;)
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(above) From Park Chan-wook's 'Thirst' (2009)
I wrote an exhaustive list with explanations in reply to Slant's top 25 horror film of the 2000's list, but lost it in a crash, which seems very 2000 to 2009.
The gist of it was:
1. At least one of Christopher Smith's works should have been on that list. In a decade known for 'extreme horror' he pushed the boundaries of story-telling with his tripartite structured, overlapping time repetitions in 'Triangle' (2009) and took satire to a new level with his horror comedy 'Severance'. Severance is a perfect answer to the decade of the war on terror, because it brings together the alienated bureaucrat with the over-seas place he re-imagined in numbers and weapons sales. Combining that geographic distinctness of office cubicle culture and former war-zone was one of the best horror comedy ideas of the decade.
2. '28 Days Later' made people hate running zombies so much that phenomenology of zombiness became public debate. In the 2000's, people became so obsessed with what is essential to zombies that the Zombie Survival Guide became a best seller. I saw a writer of a zombie fiction book booed for naming it as his favorite zombie film. It made zombies cool again and the backlash to from the old school was denouncement. Not since Twilight has a film inspired so many people to adopt such a strong identity of negation.
3. Korean Horror brought us some of the best films of the decade and escaped the J-horror remakes cycle. Joon-Ho Bong's 'The Host' (2006) made me like mega-fauna monster movies again by drawing on the environmentalist concerns that defined the post-Kyoto protocol failure of market-based regulation with another wave of deregulation.
4. It was a decade of remakes, Michael Haneke remade his own film 'Funny Games', which got dissed twice on the list for reasons I didn't quite get. If I had to pick one remake, however, it would be Shin Jung-won's horror comedy 'Chawz' (2009). It's an homage to Jaws about a giant boar in rural Korea.
5. I don't know why they put 'A History of Violence' on there. It's a great film, but I think we can all agree it's not a horror film. Did they think just because Cronenberg was there it was horror? If I was going to introduce a film that was at the edge of the genre I'd say Yorgos Lanthimos's film 'Dogtooth' (2009) pushes that edge.
It's a film about a mother and father who keep their children imprisoned inside the same house into adulthood. It's like martyrs but instead of locking the kids up and humiliating them, they are taught to irrationally fear the outside world while being instilled with values the parents' think will sustain the perfect family.
Greece continues to go through an interesting political upheaval against the economic austerity measures and corrupted democracies that defined the decade. For an American audience, this pairs well with the war on terror and the tired myth of the health of the nuclear family. Sounds like the Aughts to me.
IFC wrote their reply here.
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Procured:
"Blackout" -- Connie Willis
"The Cry of the Owl" -- Patricia Highsmith
"How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe" - Charles Yu
Read:
"The Art of Cruelty" -- Maggie Nelson
On violence and cruelty in aesthetics.
DC comics new 52 -- various authors
Most of DC's new 52 series (of which I'll at least keep on with Jeff Lemire's "Animal Man", Scott Snyder's books, "Batwoman", and "Batgirl")
"The Termor of Forgery" -- Patricia Highsmith
One of my favorite Highsmith books so far. The protagonist is a writer who gets stood up by a director in Algeria, murder, suicide, and colonialist introspection ensue.
"The Wind-up Girl" -- Paolo Bacigalupi
Somewhat indescribable. To begin... bioengineering dominates the market, a sexbot dreams of escape.
"Listen to This" -- Alex Ross
Collection of non-pretentious and thought-provoking New Yorker music essays by Alex Ross (not the comics artist, the other one). I stumbled upon this searching for info on Johann Johannsson.
"Nocturne: a Journey in search of Moonlight" -- James Attlee
The historical role of the moon in different cultures was interesting. The first person narrative of the author was a little too light on adventure to carry that part of it.
"Things that Never Happen" -- M. John Harrison
Older collection of cross-genre short stories by Harrison. Some amazing work here.
"Stories for Nighttime and Some for Day" -- Ben Loory
Bizarro allegories/new folk tales. The one that stuck with me was about a best selling book that was filled with blank pages. Sort of a lesser Borges meets Petrushevskaya. Enjoyable.
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