protean depravity

For the first chapter of the second book in the series A Short Story Lover's Guide to Stephen King , I thought I'd do something quirky and combine it with my dormant column Based on Books since Skeleton Crew  opens with The Mist , a short story (or rather novella) as masterly written  by Stephen King  as legendarily adapted to film by director/writer/producer Frank Darabont. Straight up from the start, some useful multimedia links; the movie ,  a good audiobook narration , a ZBS radio drama , and  some fun fan art . There is a TV series somewhere too, but I'm personally not crazy about series/serializations, so you need to find where to stream it yourself. I WILL SPOIL EVERYTHING SO READ THE BOOK, WATCH THE MOVIE BEFORE READING AND DON'T BLAME ME! 

Another September has come, another Fantasy Filmfest has ended with nothing left behind but the memory of more or less awesome films and a week-long escape into other worlds (and, in my case, with a DVD set of a film I miraculously WON at the FFF! More about it under my review for Sweetness ⬇). I watched twelve feature films in total (I walked out on one of them because it was getting very late and I was worrying I might miss my last train as it was a week day), nineteen short films, of which three were animated and three stop motion. Let's see which ones I saw and my personal winners of this year's Fantasy Filmfest (There is an official winner of the festival you can find on their website  when they are through with every city on their program.)

In between films and life I have been able to read a handful of books, but unfortunately none of them felt really great, although all of them worthwhile if you're possibly the right reader, maybe I just wasn't it, and that's fine. Hope you enjoy the short reviews, maybe you find something that speaks to you!

As with each of my film reviews, I certainly will talk about spoilers here, so go and watch the movie first, then come back and let's discuss this film!   So we're in the middle of the Fantasy Filmfest fever with lots of great sounding movies coming our way, but there have been lots of good horror movies showing in regular movies too, and it's time I address them in a series of posts here.  Weapons is the first movie I want to discuss because I was smitten with it, although I would not give it the 100% it allegedly got on Rotten Tomatoes.   We start off with a mystery; at 2.17 am on a given night, all children from one single class at Maybrook Elementary School disappear, except for one little boy, Alex. They just wake up in the middle of the night, open the door and make that Naruto run for an unknown place. (I have to say at this point that I don't get this running gesture, the Naruto run, and it's one of my critique points that it looks just a little bit ridiculo...

Here are some crime reads for you in this last phase of summer (that we never had this year). I hope you enjoy!

In the same way that it is not unusual to return to the same music one used to listen in their teens and twenties, I lately feel the need to return to books that I've read in my early youth and that have left a mark on me. It is interesting to observe how you perceive them now compared to back then, and what feelings those same books awake in you today. As a fan of short stories and a lifelong reader of Stephen King, it thus occurred to me to take a closer look at his best work, his short stories, and to launch off the series " The Short Story Lover's Guide to Stephen King ". We will take the chronological path from his first short story collection, Night Shift to his most recent You Like It Darker . Having finished Night Shift , we now move on to Skeleton Crew , I hope you actively follow the series and join me in (re)reading King's best. 

  The 39th edition of  Fantasy Filmfest is just around the corner (3.9 – 10.9. in Berlin) and if you haven't gotten a festival pass (I know I haven't!) the tickets for the movies will be available from August 22nd, that is next week. So it was about time to draw a roadmap to have an overview of the screenings and weed out those that will be shown regularly while highlighting those I will probably not have a chance to see somewhere else. The reason I didn't get a festival pass is (I know I announced I'd go full program, but changed my mind) that even though the FFF announces on its website that the rows for the pass owners are reserved for them, there are a lot of pass owners who fill empty seats with their backpacks and coats and other stuff, and there's nothing more terrifying for an introvert to walk around the room, ask if the seat is empty and if yes, could they please put their stuff away, (possibly endure a side eye or two) and then sit next to that person yo...

All around the world tens of thousands of fan girls dressed in pink pony shirts or black Victorian attires sipping their mini appletinis and Lady Grey teas are hit with the news... They push aside their bitch curtains, put away the Derrida they've been engrossed in, and start jumping for joy because THE BUNNIES ARE BACK! If you too missed the Smut Salon, the restaurant "Mini", the fiction girls and poetry boys, then it's time to rejoice, as the most infamous clique of literary absurdness doesn't fail to deliver for a second time.