My short story “The Field” has been selected for the upcoming anthology Year’s Best Hardcore Horror, Vol. 2. I am excited to be among some of the genre’s best! More information to come.
It’s not a mirage if you saw something on this website yesterday and then came back today and it’s gone—or in a different location, or is different color. Maybe a photo’s gone, or it’s gotten bigger. Change is good, right? And I’m on the world wide learning curve.
In maintaining marvincbrown.com, we tweak as we go. And we’re taking suggestions from visitors, which also accounts for some changes.
If the Internet’s a web, it’s a sticky one. The task is to get things user-friendly, interesting and add in enough redundancies to keep you from getting lost.
Purchase books at the Store. Read samples in the Works section. Learn more than you ever needed to know about me in About Marvin. You can slide your white-gloved hand right on past the Media Kit (unless you’re with the press), but Events will keep you up to date on where I’ll be, and News will let you know what I’m up to. My writings not defined as fiction, nonfiction and short stories (essays, features and reviews) can be found in Features. Comments are (almost) always welcome and feel free to email me at Contact.
Here In The Bloghouse I’ll serve up general observations and opinions, while also offering specific blogging like book reviews (Open Book), movie reviews (Quik Flix Hit), current events (On Point) and, with restraint, politics (Swing State).
Thanks for your input so far.
EXPERIENCES ON THE HILL KEEPS BRINGING DIRECTORY BACK
Sean Bloomfield
Before he made a film that follows seven strangers as they travel to a spiritual village in Bosnia-Herzegovina to investigate its miracles, Sean Bloomfield made the journey himself. “Something there moved me,” he recalls.
The filmmaker and author has explored religion and spirituality in previous works, but his experiences in the village of Medjugorje remained with him. In 1981, the Virgin Mary reportedly appeared before six local youths there. In the years since, thousands seeking miracles and enlightenment walk the village’s jagged hillside to the spot marked with a statue of Mary.
“It was either the biggest hoax or a miracle,” Bloomfield remembers thinking. He would make more trips there.
In returning last year to Apparition Hill—the name given the sacred spot and the title of his new documentary—Bloomfield wanted to make the experience as authentic as possible for viewers.
READ MY REVIEW OF THE DOCUMENTARY
Bloomfield, a Florida native, selected his cast from a slew of video submissions. He settled on seven from the United States and London: two atheists; a widowed father of nine; a Catholic latecomer; a terminally ill wife and mother; an on-and-off drug abuser; and a man suffering from the debilitating disease ALS.
Bloomfield’s camera watches these volunteers as they embark on a two-week pilgrimage, each seeking something—a renewal of faith, a pull into something beyond secular security, self-awareness, a life-saving miracle.
Besides peeking into the lives of the cast, Bloomfield’s camera allows us to peer into a specific place, this small village, which seems to glow in its spirituality. As we watch, we get accustomed to the village’s geography and the rhythms of the community—priests, tourists, visionaries and filmmakers alike move through Medjugorje with a sense of intimate purpose.
“There are so many stories there,” Bloomfield says. “There’s something about this place, but more so the people.”
In addition to the cast, the documentary weaves in a tapestry of locals: an area physician who begins to believe in a power beyond her medical training; a recovering addict who makes the place his home and now helps others; a tour guide and mentor who lends a sense of history; and of course the “visionaries” who first claimed to see the Virgin Mary.
One such visionary, Mirjana Soldo, is significantly featured in the documentary. Sixteen at the time of her visitation, Soldo has devoted her life to her pilgrimages and to bringing a message of hope to the world-weary. Her story captivated Bloomfield.
“As a teen she was persecuted,” he says.
Stella Mar Films
It wasn’t easy being a person claiming to have met the Virgin Mary, much less so when that person is a teenager. In the documentary, as Soldo communes with Mary, a look overtakes her, tears stream down her cheeks, she begins to smile like she’s tapped into something profound. She has told her story in a book; Bloomfield feels there is more to tell. “I would like to continue her story,” he says.
How will a film so unapologetically spiritual be received?
“We tried to make it objective,” Bloomfield says. “We just tried to record the story. We didn’t want to impose on the audience what to take away from the film.”
Audiences seem to be responding positively. It’s gaining a word-of-mouth following on social media and is selling out limited screenings.
And what about his cast? Most seem changed by the experience.
