

Perhaps most importantly on an emotional level, after experiencing the death of Brooks and prophesizing a similar end for Red, Andy implements a (successful) plan to prevent the same fate from befalling Red.

While Andy is a bit flat himself personality-wise, I can relate to his ideals and praise him for efforts to act as a sort of “hero that saves everyone” to the rest of the cast. These actions are not always successful, but it is the effort itself that make Andy a true hero—even if his name is never cleared and he is wrongly recorded by the law as a double-murderer forevermore.

So who or what is redeemed in the The Shawshank Redemption?

There’s a wide variety of  answers to this question depending upon the angle or framework that you’re looking at the movie from. But from my own specific perspective, this is an easy thing to answer. Andy himself is blameless–he committed no crime and is sin-free, so he needs no redemption himself. But through his own determination and sacrifices as a sort of savior, Andy created the opportunity for the institution and its inmates to achieve redemption.

Overall

I found this to be a beautiful movie… of the prison/fantasy genre. The lovable portrayal of the inmates with hearts of gold (besides a few psychotic rapists here and there) is hard to accept as realistic, as are some other facets of the actual overarching plot. I particularly hated the insufferable depiction of Tommy and the convenience his story added to the plot.

But even so, I found myself invested in the characters and having feelings and thoughts about them long after I finished the film. There are some wonderful quotes, themes and lessons to be learned from this movie, and I genuinely love that it is able to portray both “getting busy living” and “getting busy dying” in a balanced and positive light.

I don’t know that this is necessarily the greatest movie of all-time as many rankings and lists would have it be believed, but it is certainly a content-rich movie worthy of viewing and reflection.

GRADE: A (91 out of 100)

Lawful Good vs. Lawful Neutral (or: “Why Dabid Hates Dwight Schrute”)

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I’m presently watching a sitcom called “The Office”, a few episodes per week, because it is a favorite of several of my friends and I have been told that it is a sort of modern cultural touchstone that it will be useful for me to have an understanding of when interacting with others. This has been a bit of a difficult show for me to relate to, as I’ve never worked in any kind of office/cubicle environment, and the majority of the characters all seem like unbelievable caricatures to me.

Volunteer Depute Dwight Schrute in The Office Drug Testing Episode

Of all the characters, the one I instantly hated on sight was the Assistant to the Regional Manager, Dwight Schrute. His fussy need for logic and structure and his obsession with following rules and laws annoyed the crap out of me immediately, and I hated his awkward ways of trying to strengthen his bonds to people and his single-minded loyal devotion to his duties.

And then a terrible thing happened: my best friend said that I didn’t like that character because he behaves in a lot of ways that I do. And then I REALLY hated Dwight Schrute.

The episode I watched most recently, Season 2 Episode 20 – “Drug Testing”, serves as a good illustration of why I hate this character. Upon discovering evidence of illegal drugs on company property, Dwight begins an investigation to determine which of his friends or coworkers may have broken the law and company policy. He goes as far as even serving as the catalyst for drug testing being done in the office, an action that could potentially lead to one of his friends being fired or even arrested.

This sort of black-and-white, polarized thinking made me angry—both because of how it could lead to harm for people Dwight cared about, and also because of the fact that I could EASILY see myself doing the exact same thing at points in my life if I wasn’t careful.

Remember when I talked about role-playing games a couple entries back? In those types of games, there’s something called “character alignment”, which is a system of categorization for a character’s moral and ethical perspectives on life.

The character alignment in role-playing games that I like the best is “Chaotic Good”—characters who act according to their own conscience for what they see as the greater good, regardless of whether or not it goes against societal expectations.

So it’s no surprise that I outright dislike Dwight Schrute, who I believe is confined by a “Lawful Neutral” alignment, intractably obeying rules and laws, even if those structures will cause harm unnecessarily to people he cares about.

The resolution of the episode briefly gave me hope for Dwight, however, as he broke the rules by helping his supposed closest friend—the perpetrator—to subvert the drug testing and get away with his technical misdeed. A devastated and conflicted Dwight then resigns as a Volunteer Sheriff’s Deputy out of shame and deference to the law, which disappointed me since he was ashamed of deciding to surpass the structure of laws he’s ruled by in order to help someone close to him.

Regardless of any comparisons made between me and Dwight Schrute, I am resolute that my natural alignment is different from his. My ethics certainly also veer towards “Lawful”, as my instant inclination is always to follow the rules as they’ve been set out, and it makes me upset to see other people circumventing them and acting “illegally”. However, my moral compass points toward “Good” and not “Neutral”. I strive to work within the laws to find loopholes and ways of using the rules to achieve what I think is ultimately morally right–I’m unwilling to be a puppet to the rules.

I don’t particularly like the lawyer-like boring predictability of being “Lawful Good”—my ambition is to become something much cooler like “Chaotic Good”. But given my own savior complex and ideal of wanting to save everyone, I definitely can’t accept any “Evil” or even “Neutral” alignment wherein someone would abandon others in need out of deference to rules and regulations.

And THAT is why I hate Dwight Schrute.

Normie (or: “Dabid Watches Stuff”)

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I’ve been trying to put in an effort lately to expose myself to some media (you know–movies, TV, books, video games) that I ordinarily would not pay attention to—or would actively avoid—for a couple of purposes.

Because of the fact that my brain primarily fixates on toys and collectibles, it’s typically difficult for me to dredge up enough interest to sit still and watch something that doesn’t have any merchandising I’m interested in. There are exceptions to this when a story manages to gel with another one of my interests (my mind is not entirely one-track), but for the most part I avoid things that look scary, boring or “normie”.

For that last descriptor, please note that I’m not saying or meaning it in a derogatory fashion—it’s just that I have a difficult time relating to a lot of mainstream tastes and perspectives, and I’ve traditionally been too unmotivated (or lazy) to try to learn anything about those types of media. If there’s not a hook somewhere that manages to catch my attention, it’s a real battle to force myself to stay still and watch a thing, whether it be 22 or 220 minutes.

However. Having driven my friends and acquaintances practically insane an uncountable number of times over my life with my sheer obliviousness and inability to recognize references to popular shows and movies, I am beginning to understand the value in experiencing these things that “everybody else” (hyperbole) knows about already.

I’m not saying that everyone everywhere should try to watch, read or listen to stuff that they have zero affinity for, but I’ve discovered that having a lack of what’s considered common popular culture knowledge is an issue for at least me specifically. Why? Because it further isolates me and distances me from others, when I don’t actually want to be isolated. I think.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t love all social interaction (I dread a majority of it, honestly). But I also don’t want to be so ignorant of common knowledge and poorly-versed and inexperienced at being social that I alienate people I do want to interact with.

In addition, if you care about a person, it makes sense to me that you can learn more about them by learning about the things they love. So if a show or song or movie or video game is important to someone else, you can get to know that person better by consuming that same media to try to discover why it is important to that person and have a better understanding of them overall.

And so, I have begun my study of certain pieces of media that have been recommended to me that I otherwise would have outright rejected. Things like Alien (which apparently has a cutely named sequel named Aliens). Things like Beastars (which, incidentally, I’ve included a related Dabid Unboxes! video alongside this entry). And things like The Office. Which, strangely enough, is going to tie together these two latest entries…

Complementary Video: Dabid Unboxes!: Beastars Original Soundtrack OST – Satoru Kosaki 3x LP Vinyl Record Set