Infocult: Information, Culture, Policy, Education

Piling up the 20 top zombie movies

The top 20 zombie movies are ranked by the Boston Globe.  It's a good list, including some fine classics (White Zombie, I Walked with a Zombie) and a nice sample of current work.  Plus I'm always glad to see Return of the Living Dead cited, a sentimental favorite.

I would put Night of the Living Dead at #1, not #3, personally.

Should Herbert West: Reanimator count?

(via Reason)

The first rule of G.R.O.S.S. is....?

Fight Club as a sequel to Calvin and Hobbes.  Yes, it all makes sense.

Tyler is Hobbes, reincarnated after being trapped inside Calvin/Jack’s brain for so many years. Just as Calvin is Jack, Hobbes is Tyler.

Once you grasp this insight, everything becomes clear.

Little does Calvin suspect that while he is busy growing up, deciding what "dinette set defines him as a person," Hobbes is also maturing in the recesses of his mind, waiting to be unleashed at an appropriate time.

The theory is like some revelatory, hermeneutic virus, working its way through your memories.  "Calvin—"I Am Jack’s Lost Youth""

Discussion Questions:

1. In the film, Calvin and Hobbes actually reversed many personality traits as Jack and Tyler. Is it possible that Calvin is the personality that got repressed and Hobbes is the one that did the "growing up"? Discuss.

2. Tyler wears a fur coat near the end of the movie. What is the significance of this garment, given his past incarnation as a jungle animal? Discuss.

3. If Calvin really wanted to change things, why didn’t he just dust off his old cardboard-box time machine and hop in? Discuss.

4. After the end of Fight Club, when Calvin realizes he’s effectively killed Hobbes twice now, do you really think he’ll still be "okay"? Discuss.

(thanks to the twisted mind of Tanya)

Disturbing Strokes

A pleasantly sinister mashup, the Diff'rent Strokes credits with new music:

This is one way Infocult sees the world, o friends and readers.

(via MetaFilter, where someone points out the nifty source for the audio track)

The ultimate Shining experience

What if you watch The Shining backwards?  It becomes a romance, a positive epic, a heroic psychodrama.   Let Mstrmnd explain:

The Shining is a film meant to be watched both forwards and backwards. The human mind may find ways of playing it backwards subconsciously. ...
Shown backwards it is a heroic film about human experience: A man trapped in the logic of ghosts, trapped in a grayscale 2-D flat world, a photograph inside history, frozen in spectral finity: is unfrozen, and is lured outside of a maze where both his wife and son proceed to ‘undouble’ him and assist him in his war with his self and is finally able to drive away from the Overlook, from the lunarscape of this unreal summit and into a perfect mirror, earthmade.

The argument goes on deliriously, obsessively on this score:

Tricks are used to play with your memory of standard cinema convention. There are several reasons why backwards is a viable viewing order. The front credits are end credits, blue-turquoise filled helveticas rise as if the film is coming to an end (and Kubrick does not use rising end credits, ever). Like many other subtle combinations of camera movement and storytelling/activities in the film, seen backwards, the first shot of the film can become the end of the film: the final image the horizontal/horizon, mountain and reflection, a state of hybrid native American nirvana. Another example: Wendy reads Jack’s typed book ‘backwards’ in the film’s forward, ie: she reads the page in the typewriter then the top page and continues down. The film itself is a reflection, each scene possesses a mirror scene of the other (ie: Danny and Wendy’s campfire/roadrunner meal is doubled beginning and end.)

It's like the old joke about playing a blues or country song backwards, and getting a utopia.  The singer regains woman, money, drink, dog, happiness, guns, etc.

I disagree with this argument, though:

the film is actually scarier backwards since Kubrick has reversed the order of storytelling horror conventions in the forward. People have always commented on the film’s inability to shock, the scariest imagery comes at the tail of each ‘scary’ scene, diffusing any effect. Backwards the effects rise in their shock value.

The film has scared a lot of people since its launch.  But it's extra effective as a silent film - watch it with the sound off.  The heightened facial expressions, the tempo all work like some lost 1915 movie, colorized.

(via MetaFilter)

Still more comics bashing from Watchmen reviews

Another bad Watchmen review comes from a conservative source.  Again, we see the general hostility towards comics on display, triggered by this specific adaptation.  It starts with a terrific bang:

If you take your kids to see "Watchmen," you're a moron.