“We stay in touch,” Bloomfield says. The group maintains a private Facebook page to stay abreast of each other’s lives. “We’re like family,” he adds.
Up next for the director are plans to document the experiences of a youth festival on Cross Mountain in the same village. It was shot by a second crew at the same time Bloomfield was filming Apparition Hill.
In this time of a bruising presidential campaign and a divided nation Bloomfield believes the film is timely.
“There are things that transcend human problems,” he suggests.
Check here for screening dates and locations.
| Marvin Brown’s Movie Review Archive
Letters from Baghdad (2016)
Unrated
Between the Rivers Productions
Gertrude Bell, unknown by me, was an English writer, traveler, spy and archaeologist who seemingly conquered the Middle East at a time when women were hardly seen fit to gain higher education.
Letters from Baghdad details her remarkable movements though the Mideast, growing in legend as she did so, culminating in her taking a vital role in establishing the modern state of Iraq. That’s right, a British woman of the 1900s blazed a trail through Syria, Arabia and Mesopotamia while many woman of her age and upbringing were married, raising children and defined by their husbands.
The documentary, codirected by Sabine Krayenbühl and Zeva Oelbaum, is presented in an epistolary format in an effort to squeeze history and texture from Bell’s actual letters. The method is further supported though cinematic techniques: as Bell speaks (voiced by actors Rose Leslie as a girl and Tilda Swinton as a woman) her missives are brought to life via filmstock-aging effects, vistas rendered in sepia tone and still photos given the Ken Burns effect. The film’s like an ancient postcard brought to life. Actor reenactments and spectacular archival footage round out the illusion we’re watching a documentary of the day.
Since her early years, Bell seemed to possess not only a thirst for knowledge, but an obsession with the otherworldliness of the Middle East—its people and culture, landscapes and, eventually, politics. Very quickly her twin passions are evident: the foreign culture she couldn’t shake and her accommodating father Sir Hugh Bell. Gertrude seemed to cleave closer to her father after the death of her mother when she was but 3 years old. She wasn’t without a woman’s touch, however. Her eventual stepmother Florence Bell, an author and progressive woman in her own right, pushed her to expand her mind.
As Bell spent increasingly more time in the Middle East, with guides in tow, she traversed sandy nations as a cartologist and documentarian; her writings, photography and maps would become assets during World War I. She became a British spy and an outspoken critic and enemy of the Ottoman Empire.
That modern-day Iraq and its strife has connection-points to her long-ago adventures is startling, a reminder in this uncertain election season that an individual dabbling on the world stage can trigger long-reaching consequences in the geo-political theater. Hear that, Mr. Trump?
Letters is certainly palatable to history buffs and Arabophiles, but those with a malfunctioning attention-span gene might not find this diverting enough to join Bell on her journey.
| Marvin Brown’s Movie Review Archive
Lazy Eye (2016)
Rated R
T42 Entertainment
Dean is not so concerned with the lazy eye condition he’s had since youth. What frustrates him, though, is a recent necessity for progressive lenses. As he’s rounding middle age, Dean struggles to see things in the distance and up close. His condition becomes an analogy of sorts that plays out as he reconnects with an ex-boyfriend.
Tim Kirkman’s Lazy Eye is a pleasant and diverting romantic indie drama despite its stage-play feel. It’s a short, focused film and that feels right.
Dean (Lucas Near-Verbrugghe), a married and complacent graphic artist, decides to steal away to his Mojave Desert vacation home with the seeming intent to put work tensions on pause. Unbeknownst to his coworker Mel (Michaela Watkins, who joyfully makes the most of her limited screen time) and Dean’s often-absent husband, the weekend getaway is actually a rendezvous with Alex (Aaron Costa Ganis), a long-ago lover. In flashbacks cleverly intercut with Dean’s ruminating present, we learn that the men reconnected through carefully worded and playful emails. A span of 15 years separates them—certainly a longer time than the men were together.
Dean’s libido is ignited at the prospect of Alex actually showing up (though Dean’s love of self-love suggests it doesn’t take much to get him going), and their initial reunion brings not-unexpected carnal abandon.
Soon after, glowing and happy, the men began to talk, and talk. Walk and talk. Swim and talk. Eat and talk. There are issues to be hashed out over this weekend: Why did they break up? Why did Alex fall off the grid? Why reach out to Dean after all this time? Why is Dean settling in his career, and perhaps his marriage? Were the men ever even compatible?
