New York might have its official celluloid clusterfuck and its punk-rock stepsister Film Comment Selects delivering highbrow cinema and cocktail-party fare (not to mention NYAFF and its ilk, screening beauties that only occasionally reappear stateside), but no film fest marries cultured screenings with good ol' gore and broken bones like Austin's Fantastic Fest.

My math skills are a bit...nonexistent, but check it: 70+ features play over eight days, plus countless parties, secret screenings, and booze a'flowin'. The Alamo Drafthouse — pairing grub and grog with movies since '97 — hosts this bonkers event. Hell, screening room #3 becomes the “Shiner Bock Theatre” during the festival, meaning free pint of namesake lager with each film. 

"The nerds have completely conquered the universe. This is our world!"

—Tim League (Fantastic Fest founder, Alamo Drafthouse owner)

As I write this, I've seen “just” seven films. By the time you read it, I will have conquered 16. Somewhere in there, I caught the sound test for Dragon Sound's 25th anniversary reunion concert, karaoke'd in a Hulu-themed booth with a dozen Japanese guests. Time blurs in manifold waves during Fantastic Fest. Like, I think the autumn equinox just commenced. And I believe today, as I type this, is Saturday, but don't quote me on that.

“You are what you watch (and listen to); at Fantastic Fest, we are Motörhead.”

—Marc Savlov (Austin Chronicle) 

Kicking off the fest, Tim Burton unleashed some stop-animation enchantment with the world premiere of Frankenweenie 3D. This included a special "Dog Theatre," where tux-clad pooches and their natty human "guests" took in the film. Karl Urban and Olivia Thirlby got my heart racing at the ensuing red-carpet for Dredd 3D. (NB. Back-to-back 3D screenings is an intense experience...but it helps when they contrast so nicely as poignant black-and-white Frankenweenie and ultraviolent, slo-mo stylizedDredd.)

“Fuck Christmas, Fuck Easter...Fantastic Fest is the greatest time of the year!”

—Luke Mullen (Fantastic Fest programmer, scribe for Film School Rejects)

Despite the fest's propensity for outlandish B-movie bijoux, there's a helluva lot of quality here. Last year, Michaël R. Roskam's debut Bullhead was shortlisted for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 2012 Academy Awards, after its Fantastic Fest premiere. Cannes mind-boggler Holy Motors plays this fest ahead of its NYFF premiere. And Adrián García Bogliano's scintillating Here Comes the Devil scored high-profile U.S. distribution via Magnet Releasing during right here in Austin fest. Bogliano and Fantastic Fest founder Tim League sabered a bottle of bubbly to celebrate.

More wildness awaits, including The ABC's of Death (one director and one creative kill for each letter of the alphabet!), an “extreme sushi” competition (before Dead Sushi's U.S. premiere), and this delightful gem from Chile called Bring Me the Head of Machine Gun Woman. Tune in next week for my huge-ass Fantastic Fest wrap-up!

Images: main image and Here Comes the Devil champagne sabering photo by the author; film stills via Fantastic Fest; Dredd 3D red carpet via Austin Chronicle

James Franco is directing As I Lay Dying. I'm not sure what to say. Granted, this is the guy who played Allen Ginsberg in Howl and Hart Crane in the biopic The Broken Tower. And he's taken the English-grad-student route, so he's probably got some idea of what he's getting himself into. It doesn't hurt that he’s already cast a bumper crop of Southern actors, including Danny McBride, Tim Blake Nelson (aka Delmar from O Brother Where Art Thou), and Ahna O’Reilly from The Help.

But still. As I Lay Dying? Our own Mr. Fee just did a post on films adapted from difficult books, but Faulkner is a whole new level of unfilmability. Let's look at a few of Franco's gravest challenges.

First, an overview for those of us who didn't read it in high school: As I Lay Dying is the story of a deceased matriarch, Addie Bundren, and her family's journey from her deathbed to Jefferson County, where she asked to be buried. The genius is in the fifteen narrators who tell the tale, from Addie's oddly named children (Cash, Jewel, Dewey Dell, Darl, Vardaman) to a rogue's gallery of opinionated neighbors and countryfolk. One of the chapters is narrated by Addie herself; she declares from beyond the grave that “people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.”

