A multimillionaire Muttontown couple has been arrested by federal agents on charges of keeping two Indonesian women as slaves in their Long Island home for the past five years and torturing one of them frequently for disobedience, according to officials…. The situation was uncovered after one of the woman managed to escape and was found wandering near a Dunkin Donuts in Syosset by employees who initially thought she was homeless, the papers said. When the employees attempted to communicate with her she kept slapping her face and saying what sounded to them like the word “master,” the papers added.

—“LI couple face charges for keeping, torturing slaves,” Robert E. Kessler, Newsday. Picture of suspect Varsha Mahender Sabhnani leaving Nassau County Police Headquarters by Howard Schnapp.

O’ course, it’s probably not a giant sea turtle at all, but just a funnily decomposed whale, which is usually what these sea-monster carcasses (aka globsters) that wash up tend to be. But still, for now, whoa, eh?

More pics at Loren Coleman’s Cryptomundo.

Bruce Baugh, whose earlier letter triggered yesterday’s critique of Alan Moore, writes again in the writer’s defense:

I have to add this: Moore has been one of the most incredibly responsible people I can think of when it comes to the bad effects of his legacy. He’s very up front about what he was trying to do, his dismay at being copied for bad reasons, and his desire to get attention spread around again. And of course he’s gone on to do work in a lot of different ways himself, not all of it to my particular taste, but all showing the same underlying spark let out through all kinds of different channels. I don’t think it’s his and Frank Miller’s fault that so many people were ready to turn up the grimness dial on superheroics and then leave it stuck there, nor his and Gibbons and Veitch and Totleben and et al’s fault that there was such an audience for super-carefully structured storytelling of the sort he was doing then.

I absolutely love this bit from an interview Moore did for the Onion’s AV Club:

“The gritty, deconstructivist postmodern superhero comic, as exemplified by Watchmen, also became a genre. It was never meant to. It was meant to be one work on its own. I think, to that degree, it may have had a deleterious effect upon the medium since then. I’d have liked to have seen more people trying to do something that was as technically complex as Watchmen, or as ambitious, but which wasn’t strumming the same chords that Watchmen had strummed so repetitively. This is not to say that the entire industry became like this, but at least a big enough chunk of it did that it is a noticeable thing. The apocalyptic bleakness of comics over the past 15 years sometimes seems odd to me, because it’s like that was a bad mood that I was in 15 years ago. It was the 1980s, we’d got this insane right-wing voter fear running the country, and I was in a bad mood, politically and socially and in most other ways. So that tended to reflect in my work. But it was a genuine bad mood, and it was mine. I tend to think that I’ve seen a lot of things over the past 15 years that have been a bizarre echo of somebody else’s bad mood. It’s not even their bad mood, it’s mine, but they’re still working out the ramifications of me being a bit grumpy 15 years ago. So, for my part, I wouldn’t say that my new stuff is all bunny rabbits and blue-skies optimism, but it’s probably got a lot more of a positive spin on it than the work I was doing back in the ’80s. This is a different century.”

That’s pretty darned decent, I’d say.

That’s certainly true, though to me the “bad mood I was in 15 years ago” line he frequently employs is a wee bit condescending. It’s not like he’s blaming himself for his work’s limitations, after all–he’s blaming other people for not getting it, basically. Of course, that’s entirely fair, so he has that going for him. I totally agree that it’s completely unfair to blame Watchmen and Dark Knight for Identity Crisis and Spider-Man: Reign.

But I don’t get the sense he’s aware that the meticulous stuff is just as much a schtick now (for himself and for others, though it speaks to his prodigious talent that no one’s been able to pull it off as well as he) as the grim’n’gritty stuff. Most of his later work falls into one of two categories: The stuff you get the sense he regards as being his Important Statements, which do the clockwork bit, and the stuff he’s doing as a somewhat self-conscious Lark, which is all the homagey ABC stuff and Supreme and whatnot. The books that fall somewhere in between, like Top Ten (for the most part) and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, are the books I enjoy the most. They tend to be the most loosey-goosey.

