daj42

Disclosure: I was not much of a Dr. Who fan until Christopher Eccleston took the role in the early part of this decade, and I have only seen a handful of the episodes starring David Tennant (including the sublimely terrifying "Blink"). Having said that, I must admit that the new series is everything I usually demand not just from good science fiction television, but from good television, period, and I'm looking forward to firing up the Roku player to watch the second and third seasons soon. (Perhaps this Thanksgiving?)

More to disclose: Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey is one of my favorite movies of all time, and one of only three masterpieces the genre has ever produced in the medium. (The other two are Tartovsky's Solaris and Ridley Scott's Bladerunner).

So I guess it should surprise no one that I had a complete dorkgasm as I was watching the below video. (Thanks to Chris Roberson for the link.)

My review of The Fourth Kind is up at Revolution SF, and it isn't pretty.

The aliens are here, and they're abducting unwary individuals in Nome, Alaska. So asserts director Olatunde Osunsanmi's The Fourth Kind, which attempts to take the concept of alien visitation and abduction into the mockumentary territory inhabited by The Blair Witch Project (the first horror movie to stake claim), Cloverfield and the recent Paranormal Activity.

But it has two specific differences: (1) unlike the aforementioned films, The Fourth Kind purports to be based on actual events, backed up by documentary evidence used during the movie itself; and (2) unlike the aforementioned films, it has nothing to recommend it beyond its premise or its dubious assertions.

Read the rest of the trainwreck here.


(Milla Jovovich, looking shocked at my review of her performance.)

In the dream dead cars lined a deserted highway. A blue VW Beetle rested halfway on the shoulder, tires shredded, rims bent, doors open and askew on their hinges. Inside, strips had been ripped from the cloth upholstery, exposing pitted, begrimed padding, and the dashboard sagged as if some behemoth had used it as a chair unable to support its weight completely, yet the windshield, though filthy, remained intact. Farther down the road, a pair of black tire tracks veered off into red sand, where a brown suburban sat buried up to the tops of its tires, its windows shattered and one rear door hanging open like a broken wing on the carapace of a dead insect.

Rinek was driving through the desert of littered cars. It had been a long trip. Ahead, clouds as black as night formed on the horizon like ink that had spilled onto a blotter. Though the windows were rolled up and the air conditioner hissed through a losing battle with the heat, he could smell the moisture tinged with the sun-baked sand. Next to him the dead man hunched in the passenger seat, his head jutting forward on a neck sitting perpendicular to the rest of his body, so he can see through the windshield better, he told Rinek. Rinek told him he shouldn't sit like that, that it was squeezing his insides, and the man told him he was dead so it didn't matter. The dead man was chain smoking. Ashes dropped from his cigarette onto the darkening blood soaking through his white shirt and black jacket, and when he inhaled the tip of the cigarette glowed red but the smoke trailed from the jagged gaping wound that had been cut into his neck, and when the glowing red tip closed in on the brown filter wet with the dead man's spit and blood he pulled another from his jacket pocket and took the lit stub out of his mouth to light it and put the fresh cigarette in his mouth, then crushed out the stub and dropped it onto the floor with the greasy McDonald's wrappers and the stained Styrofoam cups reeking of old coffee. Rinek told the dead man that he shouldn't do that, that he was filling his body with carcinogens, and the dead man blew smoke from the jagged gaping wound that had been cut into his neck and told Rinek that he was dead so it didn't matter. They kept driving, heard the tires hum on the baking black road, and over the hum the radio played America's "Horse with No Name" through crackles of static. They still passed cars sitting by the side of the road or off the road completely, cars with shredded tires and rusted bodies and broken windshields, and as they drove they passed cars with dented doors and crumpled bumpers and shattered headlights and crushed and broken bodies, then the cars were gone and they approached once living bodies in various states of decay: a dead calf, its eyes buzzing with flies; a longhorn with flesh falling from bleached bones; the skeletons of two coyotes, their yellow teeth locked into one another's porous vertebrae. The black clouds grew closer and thunder rumbled. The clouds seeped across the sky like spilled water on a tablecloth but instead of things growing darker color drained from their surroundings, turning everything into a stark black-and-white photograph with only limited shades of gray. The red sand turned white and burned brightly in Rinek's eyes. He looked in the rearview mirror as the black clouds passed overhead and rolled towards the other horizon, bleaching the red sand white, making indistinct the road and the dead things in the road and the sand ahead was white and so bright that even if Rinek closed his eyes he couldn't shield himself from the white. He no longer felt the car moving, no longer heard the hum of the tires or the hiss of the air conditioner or the song on the radio, and as the feel of the steering wheel dissolved beneath his hands he looked at the dead man in the passenger seat and told him that they'd made it, they were there, but all he could see of the dead man was a trace of his jaw and the burning cigarette between his long teeth and eyes as black as charcoal that turned into the shadowed empty eye sockets of a skeleton and he told Rinek that it didn't matter because he was dead, Rinek was dead, everybody was dead.

