Digging the view
Out that boardroom window - city skylines! Towers of glass and steel! Power! An industrial estate out near the airport!

Huh? I would have thought Kubrick's The Shining was considered to be successful - and pretty fucking scary - by a lot of people, not just arty types. How's it a failure? In that it deviates from King's novel a bit? Didn't King make his own, universally derided, faithful-to-the-novel version a while ago, with…

ZMF, Salo contains candle-to-the-nutsack ownage, razorblades-in-the-custard-fed-to-starving-naked-teenagers ownage, and lots of eat-my-shit ownage. Infact, it's all about ownage of the nastiest variety you can imagine.

Cute like Shortstop from Temple 'o Doom

Apart from a short-story or two in hipster-sanctioned McSweeney's anthologies, this is my first taste of King. It's a grind, I gotta say. I picked it up in an op-shop in a little country town. I'm not one for hating popular authors because they are popular, but it has to be said - his prose fairly blows. And he calls…

In Stephen King's "Danse Macabre" (which I'm plodding through as we speak) he describes Mad Max as a "turkey". That's it. Extraordinarily bitchin', influential, and in Stephen King's eyes, a "turkey". And yet he devotes pages to his love of the all-but-forgotten mutant-bear flick "Prophecy".

The "gore" serves the themes (abuse of power, fascism etc) rather than the plot, if that makes sense. It's not really a plot-driven film. " The "gore" is filmed in a dispassionate way: it's really a nasty, confronting experience. I had a feeling of nausea that stayed with me for days after watching it.

Salo eats Saw for breakfast. Then shits it out and makes it eat itself. Seriously disturbing.

Geezer Butler. Greatest lyricist in popular music.

Quips
But what about the groan-inducing, mood-killing, "nobody-tosses-a-dwarf" quips? Have they reached an agreement on leaving that shit out this time round? Or does Jackson have teams working around the clock working on hobbit-in-a-barrel gags?

Reason number 3,455: Scores of attractive, edgy ladies who wear skirts AND trousers AT THE SAME TIME

It's been done (and Stephen King really, really liked it): http://en.wikipedia.org/wik…

If you wish to make a coney pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe

My parents saw it, without my recommendation, and loved it. They're working class, suburban and conservative in outlook. And some of their friends have seen it as well. I'd call that an impact.

Fantastic film
I saw this in Sydney. There was a Q&A beforehand with the director and the two young lead actors, who were just bemused by all the attention and answered most questions with a shrug.

Tove Jansson's Moomin books
Whimsical stories about Finnish trolls, to be sure, but characters do real-life stuff like get depressed, die etc.