I don’t mind the talk because it’s mostly interesting and pressed me to consider my own feelings on lost love, career choices and indecision. I’m am reminded of Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995), a film mainly concerned with following two people around as they discuss life, love, success and failure and what it all means going forward.
This film’s basically comprised of snapshot moments (and wonderful location photography) of their relationship’s start (their meet cute in an East Village bar with Dean sketching Alex’s picture on a napkin; Alex, meanwhile, is a flighty recent college graduate), breakup (Dean’s obsessive hunt for answers after Alex dumps him; Alex’s deception in their relationship), reunion (a waitress intrusively comments on them being a cute gay couple), and conclusion. Kirkman uses facial hair as a transitional device: In flashbacks the men are clean shaven to contrast their bearded contemporary looks.
Even though Dean is the main character I gravitated toward Alex. Dean initially seems to be the more focused adult. He has the respectable job and husband, while Alex seems roguish and mysterious. But then we realize Dean is the one who’s circling his life, cheating on his spouse and selfishly wanting … everything. Alex seems to have lived the carefree life and is trying now to zero in on something more—children and lasting love, perhaps.
But ultimately this is a study of Dean’s progressive-lens life. We watch him struggling to keep the distant past, up-close present and near future in perspective.
Oh, and the dead rats made me smile.
| Marvin Brown’s Movie Review Archive
‘KILLING’ DOC’S DUO PLUNGES INTO ABYSS SEEKING JUSTICE, HUMANITY
Nietzsche warned that when fighting monsters, beware not to become one. Josh Zeman and Rachel Mills warn that when hunting killers, take care to not to forget their victims.
The New York-based producers undertake the daunting task of hunting serial killers and puzzling through the horrors and sorrows left in the aftermath in A&E network’s The Killing Season. The eight-part docu-series bows Nov. 12 and is as relentless in giving voice to forgotten victims and knitting together coalitions to study killers as it is in actually hunting for them.
The Killing Season begins simply enough, though, as a look into the unsolved murders of four prostitutes on Long Island. Zeman and Mills throw themselves into this case in their back yard, detailing the crimes, interviewing law enforcement officials, dropping in on family and friends of the victims, and following leads.
The trail of clues to the initial crimes, which originated in 2010, has long since gone cold, complicated by law enforcement bureaucracy and a lack of cohesive shared evidence and information.
“We are drawn to the idea of helping when police get stuck,” Zeman says. He has experience with the subject matter, having produced and codirected another serial-killer-themed work, Cropsey, in 2009. He and Mills turn to cyber-sleuthing, websites and blogs dedicated with varying degrees to hashing out facts, creating serial-killer profiles and propagating theories. Websleuths.com stands out as a one of the more-credible resources.
As we watch, the team’s scope steadily widens.
A&E
“Alex Gibney (the documentary’s executive producer) encouraged us to look at bigger issues,” Zeman says. So Zeman and Mills began drilling down deeper into their investigation of victims—they are nearly all prostitutes and/or drug-addled low-income women on the fringes—as well as the fractured methods to share data among law enforcement and a disturbing patterns of long-haul truckers. In theory, some of these long-haulers target prostitutes while crisscrossing the nation. It’s a job, we are told, “perfectly suited for picking up a woman in one state and dumping her body in another.” We also learn how the Internet becomes a deadly tool used by killers to target female escorts.
Zeman notes that in this era of social media, smart-device technology and web-savvy citizen across the nation, it was startling to learn that despite the wealth of information at our fingertips, there remains hurdles to unifying these resource into a comprehensive database that can be shared by law enforcement agencies.
“It’s called linkage blindness,” Zeman says. There’s the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (ViCAP) that makes data available to law enforcement agencies, but information is entered into ViCAP voluntarily, Zeman says. The input of data is not mandatory or consistent. While many law enforcement agencies collect data in their regions, the information is not typically connected with systems from other regions.
A powerful element of The Killing Season involves watching Zeman and Mills knit together information from this agency and that agency and match it with information gleaned from fastidious websleuths and geologists who can pinpoint possible burial sites and professors programing algorithms that deduce the hunting grounds of serial killer and amateur profilers who give their FBI counterparts a run for their money.
“Citizens have the most extensive databases we can access,” Zeman says.