Halloween is once again almost upon us, and once again some of us will want to prepare by tripping the dark fantastic.  In that spirit, as with my previous list of ten favorite horror novels, I’ve decided to list ten movies that I feel are truly worthy of being part of the video library of those who enjoy this season.

There are, of course, disclaimers.  I have tried to avoid any of the movies out of Universal's classic period, since that list would be far too easy. For that same reason, I have also avoided most of the great movies in Hammer's horror canon.  Moreover, horror is tricky because it does not work for everybody.  As much as I like Re-Animator and Audition, they are simply too off the wall for some.  And then there are the movies that I would have put on this list if I wanted to make it much longer:  Jaws, A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Birds, Alien, The Cat People, The Thing, Cronenberg's remake of The Fly, and a few dozen others.  It's worth your while to seek them out.

So, as I did with the novels list, I have decided to list movies that over the years have not only scared the bejeezus out of me but also lingered in my mind long after the end credits have rolled.  Unlike the novels list, these tend to be straight horror rather than genre crossovers, and they tend to be classics of their genre rather than lesser-known titles.  All should be easy to find at any decent video store, or available through Netflix.

Off we go.



Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956, d. Don Siegel).  Based on Jack Finney’s novel, this classic has become a pop culture icon in its own right, and over fifty years later remains a solid chiller.  Kevin McCarthy plays small town doctor who discovers that the town’s population is being replaced by alien duplicates.  Though the talking points for this movie were McCarthyism when it was first released, its real theme—conformity—is so timeless that it spawned two excellent remakes.  I personally prefer Philip Kaufman’s 1978 remake—something about the pop psychology target (to say nothing of Leonard Nimoy's performance as a psychologist trying to get people to reconnect with their feelings) really gets under my skin—but this is the nodal point, and still delivers.




Psycho (1960, d. Alfred Hitchcock).  Without Hitchcock’s groundbreaking shocker, based on Robert Bloch’s outstanding novel, you would have no Halloween, no Friday the 13th, and perhaps no Thomas Harris.  Indeed, its story and characters are probably so well-known that I do not need to mention them, but for those of you who are either philistines or live in a box, Marion Crane has stolen $40,000 from her employer to start a new life with her lover Sam Loomis.  Caught in a rainstorm, she drives off the main highway and into a motel run by Norman Bates, a young man obsessed with his mother. Forget Gus Van Sant’s insipid 1998 remake, this is the real deal.




The Exorcist (1973, d. William Friedkin).  There’s something about religious horror movies that really gets to me, most of it having to do with my own Lutheran upbringing.  I became a Buddhist a couple of years ago, but the ideas behind Christian symbology nonetheless make up a significant part of my psyche.  As a consequence, I tend to find horror movies with religious overtones scarier than most others.  I mean, if you’re being attacked by vampires, werewolves, zombies or aliens then you’re dealing with something physical and you can fight it.  But dealing with the forces of darkness, metaphysical beings…how do you fight that?  (My friend Paul Miles has this same problem.)  That said, this is another movie that really needs no introduction, with good reason: everything you’ve heard about how terrifying it is, is absolutely true.  As in the novel on which it is based, an actress notices drastic changes in her twelve-year-old daughter’s behavior while a young priest begins to doubt his faith while dealing with his mother's illness.  The set pieces are so legendary that the rest—direction, acting, writing—almost go without saying.