Faulkner actually worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood. It makes sense: his characters are that vivid, that real. So it should be sort of feasible.

But. But, but, but.

How could a film possibly do justice to this page, the most famous page in the entire book?

I’m serious. The rest of the page is blank. Film just can't withhold information like this. If we see Vardaman onscreen, a small boy sitting on a porch or eavesdropping or smelling the fish that we later learn is cooking nearby, then that thought, my mother is a fish, simply won’t carry the same weight. The audiobook has an exaggerated pause, and that’s as close as we can get.

That's not all. Right before that chapter, another one of Addie's sons has a numbered list explaining how and why he built his mother's coffin the way he did.

Pretty sure that's going to get adapted beyond all recognition.

James Franco was able to pull off Allen Ginsberg and Hart Crane because they were essentially biopics. But here, he's set himself the task of extracting the story from the book. And the story really isn't the point.

I can’t wait to hear James Franco’s brilliant cast toss around lines like “I gave Anse Dewey Dell to negative Jewel” and “I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.” But if I go to see As I Lay Dying, I guess I'll be prepared to experience something completely different from what I read in English class. Good luck, Franco; you’re up against Faulkner now.

Image credits: photosmoviessongs.com; bigbowlofsoup.tumblr.com

Stephen King, horror's überscribe, is still setting the pace with new novels. If 2013's print-only Joyland doesn't get you going, check this: a recent Los Angeles Times article details Doctor Sleep, a sequel to The Shining penned 35 years after the original. Doctor Sleep focuses on a now-adult Danny Torrance, the child with “the shining,” drawing intriguing parallels to youngShining-era readers who are now adults themselves. But the article's final paragraph bears the most divisive news: Hollywood is also talking about a prequel.

NO. No, no, no. Look, some doors do not need to be opened. Where's Hallorann when we need him, warning Danny (or us, or the filmmakers):“You ain't got no business goin' in there anyway. So stay out.” Take my hand through this Shining survey, from the late 70s original to futures unknown. 

1977, Stephen King's novel horror: King's first hardcover bestseller is terrifying to this day, a modern haunted house tale enveloping a semi-autobiographical core: the tormented, alcoholic writer terrorizing his own family.

The good: Father Jack Torrance wields a sadistic roque mallet: “Roque...it was a schizo sort of game at that. The mallet expressed that perfectly. A soft end and a hard end. A game of finesse and aim, and a game of raw, bludgeoning power.” The bad: no "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" (typed by Jack, perhaps in subconscious homage to Christopher Knowles). The ugly: Danny's skin-crawling encounter with the old hag: “Still grinning, her huge marble eyes fixed on him, she was sitting up. Her dead palms made squittering noises on the porcelain. Her breasts swayed like ancient cracked punching bags. There was the minute sound of breaking ice shards.”

1980, Stanley Kubrick's film: It's rare that a film stands so vividly over its source material, but Kubrick's Shining does. His Overlook is my Overlook. 

The good: Kubrick transformed the Overlook Hotel into a practically living, breathing entity, a frightening, temporal maze of impossible passageways, sometimes containing Grady's twin daughters (also absent from King's novel), intoning: “Come and play with us, Danny. Forever...and ever...and ever." The bad: not a damn thing. The ugly: the old hag, or rather, the young woman who seduces Jack and turns into the old hag.

1997, Re-adaptation as TV miniseries: King's major disappointment in Kubrick's adaptation was casting wild-eyed Jack Nicholson, as King preferred a more believable everyman for the role of Jack Torrance. Hence King's screenplay for an ABC miniseries, arriving nearly two decades later.

The good: As in King's novel, Hallorann survives the horror, and it's Danny who discovers the old hag. The bad: the Stanley Hotel location, while true to King's writing, lacks the labyrinthine dread of Kubrick's environs. (And don't get me started on the soap-worthy acting.) The ugly: those hedge animals, wisely absent from Kubrick's film, proved scarier in print than on screen. ABC gave King's verbose IT similar treatment in 1990 (without King's screenwriting credit), traumatizing coulrophobes everywhere and proving that living topiaries are no Pennywise the Dancing Clown. Did you even know there was a Shining miniseries?