Meeting with victims’ family and friends was about more than gleaning information about the cases, Mills says. It offered insight into the lives of often-invisible victims of these crimes. It was a difficult, but rewarding experience, she says. The love ones often emerged as keepers of the flame for the victims.
“Sisters in particular, they continue to tell these stories, keep the memories (of the victims) alive,” says Mills, executive producer at Jigsaw Productions, whose work includes the documentary Killer Legends (2014).
The duo often appears fearless in documentary, whether calling up possible serial killers, or confronting a suspect directly at his home, or taking rides with supposed informants, or meeting clandestinely with mysterious characters.
“Josh was gung-ho,” Mills says. “I had to work up bravery.” But there she is right beside Zeman, journeying into potential danger. At times, the two had to haul around bulletproof vests, Zeman says.
“Of course we got nervous,” Mills says, “but to make our point we had to be bold, to try to give these women justice.”
“These families were braver than us,” she adds.
All told, the duo spent 175 days on the road in an emotionally draining experience.
“We’ll see how people respond,” Zeman says. “Our goal is not to solve one crime, but to solve a whole lot of crimes.”
Take a look into the abyss on Nov. 12 at 9 p.m. ET on A&E.
| Marvin Brown’s Movie Review Archive
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TV series review
The Killing Season (2016)
TV-MA
The most powerful moment in A&E’s eight-part docu-series, The Killing Season, arrives midpoint when documentarians Josh Zeman and Rachel Mills make the startling revelation that their dogged search for a serial killer of at least four prostitutes turns out to be the preverbal tip of the iceberg.
Up to this point we’ve joined them on whirlwind tours of crime scenes and talking-head recollections, punctuated by images of regional maps marked red at the spots where victims were discovered. After journeying through at least seven states, countless police departments, harrowing locales, the intrepid duo connects with a Florida journalist whose work dovetails with the documentarians’ in the worst of ways. We cut to a map of the whole United States as it explodes with red markers denoting unsolved murders of hundreds of prostitutes/drug-addled women from what looks to be the work of hundreds of serial killers. Finally, a series that was careening from one serial-killer theory and conspiracy to another snaps into chilling focus.
Executive produced by Alex Gibney and produced by Jigsaw Productions and Gigantic Pictures, the series arrives Nov. 12 at 9 p.m. ET on the A&E network. It’s like a student project that starts simply but increases victims, killers and theories exponentially, becoming instead a master’s thesis on the subject.
READ MY INTERVIEW WITH JOSH ZEMAN AND RACHEL MILLS
Things start off in typically disturbing yet familiar documentary fashion: Zeman and Mills’ workaday detailing of the history of the Long Island, New York, serial killer (LISK). Soon, the team is in a neighboring community, studying its victims, who have similar and conflicting links to LISK, suggesting two killers may be at work—and even at odds with each other. Next, we follow the team to Atlantic City, drawn there by similar victims and a killer with a similar MO. Then, prostitute killings in Daytona Beach, Florida, seem to be yet another link and/or distraction in this ever-sprawling case. Here the killer may be hidden amongst throngs of spring breakers. All of this sleuthing eventually leads to unnerving revelations of whole-sale slaughter of women spanning the country.
Zeman, like one of those bold reporters willing to go wherever the story takes him before asking whether it’s safe, seems to subsist on caffeine rather than sleep. He’s traversed the serial-killer terrain before in his co-helmed Cropsey, 2009. Mills, equally bold, is harder to read; she’d be a good poker player. She’s quick to follow a lead, to take a ride with a possible suspect, to share space in a trucker’s cab as he tells her she’s dressed to temp rapists; and yet here she is shedding tears speaking with a victim’s relative. The team, which includes at least a cameraman who follows them into every uncertainty, is persistent, whether whacking its way through overgrown fields, exploring decrepit junkyards, traversing lands occupied by disturbing campers, or flirting with an outlaw biker club.
The Killing Season is most effective, though, when meeting friends and family of victims. One such woman keeps ashes of the victim, her best friend, in a box at her feet. Gratuitous, yes, but who else mourns for this all-but-forgotten victim? Another victim’s daughter—seeking understanding and closure—is eager to join the team on an ominous journey to the occupied backwoods where her mom’s body was discovered.
The doc also intrigues with its look into and use of cyber-sleuthing, websites and blogs dedicated with varying degrees to sussing out facts, creating serial-killer profiles and propagating theories. Websleuths.com stands out as a one of the more-credible resources.