Deep Red (Profondo Rosso) (1975, d. Dario Argento).  A psychic inadvertently reads the mind of a murderer and becomes the killer’s victim.  David Hemmings plays a jazz musician who witnesses her murder and becomes the killer’s prey as he begins his own investigation.  Fans and critics often call director Dario Argento “the Italian Alfred Hitchcock,” an overstatement with, nonetheless, more than a grain of truth.  Argento lacks Hitchcock’s adept pacing, and his movies seldom hold up on a narrative level, but he knows how to use suspense, his photography is beautiful, and his violent set pieces are visually arresting.  I prefer this to the better-known but overblown Suspiria.




Salo: 120 Days of Sodom (1975, d. Pier Paolo Pasolini). If any movie should come with a warning, this would be it. One of the most infamous movies ever made, Salo chronicles four Italian noblemen in the last days of Fascist Italy who round up sixteen teenage boys and girls in a secluded villa and subject them to a series of degrading events inspired by the Marquis de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom. Pasolini (who was murdered shortly after the movie's completion) structures this political allegory using Dante's Divine Comedy, and never flinches from the sequences of torture and madness, making the movie all the more disturbing. It's not easy to take, but worthwhile for those who can see past the nauseating images to the commentary on power, consumer culture, and fascism. You've been warned.




The Shining (1980, d. Stanley Kubrick).  Stephen King, who wrote the novel on which this chiller is based, once opined that director Stanley Kubrick didn’t understand the horror genre.  Even if true, it doesn’t make this tale of a family stuck in an abandoned hotel with evil ghosts any less terrifying.  In fact, the hotel’s modernity makes things more frightening, as do the over-the-top performance by Jack Nicholson and the silent-movie-style looks of Shelly Duvall.  I’ll admit bias, as I’m a sucker for almost anything by Kubrick, but as haunted house stories go, few are as genuinely creepy.




Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn (1987, d. Sam Raimi).  Before Sam Raimi turned his back on horror movies to make smaller, more personal movies like Spider-Man, he made what is perhaps the greatest horror comedy of all.  Ash (played by Bruce Campbell) takes his girlfriend to a secluded cabin and plays a professor's tape recorded recitation of passages from the Book of the Dead calling forth up an evil forces from the woods. Chainsaws, shotguns, crazed disembodied hands and flying eyeballs: honestly, what more could you possibly want from a motion picture?  (Sorry, no tree-raping scene this time out.)  It is, in the words of Ash, "groovy."




Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992, d. Francis Ford Coppola). Billed at the time of its release as the most faithful adaption of Stoker's great novel, Coppola's lavish, extravagant picture emphasizes the tragic aspects of the main character (Gary Oldman, in a captivating performance) and his doomed love affair with Mina, portrayed here by Wynona Ryder, all the while dazzling us with incredible sets and masterful camerawork. Perhaps not the most frightening work on this list, but certainly one of the most beautiful.




The Host, Gwoemul (d. Joon-ho Bong, 2006). In this Korean updating of practically every Godzilla movie ever made, a lazy slob sees his daughter taken by a monster born of toxic sludge dumped by the U.S. military in Seoul's Han River. There are great shots and genuine food for thought here (one subplot has the government exploiting public fears for its own purposes), as well as a lot of suspense.




Let the Right One In, Låt den rätte komma in (d. Tomas Alfredson, 2008). Shortly after seeing this subtle, lyrical film, my oldest son called it the greatest vampire movie ever made. In truth, it is hard for me to disagree. Set during the early 1980s, it follows twelve-year-old Oskar, who must deal both with his distant mother and a gaggle of vicious school bullies, as he begins a relationship with his dark-haired new neighbor Eli, who appears to be his age on the surface but is in fact much older. This is a chilling movie, both in terms of its locale (you can almost feel the snow in every shot) and its subject matter, and lingers long after you've left the theater. By turns touching and terrifying. Note: look for the version with the original subtitles.