What it comes down to is whether you want to decode a work of fiction. Decoding has its undeniable thrills, and I don’t mean to condescend to them or deny them or minimize them at all. The revelatory frisson of noticing all the easter eggs and hidden symbolism and syncronicitities in the days and weeks and months and, frankly, years following my first read of Watchmen is one of my all-time favorite reading experiences. But the problem with works where everything is mapped out and thought through and consciously connected is that you can hit bottom on them. At a certain point, you’ve exhausted their possibilities. Once you’ve cracked the code, the code is cracked. You’ve figured it out. That’s the only way to skin that particular cat. Compare and contrast that with the pretty much boundless possibilities within the unanswered questions of just one Sopranos episode. (Don’t click that link if you haven’t seen the most recent episode, but if you have, I urge you to click it.)

I like the wiggle room, is what I’m saying. I like the message I receive to be more or less up to me, not simply an extremely erudite version of “Be sure to drink your Ovaltine.”

Ain’t It Cool News guru Harry Knowles reports from the set of The Dark Is Rising, the upcoming adaptation of Susan Cooper’s marvelous fantasy novel. A newcomer to the franchise, he’s come away from his read of the script and his visit to the set a believer. This makes me extremely optimistic about the prospects of one-third of my Extremly Highly Anticipated Adaptations Triumvirate (which also includes The Mist and The Midnight Meat Train.)

Lots of info and waxing enthusiastic and pictures–such as the one above, of Christopher Eccleston as the Rider–at the link.

My take is that dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction has always been around (from The Time Machine to Pan in Year Zero! to Blade Runner), so what we’re really noticing now is the absence of any other kind of sci-fi, at least when it comes to sci-fi that reaches the mainstream of pop culture.

—Jon Hastings, in response to my post on the fall of optimistic sci-fi. Lots of other good “towards a definition of science fiction”-type stuff in Jon’s post, too.

The difference between Heidi and Kennedy and Tony and Christopher is one of degree, not kind. The young women had a chance to do the right thing but didn’t…. What’s important — for Chase’s purposes — is that they were presented with a moral test and they not only failed it, they didn’t seem terribly aware that it was a test.

—Matt Zoller Seitz, on David Chase’s starless and bible black cynicism as embodied in a pair of bit characters in this week’s episode of The Sopranos. None more black.

The illustrious Bruce Baugh writes, regarding my and Jon Hastings’ thoughts on “improvisational storytelling” versus “having it all mapped out” in serialized television (and other places):

Oh, man, this is such a standard rant of mine. Way too many fanboys (this is much less common a problem among fangirls) give plotting an undue respect. In comics, it’s all Alan Moore’s fault. 🙂 Okay, not really, but the famous scripts and all for Swamp Thing, Watchmen, et al, set far too many folks already inclined to favor plot at the expense of other concerns to thinking that the best work is all done up in advance. Nothing of the sort, of course, and you can cite as many good examples of improvisation as I can, I’ll bet, in film, music, comics, prose, and so on until we get bored with it.

Indeed, and agreed that Alan Moore is particularly egregious in this respect, something I’ve been saying for a few years now (and also recently). The thing that most irks me about Moore’s work, even his best work, even his work I enjoy a great deal, is how ostentatiously writerly it is–the way his Godlike Authorial Hand shows in every move machination of his clockwork-precise plotting. And the thing is, to employ a criterion frequently used to lambaste superhero comics of a very different sort, what does this say to you about life, anyway? I think it’s awesome that there’s a completely symmetrical of issue of Watchmen, but it has sweet fuck-all to do with the way the world actually works. You’d never get one of those great Alan Moore “holy crap, that’s so cool!” moments out of reading scripts in which, say, Christopher Moltisanti falling on and off the wagon for five seasons of The Sopranos, or Johnny Sack getting cancer out of the blue, or whatever, but that’s a lot more evocative of the human experience than the pentagrammatic structure of different From Hell character arcs or whatever.

I remember being completely blown away when I was younger by the notion that someone could think through every aspect of his fiction so thoroughly and arrange it so meticulously. I still find it impressive, but I also find giant jigsaw puzzles impressive.

Surely the dearth of optimistic futuristic science fiction is linked to the recent rise of the fantasy genre I noted Kristin Thompson talking about. Writers of imaginative genre fiction have abandoned the future as a source for wonder and are retreating to worlds created out of whole cloth instead.

Brainfart: This doesn’t bode well for Robert Rodriguez’s live-action Jetsons movie, does it? Unless you find out Spacely Sprockets are made out of people, that is.

“I have being paid $50,000.00 in advance to terminate you”

–anonymous threatening spam email, as quoted in “E-mail threatens to snuff recipient,” Bob Sullivan, The Red Tape Chronicles, MSNBC.com

Today we seem to have trouble picturing the future, except in cataclysmic terms or as the present gone worse.