We learn that long-haul trucking is a job “perfectly suited for picking up a woman in one state and dumping her body in another.” We are told truck-stop prostitution is the “lowest rung” of prostitution, and we believe it. These women seem to be whispers and faded photographs in a cyclone of terror and bureaucracy, whose sad lives are teased out by the few who knew and loved them. Different theories, different obstacles, different cities—New York, New Jersey, Florida, Oklahoma, Cleveland—but the same creeping terror abounds.
Where we start, on Long Island with the discovery of four female bodies wrapped in burlap, allegedly the victims of a coast-surfing serial killer, to where we end up, Cleveland, following the destruction of hundreds of woman at the hands of two hundred serial killers is a wakeup call—to both our lack of interest in the sadly invisible mothers, sisters and daughters on the fringes of society, and the demons among us left uncheck to fester in the crevices of this nation.
| Marvin Brown’s Movie Review Archive
My essay on “time travel” is among contributions to the latest edition of Insomnia & Obsession magazine, edited by Robert Pope. Fellow author and friend Jim Koloniar (Cannibal Reign) is also featured. Check it out here!
Video review
Indigo Children (2012)
Unrated
In an unremarkable small town that could be any unremarkable small town, a quiet boy is spied upon by a quiet girl. She’s drawn to him because, like her, he’s an Indigo child. This means, according to her, that they are special, different, better, though to the viewer they seem as ordinary and stoic as their town.
Writer-director Eric Chaney’s debut film bows this month in digital format. Deliberately paced, Indigo Children strives to echo the rhythms of small-town pathos. Shots are held, given time to be seen and absorbed.
I say the town’s unremarkable, but the cinematography’s not. Fantastic aerial shots of lush-green fields, mighty trees and ancient railroad tracks are contrasted with a model-train diorama. Homes decayed and moss-covered are contrasted with upscale homes, and a big city on the horizon.
Story proper—young lovers Mark and Christina (Robert Olsen and Isabelle McNally) attempting to connect with themselves and each other—flows through laconic voiceovers, videotape confessions and clipped dialogue. The dialogue, at times, seems intentionally vague.
After the death of his absent father, Mark’s family is reduced to himself and his shattered mother; they move around each other like ghosts. Christina, with her wide eyes, cutoff shorts and forced confidence, launches a relationship with Mark. It’s as if inert Mark’s a potted plant and she’s cultivating a relationship around him. Fond of binoculars, Christina’s new to town, supposedly staying with an uncle who’s never seen.
A second story involves lustful teen boy (Arturo Castro) trying to find a connection with his mother, who never speaks, and is seen each day methodically readying herself for a night out … somewhere, with someone. This disconnection is a reoccurring theme in Chaney’s film. There are always circumstances separating kids from adults—disappearance, death, disillusionment, depression.
Several shots of big-city skyscrapers looming in the distance put a bigger (better?) life in sight, but out of reach.
Chaney, talented at finding emotion in mundane scenes, has an eye for detail and conveys confidence in pacing. The film evokes a strong sense of place; the director hints at personal connections. It’s hard, though, to imagine those beyond the art-house crowd investing in this short, enigmatic tone poem. Its structure is everything our attention-deficit movie-going society sidesteps. Artsy or not, Chaney’s a filmmaker to keep an eye on.
We are all Indigo children, I guess, yearning to be special and to get beyond our stations in life, but struggling to find a way to board a train that will take us there.
| Marvin Brown’s Movie Review Archive
Bloghouse- Ohioana Book Festival| OHIOANA BOOK FESTIVAL Marvin Brown will be at the Ohio HWA booth during the festival. What: Ohioana Book Festival When: April 20, 2024 Where: Columbus Metropolitan Library, 96 S. …
- Book FairCOLUMBUS BOOK FESTIVAL Marvin Brown will be appearing at the event. What: Columbus Book Festival When: July 15-16, 2023 Where: Columbus Metropolitan Library, 96 S. Grant Ave./Topiary Park, 480 E. …
- Interview with Ginger GentileTAKING ON IVY LEAGUE: INTERVIEW WITH ‘EXCLUSION U’ DIRECTOR GINGER GENTILE Activist director sets sights on elite universities Spin the wheel and land on a current hot-button topic …
- Ohioana Book Festival