I've been in retreat all weekend, and now that I'm back I've taken an assessment of the work I need to do over the next couple of weeks. To wit:

A review of the movie The Fourth Kind, to be turned in sometime tomorrow evening;

My review of the Alastair Reynolds double-novella collection "Thousandth Night and Minla's Flowers,", to be turned in by Tuesday;

Read and review Transition by Iain M. Banks; and

Two short stories, one science fiction, one horror, to be completed before the end of November.

And that's not counting all of the day job stuff pending.

And how is your world?

Halloween is once again almost upon us, and once again some of us will want to prepare by tripping the dark fantastic. In that spirit, I’ve come up with ten books that I feel are truly worthy of being placed upon the shelves of those who enjoy this season.

There are, of course, some disclaimers. Not all of these books are, strictly speaking, horror. While I could come up with ten titles that one could more traditionally place in the genre, in my opinion too few of those books are genuinely scary, thus failing as "horror," so consequently hold little interest for me. In addition, many of those that do in fact provide a good scare are already so well known that you don’t really need me to recommend them. (Do you really need to hear from yet another person how creepy Blatty’s The Exorcist and Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby actually are? Do you really need yet another person to recommend that you read Shelley’s Frankenstein or Bram Stoker’s Dracula because they’re genre classics?) Worse still, some of the titles that are classics and are fairly well-known are unfortunately and inexplicably out of print and difficult to obtain, which is why I'm not listing David Martin's Lie to Me or Dennis Etchison's Darkside, though both are worth your time.

So, rather than list titles that are straight horror or hard to come by, I have decided to list books that meet my demands for this rather fluid category. They tend to cross genres, but if you’re in the mood for a good scare then you can do a lot worse than these. One or two might be hard to come by, but they should be easy to scare up on Amazon.

On to the fun.

Ten Scary Reads:



The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks. Banks’ first novel caused quite a stir when it was first published, and probably would do so today. Frank Cauldhame is a teenager living with his father on a remote island off the coast of Scotland. He is also responsible for the murders of three members of his family, making each look like a freak accident. Now his brother Eric has escaped from an insane asylum and is coming home for what seems to be a showdown with his brother. Great, disquieting stuff.




The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick. Yes, it’s science fiction, but it’s one of the most nightmarish novels ever to come out of the genre. Can-D is the drug of choice for most of the Earth’s inhabitants, allowing them to live briefly in the world of Perky Pat. But Palmer Eldritch has returned from an alien star system with the drug Chew-Z, which can completely—-and perhaps permanently—-alter the reality of those who take it. I don’t know if it’s Dick’s best novel, but it’s definitely one of the top three.




Lord of the Flies by William Golding. Not technically horror, Golding’s best known work remains a powerful, haunting tale of boys left alone on a deserted island after a nuclear war has broken out, and chronicles their descent into savagery. You always hear about classic works being stuffy and dull. This one isn’t.




Falling Angel by William Hjortsberg. In this wonderfully gruesome chiller, New York private detective Harry Angel is hired by a mysterious gentleman to locate missing crooner Johnny Favorite. Along the way he uncovers many bodies and more than a few Louisiana voodoo practitioners who don’t want Favorite to be found. A great melding of mystery and horror that was made into the quite good (if stylistically overwrought) Angel Heart.




The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. A true classic of supernatural literature, The Haunting of Hill House tells the story of Eleanor Vance, a shy loner who receives an invitation from supernatural investigator John Montague to take part in a gathering of those who have been touched by paranormal phenomena at Hill House, a foreboding estate in New England. Eleanor, it seems, is a supernatural magnet; none of the others attract as much attention as she. Richard Matheson’s Hell House is, in some ways, scarier but more overt, as is Stephen King’s The Shining, but both owe a great debt to this subtle, harrowing work.




High Cotton by Joe R. Lansdale. Lansdale’s excellent short story collection showcases a wonderful blend of humor (“Steppin’ Out, Summer, ‘68”), suspense (“The Pit,” “The Steel Valentine”), setting (“The Fat Man and the Elephant”) and just plain weirdness (“Bob the Dinosaur Goes to Disneyland”). And it features “Night They Missed the Horror Show,” one of the most disturbing horror stories ever written.




