* When I think about my “favorite movies,” I have a whole lot, and I tend to separate them out into groups. For example, some of my favorite movies are millions of people’s favorite movies: The Godfather Parts I & II, The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, etc. Then there are horror movies: The Shining, The Exorcist, Hellraiser, The Blair Witch Project and so on. I’m not sure that either list is all that unique to me. That’s the job of my “Idiosyncratic Favorites” list, consisting of movies that are uniquely my bag in a big way. Three of those movies, Heavenly Creatures, Velvet Goldmine, and Eyes Wide Shut, are the subject of recent installments in Scott Tobias’s New Cult Canon series at the Onion AV Club. (The others, if you were wondering, are Lost Highway, Barton Fink, and Casino. Actually I’d probably throw Hellraiser on there as well.) Go read all three please.
* Happy Seventh Blogiversary to ADDTF Blogather Bill Sherman!
* Chris Butcher notes that the Final Crisis hardcover is now slated to include Superman Beyond and Submit. No Batman: Last Rites, but I’ll take what I can get.
* Looks like longtime Romero-movie composter John Harrison’s directorial adaptation of Clive Barker’s Book of Blood will be going straight to DVD. Somehow that seems less ignominious than what happened to The Midnight Meat Train.
* I think we already knew that Cloverfield director Matt Reeves was remaking Let the Right One In, but I don’t think we knew that he was calling it the far less elegant and evocative title of Let Me In. Character-driven horror is not exactly what I would set the director of Cloverfield up with as a follow-up project, but hey.
* The making of a masterpiece: Geoff Grogan explains how he created his collage comic Look Out!! Monsters. (Via Chris Mautner.)
* Douglas Wolk reviews several notable superhero collections of late: Omega the Unknown, All Star Superman, and the Greg Sadowski-edited Supermen! In this piece Wolk seems to subscribe to the theory, advanced here and there around the internet, that there’s a twist ending in All Star Superman in terms of a certain character and a certain other character and perhaps a relationship of some kind between them. I’m not convinced and I think Morrison has more or less denied it in interviews, though not in so many words because he’s never been asked it in so many words, but still. Ah, does anyone even know what I’m talking about?
* Rick Trembles reviews Tim Lucas’s book on David Cronenberg’s Videodrome in his inimitable comic-strip style. Full of fascinating insights and what-ifs.
* Stacie Ponder is right: This trailer for The Shining is astonishing.
* Good lord Tom Neely can draw.
* The Bush Administration’s legal team asserted that virtually no law or legal principle applied to the President’s conduct towards you provided he believed you to be a terrorist, so in that light it’s not surprising that recordings of almost 100 interrogations of terror suspects were destroyed. Somewhat more surprising is how little the Obama Administration has deviated from some of the Bush Administration’s more jawdroppingly authoritarian policies.
* I’ve got a fever! And the only prescription! Is more Kate Winslet!
* Which reminds me: As promised, here’s the first installment of The Best of Bowie Loves Beyoncé. I’ve come across a lot of wonderful images during my first week and a half of running this tumblelog, but I think this is my favorite pair of all:
Beyoncé and her team are not here to win news cycles, they’re here to win the election.
And of course, if you’re not in it for the clever juxtapositions, it is of course a blog containing nothing but pictures of two human beings who look like this:
Two things:
1) Part of me thinks I’ve seen that trailer before, but I’m not sure – it sells that movie so well, though. And that music…I had the Shining score on LP back in the 80’s and spent a fair bit of time trolling around on-line a year or so back to rebuild it. Next to the score to The Thing and now There Will Be Blood, it really is my favorite film score of all time – just brilliantly horrifying. Some of the Joker cues in TDK remind me a bit of it, in fact.
2) Is that Klaus Nomi with Bowie in that pic?? That just reminds me of the Season 2 finale of the Venture Bros where Nomi and Iggy Pop engage in a superpower battle with Bowie…great stuff, man.
That’s Klaus Nomi alright. He sang back-up for Dave on SNL. Look for it on YouTube!
Re: Jog’s theory. I know what you’re talking about and I agree with him. Putting the clues together now…
I’m glad that Sean B. asked that question, ’cause I was gonna.
Need to track that down.