Dobes Zone

     I read The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek for the fab book club hosted by Annie Rose of the podcast Girls Guts Giallo and it was definitely one of the more challenging books. Stylistically, the text is quite dense and layered, flowing from one metaphor to another and shifting seamlessly between perspectives of omniscient narrator and different characters. Structurally it takes a very different approach to story-telling, though the events are all quite linear and easy to follow. Aside from its dense and descriptive nature, I actually found the actual content of the book more challenging than the style, which is used to intensify the emotional experience of the text.     Erika Kohut is a talented pianist in Vienna who never made it big in her field. Instead she teaches piano for a living and has a repressed and very controlled homelife with her domineering mother. The relationship between mother and mid-30s daughter is a very toxic and codependent one...

       2022 was another bizarre year with a lot of bad news but I did watch nearly 300 films and short films.  I wanted to write a bit about my favorite new (to me) watches. It was a tough choice because I watched so many films that were fun, beautiful, affecting, and exciting. I tried to pick things that surprised me and which I kept thinking about.      I'm notoriously bad at watching new movies the year they actually release- especially since I don't go to theaters much anymore, so a lot of these will be older films. Like last year, I will also be including 10 of the films at the end that were total stinkers, but truth be told, I didn't watch a ton of films that I outright hated.    Cabaret scene from Adele Hasn't Had Her Dinner Yet       In no particular order, here are the hits! 1) On the Silver Globe (1988) Many folks have only seen Zulawski's Possession (an incredible film) but it's been nice seeing a little more lo...

Continuing my screencap project of all the werewolves and werewolf transformation effects in film, this post is for all the stuff from the 1990s. The 90s definitely don't have as lush an offering as the 80s, but it still has some really fantastic prosthetics, costumes, puppets and effects. I'm also including some were-cats, because the 90s had two very cool shapeshifter movies dealing with cat monsters.    Unfortunately, the 90s is also were we start to see CGI take the place of practical effects and other effects that would otherwise be achieved by time-lapse, painting on/altering the film itself, or through methods like stop motion. In most cases, CGI looks pretty bad and it's best put to use either for assisting practical props or for scenes that might otherwise be dangerous for a human or animal actor. My other CGI hot take is that it often looks bad because VFX studios tend to be non-union and it's incredibly exploited labor. 90s CGI is also not as refined as it be...