* And now, a bunch of interesting (note: consult thesaurus for synonyms of “interesting”) reviews of older things…
* Inveterate person who doesn’t have much use for superheroes Tom Spurgeon takes a look at Joe Casey and Frazer Irving’s beautiful-looking, underappreciated miniseries Iron Man: The Inevitable.
* Bruce Baugh takes a look at Rian Johnson’s po-faced high-school noir Brick. I watched both this film and Donnie Darko for the first time right around the same time and started to reimagine high school as a sort of heavily medicated flat-affect genre-revisionism wonderland.
* Matt Maxwell, like me, found much to admire in Francis Lawrence’s I Am Legend–at least until the ending with its forced Shyamalanisms and Hollywood inversion of the titular concept.
* At The House Next Door, Will Lasky discusses M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening, comparing the director’s oeuvre to Rod Serling’s and declaring that since his films rely on their protagonists’ dramatic self-discovery, they really do require The Twist–not as a matter of pyrotechnics but of dramaturgy.
* Looks like they might remake, and by remake I mean cut the balls of off and otherwise ruin, The Monster Squad.
* There’s a trailer for Frank Miller’s The Spirit out there, if you can still find it, and believe me, it’s nuts. Somehow I don’t see the fan/critical community that rejected Speed Racer and is increasingly divided about 300 appreciating this thing at all, but time will tell. Since I really don’t care about the Spirit as a character or franchise, the chance to see my favorite cartoonist take movie-making tools and go as absolutely bananas with them as Lynn Varley did with Photoshop while coloring The Dark Knight Strikes Again tickles me pink.
* In the comments downblog, Jon “The Forager” Hastings discusses the strange case of Guillermo Del Toro, throwing his career into relief by comparison to similar disreputable-genre visual-stylist nerd icons Tim Burton and Peter Jackson.
* Yours truly weighs in on the controversy over The New Yorker‘s Obamas-as-radicals cover at Tom Spurgeon’s blog (scroll down).
* Over at Loren Coleman’s joint, paleonotologist Darren Naish debunks the trunks, throwing cold water on that awesome “dinosaur with a trunk” image I posted yesterday. Oh well.
* Finally, congratulations to my Partyka chums Shawn Cheng, Sara Edward-Corbett, and John Mejias for making it into the Lynda Barry/Jessica Abel/Matt Madden-edited Best American Comics 2008!
I’m not a big fan of either McCain or Obama, but it seems to me: McCain went on SNL to make fun of himself, based on the way his opponents see him. Obama put out an outraged press release when an obviously sympathetic magazine (with a much smaller audience than, say, SNL) made fun of the way his opponents see him. Advantage: McCain.
Let’s hope the Spirit calls one of those broads “sweet chunks.” Over and over and over.
a Monster Squad remake?? i don’t know about that… i would much rather have a sequel.
Wow, Brick and Donnie Darko would make a fantastic double feature. Have to try that sometime. Maybe Donnie Darko is what happens if you live without enough genre in your life.
Much agreement in the comments on I Am Legend. I wonder if something more in the spirit of the original book could work as a small-scale project like, say, Brick.
I’m sorry, dude. That Spirit trailer just confused me.