2013, Doctor Sleep, a three-decades-hence sequel: I got into King as a preteen, probably around the same age as younger Shining readers, tackling Desperation (disgusting) and Bag of Bones (heart-wrenching) in the late 90s. It's notable, and unfortunate, that both became avoidable TV movies. I approach Doctor Sleep guardedly.

The good: We'll know in wintery January if Doctor Sleep is crud or an early classic. The bad: King's preview of Doctor Sleep at the 2012 Savannah Book Festival, featuring a still-young Danny revisited by the old hag, closely mirrors The Shining in disgusting descriptives. The ugly: Evidently, adult Danny will be fighting quasi-vampiric immortals.

201?, The Shining filmic prequel: I don't need Danny's “shining” ability to foresee this as a very bad idea.

The good(?): Screenwriter Laeta Kalogridis (who penned claustrophobic Shutter Island) is involved. The bad: I fear this “Outlook origin story” becomes a near shot-for-shot remake like The (2011) Thing and/or casts Ryan Reynolds or Channing Tatum as the Outlook's caretaker. The ugly: old hag in her carefree pre-bathtub days?

If a more authentic TV miniseries couldn't shake Kubrick's masterpiece as the definitive cinematic Shining, what more could a prequel possibly afford? I hope it ends like Jack in Kubrick's film—spoilers!—lost and frozen in a (developmental) maze.

Images: Main image via The Overlook Hotel; Danny via GoneMovie.com;Here's Johnny! + Grady Twins; Pennywise + Hedge Animals; Overlook Hotel party photo via Haunted American Tours

Fantasy bibliophiles and lovers of lush cinema are facing acute overstimulation via the epic-length Cloud Atlas trailer, which surfaced last week. Even attempting to translate David Mitchell's award-winning book—its interlocking stories, its sprawling landscapes—into a standalone production is crazy ambitious. But considering co-director Tom Tykwertackled the unfilmable Perfume: The Story of a Murderer and the Wachowskis wrote the solid screenplay to V for Vendetta, I think we're in for something special.

Were there a “Most Daunting and Badass Literature-to-Film Adaptations” award, I'd vote for David Cronenberg. He practically defined “body horror,” but Cronenberg balanced gore with ballsy, bookish films like Naked Lunch and J.G. Ballard's paraphilic voyage Crash. His adaptation of Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis (young multimillionaire/recovering vampire cruising across Manhattan via limo for a haircut) premiered at Cannes 2012. Should Hollywood ever consider another go at James Joyce's Ulysses, Cronenberg's the one to helm it.

The nine-plus hours of Hobbit-sized heroism igniting Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films deserve even the most elf-averse filmgoer's respect. Now that Jackson has confirmed that The Hobbit prequel will indeed grow by half, his Rings legacy usurps Scott Pilgrim vs the World's cheeky tagline: “an epic of epic epicness.”

On the flipside, there's Philip K. Dick. His sociopolitical sci-fi sired a succession of big-screen adaptations, ranging from the superlative (Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, based on Dick's 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and backed by the author) to the splashy (Paul Verhoeven'sTotal Recall, née “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale”, and its unnecessary remake) to the wildly aberrant (Minority Report, The Adjustment Bureau).

Here we have the double-edged sword, for what appears compelling on page could become a cinematic shitshow. Minority Report's steroidal action obscured the original story's metaphysical elegance, and though I was stoked as a kid to see a live-action version of Masters of the Universe, Gary Goddard's goofy result epitomized '80s schlock-cinema. That Jon M. “Step Up 3D” Chu is plotting a He-Man reboot does not bode well.

Sci-fi literature is particularly rife with “unfilmable” gems. I doubt William Gibson's seminal cyberpunk classic Neuromancer will ever make it to the big screen, though Vincenzo Natali has been pursuing the project for eons. Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash—a decade younger than Neuromancer and a billion times more irreverent—is equally enticing and elusive, in its mix ofronin action, virtual reality, and cryptic archaeology. It's telling that Natali considers Snow Crash unadaptable as a commercial film.

