Dobes Zone

 Recently I finished reading Baise-Moi, the controversial French novel by author Virginie Despentes (who also co-directed the film adaptation which was initially banned in France!) for the other book club I'm in. I hadn't seen the film yet and was unsure of how I'd respond to the book given its reputation- but as heavy as it gets, there's something grimly humorous and very cathartic about it. It is also, without a doubt, an incredibly feminist novel, which makes the experience very different. --- Just a heads up, my review involves discussions of rape and sexual violence, though not in graphic detail. The book is pretty intense!     Two women end up going on a rampage of murder and theft after life pushes them to a breaking point. The story follows each woman up to said breaking point and to their chance encounter, wherein they find each other to be kindred spirits. Both girls are from poor working class neighborhoods and are deeply interested in filth and self indulgen

      I'm dusting the cobwebs off my blog, realizing that I had a couple unfinished book reviews waiting for me, I still have a couple on the backburner and yet here I am working on a new review. I'd previously reread A Clockwork Orange and also read Phantom of the Opera as well as The Island of Doctor Moreau for the first time. For the book club I'm running myself, we just wrapped up Watership Down by Richard Adams. This was a reread for me and also was a childhood favorite. It's the kind of book that a kid with a certain type of brain gets sucked into. Admittedly Watership Down was an obsession for me for a while. I read this wonderful illustrated edition of Watership Down which includes paintings by Aldo Galli in glossy inserts. Good stuff.       Revisiting as an adult, I can really appreciate why this particular book has had such staying power. Along with being just a fantastic and epic tale, Watership Down is also impeccably researched both for the behaviors and na

       It seems that this year has been a good time to catch up on classics. A few months back I dipped into two classics for two different book clubs, the first being Phantom of the Opera.        The Phantom of the Opera is a story I'm well familiar with from both various movie adaptations and it's long-staying effects on popular culture. Surprisingly, I'd never actually read the book despite plowing through other gothic and horror classics like Dracula and Frankenstein as a kid. What I didn't expect and found myself pleasantly surprised by is how exciting and funny this book actually is.     The format of the story is one I'm fond of, it's presented as a historical work, a piecing together of different accounts, news, letters and papers that answer the question of a mysterious disappearance at the Paris Opera House. Both impeccably researched about its setting and having lot of details grounding it in the Paris, it works well as a piece of historical fiction.

  From the late 90s on, werewolf movies have definitely gone down in quality with regards to practical effects, with CGI taking a center stage- some of it decent, some of it very bad. There's also a higher volume of movies, due to digital film-making lowering the barrier to access, which has led to some really interesting indie films and a lot of extraordinarily cheap and boring ones. Here I'll be attempting to catalogue what I can, as long as there's a werewolf on screen in the film and the design isn't just a pre-fab Halloween mask or just a guy with minimal make-up. I'm also skipping over a lot of CGI-only efforts, though exceptions will be made for CGI that had maquettes/models to start the process (such as Van Helsing). The 2000s, despite a lot of cheap z-movies and more movies relying on CGI, did end up having some  really spectacular practical effects-heavy films, some of which I'd consider to be some of the most iconic and "classic" were