Our Lady of Darkness by Fritz Leiber. A mounting sense of dread permeates Leiber’s World Fantasy Award-winning novel about a writer and recovering alcoholic who investigates the life of a long-dead spiritual philosopher. With references to Clark Ashton Smith and Dashiell Hammett, it often reads like a prose version of Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which is high praise indeed.




I Am Legend by Richard Matheson. I could have chosen a half dozen of Matheson's novels, but opted, finally, for what is perhaps his best known, at least currently. It’s probably the most influential vampire novel of the twentieth century, and remains one scary read to boot. Vampires have overrun the earth, and Robert Neville, the planet’s only remaining human, fights daily for survival. Stephen King once cited this as his favorite novel, and it’s easy to see why.




The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers. Of all the fine books on this list, this novel by one of Philip Dick's friends is the only one that I can honestly say has it all: time travel, rich Dickensian characters, poetry scholars, Egyptian gods, secret societies, ancient mysticism, and spooky clowns. Brendan Doyle joins a group of time travelers to hear a lecture by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but finds himself among Gypsies led by an Egyptian sorcerer who wants to overthrow the English Monarchy. What's not to love? (Oh, and I understand that Powers's novel On Stranger Tides will be the basis for the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie. Now that is cool.)




Song of Kali by Dan Simmons. As is the case with Matheson, I could have chosen among several of this author's fine novels, but decided to go with his first. Simmons won the World Fantasy Award for this, his first novel, about a poet who journeys to Calcutta to track down the author, long believed dead, of a poem that could bring in the Age of Kali. It is neither his best work—-that, perhaps, is Phases of Gravity-—nor his most ambitious-—the engaging suspense thriller The Crook Factory-—but Simmons makes his setting a malevolent entity that lingers in the mind, and presents us with some truly chilling moments.

Via Liz Hand. Shatner's capacity for awesomeness is limitless.

Sent to me by my friend Brennan. This Long Life Prayer for Tenzin Gyatso, The 14th Dalai Lama, may be recited on his Birthday, today July 6, 2009, or any other auspicious time...

OM SVASTI

To the assembly of most kind teachers, both present and past -
the miraculous dance of the body, speech and mind of innumerable Buddhas
manifesting in accord with aspirants' spiritual capacities,
the wish-granting jewel, the source of all virtue and goodness -
to you, we offer our prayers with fervent devotion:
That Tenzin Gyatso, protector of the Land of Snows,
live for a hundred aeons.
Shower on him your blessings so that his aspirations are fulfilled
without hindrance.

To the assembly of all meditational deities
manifesting as countless mandalas and divinities -
the magical clouds of immaculate, transcendent wisdom
reaching to the farthest expanse of the space of ultimate reality -
to you, we offer our prayers with fervent devotion:
That Tenzin Gyatso, protector of the Land of Snows,
live for a hundred aeons.
Shower on him your blessings so that his aspirations are fulfilled
without hindrance.

To all the victorious Buddhas of the three times
endowed with ten powers and who are even masters of the gods,
and whose attributes of perfection are the source of all compassionate deeds
benefiting the vast ocean-like realm of sentient beings,
to you, we offer our prayers with fervent devotion:
That Tenzin Gyatso, protector of the Land of Snows,
live for a hundred aeons.
Shower on him your blessings so that his aspirations are fulfilled
without hindrance.

To the assembly of sacred doctrine embodied in the Three Vehicles,
supremely serene, a jewel-treasure of enlightenment,
stainless, unchanging, eternally good, and the glory of all virtues,
which actually liberates beings from the sufferings of the three worlds,
to you, we offer our prayers with fervent devotion:
That Tenzin Gyatso, protector of the Land of Snows,
live for a hundred aeons.
Shower on him your blessings so that his aspirations are fulfilled
without hindrance.

To all members of the enlightening, noble spiritual community,
who never stray from the thoroughly liberating adamantine city,
who possess the wisdom eye that directly sees the profound truth
and the highest valour to destroy all machinations of cyclic existence,
to you, we offer our prayers with fervent devotion:
That Tenzin Gyatso, protector of the Land of Snows,
live for a hundred aeons.
Shower on him your blessings so that his aspirations are fulfilled
without hindrance.