Should Cloud Atlas' emotional takeaway not equal its gorgeous visuals, Ang Lee's adaptation of Yann Martel's fantasy-adventure quest Life of Pi will be waiting. This fall's cinematic options are looking truly sublime.

Main image via Badass Digest and Wikipedia, photo-chopped by the author; LOTR montage via LOTR Wikia; Blade Runner via Ghost Radio

I owe my childhood fear of clowns and feral felines to Stephen King. His brick-sized bestsellers dominated my bedroom bookshelves, although I supplemented historical horror with a leatherbound volume of Edgar Allan Poe. I remember wondering who bridged Poe's masterful 19th-century macabre and King's contemporary terror. Today, King's ubiquity remains unchallenged—New York has ranked his entire published oeuvre, and he's got two novels planned for 2013—but contemporary horror trends contain an undercurrent of something unspeakably scarier, originating from the cosmos-chilled, slime-soaked legacy of the writer who not only greatly influenced King, but has his own sub-genre. I give you H.P. Lovecraft.

King himself acknowledges the genre's debt to Lovecraft in his book Danse Macabre: “The reader would do well to remember that it is Lovecraft's shadow, so long and gaunt, and his eyes, so dark and puritanical, which overlie almost all of the important horror fiction that has come since.” With that in mind, I offer this brief primer to help you navigate the Lovecraftian goo.

The Necronomicon

A purely fictional book of the dead that figures greatly into Lovecraft's work. Consider The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and its central tale “The Dunwich Horror.” A librarian senses “a hellish advance in the black dominion of the ancient and once passive nightmare” upon opening the cursed tome. In Sam Raimi's film The Evil Dead, the titular antagonists are (un)wakened by the Necronomicon, while HR Giger's debut monograph(and painting Necronom IV, which inspired Alien's iconic xenomorph) shares the name. Unfortunately, The Dunwich Horror is also a ridiculous B-movie starring Sandra “Gidget” Dee. Tread carefully with “direct” Lovecraft film adaptations.

Arkham

A fictional Massachusetts town (like King's Castle Rock, Maine) and the setting for Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. Meet “Herbert West—Reanimator,” who proved “rational life can be restored scientifically," and proceed to the decent '85 bloodbath Re-Animator, but I advise eschewing the slasher atrocity The Unnamable, based on Lovecraft's 1923 story. “The Thing on the Doorstep” revolves around Arkham's sanitarium, preceding Arkham Asylumand its gallery of Batman villains, and its personality-shifting plot is a bit Lost Highway. Just think: Lovecraftian and Lynchian!

Indescribable terror

“The Call of Cthulhu” birthed Lovecraft's famous extradimensional, malevolent entity, yet it simultaneously underscored the crippling bafflement of fear. Here's Cthulhu's setup, after a very late reveal: “the Thing cannot be described—there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order.” Frank Darabont's 2007 film The Mist, based on King's 1980 novella, keeps its besieging, otherworldly fauna masked by the enveloping haze. Jorge Luis Borges, preeminent engineer of enigmas, dedicated The Book of Sand's “There Are More Things” to Lovecraft. The narrator's abstracted inability to describe a house's monstrous inhabitant recalls Lovecraft's scientific barrage of the frozen...things in his singular novella At the Mountains of Madness: in either case, we are no closer to understanding the horror in front of us.

This brings me to Guillermo del Toro's much-delayed dream-project: translating At the Mountains of Madness to cinema. Despite the aforementioned Lovecraft-flavored films, there's little out there that successfully combines “proper Lovecraft adaptation” with “quality viewing” besides 1992's The Resurrected, which didn't even have a proper theatrical run. Del Toro aimed to change this, but after Universal's balking at the blockbuster price tag and Del Toro fearing similarities between ATMOMand Ridley Scott's Prometheus—which draws tellingly from Lovecraft's “Promethean trespass”—its fate is in limbo.

I'm not ready to close this chapter just yet. If Michael Bay gets the OK to helm yet another schlock-and-awe Transformers sequel—whether or not it stars Rosie Huntington-Whiteley—then I say we need a philosophical sci-fi horror film of ATMOM's stature more than ever. In Lovecraft's words from “The Nameless City”:

That is not dead which can eternal lie,

And with strange aeons even death may die.

