Watch. Read. Repeat.

Let the Right One In: Birth of a Contemporary Vampire Legend

Illustration by Tyler Stout 
 
With the Millenium trilogy and other great mysteries like The Man From Beijing finding their way into my collection over the past year, I've been on a real Swedish author kick.  Taking a deviation from the inventive page-turners of Larsson and Mankell, I recently picked up Let The Right One In, by yet another Swedish author, John Ajvide Lindqvist.  Set in the early 1980's Stockholm, the story is an unusual blend of a coming of age buddy tale and an eerie vampire horror. 

Twelve-year-old Oskar lives with his mother, is bullied at school, shoplifts, and keeps a scrapbook of notes and clippings about gruesome murders. Eli, apparently about his age, moves in next door but doesn't go to school, leaving the flat only at night. Shortly after, the killings start. At first more fascinated than sorry, since one victim had bullied him, Oskar eventually discovers that Eli is a vampire, stuck permanently in childhood.

What should Oskar do, especially when Eli is his friend as much as anyone is? Lindqvist develops the plot in rich detail. The characters, adult and child, are quite convincingly the sort that one would probably cross the street to avoid in any city. Lindqvist also realistically depicts the aftermath of brutal homicide on the nearby: shock and horror, some sleepless nights and bad dreams, despite which you must go to work and get the groceries; eventually, the police leave the neighborhood.

This is a much needed, fresh departure from the other Vampire stories currently splattered upon the zietgeist.  So before the movie comes out on October 1st, I'd highly recommend that you take a few days (it's a fairly quick read) to enjoy this book.

 Here's the movie trailer:

 

 

All My Friends Are Dead

A dark-witted book explores the feelings of loss and loneliness with ironic levity

 

 
A children's book for adults, "All My Friends Are Dead" cleverly illustrates the inevitable sadness we all will face—whether you're a tree, sock, pirate, cassette tape or other—when our friends cease to exist.

 
From the snowman whose friends all melt away to the house plant whose friends are slowly killed by humans, the book uses dark humor to shed light on the ubiquitous feeling of loneliness.

 
Written by actor Avery Monsen and journalist Jory John, "All My Friends Are Dead" is for sale in The Watch. Read. Repeat. Bookstore for $10. 

 

Via Cool Hunting

Dante's Divine Comedy, the Graphic Novel

By Seymour Chwast

I took on this project with great trepidation because so many great artists have already interpreted this important work.

Never mind, I took advantage of the form to interpret the material in a contemporary manner. I changed scale and emphasis to fit the situation in opposition to the static, uniform boxes of most graphic novels.

Dante plays himself as he travels to the other side with classical poet Virgil.  They, and the other characters are depicted in 1930's dress.  I meant Dante to look like a Dashiell Hammett detective, searching for the truth.  The Dante character looks for answers unseeable to mere mortals, by traveling respectively, to Hell, Purgatory and Paradise.

The following images are taken from my translation of Dante's "Divine Comedy."

 

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 "The Divine Comedy" can be purchased here.

 Via Huffington Post

 

Underground Comic Artist Takes On Che Guevera

Heard of Robert Crumb? You should also know something about another legendary comic-book artist, the great Spain Rodriguez. Here he talks to Revel in New York about creating Che: A Graphic Biography.

 

 Via The Daily Beast

Get Your Freakonomics On... at the Theater.

The bestselling book by University of Chicago economist, Steven Levitt, and New York Times journalist Stephen Dubner, Freakonomics, is now a movie by the same name.  In a move as unconventional as the material it covers, Magnolia Pictures has chosen to release the movie directly to iTunes on September 3rd, and then to theaters a month later.

The book, published in 2005, is a collection of articles that apply economic theory to diverse subjects not traditionally covered by economists.  Levitt and Dubner argue that that economics is, at root, the study of incentives and apply this theory to everything from parenting, to the Ku Klux Klan, to the impact legalized abortion has had on crime. 

The Freakonomics, the Movie will consist of four-documentaries-in-one, each with a different director (including documentary nobility like Morgan Spurlock and Academy Award winner Alex Gibney ) focusing on studies from the book including whether names given at birth are a major factor of success in life, and cheating sumo wrestlers.

What impact do you think releasing their movie online first will have on the eventual success of the theatrical release?  Is it genius marketing or a waste of time and resources?  I suspect that Levitt will share the outcome with us as data in a third edition of the series, perhaps titled Super-Duper Freakonomics.