* Frank “The Tank” Miller talks Holy Terror, his now-Batman-free vigilante vs. al-Qaeda graphic novel, which he says he should be finishing next month. (Via Kevin Melrose.)
* Today on Robot 6: Tom Brevoort on Marvel’s latest “tie-ins for variant” swap.
* Today the five-minute trailer for Kenneth Branagh’s Thor that Marvel debuted at the San Diego Comic-Con leaked onto the Internet for a few hours. (It used to be here but is no longer.) It was pretty good. Firmly in the spirit of the 21st-century Marvel approach to any and all of its properties to be sure, i.e. filtering them through military-industrial-espionage-action tropes, but it’s not like I was expecting Asgard and its denizens to be done in Speed Racer style. Ang Lee scared the experimentation right out of Marvel movies, at least somewhat justifiably so. Asgard looked big and unearthly, at least, and the Destroyer–one of the all-time great villain designs, like Jack Kirby presaging the Cenobites–was great, and I look forward to seeing fight choreography that revolves around the use of a war hammer.
* Yet all that being said, I still find myself far more entertained by an entirely different comic-book movie trailer, one for a book I’ve never even read: Stephen Frears’s adaptation of Posy Simmond’s Tamara Drewe. What on earth could be drawing me to this movie? What could it possibly, possibly be?
* Guillermo Del Toro will indeed direct a 3-D adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness with James Cameron now producing, which seems to mean that yes, it’ll get made. Shrug.
* A great way to get a sense of fanboy conventional wisdom on any given topic is to read what the big horror sites say about it. In the process of reporting that They may hire Damon Lindelof to rewrite Ridley Scott’s Alien prequel, Dread Central shits alllllll over Lindelof and the Lost finale–like, to an M. Night Shyamalan degree. So I guess that’s where Nerd Culture comes down on that. NEEDS MOAR NANOTECHNOLOGY!!!
* Sean P. Belcher wasn’t nuts about Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour. The way he talks about it makes me think he had a hard time with aspects of it in the same way I did, namely not connecting with the supposedly knockout emotional content. And like me he feels obligated to couch this caveat in as complimentary language as possible, because the overall project was so innovative, entertaining, and endearing.
Del Toro plus Lovecraft equals?
Shoggoth-senses tingling. And not in a good way…
Yeah, that pretty much sums up my feelings on Pilgrim. Vol 5 actually resonated much more for me than this one, in as far as connecting with my life in a recognizable way. But I don’t demand my art be representative of my life to appreciate or enjoy it.
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I think I was just thrown more by how uninvolved I ultimately was, particularly in the final boss fight (I can’t even talk about the series without couching it in video game terminology) – the fight had too many off-beats, too many breaks in momentum. If he was going for the ever-evolving-threat aspect of, say, a Final Fantasy Boss fight, he didn’t quite pull it off – if anything Gideon seemed to constantly diminish in terms of the threat he posed as the fight progressed. Beating him seemed increasingly less vital and less relevant. I liked that the stakes were higher for Ramona in that whole thing, but I wish I could have felt that same urgency as a reader.
It really did feel more like a final battle that was trying far too hard to work on far too many levels simultaneously. I don’t think the spine of the series was ever sturdy enough to support the kind of thing it felt like he was going for in that conclusion.
It does make me very curious to see how that will play in the film. If translated faithfully, I suspect it will come across more hokey than impactful, especially with only two hours worth of narrative to get the audience to that point.
My favorite part of SPv6 was definitely the Memory Cam. Because, on an emotionally resonant level, I’ve got that same Memory Cam, myself.
Matt: Yeah. I’ve tried to temper my reflexive distrust of Del Toro because one time I caught myself calling his approach “bullshit” like I’m one of the blogosphere’s short-bus bullies and he’s a Grant Morrison comic I’ve decided I don’t like. But…yeah.
Sean: I’m pretty sure the movie’s finale and the final volume diverge since the latter wasn’t written when the former was.
Don’t know where I saw it, but there was a story going around that they reshot the ending to making it “more in line” with the ending of the comics (same source said that if they had kept the ending they had screened a few mos back, fans of the book would have been pissed – so hopefully we’ll see it on the DVD).
Could be bullsh*t, but we’ll know in a couple of weeks.
I’ve seen the movie, so no spoilers, but… the final confrontations are superficially similar, but quite different in tone. I suspect someone on some end caught wind of the other’s plan, since one character tword the end of the movie pretty evidently takes on the characteristics of another character in vol. 6, in addition to their own…
Sean and Joe: Now that you mention it I remember Edgar Wright saying he changed some stuff once he read vol. 6. Also, how the heck is everyone seeing this movie already??? I understand if you were in San Diego, but Joe, aren’t you in Pennsylvania someplace?
Universal’s been running sneak peek screenings (in addition to press screenings, which have been going on this week too)… trying to drum up extensive grassroots hype, I suppose!
Sean, TAMARA DREWE is a really good read. But even if it wasn’t, I, like you, would shell out the 10 bucks to watch Gemma Arterton cavort about in cutoff shorts for 90 minutes.
The amount of text in Simmonds comics always puts me off. That trailer certainly incentivizes getting past that.
The amount of text in Simmonds comics always puts me off. That trailer certainly incentivizes getting past that.