Main image: H. P. Lovecraft Wiki + ToyVault, photo-chopped by the author; At the Mountains of Madness via The Furnace

Launched twelve years ago, the Caine Prize celebrates short fiction from Africa. And judging by 2002 Caine winner Binyavanga Wainaina's scathing satirical article "How to Write About Africa," it's about time. In collaboration with The New Inquiry and a horde of like-minded bloggers, I’ve been writing about this year's five finalists—and linking to each story so you can read it yourself.

Part 5: South Africa's Riddles

As I read Constance Myburgh’s “Hunter Emmanuel,” [PDF] I was reminded of the literary critic Michael Dirda’s recent Q&A on Reddit:

More than 30 years ago I predicted that mainstream literature would be invaded by "genre" fiction, and this seems to be happening. Writers like Jonathan Lethem, Michael Chabon and others came out of science fiction and comics...I think that we are seeing what SF critic Gary Wolfe calls the "evaporation" of genre lines, and fiction is bursting with all sorts of new inventions and possibilities.

“Hunter Emmanuel” is a hard-boiled detective story torn straight from the headlines of the nineteen-forties. It was published in Jungle Jim, which bills itself as an African pulp fiction magazine. “Hunter Emmanuel” is very much a generic story—not in the figurative sense of being predictable or boring, but in the original and literal sense of adhering to a genre.

Mainstream “literary” fiction itself is a genre of sorts. It is largely realistic, largely psychological, and largely preoccupied with the exacting and poetic use of language. As such, I don’t particularly feel like ranking literary fiction as a genre better or worse than other genres. And that's a good thing, because this story seems to be describing a whole lot more than a detective’s investigation of a disembodied leg in a tree, and the woman the leg came from.

This is a story from South Africa, a country that has experienced splits and divisions of many sorts—political, physical, linguistic, racial. Hunter Emmanuel has decided to figure out how the leg was parted from its owner, why one ended up in a tree and the other ended up in a hospital, and what motives might lurk behind all this. If this story were to be taken as a literary allegory, it wouldn’t be hard to posit that the female represents South Africa in one sense or another, while the male detective is an outsider trying to understand divisive actions already completed. But there isn’t quite enough evidence in this story to complete the analogy. All the same, Jenna Bass, the author and filmmaker who has taken Constance Myburgh as her pseudonym, has expressed openness to such interpretation:

I think many films I’ve made, or written, have political elements, even if not on the same level as The Tunnel; I don’t think you can help it if you live in a country where political decisions are particularly visible. At the same time, I don’t like the idea of profiting off of message-based films.

As with films, so with literature, including the stories in Jungle Jim, which she edits herself. There's clearly much beneath the surface of Myburgh's South African-accented prose, and so I hope the continued adventures of Hunter Emmanuel open doors to more conjectural interpretations.

Here's the story as a PDF: Constance Myburgh's 'Hunter Emmanuel' 

Check back for a list of the other bloggers contributing to the discussion on this story.

image credit: junglejim.org

Welcome our antebellum vampire overlords, infecting young adult fiction with chalky, angular cheekbones and numbing chastity! The undead are everywhere, from Twilight to Seth Grahame-Smith's New York Times bestseller (no joke) Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. I'd managed to steer clear of this post-Lestat world until Vulture highlighted an annoying paradox: fanboys have their Underoos in a knot over the “unrealistic” overhaul of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, yet they seem totally hunky-dory with the idea of Lincoln staking vampires. Here we go!

My beef isn't really about converting Grahame-Smith's tiresome mashup novel into a film. It's a made-for-summer blockbuster, akin to last year'sCowboys & Aliens (which was based off a graphic novel). In effect: pure eye-candy, with historical accuracy totally suspended in favor of dudes on horseback rustling up UFOs or America's 16th President brawling with bloodsucking plantation owners. At least in Vampire Hunter's case, Benjamin Walker (star of Tony-nominated musical Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson) plays honest axe-wielding Abe and scream goddess Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays his wife. I'm hesitant toward director Timur Bekmambetov, whose style is like Michael Bay on pyrotechnic steroids, though he “cut his teeth” on vampires with the frenetic Night Watch—Russia's highest grossing film ever.

