* Frank “The Tank” Miller talks Holy Terror, his now-Batman-free vigilante vs. al-Qaeda graphic novel, which he says he should be finishing next month. (Via Kevin Melrose.)
* Today on Robot 6: Tom Brevoort on Marvel’s latest “tie-ins for variant” swap.
* Today the five-minute trailer for Kenneth Branagh’s Thor that Marvel debuted at the San Diego Comic-Con leaked onto the Internet for a few hours. (It used to be here but is no longer.) It was pretty good. Firmly in the spirit of the 21st-century Marvel approach to any and all of its properties to be sure, i.e. filtering them through military-industrial-espionage-action tropes, but it’s not like I was expecting Asgard and its denizens to be done in Speed Racer style. Ang Lee scared the experimentation right out of Marvel movies, at least somewhat justifiably so. Asgard looked big and unearthly, at least, and the Destroyer–one of the all-time great villain designs, like Jack Kirby presaging the Cenobites–was great, and I look forward to seeing fight choreography that revolves around the use of a war hammer.
* Yet all that being said, I still find myself far more entertained by an entirely different comic-book movie trailer, one for a book I’ve never even read: Stephen Frears’s adaptation of Posy Simmond’s Tamara Drewe. What on earth could be drawing me to this movie? What could it possibly, possibly be?
* Guillermo Del Toro will indeed direct a 3-D adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness with James Cameron now producing, which seems to mean that yes, it’ll get made. Shrug.
* A great way to get a sense of fanboy conventional wisdom on any given topic is to read what the big horror sites say about it. In the process of reporting that They may hire Damon Lindelof to rewrite Ridley Scott’s Alien prequel, Dread Central shits alllllll over Lindelof and the Lost finale–like, to an M. Night Shyamalan degree. So I guess that’s where Nerd Culture comes down on that. NEEDS MOAR NANOTECHNOLOGY!!!
* Sean P. Belcher wasn’t nuts about Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour. The way he talks about it makes me think he had a hard time with aspects of it in the same way I did, namely not connecting with the supposedly knockout emotional content. And like me he feels obligated to couch this caveat in as complimentary language as possible, because the overall project was so innovative, entertaining, and endearing.
11 Responses to Carnival of souls