–Simon Reynolds, “Back to the future,” a review of Where’s My Jetpack?: The Amazing Science Fiction Future That Never Happened by Daniel H. Wilson, Ph.D., Salon.com

That’s certainly true. I really can’t think of the last non-Star Wars science-fiction film I saw that wasn’t dystopian or downright apocalyptic, post- or otherwise, in nature. Children of Men, Starship Troopers, The Matrix, 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later, War of the Worlds, A.I., Minority Report…and jeez, those last three were from America’s Director, Steven Spielberg, for crying out loud. Even the comparatively down-to-earth Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind had nothing uplifting to say about scientific progress. Then there’s books like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Stephen King’s Cell, comics like Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead and Paul Pope’s Batman Year 100, albums like nine inch nails’ year zero, TV shows like Heroes and Battlestar Galactica and even Lost, which is actually based in large part on the failure of an optimistic futurist utopia.

I found this link via Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds (“no relation”), who offers Quote #2 in response to Quote #1:

That’s a cultural thing, I think, brought about more by the values of filmmakers, etc. than by anything inherent in reality.

Now, I’m tempted to agree with him out of my long-held opinion that a belief in the imminent apocalypse–best exemplified by religious millenarianists, although as the excellent Children of Men and most of the other aforementioned films would indicate, that lot by no means has a monopoly on the doctrine–is 100% pure vanity, a reflection of the deep-seated conviction that one is part of the Most Special Generation EVAR. But really, there’s nothing inherent in present-day reality to make people feel pessimistic? Perhaps not for Reynolds, who doffs his rose-colored glasses only to look at Islamism, gun rights, and the Democratic Congress’s approval ratings, but for the rest of us, a lot of things do look mighty grim.

But Simon Reynolds takes the pessimism too far:

Race, gay rights, drugs, socioeconomic equality, religion — on just about every front, things either are not nearly as advanced as we’d have once expected or have actually gone into reverse.

Again, really? Look, there’s a difference between “as we’d have once expected,” and “as we’d like,” unless the “we” refers exclusively to hippies and little kids. I’ll admit that the Sesame Street watcher in me is kind of amazed that racism even exists, but the notion that we’re backsliding as a culture (as opposed to via certain current policies that stand to be subsequently backslid themselves) across a broad spectrum of socially progressive issues just doesn’t ring true to me. Maybe this is just more optimistic futurism, but for example, don’t statistics indicate that gay marriage will be a widely accepted reality within a generation? And, for another example, don’t we stand a better-than-decent chance of electing either a woman or a black man president the next time around? Don’t let’s give up on the metaphorical jetpacks just yet, folks.

Contrary to earlier reports from Edward James Olmos, Battlestar Galactica co-executive producer David Eick says no end has been announced for the show. Hooray! (Of course, this doesn’t necessarily mean that Season Four won’t be the last–just that it hasn’t been announced yet. But I’ll take what I can get.)

See 28 Weeks Later.

Wow.

This week’s Horror Roundtable asks its participants to name and describe the last horror movie we watched, “good, bad, or ugly.” Mine’s good.

Eli Roth has announced plans for a movie called Trailer Trash, consisting solely of fake trailers for nonexistent films. Please, please, please God let this happen.

Battlestar Galactica star Katee Sackhoff has been cast as a sort of beta-test Bionic Woman in BSG exec producer David Eick’s revival of The Bionic Woman for NBC. Prepare your TiVos.

Fellow Battlestar Galactica star Edward James Olmos has wandered off the reservation and let it slip that 2008’s Season Four will be the show’s final season. Frak.

In a somewhat spoilery interview with Entertainment Weekly that, let’s face it, you’ve probably already read, Lost honchos Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse talk about the genesis and impact of the decision to end the show after 48 more episodes, as well as reveal some details about the end of the current Season Three. Due to the aforementioned spoilery nature of much of this information I’ll refrain from commenting, except for the unrelated point that this week’s episode contained one of the scariest scenes of television I’ve ever watched. That was some Blair Witch shit is what that was.

Invincible, Countdown, Marvel Zombies: Dead Days, The Immortal Iron Fist, The New Avengers, Stormwatch: P.H.D., Thunderbolts, and Wolverine: Origins get the Sean T. Collins treatment over in this week’s Thursday Morning Quarterback review column at Wizard.