It's the silly collision of genres, or stitching a historical figure into the realm of fantasy, that irks me. I'm looking at you, Quirk Books, and your highly lucrative fusing of public domain classics with horror/sci-fi tropes. We can thank Grahame-Smith's mashup debut, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, for launching this peculiar strain. As DreadCentral reported, P&P&Z is now an interactive iPhone- and iPad-capable eBook. However, its big-screen adaptation is in limbo, with Blake Lively, Emma Stone, Natalie Portman et alpassing on the leading role and three directors abandoning the project. I love me some zombies, but I don't need them interwoven with Austen's classic prose. Do fanboys read this shit?

Which brings me to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the archetypal mashup. What began as a grim indie comic parodying Marvel's Daredevil and preempting the mid-80s animal-based action boom (Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters, anyone?), spawned a tubuloso animated series and some far-out feature films. Thing is, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird's original comic was drenched in vengeance and solitude, versus the kid-friendly, pizza-eating, wisecracking terrapins who made it mainstream—let alone Vanilla Ice's totally bogus cameo in The Secret of the Ooze. As for producer Michael Bay's remarks that the relaunched Ninja Turtles are aliens, director Jonathan Liebesman tried assuaging fan-fears: “anything we expand will tie right into the mythology, so I think fans will go apeshit when they see it.” Translation: this is a money-making franchise, and we don't dare mess that up.

Too early to predict if the turtles go mano-a-mano with Confederate zombies, but maybe that's best left for the pages? Cowabunga!

Image credit: Nerdbastards

Fan fiction’s loyal partisans were probably tickled pink last week when the story broke that E.L. James’ book Fifty Shades of Grey was going to be optioned for a film.  That book, which began as an imaginative response to the Twilight trilogy called Master of the Universe, explores the hawt hawt hawt relationship between sexual naïf Anastasia and sexually domineering Christian, and will, like Twilight, probably produce a triplet of middling to poor films the rest of us can enjoy on TNT the days we call off sick.

But in these, there’ll be more sex—apparently, one reader had to pop a Viagara just to get through the book. So what makes fans want to write their favorite characters into ropes and ball gags?

Don’t blame the net: erotic fan fiction has been around at least as long as leisure suits, even if it’s blossomed in the interwebs. And sometimes it finds inspiration in strange places: I was startled to come across Caitlyn Reads 2666, an erotic novel putatively riffing on Roberto Bolaño’s grisly epic. It’s hard for me to imagine wanting to embark on a sexual odyssey after reading  “The Part About the Crimes,” but maybe I just need to think with my, uh, teeth more. And to imagine a castle. Complete with a dungeon. Mmm...dungeons.

Whatever impulse sprang these fandoms loose, assuming there’s a common one, it produces highly varied literary products. And the stuff usually isn’t even illustrated. It’s driven by narrative only. Lesser, better mortals might claim that this is rooted in essential differences between genders. Something about the male gaze, blah blah, something about female intuitions and narrativity, blah blah. See, clearly the proof is in evolutionary psychological pudding.

Fifty Shades of Grey stands apart from its estimable kin because of the monetary success it’s enjoyed. Not only has it been a number one bestseller (it had spent 18 days in that spot at Amazon as of April, 3, 2012), but the film contract it garnered is rumored to be on par with The Da Vinci Code. Some people are downright offended that E.L. James is making so much money while riding on the coattails (supposedly) of Twilight; others are celebrating the entrance of fan fiction into the serious literary world (i.e., the one that pays). As for me, I’ll give a nod to Shakespeare’s appropriations and grumble something about stickiness of creativity, especially once money enters.

Because let’s face it, it’s money that’s at stake here. We can argue about the ethics of Fifty Shades of Grey, but really, the ethics behind its creation and that of the rest of fan fiction are the same: writers appropriate other writers’ characters and put them into novel—sometimes really novel, if you catch my drift—situations. Published authors from Anne Rice to J.D. Salinger strongly disapprove; others not so much. Presumably Stephanie Meyer didn’t care about Fifty Shades, or she saw it as a way to increase attention for Twilight.

After all, that’s synergy, my little munchkins.

Image from flickr user Sarah Dawes