And that’s that.

I don’t want to talk about this too much, but I did want to link to Jon Hasting’s thoughts about the situation–nutshell: It’s a crabs in a pot deal, and it’s shitty–and to Jim Treacher’s–nutshell: These cases are never just about this particular case, but about the next one and the next one and the next one after that, and it’s shitty.

Regardless, I have one about the latest issues of Nova, 52, New Avengers, All Star Superman, B.P.R.D.: Garden of Souls, Cold Heat, Optic Nerve, Thunderbolts, and Wonder Woman at this week’s Thursday Morning Quarterback.

God, how depressing and awful. I’ve listened to Imus for years, and my dad listened to him for years before that while I was a kid. So I feel like I speak with some authority when I say that he’s OBVIOUSLY not a racist. He flipped out at the race-baiting ads that the Republicans ran against Harold Ford, he ranted for weeks about how Harold Ford lost because people were racist, he flipped out at the racist push-polls that the Bushies ran against John McCain, he’s done tons of charity work for sickle cell anemia, he and his wife work with inner-city kids with cancer, he and his wife help green inner-city facilities, every MLK Day he plays the entire “I Have a Dream” speech even though the station tells him not to because people tune out, he listens to and plays and has on black preachers, and on and on and on.

He’s also OBVIOUSLY an equal opportunity offender. He makes fun of old people (“time to head out to the dog track”), fat people (“tubbo”), bald people (“bald-headed stooge”), gay people (“half a fruit salad”), Catholics (“stop hosing little children”), Jews (“boner-nosed beanie-wearing Jew-boy”), born-agains (“religious whack-jobs”), liberals (“Commies”), conservatives (“Nazis”), Dick Cheney (“lying war criminal”), Hillary Clinton (“Satan”), Ray Nagin, George W. Bush, Alberto Gonzales, Rosie O’Donnell, Joy Behar, Cardinal Egan, Dan Rather, Larry King, Katie Couric, Bill O’Reilly, Bill Clinton, Don Rumsfeld, and on and on and on. And he hates the Iraq War, for whatever that’s worth.

And he’s done a ton of good work, for pediatric cancer, adult cancer, SIDS, sickle cell, autism, wounded veterans, slain veterans’ families, the environment, and on and on and on.

Plus his show is funny! And he has good guests. And it has good country music if you like that sort of thing.

His ouster is being presided over by professional greivance-mongering hucksters like Sharpton and Jackson, but mostly by the countless powerful people he’s pissed off. Fox News and CNN and CBS and Stern and the Daily News and rival jocks and politicians he’s gone after and pundits he’s gone after smell blood in the water. Looks like they’ll get him.

Sucks.

“…I made a general announcement to my guys at Seraphim and Joe, and to my agent – obviously first off to David – that I was going to severely cut back on what I did for movies and television. I would never pitch a project again, I decided. I would never go to a studio to pitch a project – if they wanted to come to talk to me about something then of course, I would listen, but my pitching days, with all the anxiety attached to them, and then often the sense that it wasn

That thing scared the bejesus out of me, and it was painted by Jesse Peper.

(Hat tip: the amazing horror-art site Monster Brains, which you should be visiting regularly already.)

Stacie Ponder at Final Girl talks The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

Jason Adams at My New Plaid Pants talks Children of Men.

Jon Hastings at The Forager talks The Sopranos.

Oh dear.

Well, I suppose we could have seen this coming. It’s a massively long movie, meaning most theatres I checked could fit in no more than four screenings a day even for the people who’d want to sit for a three-plus-hour movie, and that’s a comparatively rare breed these days. And it’s not like they’re gonna put it on multiple screens to offset that–this isn’t The Return of the King we’re talking about here. Even as a horror film, it’s kind of been marketed to a niche within a niche. All the horror buffs I know were stoked as hell about it, but based on the ad campaign, would the hoi polloi even know if it’s supposed to be scary? Hell, is it supposed to be scary?

That being said, it’s inspired some hella fun posts around the horror and film blogospheres, my favorite being the bitchin’ Horror Roundtable for last week, which asked participants to name their ideal grindhouse programming line-ups. I kinda cheated…

To tire of The Sopranos is to tire of life.

–Timothy Noah, “The Sopranos: Final season, Week 1,” Slate

Amen!

