Kevin Rush's Blog

Recently, a reviewer for Online Book Club gave The Wedding Routine Four Stars Out of Four , calling it an "amazing book" with "dynamic characters" who "produce nothing but comic gold." You can read the complete review here. https://forums.onlinebookclub.org/vie...

P.D. James emasculates a planet in Children of Men; Cormac McCarthy seeks salvation on The Road. By Kevin Rush

Released in 2006, but set in 2027, Alfonso Cuarón’s dystopian thriller, Children of Men is frenetic and at times intense, though ultimately incoherent and unfocused. In a near future where all women have become infertile, a disenchanted bureaucrat or journalist—it’s not clear—falls in with a band of violent extremists who needs his help to smuggle out of the country the first woman to become pregnant in a quarter century.


I saw this film when it first came out and didn’t much care for it. Cuarón was too busy weaving in themes of the Iraq War to focus on the central premise of the film: How would the world react to a global crisis of infertility?

Continue reading at:

https://kevinrush.us/2021/11/30/if-i-...

Boldly enigmatic, notoriously inscrutable, and featuring a grandiose fusion of classical music and cinematic images, Stanley Kubrick’s dazzling science fiction epic, 2001: A Space Odyssey has mesmerized and confounded audiences for decades. Released in 1968, 2001 was largely ignored at Oscar time. But today, the American Film Institute ranks it as the greatest science fiction film of all time.

2001 began as a collaboration between producer/director Kubrick and the famed sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke. The plot is drawn from Clarke’s 1951 short story, The Sentinel of Eternity...

Continue reading at... https://kevinrush.us/2021/11/16/if-i-...

Bizarre animal, mineral, and human behavior in The Birds and Picnic at Hanging Rock. By Kevin Rush

Halloween is finally in the rearview mirror, but we can still talk about eerie goings on that capture our cinephile imaginations. Today, two haunting tales of enigmatic terror.

Continue reading at: https://kevinrush.us/2021/11/02/if-i-...

After my rant on another space against what Halloween has become, I thought I’d revisit what Halloween once was. A kid’s day of campy fright and copious candy? Of course, there was that, but there was also a sense of horror, closer to its original meaning. The word has Latin roots, stemming from the verb “to bristle,” as in hair standing on end, due to dread—and get this—veneration and religious awe. This is what separates classic horror from conventional slasher films. Horror is not just the fear of temporal harm or torment. It’s the dread of a supernatural force that attacks us on the spiritual level.

For me, nothing I’ve ever seen or read captures that definition so completely as Bram Stoker’s celebrated horror novel, Dracula. The horror Stoker depicts isn’t simply creepy or scary, it’s cosmically consequential. Deranged murderers wielding machetes or chainsaws are frightening, but they cannot touch their victims beyond the grave. Mourners can bury them believing they’ll rest in peace. But Stoker’s novel is horrifying, because he threatens the notion of eternal rest. Stoker creates a world of perverse religious veneration, where the Count is a false god, collecting souls as well as strewing corpses. Dracula is whom Jesus warned us to fear in Matthew 10:28: “…do not fear those who kill the body, but are unable to kill the soul; but rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.”

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I recently received a cover blurb for my upcoming novel, The Wedding Routine.

“The Wedding Routine is real, raw and heartwarmingly funny. In the "song and dance" of life, this lovely story teaches how to lead with your heart. It showcases how helping people not only benefits those receiving, but is therapeutic for those who give.”
— Laura Orrico, TV and Film Actress and President of Laura Orrico Public Relations, LLC

Thank you, Laura!

Twisted psychology and dark humor in The Talented Mr. Ripley and Fight Club. By Kevin Rush.

If you’ve ever gotten into a roommate situation you’ve regretted, you can probably appreciate this week’s two books. In each, a new acquaintance appears mysteriously, moves in and creates mayhem. Sure, there are plenty of bad iterations of this basic plot—I’m looking at you, Single White Female—but our featured authors masterfully elevate their tales with haunting portrayals of human psychology at the breaking point.
Continue reading at: https://kevinrush.us/2021/10/26/if-i-...

Supernatural terror from The Exorcist and Frankenstein. By Kevin Rush.
We’re past the middle of October, so it’s a ghoulishly good time to look at horror films. Not that I’m a big fan of what Halloween has become. What had been a fun kid’s holiday has, in recent decades, metastasized into an off-putting celebration of adult perversity. Hollywood continues to turn out “horror” films, but gone are the good scares, replaced by stomach-churning, slow torture. Evil in all its banality that fails to deliver chills. So, this column is dedicated to those days when horror was entertaining and scary, rather than desensitizing and addictive. That last point is important, because Halloween was originally practiced as a warning against demons prowling the earth for the ruin of souls. Thus, it was good to be scared. Today, the darkness has become too seductive, and that’s not good, as our first film ably demonstrates.

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The Western is the archetypal American story. Its roots go back at least to the early 19th century and James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales. In those five novels, Cooper laid out the rules that future writers would assiduously follow: the unyielding land, the Noble Savage and his ruthless counterpart, and the frontiersman, whose identity is so closely tied to a changing landscape that once he tames the land, he finds he can no longer inhabit it. Drawing on existential struggles with nature and against our own human nature, Westerns gained popularity the world over. In Hollywood, they have made an indelible impact that has bled into other film genres as well. I've watched Western movies and TV shows all my life, but I've read very few Western novels. Today I look at two which served as source material for two of the greatest Western films ever made: Shane and The Searchers.

Continue reading here: https://kevinrush.us/2021/10/12/if-i-...

From The Petrified Forest to The Harder They Fall, Humphrey Bogart was the undisputed King of Film Noir. As Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, Bogey set the tone for hard-boiled gumshoes navigating “the great wrong place” and surviving the intrigues of the deadly femme fatale. In Key Largo, he embodied the soul-dead weariness of a disillusioned crusader, who’d concluded the world was just too rotten to save. Bogart was so noir, he could shed the shadows and fog, defying the disinfecting powers of sunlight, to play betrayal, corruption and revenge on the picturesque streets of San Francisco. In Dark Passage, with the help of a fortuitous self-defenestration, and after the necessary extermination of underworld vermin no one would miss, Bogart extricates himself from peril and achieves one of the rare happy endings in a film that is nevertheless truly noir. Continue reading at https://kevinrush.us/2021/10/01/if-i-...