* Steven Wintle has posted the farewell edition of The Horror Roundtable. I stole my entry from My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult’s Buzz McCoy’s contribution to the liner notes of the WaxTrax! box set, but my favorite valedictory has to be T Van, who drops the greatest, and most underutilized, Seinfeld quote of all time.
* Apparently Battlestar Galactica‘s ratings are up, but what really struck me about the Hollywood Reporter article stating as much was this passage about the show’s current direction:
The numbers are also surprising since “Battlestar” has as many fans frustrated with the current season as enthralled. The storylines have turned the show’s longtime shades-of-gray character morality into a muddy and often indecipherable quagmire of interlocking mythology, with a slew of formerly down-to-earth human and cylon characters elevated to quasi-deities pondering their higher purpose.
I don’t think it’s all that indecipherable–I don’t find Lost hard to follow either–but other than that, yeah, that’s kind of a downer, isn’t it? Not surprisingly, the focus on mythology seems to have completely energized various BSG fans of my acquaintance who made the transition over to the show via Netflix’d DVDs after hearing “Hey, you like Lost? You’ll like BSG too!” The current Battlestar storyline seems tailor-made to fan the guessing-game flames that mark Lost‘s most ardent fans. (Via Whitney Matheson.)
* I’m fond of saying I didn’t read comics as a kid, and this is basically true. However, around the time that I saw Batman and read The Dark Knight Returns, I was massively into Marvel trading cards. In one of the all-time great acts of cluefulness, my buddy Ryan Penagos at Marvel.com has posted every single Marvel Universe Series I trading card. I found this via Gary Wintle, who writes that he took the cards so seriously, he thought the “joke” cards were canonical. I’d imagine there are a lot of us out there whose ideas of heroic fantasy were shaped in a fairly fundamental way by these cards.
* Quentin Tarantino’s gonna shoot and complete his long-mooted World War II epic Inglorious Bastards in time to premiere it at Cannes next year? I’ll see it when I believe it. (Via AICN.)
* Behold, Watchmen‘s Minutemen! Folks, this is why they didn’t give the modern-day superheroes spandex costumes. (Via AICN again.)
* Speaking of Watchmen, you know the pirate story Tales of the Black Freighter from the comic? A direct-to-DVD animated adaptation by Zack Snyder and company will come out days before the Watchmen theatrical release. Clever. (Via SciFi Wire.)
* Also at SciFi Wire, Incredible Hulk director Louis Leterrier says his movie is both a reboot of and sequel to Ang Lee’s Hulk film (I guess he does, it’s not a direct quote), sources the movie’s inspiration to the ’70s TV series and the Jeph Loeb/Tim Sale graphic novel Hulk: Gray, and promises you won’t have to go 40 minutes into the movie to see the Hulk for the first time.
* Comic Book Resources has a preview of the latest Mike Mignola/John Arcudi-scripted B.P.R.D. miniseries, War on Frogs. The B.P.R.D. banner is basically the best ongoing superhero comic on the stands for the past three years or so–better than Hellboy proper, if you ask me. Bonus points for old-school artist Herb Trimpe’s Guy Davis impersonation.
* My experience with actor-director Sydney Pollack is basically limited to his role as Ziegler in Eyes Wide Shut and his black-comic bluebeard cameo in The Sopranos. That being said, I loved Matt Zoller Seitz’s two-paragraph comment-thread obit, not just as a reminder of how great a film writer Seitz is, but for the way it effortlessly implies an ocean of interesting work beneath the surface of every “So-and-So Dead at 73” headline.
* Go, look: New Anders Nilsen comics.
* Go, read (and disagree vehemently at least twice): Tom Spurgeon on this summer’s blockbuster movies.
* The Vault of Horror’s B-Sol reviews Inside, the French horror film I’m clearly the last person in the horror blogosphere to see.
* The humor of recognition: Ten Arcs That Most Superheroes Must Endure Even Though Almost None of Them Should. (Via Matthew Perpetua.)
* Finally, the owls are not what they seem.