* I recommend Joe “Jog” McCulloch’s MoCCA report.

* I do not recommend reading Platinum Dunes producer Brad Fuller’s rationale for remaking Rosemary’s Baby:

“I want to address that,” Fuller said. “Because if we don’t do Rosemary’s Baby, somebody else [will]. They’re not going to pass on it. And, like I said, being horror fans like we are, we would want to take the opportunity and take a shot at it, rather than read about someone else doing it. So all the s–t we get for doing these things–it really just comes out of being huge fans and wanting to take a shot, you know?”

Fuller added that they have not come up with a story for the reboot of Rosemary.

This line of reasoning in almost beautiful in its utter lack of cluefulness on every level. But don’t worry, everyone, “it really just comes out of being huge fans.” See, he’s one of us, my fellow idiots horror buffs! (Via the equally appalled Jason Adams.)

* Here’s a very, very, very long examination of the final scene in The Sopranos that makes a fairly convincing case for interpreting it in one particular direction rather than another. It goes in for close-reading that borders on clue-spotting, but that is by no means the sole source of its argument–the most convincing aspects are the ones drawn from a series of increasingly less cryptic statements I’d never heard before from creator David Chase. (Via Keith Uhlich.)

* This interview with Grant Morrison about Final Crisis #1 is, as they say, FULL OF WIN. In large part the questioner, Newsarama’s Matt Brady, focuses on continuity discrepancies between FC #1 and various miniseries from the past year or so, particularly the widely rejected weekly “spine of the DC Universe” series Countdown. Morrison’s answers, which explain that most of the events we’ve seen so far that contradict what happened in his comic were written after his was completed, are beyond delightful:

Obviously, I would have preferred it if the New Gods hadn’’t been spotlighted at all, let alone quite so intensively before I got a chance to bring them back but I don’t run DC and don’t make the decisions as to how and where the characters are deployed.

[snip]

…bear in mind that Countdown only finished last month so Final Crisis was already well underway long before Countdown and although I’ve tried to avoid contradicting much of the twists and turns of that book as I can with the current Final Crisis scripts, the truth is, we were too far down the road of our own book to reflect everything that went on in Countdown, hence the disconnects that online commentators, sadly, seem to find more fascinating than the stories themselves.

[snip]

The way I see it readers can choose to spend the rest of the year fixating on the plot quirks of a series which has ended, or they can breathe a sight of relief, settle back and enjoy the shiny new DC universe status quo we’re setting up in the pages of Final Crisis and its satellite books. I’m sure both of these paths to enlightenment will find adherents of different temperaments.

I don’t know why this particular interview is reducing me to Internerd speak, but that’s just pwnage all over the place. It also scratches a real itch for me because I’ve spent most of the time since the issue came out debating with some friends of mine whether or not Grant “should” have tweaked a line or two to “fix” the “problems” of his comic not lining up with Jimmy Palmiotti & Justin Gray’s or whoever it was that did the New Gods stuff in Countdown. Even aside from the temporal/logistical issues Morrison himself points out, the answer is “of course not.” He’s a writer, not a janitor, and his obligation is to tell a good story, not to provide a seamless experience for devotees of a shared fictional universe cobbled together from the work of thousands of disparate creators by corporate diktat.

Anyway, the interview also explains how the issue connects with similar elements in Seven Soldiers, sticks the book into Identity Crisis a bit, and confirms my theory as to why the book took an offhand approach to Martian Manhunter’s death:

we wanted to open with a nasty, execution-style death of a superhero as a way of demonstrating how far behind us the Silver Age is. We’re conditioned to expect the hero to fall after a noble struggle or to give his life saving the universe but this had to be different. The scene was very much about calling time on expectations and letting our readers know up front that the rules have changed. Evil is getting away with it. Things are going to get nastier and grubbier and scarier before it’s over, just like in the real world.

I look forward to subsequent issues.

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