* I’m still over at Robot 6–if you’d like, you can click here to see all my posts so far.

* TheOneRing.net reports that the Tolkien Estate and New Line Cinema have reached a settlement over revenue from The Lord of the Rings movies. When oh when will some brave soul stand up to the Cult of the Author?

* This week’s League of Tana Tea Drinkers best-of roundup features a diverse lot of horrors for your reading pleasure: Blackest Night, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Mother’s Day posters, Shrooms, Faces of Death, and post-millennial “road horror” movies.

* God knows I’m a sucker for good World of Warcraft blogging, so I dug this little Matt Maxwell piece about a particularly well-imagined and exciting final boss of a particular part of the game. Besides effectively communicating the baroque, multifaceted maneuvers you need to pull off to survive the fight to a noob like me, he also emphasizes how a good game will catch you off guard even when, as is the case with many WoW players, you’ve been hacking away at it for a very long time. Also there are giant insects.

* Curt Purcell’s epic comparison of Blackest Night and The Great Darkness Saga continues with an examination of that most underappreciated of tools available to the cosmic-comic artist: the generic planetscape establishing shot.

* Having finally watched the final three parts of Matt Zoller Seitz and Aaron Aradillas’s five-part video essay on the evolution of the modern blockbuster via the summer movies of 1984 and 1989, I have to say it really only lives up to the latter half of that particular billing. If there is a case to be made that the smaller movies they talk about–pioneering indie films like Do the Right Thing and sex, lies and videotape; teen movies like Heathers and Say Anything; mainstream Hollywood movies with no explosions like Field of Dreams and Dead Poets Society–did any sort of cross-pollinating with the big movies they discuss–Batman, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Lethal Weapon 2, The Abyss–to lead to “the modern blockbuster” as we know it, they don’t make it. Nor do they specifically cite Batman as the kick-off for the way we think of Summer Blockbusters today, which is always how I’d remembered it; nor do they discuss what kind of audiences went to these movies, which I figured was where the linkage with all the teen movies they were talking about would come. But that said, it’s still a fun tour of what made all these flicks tick, and anything that touts the brilliance of Tim Burton’s Batman, still the best superhero movie ever made by a comfortable margin, is okay by me.

* Alright, alright, I’ll go see Paranormal Activity if it comes out anywhere near me this September. You win!

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