To the assembly of heroes and dakinis, heavenly beings of the three worlds,
who appear in the highest paradises, in the sacred places, and in the
cremation grounds, and who, through creative play in the hundred-fold
experiences of bliss and emptiness, support practitioners in their
meditation on the excellent path, to you, we offer our prayers
with fervent devotion:
That Tenzin Gyatso, protector of the Land of Snows,
live for a hundred aeons.
Shower on him your blessings so that his aspirations are fulfilled
without hindrance.

To the ocean of protectors endowed with eyes of transcendent wisdom -
the powerful guardians and upholders of the teaching
who wear inseparably on their matted locks
the knot symbolising their pledge to the Vajra Holder -
to you, we offer our prayers with fervent devotion:
That Tenzin Gyatso, protector of the Land of Snows,
live for a hundred aeons. Shower on him your blessings
so that his aspirations are fulfilled without hindrance.

Thus to this congregation of excellent, undeceiving refuge,
we pray that by the power of this prayer
expressed from a heart filled with fervent devotion and humility,
may the body, speech and mind of the sole of the Land of Snows,
the supreme Ngawang Lobsang Tenzin Gyatso,
be indestructible, unfluctuating and unceasing;
may he live immutable for a hundred aeons,
seated on a diamond throne, transcending decay and destruction.

You are the jewel-heart embodying all compassionate, beneficial deeds;
O most courageous one, you carry upon your shoulders
the burden of all the Buddhas of the infinite realms.
May all your noble aspirations be fulfilled as intended.

By virtue of this may the heavenly doors of the fortunate era open
eternally as a source of relief and respite for all beings;
And may the auspicious signs reach the apex of existence and release,
as the sacred teachings flourish through all times and in all realms.

May the nectar-stream of the blessings of the Lotus Holder
always enter our hearts and nourish it with strength.
May we please you with our offerings of dedicated practice,
And may we reach beyond the shores of perfect, compassionate deeds.

Through the blessings of the wondrous Buddhas and Bodhisattvas,
by the infallible truth of the laws of dependent origination,
and by the purity of our fervent aspirations,
may the aims of my prayer be fulfilled without hindrance.

Sarva Mangalm!

I saw the movie Taken a while back at the discount cinema outside of Austin. I paid $1.50 to watch ex-CIA officer Liam Neeson rescue his daughter from white slave traffickers and can honestly say I got my money’s worth, but no more, because I never completely engaged with the material. Part of it was due to the standard movie thriller ridiculousness – firing guns in small apartments without deafening any of the occupants, or even alerting neighbors – but more of it had to do with its betrayal of how the best thrillers should work, and with a fundamental flaw with this type of thriller.

The best thrillers traditionally concern ordinary people thrust into extraordinary circumstances. They may have specialized knowledge or hobbies (see the narrator of Geoffrey Household’s sublime Rogue Male), they may possess specialized skills (see Rambo, sans the John, in David Morrell’s brutal but effective First Blood), but on they whole they are regular people who must overcome incredible odds in order to survive. (In this respect, they resemble American naturalists such as Jack London, whose protagonists faced incredible challenges, many of them natural, that were often too great for their own modest abilities.) Law enforcement either cannot or will not believe their circumstances, either because they believe the protagonist to be delusional, or because they believe the protagonist to be the actual danger, or because they themselves are complicit in the conspiracy against the protagonist. The antagonists themselves are often smarter, better equipped, better manned and better funded, which means that the protagonist must learn to outsmart his or her opponents. He must learn that he is better than they. It is something Hitchcock understood when he made The Thirty-Nine Steps, The Man Who Knew Too Much and North by Northwest, and which the first-time director of Taken turns upside down.