If you see it yourself, you're also probably a moron and a vapid, indecent human being.

Schlussel's rip has a few things in common with other negative reviews (cf The New Yorker, The New York Times).  She thinks it's boring and too violence.  She also reveals not having read the book, although she won't admit that explicitly.

What she adds is a return to the old-school disdain for comics, presuming that they are intended only for children.  I don't know if Schlussel knows anything about comics history, but her itemized list of bad things feels a lot like a run-through of one of the early Comics Codes - i.e., heroes can't have flaws, violence can't be shown, no bad language.  Plus a few bonus stabs of homophobia.

These bad reviews are fascinating for what they reveal about American cultural attitudes towards comics in 2009.

And no, I still haven't gotten to see the movie yet.

(thanks, Steve B!)

Awesome space launch sound and video

This is amazing, footage shot from the space shuttle's booster rockets.

This one shows the whole story from just before launch until splashdown:

In this clip, from the other rocket, you don't see anything until 1:50 in or so. You get to hear the rocket engine thundering, and the fat fuel tank gurgling away.  Then the booster blows away from the STS and - well, just watch.  Towards the end there's some spotty stuff during parachute deployment; keep going.
The sounds are awesome.

(via MetaFilter)

The great Soviet zombie wars rock on

Here is a fun mashup: Soviet alternate history, zombies, and Tunguska, all set to a killer Metallica track.



(via MetaFilter)

The serum will have already worked, Sooner or Later

"Sooner or Later" (István Madarász, Hungarian, 2008) is a fine very short science fiction story, about a Nazi experiment on a concentration camp inmate.  Barely ten minutes, so go:

(via MetaFilter)

Canadian Gothic: horror film goes for cinéma vérité

Yet another Canadian Gothic tale is emerging, with authorities prosecuting a filmmaker who seems to have made his horror film project a tad too realistic.

Edmonton filmmaker Mark Twitchell, 29, has been charged with first-degree murder in Altinger's disappearance, in a case that shares similarities to a movie he was making...

This is really splendid for the "real life imitates Gothic" theme.   There's the luring an innocent victim with sex angle:

Police allege Altinger was lured to a southside detached residential double garage through a dating website with the promise of meeting a beautiful woman. Instead, police said, Altinger was killed.

Then the classic horror movie turn:

Edmonton police said the second man was apparently confronted by someone wearing a hockey mask when he showed up at the garage a week before Altinger went missing.

And the scheme undone by a hero's escape:

"The male was able to break free and run into the lane, being chased by the male in the mask. At this time a couple was walking by and saw the altercation," said Det. Mark Anstey of the Edmonton Police Service on the weekend.

Bonus points for a mix of Web 2.0 and fearsome media:

On his Facebook page, Twitchell is revealed to be a huge fan of the Showtime program Dexter, which follows the exploits of Dexter Morgan, a blood-spatter expert for the Miami police who also leads a secret life as a serial killer.

"We have a lot of information to suggest he definitely idolizes Dexter," Anstey said.

Anstey also alleged the police have evidence that Twitchell tried to emulate the character.

Already the National Post is worrying about "pop culture violence."  Other media outlets worry that he was good at video games (gasp).

Not to mention the weird spin involving Star Wars fandom.  Yes, he was making a fan movie, and we can read this comment with all sorts of double meanings (assume Dexter):

"I get to be able to put the film out and do my fan thing, while at the same time generating a career for myself and everyone else who's involved," he said.

Twitch is in the judicial system now.  HubDub currently gives a 62% chance of conviction.

What's going on in Canada this year?  Severed feet, bus passenger decapitations, mystery boom sounds...

(thanks to the excellent Duncan McHugh)

The five scariest films: the New Yorker broods

The five scariest movies: a decent list from the New Yorker.   I'm glad the author (and the brain trust behind the article) doesn't focus on one period.  Bonus points for picking Night of the Hunter. 

Some classic suspects, hard to argue with: Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Silence of the Lambs.

And two inspired choices.  The Body Snatcher seems to stand in for a generation of classic horror.  And Mulholland Drive - if the idea was to pick Lynch, I'd have gone for the first third of Lost Highway, for scenes like this one:

The article also has a nice point about the demographics of horror. It certainly chimes in with my experience of teaching Gothic lit.

The idea of the article makes for a good game.  Which five - only 5 - would you pick?