Link Dump

Just some links for your enjoyment…

  • Make it Stop: Dreamcatcher – Devin Faraci’s epic takedown of a bad Stephen King adaptation.

    It’s like this series of non-sequiters; the opening of Dreamcatcher is almost avant garde in how weird and unsettling it is. The movie opens by daring you to keep watching – “We’re starting with this nonsense, imagine where we’re going to end up!” And where you end up is a movie about shit weasels and Morgan Freeman’s baffling eyebrows.

    I’ve seen the movie. It was a while ago, and yeah, it’s pretty bad, but in a so-bad-it’s-good kinda way. Faraci addresses that sort of thing in his review, but I still think it takes talent to make something this bad. I don’t mean to say that they did it intentionally, but you have to have a certain level of ambition to make something this bad.

  • My Zombie, Myself: Why Modern Life Feels Rather Undead – Chuck Klosterman’s musings on why Zombies are so popular these days.

    You can’t add much depth to a creature who can’t talk, doesn’t think and whose only motive is the consumption of flesh. You can’t humanize a zombie, unless you make it less zombie-esque. There are slow zombies, and there are fast zombies— that’s pretty much the spectrum of zombie diversity. It’s not that zombies are changing to fit the world’s condition; it’s that the condition of the world seems more like a zombie offensive. Something about zombies is becoming more intriguing to us. And I think I know what that something is.

    Zombies are just so easy to kill.

    He’s got some interesting ideas, but on the other hand, this highlights one of the big problems with zombies. They’re so easy to attach meaning to that they quickly become meaningless.

  • The Rose in Winter – I suppose this is kinda like that Infinite Summer thing (that, uh, I never finished), but for Umberto Eco’s In the Name of the Rose (a book I do want to read at some point, not that I don’t already have lots of reading to do)
  • The Physiology of Foie: Why Foie Gras is Not Unethical – I’ve never actually had Foie Gras. It’s one of those weird things I only ever saw on Iron Chef (the proper Japanese version of the show, that is). As such, I never knew there was any sort of controversy around it, but this article is a pretty interesting look at where Foie comes from…
  • The Comics Curmudgeon – You wouldn’t think that some guy who analyzes the Sunday funnies would be compelling, but yep, it is.