Book gift guide

Sex, satire, fashion, food and literature: Nice and naughty books for everyoneon your list

The Story of O by Pauline Réage
Grace: A Memoir by Grace Coddington
Building Stories by Chris Ware
Hugo Ortega’s Street Food of Mexico
Photo by Penny de los Santos
Marie Lu's Legend series
America Again: Re-becoming the Greatness We Never Weren't by Stephen Colbert
Salt Lick Cookbook by Jessica Dupuy and Scott Roberts

With only a few days left for holiday shopping, we at CultureMap would like to offer a happy medium between fighting the frenzy at NorthPark and just giving up and throwing gift cards at loved ones. How about a nice book?

The well-selected, gifted book literally and sometimes literarily tells a story to the receiver and can send many messages. I love you. I know you so well. I understand what you like. Please stop trying to force me to read 50 Shades of Grey.

Without further ado, here is the CultureMap definitive, but completely random, book gift guide.

Movie lover
For the movie lover who’s just not into books, let him know Hollywood is with a gift basket filled with The Life of Pi, Cloud Atlas, Les Misérables (the book turned musical, turned movie), Anna Karenina, Jack Reacher, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln and The Hobbit. Do readers' imaginations project at 48 frames per second or 24?

Contemporary lit reader
For the contemporary literary reader with shelves of signed copies and tales of meeting authors, pick up Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue.

Teen reader
If instead you’re shopping for a teen reader who wants to get into the next big series before the rest of the world flocks to the obligatory movie, we suggest the Legend series by Marie Lu, who used to call Sugar Land home. In this post-apocalyptic novel, the main character, a teen, is slated to become an assassin. Things get nutty when she is sent to kill a boy who may have killed her brother.

Food lover
Need a gift for a foodie who always buys locally? Try a cookbook by a favorite Texas chef. Hugo Ortega’s Street Food of Mexico is not only filled with his favorite recipes, but he also includes personal stories to savor with each dish. An equally good idea is the Salt Lick Cookbook by CultureMap Austin dining editor Jessica Dupuy.

Fashionista
If that fashionista in your life loves the behind-the-scenes drama of the industry as much as the clothes, find some sophisticated gift wrap for Grace: A Memoir by Grace Coddington, the woman who managed to steal the spotlight from Anna Wintour in not one but two documentaries about Vogue.

Hipster satire-lover
Give the gift of historical irony to your favorite hipster satire-lover by pairing Stephen Colbert’s latest, America Again: Re-becoming the Greatness We Never Weren't, with some ancient school Gulliver’s Travels. Because if Jonathan Swift were alive today, he’d no doubt have his own Super PAC.

Bibliophile
For the bibliophile who refuses to buy an e-reader and is looking for validation, we like Chris Ware’s Building Stories, an oversized box of 27 different booklets, each with a different point of view. It is a book to wade through rather than read start to finish.

Lovable Luddite
And if that lovable Luddite reader is raising little ones, we recommend In My Den by Sara Gillingham, because you can’t download the felt finger puppet that comes with the board book and then poke it through a Kindle.

Future forecaster
For the gambler, baseball stats lover or fortune-teller in your life, let he or she know that the future can sometimes be forecast with The Signal and the Noise: Why Most Predictions Fail but Some Don't, the new book by this nation’s recently chosen math-nerd-in-chief, Nate Silver.

An alternative to 50 Shades of Grey
And, finally, for that sweet, budding-sadist friend who won’t stop insisting you have to read 50 Shades of Grey, try giving her The Story of O by Pauline Reage, described as a story of love and submission. It won the French literary prize in 1954, the year it was originally published, and it has been in print ever since. Another option is Exit to Eden, Anne Rice’s S&M romance written under her pseudonym, Anne Rampling.

If those suggestions don’t send the message, throw a hardback copy of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer at your best friend's head. Carrie Fisher would approve.

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Movie Review

Faces of Death returns with modern twist on cult horror film

Photo courtesy of of IFC Films

Dacre Montgomery in Faces of Death.

True horror fans will likely be familiar with the 1978 cult film Faces of Death, which purported to be a documentary showing real-life killings in gory detail. It didn’t, of course, but that didn’t stop rumors from continuing to spread for decades. Now, almost 50 years and multiple sequels later, comes a new version of Faces of Death, an actual movie that pays homage to the original in interesting ways.

Margot (Barbie Ferreira) works at a YouTube-like company called Kino as a content moderator, flagging videos that violate the company’s policies. This means her job often involves seeing some truly despicable things from all manner of depraved people. One day, though, she comes across a video that seems a little too real, and after seeing more similar videos, she starts to believe they’re genuine murders.

Going against her company NDA, she starts to investigate the videos on her own, which puts her on the radar of Arthur (Dacre Montgomery), who is actually kidnapping people and killing them on camera through methods seen in the original Faces of Death film. It’s not long before Arthur tracks her down, with a plan to make her one of his next victims.

Written and directed by Daniel Goldhaber (How to Blow Up a Pipeline) and co-written by Isa Mazzei, the film is not so much scary as it is creepy, with the occasional gross-out sequence. The idea of having someone emulate the killings in the cult film is a good idea, and pairing it with the modern-day attention economy - in which content creators go to increasing lengths for clicks - is a clever twist on a concept that other films have done.

The film as a whole is a commentary on how social media and video sharing sites have often decided to prioritize profits over the well-being of their users. Margot is shown allowing videos involving violence and sexual assault to stay on the site while nixing ones depicting how to use Narcan or demonstrating putting on a condom on a banana. Josh (Jermaine Fowler), Margot’s boss, is even explicit in the company mandate that outrageous videos drive views.

While Arthur has the makings of a good villain, there are few attempts to make him seem truly diabolical. His kidnappings often seem more spur-of-the-moment than calculated, and even though he has a well thought-out dungeon at home, the house’s location in the suburbs seems to make him vulnerable to easy discovery. Goldhaber and Mazzei leave more than a few unanswered questions along the way that take away from the intensity of the story.

Ferreira is yet another actor from Euphoria who’s capitalizing on her exposure from that show. She plays Margot’s increasing anxiety well, and when the action ratchets up in the final act, she meets the moment in a satisfying way. Montgomery returns to the vibe he had while playing the evil Billy on Stranger Things, and even though his character doesn’t fully live up to his potential, Montgomery sells his evil for all it’s worth.

The new Faces of Death may not be what some are expecting given the reputation of the previous films, but it’s a solid horror/thriller that uses the brand as a launching pad into something different. It doesn’t make much of a dent in the scare department, but it does give its violence and gore a degree of relevance in today’s often desensitized world.

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Faces of Death is now playing in theaters.

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