Taken’s protagonist is ex-CIA. He is better trained than his Armenian antagonists they have more people and more money, but aren’t any smarter than your average street thugs, making them little threat. (Indeed, they resemble the Spangled Mob in Ian Fleming’s novel Diamonds Are Forever, who has significant manpower but nothing in the way of brains.) This bleeds the film of suspense because it treats the viewer not to an ordinary man overcoming extraordinary odds, but a trained professional picking off second-rate criminals. It’s like watching an exterminator kill roaches or a pimply teenager play a video game: mildly amusing, but lacking in any real involvement. A better way to have handled the material would have been to have Kim, Neeson’s daughter, once captured, overcome her captors and escape. Instead, actress Maggie Grace spends most of her time staggering through her scenes in a drugged state. By focusing on Neeson’s professional, the filmmakers fuel a power fantasy of justifiable homicide.

If Taken upends the standard thriller format, it retains the thriller’s fundamental flaw: nothing actually happens. Neither the world nor the characters that inhabit it change. In the thriller, sabers may rattle, but in the end the protagonist manages to keep the world in the same shape it was before bad people decided to do bad things. It upholds the status quo, keeping the social order instead of transforming it, even if the transformation might be horrifying.

This is not always the case. Change occurs in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, as well as in the film version of The Sum of All Fears, but for the most part the protagonist’s challenge, for all of the events that unfold, involves keeping change from the Hegelian “becoming” into “being.” This is exactly the opposite of how fiction should work.

The world of the thriller is rigid, frozen, unchanging. But things change. Things do change, even in what we consider escapist fiction. Think of Frank Herbert’s Dune, in which Paul Atreides is left by the Harkonnens to die in the desert. He does not fight to restore the old social order, but instead ursurps it, turning Arrakis over to the Fremen. And Gully Foyle in The Stars My Destination does not try to return PyrE to its rightful owners, but instead gives the entire solar system the ability to use PyrE…for their own benefit, or their own destruction. Even the most recent Star Trek movie, by destroying the planet Vulcan and altering the entire series’ time stream, changed the very universe on which its initial template was built.

It would be nice to see a thriller, either in film or in print, break this mold. If the very nature of fiction is change, then the thriller could benefit from letting their protagonists change the world, rather than letting it stagnate.

Not just a series of tubes. This animated documentary was produced by Melih Bilgil, a freelance graphic designer in Germany, using a set of 22 icons.


History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.

This is the coolest bit of tech demonstration/design since the Nokia Morph concept animation.

My (brief) review of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is up at RevolutionSF.

Fincher appears to be channeling not Fitzgerald but Steven Spielberg, in particular the Spielberg of “Kick the Can” from Twilight Zone: The Movie. And that turns out to be only one of the picture’s problems.

During a screening of the Swedish vampire picture Let the Right One In we caught the trailer for Waltz with Bashir, Ari Folman's animated picture about the horrors of the 1982 Lebanon War.



I'd never heard of it before and will certainly catch it once it hits theaters here in Austin. But now I'm even more interested because, according to io9, Folman also wants to make a movie out of Stanislaw Lem's outstanding dystopia The Futurological Congress, the tale of astronaut Ijon Tichy's visit to the the futurist gathering of the Eighth World Congress and his subsequent visit to the overcrowded world of 2039. I first read it as a college freshman in part because I had read and enjoyed Lem's essay on Philip K. Dick in his book Microworlds, but I wasn't prepared for how well he managed to pull off this pastiche of both Dick and Jonathan Swift. It immediately became one of my favorite novels, and one that is hard for me not to recommend to others.



Like Bashir, Congress will be filmed using a mixture of live-action and animation, similar to the rotoscoping technique used in Richard Linklater's excellent A Scanner Darkly.



Finally, I can honestly say that somebody is making a science fiction movie that I'm actually looking forward to.

Jack Black as Jesus? I'm down with it despite the typecasting...

Via Lou Anders:

From John D.'s blog.

Your result for The Classic Leading Man Test...

Cary Grant

You scored 24% Tough, 14% Roguish, 29% Friendly, and 33% Charming!

Take The Classic Leading Man Test at HelloQuizzy

This I definitely can see.

Hands down, this is the funniest thing I've seen all week.

The folks at Runaway Box really have captured the despairing, snarky culture of contemporary corporate America in a series of YouTube videos lasting a few minutes each. Think of these as a live-action Dilbert, or maybe Office Space for those with the attention spans of a right-wing talk-show host.

