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Dahlia DeWinters - Author

Quirky Heroines, Happy Endings

Movie Review: The Battery

Title: The Battery
Genre: Horror: Zombies
Director: Jeremy Gardner
IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2272350/

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In a land ravaged by the undead, Ben and Mickey must first learn to survive each other.

It’s a zombie movie. Of course I’m going to watch it, either through my fingers or like a boss, but I’m going to watch it. I liked the movie poster. I’m still a fan of the baseball move to whack a zombie skull, so to see one of the characters holding a bat…I was pretty pleased.

This is not your typical zombie movie with the characters hiding in an attic or basement, surviving on canned food and sniping at each other. Rather, this is an open movie: regaling us with the beauty of the New England countryside in summer while also reminding us of the danger that lurks around nearly every corner.

The director, Jeremy Gardner, is also one of the main characters named Ben. Ben has an epic beard and is the alpha of the two males. The second main character, Mickey, is the softer type. He walks around with headphones on, keeping the music going in his ears as he follows Ben through the woods and along the roads, basically allowing Ben to make most of the decisions and all of the zombie kills.

Ben’s growing impatience with Mickey’s refusal to cope with their reality leads to some interesting scenes that I won’t spoil here.

Overall, this is more of a character study of the two men and how they react to these new circumstance than a run-for-your-life post apocalyptic movie.

Special Effects: The effects are not the point here. If I read correctly, Gardner spent about 6k to make the film in two weeks. Don’t go into this expecting realistic splatter and gross-out gore.

Watch or not to watch?:
If you like quiet, self-contained movies and the dynamic of male relationships, then you’ll like this movie. If you’re looking for blood, gore, brains and breathless chases, you will find this movie boring.

Trivia: In baseball, the term battery refers collectively to the pitcher and the catcher, who may also be called batterymen[1] or batterymates of one another. (wikipedia.org)

Grade: A minus


Filed Under: Horror Movie Reviews, Uncategorized Tagged: dahlia dewinters, horror movies, jeremy gardner, reviews, the battery, zombies

Writing is not Teaching

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freedigitalphotos.net

Nearly every person reading this has received a bad review at one time or another, whether it be a poor grade in a class, a poor performance review at work, or (gulp) a bad review on a book.  Given my successful experience as an educator (backed by  a file full of good reviews) my take on reviews were a lot different.  Let me explain.

As a teacher in a room full of students, it is your job to convey the material to them.  That is to say, if you administer a test and more than ten percent of the class fails, you’ve failed as a teacher and the material must be re-taught.  The purpose of a teacher is to ensure that students are learning and retaining the material because every lesson taught builds upon the one before it.  If they miss out today, then the next portion of material will be that much harder for the student.

A brief example:  if a student doesn’t understand the concepts of addition and subtraction, then teaching them multiplication and division would be difficult, as the latter concepts are simply repeated addition and subtraction. (I could go on all day about math, but I’ll restrain myself.  For all of our sakes.)

I carried that same mentality over into my profession as a writer, not realizing that some absolutes don’t transfer.  When I received that two star review, it wasn’t the rating that bothered me the most – it was the fact that the reviewer didn’t “get” what I was trying to convey.  Therefore, I felt that I wasn’t doing my “job” as a writer because they didn’t understand my story.

Then, I realized something.  I write to entertain, not to teach.  This is fiction, not a textbook.  If you look at the plethora of television shows, books, movies and music that are available, you realize the spectrum of taste that is out there.  Perhaps my story wasn’t entertaining to this particular person.  They didn’t identify with the heroine, or a word I used yanked them out of the story. Maybe they didn’t like the hero.  Who knows?  I re-read and read a lot of books to which people have given bad reviews.  Conversely, I’ve wrinkled my nose at reading some books that people found fan-freaking-tastic.

Writing fiction is not teaching two plus two.  The entertainment/enjoyment value of my writing  to a random person is so subjective that it simply cannot be gauged. And since it cannot be gauged, then, I have to fall back on À chacun son gout:  To each one his taste.

But here’s a story I’ll hope you do like…tis the season!

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged: authors, dahlia dewinters, reviews

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