* Kristin Dos Santos has the final word on post-strike Lost: After airing the seventh of the eight pre-strike episodes on March 13, the show will break for six weeks, then return at 9pm on April 24 with the eighth. It will then be rolling out at 10pm (after Grey’s Anatomy) for the following five weeks’ worth of post-strike episodes. And show honcho Carlton Cuse tells Michael Ausiello that the spare three hours of show out of the originally planned 16 that they now won’t end up using this season will be employed at some undetermined point in future seasons. Man, that was frickin’ exhausting.
* I’m not going to read the whole thing until I see the movie—and god knows when that will be, given its super-limited release and a bevy of lukewarm responses that make me reluctant to go out of my way to track it down—but I really liked the opening lines of Robbie Freeling’s review of George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead:
There’s a tendency in some high and low circles to instantly enshrine any new work from classic horror-meister George A. Romero, good-natured, jocular guy that he is, as a way of validating not only his formidable zombie oeuvre but also the seventies horror movie canon itself. Always the most overt of that bunch in his penchant for toothy sociopolitical commentary, Romero has often traded in rather glib social satire since the revelation of his 1978 Dawn of the Dead; whereas Tobe Hooper and John Carpenter’s genre work has mostly been greeted with retrospective praise and analysis, Romero’s never made any bones about his intent. His easy-to-bottle concepts have always had a clever ring—the pop-allegorical purity of brain-devouring zombies shambling through a shopping mall was a great idea waiting to happen.
* Romero himself talks about some dream projects at SciFi Wire, including an outright slapstick zombie horror-comedy and letter-faithful adaptations of Burroughs’s Tarzan and Stoker’s Dracula. He also expresses bemusement at the outrage from some fannish quarters that Diary might in some ways be Blair Witch Project-esque, because, you know, god forbid.
* I really enjoyed this David Bordwell post on inventive blocking within static shots in There Will Be Blood; it’s written to illustrate how most staging of actors in films these days is either stand-and-deliver or walk-and-talk because filmmakers rely on camera movement and editing to keep things interesting instead.
* The great Bruce Baugh posts his thoughts on Scott Smith’s excellent horror novel The Ruins. My favorite part runs thusly:
The main characters are on vacation in Mexico after having graduated college, and before heading off to work or grad school. From my 40-something perspective it’s all too easy to look at such people and think rude thoughts like “slacker”, but in fact they’re not slackers. They have no great sins and not many significant lesser ones. They’re not doing anything that would normally ever be wrong, until they go off on what should be a lark and isn’t. Calamity ensues. They’re naive, yes, but then part of the point of a civilization is that people don’t get thrown into the state of nature all the time so a little naivete won’t kill you.
In conversation with Bruce he pointed out that the attitude of the book toward the characters is much less judgmental than that of similar stories by Clive Barker and even Stephen King, which I think is about right.
* The latest from the “science is awesome” files: Two gigantic new carnivorous dinosaur species have been discovered in Niger.
* Finally, the 20 Most Awesome but Tremendously Geeky T-shirts.