Riot police have been sent to a remote mountainous village in Papua New Guinea after a gun battle between police and members of a cult involved in human sacrifices, local media reported Wednesday.

—“PNG police in gun battle with human sacrifice cult,” Reuters

(Hat tip: Kennyb.)

Jon Hastings is absolutely right when he says (and says and says) that the “messiness” and lack of closure offered by The Sopranos is what makes it such a great show. I mean, as I’ve been saying for a LONG time, totally, right? I’m completely baffled by the proclamations (including some from writers who’ve stuck with the show as it moved away from its comparatively good-natured goombah roots and therefore one might expect to know better) that unless we get some tidy climax the show will have failed or cheated the audience or something. Why? It would be completely within the spirit of the series to end without one, and I’ve enjoyed the series so far, so simple arithmetic would seem to dictate I’d like it that way.

I also think it’s astute of him to point out the way the serialized (read: relatively open-ended) nature of the show allowed “improvisation” with the storylines and characters. One of my very favorite moments in the history of the show was when Johnny Sack–at first a throwaway face at Vesuvio’s, and then a fairly straightforward villain–stumbled across his (eating-disordered, though we didn’t know it until that moment) wife binge-eating and reacted with genuine devastation. They took a minor character and played with him and bang, one of the show’s strongest characters emerged. I doubt that was part of some everything-mapped-out game plan that’s now apparently de rigeur for a show for a lot of viewers and writers.

Finally, I agree with Ross Douthat: Critics need to shut up about the goddamn Russian already.

That’s all, really.

A while back, Keith Uhlich at The House Next Door linked to an essay on Nic Roeg’s Don’t Look Now by Sheila O’Malley, in which she said the following:

So when that sex scene comes … it’s not like a gymnastics soft-lit scene , the way you so often see in Hollywood movies. Where when people take off their clothes, they cease being human beings – or characters – and just become People Having Sex. As though everyone has sex the same way – married couples, one-night stands, whatever, and everyone is good and graceful at it, and nobody has body issues, and there’s always a soundtrack … We all know scenes like that. This scene, which comes in the first half of the movie – is, indeed, striking – and there’s a reason why it is referred to all the time. They’re both buck naked – the scene goes on forever – but watching it, I felt … Let’s see. First of all – as the scene goes on and on, there are intercut scenes, glimpses of them getting dressed afterwards because they’re going out to dinner. So we get a close-up of her buttoning her blouse, him zipping his trousers … interspersed with the love-making. Fascinating. This is a real relationship. Couples behave this way all the time. You are naked, then an hour later you’re clothed and you’re at a dinner party. The world doesn’t STOP for sex. Sex is just ONE part of a relationship, and the way the scene was edited really hit that home. I thought it was a great choice.

“The world doesn’t STOP for sex”? To paraphrase the Woodman, it does if you’re doing it right!

The praise heaped on this scene has baffled me ever since I first saw the film years ago. Simply put, this really isn’t how sex works. (In my experience, of course. Not to put too fine a point on it or anything–it’s just, who else’s experience would I be basing this on?) From your diminished pain response on down, sex is an immediate, all-consuming enterprise. Roeg’s cross-cutting to Julie Christine and Donald Sutherland getting dressed afterwards appears sexy because of the way it acknowledges the everyday intimacy of a married couple, but it’s actually emotionally, and more importantly erotically, false. It would work if we were to interpret the getting-dressed as “right now” and the sex as a flashback, but if I recall correctly the scene is framed so that the getting-dressed is a flash-forward from the in-the-now sex. There have been a lot of times where I’ve fondly recalled sex after the fact, but literally never have I drifted away during the act to ruminate about putting my pants back on.

It’s sadly unlikely that anyone will do “Every Christian Lion-Hearted Man Will Show You.”

I think it’s indicative of the ways that Las Vegas has changed for the better and the world has changed for the worse that a bomb can blow someone up in a casino parking lot and the first culprit people think of isn’t the mafia.

Regarding the announcement that Lost will end in 2010 after three more 16-episode seasons, I want to point out that I honestly thought to myself “Oh great, now I have to make sure to live until May of 2010 so that I can see how it ends.” I’ve previously thought this with the Star Wars prequels, the Lord of the Rings movies, and The Sopranos. Now it’s a race between Lost and Battlestar Galactica as to when the earliest point at which I’ll be comfortable dying will arrive.