Usually, the words “Spoiler Alert” is there to warn you that a review or discussion of a movie or TV show might include something that gives away a big “reveal”; think Rosebud is a sled! Dil is a dude! It was all a dream! But when Eugenie Brinkema, a professor of literature at MIT, writes about movies, the spoiling is of a different sort. She specializes in deconstructing horror films, trying to work out how filmmakers use color, light, sound, time and other techniques to scare the bejeebus out of you. But that’s not how she puts it. ““I am really interested in the ethics and the aesthetics of extremity,” she explains, using Kubrick’s claustrophobic classic “The Shining” as an example. How does it create an “experience of vertiginous disorientation and nausea and horror and terror?” It’s not Jack Nicholson chopping through a door, sweaty and rabid, yelling “Here’s Johnny!” It’s actually a case “of scale and perspective.” They say they if you have to explain a joke, you’ve killed it. Perhaps if you have to explain a killing you’ve killed it, too.
The concept of the new multiplayer video game Bad Blood: Dying Light is pretty simple. You’re on an island of zombies, and you’ve got to get off. But there’s a catch: there’s only room on the last helicopter for one more person, so after you’ve dispatched the zombies, you’re fighting with other players for that last seat off. One more thing: The undead aren’t just of the fast zombie persuasion, they know parkour, the discipline that teaches them to acrobatically jump across buildings, using fire escapes, billboards, and whatever else makes up the locale as perches, vines, ramps for leaps, etc. Good luck with that…
The Finger Lakes Trail, a a system covering over 950 miles of trails straddling central New York and northern Pennsylvania covers some of the most beautiful vistas in the country: rolling green fields, mountains and, of course, the Lakes themselves. But the local Steuben Courier-Advocate says it’s something else: a trail of cemeteries. It lists eight different graveyards that can be visited while hiking the various trails. They range from old churchyards that date from before the Revolution, to more recently active burial grounds dotted with memorials to pioneers in aviation and glassmaking.
Leave a Reply