* The teaser poster for the next M. Night Shyamalan movie, a natural-disaster-apocalypse movie called The Happening, is out. Needless to say it hits my buttons.
Via Bloody Disgusting. And Jason Adams points out something about the poster’s tagline that never even occurred to me.
* Riffing off a recent post of mine about the reaction to No Country for Old Men, Jon Hastings talks film-critical aversion to craft.
* It’s still Krampus Week over at Monster Brains, and this particular postcard of the Christmas devil is stunning. Dig that color design!
* Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell turn a skeptical eye to Beowulf, focusing on whether the tech really works. I disagree with many of their observations (duh) but it’s the most thought-provoking negative review of the film I’ve read; the effects-based comparisons to The Lord of the Rings were particularly specific and illuminating.
* Jonathan Bennett brings our attention to HitchcockWiki’s 1000 Frames of Hitchcock project, which breaks down every one of the Master’s films into 1000 screen grabs.
* Breaking news: Jeph Loeb is not a very good writer.
* I love that Kevin Huizenga keeps posting his Powr Mastrs fan art. I really just love when any artist shows unabashed enthusiasm for the work of one of his contemporaries by creating homages to it (that’s why I’ve been happy about the recent return to quick-response pop-music cover versions–for years and years I thought we were losing something by not having the equivalent of Joe Cocker’s within-the-year Beatles covers, you know?) Anyway, his seemingly extradimensional Jellyfish Emperor is really blowing my mind.
* Apparently in response to the infamous Gordon Lee case, which at this point looks more likely to end in a misconduct conviction for the prosecutor than an obscenity conviction for the retailer, all Free Comic Book Day books must now be all-ages. I’m no retailer, and I dunno, maybe FCBD really is geared all-but-exclusively to children already. But my first instinct was that this is a profoundly dopey (and cowardly) decision equivalent to the film industry having a free-movie day that only includes PG-rated movies.
* For a glimpse of the kinds of things that went down before video-game culture fully calcified as a children’s affair in the public mind, take a look at some naughty “adult” Atari games courtesy of Kotaku. (Link via the Daily Gut.) The combination of the ultra-lo-res graphics we associate with the game-playing experiences of our youth and the crassly pornographic subject matter leads to some fascinating cognitive dissonance.
* Finally, this week’s Horror Roundtable is all about our best creative achievements of the past year. Come listen to us toot our own horns!
Mmm. The poster looks mighty good.
I see the FCBD decision as an acknowledgement of a pragmatic reality: there are N thousand jurisdictions out there, with N thousand times X local officials who might go showboating. It’s not really feasible to predict in advance who’s going to go for what. This keeps retailers from being put at a bad and avoidable risk.
It might be interesting to have a supplemental track of not-all-ages-safe material for retailers who’d choose to get it or not, though.
I believe that’s how it HAD been working, and now that track is eliminated entirely. That’s my beef–it’s not as though anyone was being forced to hand out non-all-ages books, and now they don’t have the option.