* Jason Adams has blogged his thoughts on Battlestar Galactica: Razor. Like me, he thinks that the lack of on-screen canoodling between Tricia Helfer and Michelle Fobes smacks of rainbow-flag cold feet; also like me, he thinks it ranks with your average okay BSG episode. I think that normally this wouldn’t be a problem, but when you’re debuting something as a feature-length movie, selling it as a stand-alone DVD, and using it to tide fans over during a year-long hiatus that is itself under the shadow of a strike that may postpone or even eliminate the series’ final episodes, okay probably isn’t good enough.

* Jason has also blogged his thoughts on The Mist, which he says he “mostly dug.” His main complaint, a pretty fundamental one, is basically that the whole never added up to more than the sum of its parts. That sounds about right to me. Aside from obvious missteps like Mrs. Carmody it’s hard to point to anything disastrous about the film (even she isn’t so); everything works, but nothing works wonders.

* Jon Hastings is Mistblogging too. He liked it quite a bit, except for the ending, which (like me) he wasn’t crazy about not because he objected to it in principle but because he found it tacked on. Amid interesting comparisons to 28 Weeks Later, Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, and Romero’s Dead movies, he articulates in a roundabout what I think is the core appeal of this story, namely that the monsters aren’t waiting around stalking the humans, but that they’re going about their everyday business of eating each other, stopping only to dine on something more readily available whenever the humans happen to cross their paths. That was what was so scary about the original story, and what also makes even the un-scary movie adaptation compelling (and re-watchable, even to me): Yes, the world of the mist-creatures is infiltrating our own, but the result is more akin to our world being plopped in the middle of theirs. (The novella made this more explicit with its earthquakes and great rifts in the ground, meant to evoke the shifting or perhaps even replacement of our earth’s crust to match theirs.)

* While he’s at it, Jon offers this dead-on observation about “inherent silliness” in genre works by way of musing on big creepy monsters and their discontents:

As for the goofiness issue: different people will bring different standards to the table, and, I’ve noticed, very few people are consistent about it. That is: some people will balk at taking stories about super-powered mutant heroes seriously, but have no problems with stories about the living dead. Other people might be completely down with the whole flying dudes in tights thing, but just can’t believe that anyone over the age of 12 would be interested in stories about a teenage wizard. In generally, I’m pretty accepting of any kind of fantasy element and while I recognize that it’s pretty common for folks to draw a line somewhere or other, I can only just wrap my head around doing that.

Bingo! Jon notes that The Mist takes its monsters dead seriously, which is one of its strengths.

* Jon’s post also got me thinking about The Mist‘s kind of surprisingly (to me at least) lackluster take at the box office. I tend not to think about box-office stuff at all anymore now that I don’t work at Wizard, so the main reason it surprised me is that I read a post on the blog of one of the big horror websites that theorized it could have a $100 million theatrical run. In retrospect I realized that this kind of thing is one of the reasons I’ve learned to ignore the big horror websites in terms of prognostications, criticism, or anything other than news. I think I really got the message around the time they started worrying about what Hostel Part 2‘s failure “meant for our genre.” A) It’s not our genre, that’s goofy; B) It failed because it was bad; C) In the short-term it means fewer shitty Hostel and Saw knockoffs will get greenlit, which is fine; D) in the medium-term it means some good horror movies might have a harder time finding distribution and an audience, but that’s always a crapshoot even in the best of times; E) in the long-term it won’t mean anything, because as we’ve seen time and time and time again, dozens of crappy Exorcist-Omen / slasher / self-reflexive / WB-stars-in-peril / Sixth Sense / J-horror / ’70s-remake movies can come and go and the kinds of people interested in making good horror movies will continue to make them in new and unexpected ways, and now we can just add torture porn to that list. In terms of The Mist, Cloverfield will still make a lot of money, and The Mist will end up with Carrie and The Shining on the perennial “hey, there are a few good Stephen King movies” articles that media websites run at Halloween, and it’ll make up its money on DVD if not in the theatres (and I can’t imagine it cost that much anyway) and we’ll all live happily ever after. The reason to be upset if horror movies don’t find an audience is if they’re good movies and people would enjoy them.

* I found this pan of No Country for Old Men by Fernando F. Croce fascinating insofar as it repeatedly uses the movie’s acknowledged strengths as exhibits for the prosecution. Much like Jonathan Rosenbaum, Croce cites the wholly successful use of Chigurh as a figure of horror as a failure. He does it by calling him “some peevish bad-guy out of Diamonds are Forever,” though, which is a lot (intentionally) funnier than anything Rosenbaum said. Also like Rosenbaum, he cites the Coens’ articulation of a bleak worldview as a failure, and though he faults it for its aesthetic shortcomings rather than its political ones, I of course agree with this argument no more than I agreed with the other one. Finally, and again like Rosenbaum but also reminiscent of the critics who lambasted Children of Men for its proficiency, he continuously cites the Coens’ ridonkulous level of skill as filmmakers as a sign of emotional paucity, which as a student and lover of film is utterly baffling to me; you’d think it’d indicate the opposite. Finally, Croce misuses the words “decimated” and “et al,” which is a dick move of me to point out, but I find that sort of thing funny when it’s done by someone who’s obviously a good writer. (Via Keith Uhlich.)

* I liked this Dick Hyacinth post ranking the different types of continuity gaffes. Continuity is a tricky thing. As you might have gathered over the years, I’m a bit of a snob and find a lot of continuity-heavy superhero comics tedious, but I’m also a bit of a nerd and find a lot of continuity-heavy superhero comics delightful. I’ve come to think of continuity as one of the pleasures of superhero comics if used entertainingly. I think complaining about continuity in, I don’t know, Green Lantern is like pointing to a Conan novel and saying “this book requires you to know a lot about Conan.” Well, duh. I mean, hopefully it’s enjoyable on other levels, hopefully it’s not just a wikipedia entry with sequential art illustrations, but the continuity is what it is. Anyway, I think Dick’s post helps draw lines between helpful, fun continuity usage and reductive, byzantine regurgitation.

* Johnny Ryan, the G.G. Allin of humor comics, once called by this writer “the funniest cartoonist on Earth”, is premiering “dozens of new paintings inspired by cult, horror and exploitation films” in an art show called, appropriately enough, HORRORSHOW, debuting this Friday at California’s Secret Headquarters.

Please let there be a book of these coming out from Buenaventura or somebody.

* It feels good to be done with blogging The Dark Tower, for a few reasons. A) As I mentioned, it showed me I can handle really long-term reading-and-blogging projects, which I hadn’t been sure about. I’ve got a couple of biggies in mind now. B) In the meantime I can just enjoy a second breeze through the wonderful World War Z by Max Brooks, which I’m doing in lieu not just of those other two projects but reading the latest Clive Barker and Chuck Palahniuk novels, too. And because it bears repeating, I want to thank my commenters and email interlocutors once again for blogslinging along with me, which is really how I felt about it. Yep, I mean all you guys who encouraged me to stick with it, too. Your sincerity and passion challenged me not just, and not even mostly, to finish the books but to try to analyze and articulate my own less passionate reactions to them as best as I could. Thanks!

* Oh boy.

* Finally, it’s awesome that this is what pregnant Helena Bonham-Carter looks like.

Pix at The Daily Mail, via Jackie Danicki, who advances the absurd notion that HBC doesn’t look smoking hot in that photo.

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