Here's my favorite from The Elevator.



I'm curious to know what a Ford Focus turned inside-out would look like.

And here's one from their series Man in the Box. (No, it has nothing to do with the Alice in Chains song.)



Yep, it's kinda like that where I work.

You don't want to see this. Don't ask why I'm posting it.

Stolen from Jonathan Strahan.

Instructions: Go to www.popCulturemadness.com and select the year you became 18. Paste the list of the top 75 songs. Bold the ones you liked; strike the ones you disliked; and italicize the ones you know but don’t exactly like nor dislike. The ones you don’t know will stay common text.

This is what there was to listen to:


1. That's What Friends Are For - Dionne & Friends
2. Addicted To Love - Robert Palmer
3. Kiss - Prince
4. Walk This Way - Run D.M.C./Aerosmith
5. Living In America - James Brown
6. Take My Breath Away - Berlin
7. Burning Heart - Survivor
8. Walk Like An Egyptian - The Bangles
9. The Sweetest Taboo - Sade
10. You Give Love A Bad Name - Bon Jovi
11. Higher Love - Steve Winwood
12. Never As Good As The First Time - Sade
13. Greatest Love Of All - Whitney Houston
14. Tarzan Boy - Baltimora
15. Sledgehammer - Peter Gabriel
16. You're A Friend Of Mine - Clarence Clemons & Jackson Browne
17. Manic Monday - The Bangles
18. Glory Of Love - Peter Cetera
19. Like A Rock - Bob Seger
20. I Knew The Bride (When She Used To Rock and Roll) - Nick Lowe
21. Word Up - Cameo
22. Conga - Miami Sound Machine
23. The Men All Pause - Klymaxx
24. In Your Eyes - Peter Gabriel
25. Live To Tell - Madonna
26. Dancing On The Ceiling - Lionel Richie
27. Venus - Bananarama
28. Typical Male - Tina Turner
29. Take Me Home Tonight - Eddie Money
30. Rock Me Amadeus - Falco
31. I Can't Wait - Nu Shooz
32. If You Leave - O.M.D.
33. You Be Illin' - Run DMC
34. Crush On You - The Jets
35. The Rain - Oran "Juice" Jones
36. Papa Don't Preach - Madonna
37. Mad About You - Belinda Carlisile
38. R.O.C.K. In The USA - John "Cougar" Melloncamp
39. Danger Zone - Kenny Loggins
40. Words Get In The Way - Miami Sound Machine
41. Walk Of Life - Dire Straits
42. I'm Your Man - Wham!
43. West End Girls - Pet Shop Boys
44. All Cried Out - Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam With Full Force
45. We Don't Have To Take Our Clothes Off - Jermaine Stewart
46. My Hometown - Bruce Springsteen
47. On My Own - Patti LaBelle & Michael McDonald
48. Everybody Have Fun Tonight - Wang Chung
49. All I Need Is A Miracle - Mike & the Mechanics
50. Tuff Enuff - Fabulous Thunderbirds
51. The Future's So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades- Timbuk3
52. Love Walks In - Van Halen
53. Shot In The Dark - Ozzie Osbourne
54. The Next Time I Fall - Peter Cetera & Amy Grant
55. Move Away - Culture Club
56. Day By Day - Hooters
57. Rumors - Timex Social Club
58. I Wanna Be A Cowboy - Boys Don't Cry
59. The Power Of Love - Jennifer Rush
60. One Step Closer - Gavin Christopher
61. A Love Bizarre - Sheila E.
62. Everybody Dance - Ta Mara and the Seen
63. Sex As A Weapon - Pat Benatar
64. Superbowl Shuffle - Chicago Bears
65. Live Is Life - Opus
66. Great Gosh A'Mighty - Little Richard
67. Jungle Boy - John Eddie
68. Crazay - Jesse Johnson and Sly Stone
69. More Than Physical - Bananarama
70. Baby Talk - Alisha
71. Pleasure and Pain - Divinyls
72. Don Quichotte - Magazine 60
73. Why Can't This Be Love - Van Halen
74. Once In A Lifetime - Talking Heads
75. Caravan of Love - Isley Jasper Isley