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The Rover, the second feature from David Michod (Animal Kingdom), is a western-style revenge thriller that asks the audience to define what a human being is. Set in a wasteland after an apocalyptic event called “The Collapse”, it stars the always-excellent Guy Pearce as a man who sets out to retrieve his car from the men who have stolen it. Robert Pattinson does good work as the carjackers’ halfwit cohort.

We wonder if The Rover has anything to do with the Harlan Ellison novella A Boy and His Dog, which is set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland and was going to be expanded into a novel called Blood’s A Rover (not related to the James Ellroy novel).

Rating: Drop everything and watch this in the cinema before it disappears.

Chef is so low-key and pleasant, it’s like having a meal with friends with the TV on, tuned to the Food Network. Why was it even filmed, except as an excuse for friends to hang out? Writer and director Jon Favreau (Iron Man) stars as a chef who does his work not for the critics but for the people. He achieves mainstream success but what he really wants is the freedom to pursue his personal projects. Now replace “chef” with “filmmaker” and you know what Chef is really about.

Favreau’s character has a meltdown following a bad review in a food blog, and after an unfortunate Twitter exchange over the article, he takes a break. The most unbelievable thing about Chef is not that women who look like Sophia Vergara and Scarlett Johansson would go for him—he is a celebrity chef after all—but that his ten-year-old son would volunteer to help him clean and refurbish a grotty food truck so they can spend time together. You may enjoy seeing Robert Downey, Jr playing a variation on Tony Stark.

Rating: Food porn. If you’re on a diet, you should probably avoid it. It gave us a hankering for Cuban food. Could someone recommend a Cuban restaurant? A place that sells Cuban sandwiches and carne asada?

Ivan Karamazov and the devil

What exactly happened to me? Contrary to reports—though it is flattering to think that my medical condition would interest anyone—I did not have a stroke or fall down the stairs, nor did anyone have to break my door down to rescue me. (If you started these rumors, I hope you are not too attached to having skin because I will have you flayed alive.) Ironically, a battery of tests has proven that I am in rude health. I don’t even have high blood pressure, how did that happen?

As a literature major I get a kick out of telling people I had “brain fever”, a 19th century catch-all term for any inflammation of the brain. Practically everyone in Victorian and Russian novels had it: Pip in Great Expectations, Catherine in Wuthering Heights, Victor Frankenstein in Frankenstein. In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan had it just before he was to defend his brother on the charge of murdering their father. When he had brain fever he saw the devil, who looked like a nouveau poor landowner.

Read our column at InterAksyon.com.

We are halfway through Frankenstein. We’d be finished by now but for all the meals and coffees with friends who want empirical evidence that we are alive and “normal” (What is that?). These are inevitably interrupted by people approaching us to say: “You’re alive!” Not only are we alive, but we are healthier than most people: according to our many, many hospital tests, we do not have high blood pressure and our blood sugar is normal. And according to the second opinion of our Chief Mentat and Maester, we did not have encephalitis and do not have cytomegalovirus. Details in the next column.

Frankenstein is fantastic! We now like Mary Shelley better than her husband and most of the Romantics, and she was 18 when she wrote this early science-fiction novel. Our opinion of Frankenstein has been formed and colored by the movie adaptations, so it’s a little shocking to read the original and find that it could be a different movie altogether.

Not that the James Whale movies (See Gods and Monsters starring Ian McKellen in which he does not add an extra syllable to the end of every sentence, and Whatever Happened To Brendan Frasier. It’s about the making of Frankenstein. Avoid the Kenneth Branagh Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with the extended homoerotic wrestling in amniotic fluid featuring Branagh and Robert De Niro. Unless you’re into that.) and Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein (It’s Frankenshteen!) weren’t great, but reading Frankenstein highlights the difference between reading a novel and watching the movie based upon it. The movie you can see unfolding in your head as you read is unique to you. A movie adaptation is other people’s interpretation. That’s why the core fan group always has problems with the adaptation.

Frankenstein reads not just as a cautionary tale about playing god; it is an indictment of the creator. Victor Frankenstein makes his creature and then is horrified by it and abandons it. The creature is left alone to fend for himself, to figure out the complexities of language, to learn how to survive in a very hostile enviroment. His creator shuns him. Why create something in your own image and then abandon it in a world that is indifferent at best, and is trying to kill him at worst?

To be continued. Meanwhile, in Comments, allancarreon and balqis have gone ahead with the discussion of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, focusing on the monumental question: Is Lucy a slut?

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Whether it is due to our recent encounter with brain fever or our fascination with the television series Penny Dreadful we cannot be certain, but suddenly we feel compelled to read the masterworks of 19th century English horror literature, Frankenstein and Dracula. We must admit that despite having seen many film adaptations of the novels by Mary Shelley (including the Mel Brooks classic Young Frankenstein) and Bram Stoker (Gary Oldman in armor that makes him look like a giant insect sends vampire sirens to bite Keanu Reeves and stop him unleashing his British accent), we have never read the source material, for shame (And we were a Comp Lit major).

Therefore we shall attempt to rectify this error most grievous not merely by expressing ourself in this rather florid manner, but by perusing Shelley’s Frankenstein and Stoker’s Dracula and conversing about them with any and all interested parties. Please make yourselves known in Comments.

Our Minister of Propaganda wishes to remind those who would obtain the books to avoid the abridged versions. Those who wish to read them online or to download the free e-books may visit the most dependable Project Gutenberg.

Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley
Dracula by Bram Stoker

One afternoon there’s a knock on the door and a messenger delivers this giant bag of snacks. What’s in the baaaaag, you ask, in the voice of Brad Pitt in Se7en. Go to Glorietta on Wednesday and Thursday afternoon to find out.