Tired of being speared with Best of Lists? Me too. But my ears perked up when I heard Stephen King posted his Top 10 movies of 2009 over at EW, which I wish he didn’t have anything to do with. I guess it’s a perfect magazine if you’re on the toilet all day long – the only place I’ve ever opened an Entertainment Weekly.

Like almost everyone else in the universe, The Hurt Locker topped King’s list. Can’t blame him; if you have eyes and ears that movie should top your list. Unless your nipples get hard when Nic Cage is on screen, like me. But thankfully King included some movies I didn’t see anywhere else: Law Abiding Citizen, The Last House on the Left, and The Taking of Pelham 1, 2, 3. Right on, King. Now I’ve gotta check these out. He stated that the Pelham (one of my favorite ’70s crime flicks) remake:

“…makes Public Enemies look pretty tame.”

Good enough for me. If Ebert can convince me to shoot Knowing to the top of my queue, King can force me to add all his favs too.

King is having a good laugh in the above picture because for the past week I’ve been lugging around his new novel, Under the Dome. There’s a reason I haven’t seen other commuters reading this on the train: it’s like having a fucking calf in your shoulder bag. It cost me $35 and costs about a dollar a pound. But regardless of the weight and hit to your wallet, it’s classic King worth the dime. A small town with an immense amount of interesting characters and a mystery unraveling like molasses; that’s the slow-burners I like. And Dome delivers. Honestly some of the characters are archetypal to the point of boredom, but he’s juggling about 25 of them at once so whatever, and the overarching story is so fucking good I haven’t been able to put this one down.

Anyone else been reading Under the Dome?

- Oh Mars