For more Sopranos reading, I’ll simply point you to the blogs of Matt Zoller Seitz and Alan Sepinwall, who collectively offer the most insightful and comprehensive coverage of the show on the web. Read their reviews, follow their links to other sites, do it all.

An unusual bit of breaking news at the day job: Wizard reports that Batman Begins and Blade screenwriter David S. Goyer will be penning a “Green Arrow vs. DC Comics supervillains in prison” film called Super Max. Hey, stranger things have happened…

It’s an interesting day from a psychological perspective, as my depression that every one of my traditional movie-going companions will have seen Grindhouse already by the time I get a chance to go duels with my anxiety that I won’t make it through the Sopranos season premiere (let alone the finale) spoiler-free. Agita!

Holy smokes, I’m blogging a lot about this movie that I haven’t yet seen and probably won’t this whole weekend, aren’t I?

My beloved Wizard talks to Marley Shelton, Vanessa Ferlito, Sydney Poitier, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Rose McGowan, and Quentin Tarantino & Robert Rodriguez. Add that to yesterday’s Q&As with Naveen Andrews and Rosario Dawson, and that’s some wall-to-wall shit right there.

Here’s one juicy exchange with QT and RR, debunking a big bit of horror blogosphere CW:

WIZARD: Did you guys have a problem with the ratings board?

RODRIGUEZ: No.

TARANTINO: No, not at all. That is a complete rumor. [The MPAA] hadn

I’d been looking forward to Slate.com film critic Dana Stevens’s review of Tarantino & Rodriguez’s Grindhouse, assuming it’d be just as humorless, myopic and all but parodically p.c. as her reviews of every other genre movie ever. Imagine my disappointment when her take on the flick didn’t even register on the joyless-scoldometer. She actually kind of liked it!

But don’t worry. In an essay straight from the log of Captain Obvious, Stevens’s Slate-mate Grady Hendrix is bringing killjoy back, telling us all that grindhouse movies weren’t actually very good. (No, really?) While he’s at it he attacks Tarantino for being a closet bourgeois (an oldie but goodie) and works in a factual error about Mariah Carey’s movie career to boot.

Have fun, suckers!

The day job’s on the beat: Wizard interviews stars Rosario Dawson and Naveen Andrews. I like Andrews more and more with each interview of his I read:

Well, Quentin [Tarantino] and Robert are beloved in England. I remember after

Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving trailer from Grindhouse is pretty agoddamnedmazing.

It’s so gleefully, joyously violent and sleazy and exploitative and poorly made that I’ve been in awe ever since I saw first saw it. Maybe it’s that announcer voice: “WHITE MEAT. DARK MEAT. ALL WILL BE CARVED.” It’s enough to make me reconsider my (ill-informed, but no less passionate for that) anti-Roth stance. And (the ostensible goal, of course) it’s also overcome my From Dusk Till Dawn-diminished expectations of Grindhouse.

In related news, Rose McGowan and Rosario Dawson are sexy and Rolling Stone is awful.

(Via Cinematical.)

A 300 poster for sale in Hot Topic, featuring a picture of Queen Gorgo and the words “YOU WILL NOT ENJOY THIS!” So the line used during both her rape and the murder, by her, of her rapist, is an advertising slogan. Go figure!

–from “Quint spends his final day on the set of STEPHEN KING’S THE MIST watching spiders run amuck!!”, Ain’t It Cool News.

So far, so good.

There were two things I really enjoyed about my viewing of the Korean monster movie The Host on Saturday at the Landmark Sunshine on East Houston Street:

1) That magnificent shot toward the beginning of the film, just after the monster has leapt out of the river, where he slowly rampages his way from the background of the shot to the foreground as our oblivious protagonist stares off the left of the screen. This is a shot that’s been in my head for years and years as the coolest possible rampaging-monster shot possible, and seeing it was an absolute joy, even if it’s a publish-or-perish situation for yours truly.

2) Lou Reed was there too. He looked shorter and older and more fashionable and wealthier than I imagined him, but mostly it was cool that Lou likes to go to monster movies on a Saturday afternoon.

And that was about it.

The Host suffers from a vast, er, host of problems that interfere with its supposed effectiveness as a top-drawer monster movie. For starters, there’s the monster itself, which is goofy-looking and not scary at all to behold. The visual effects used to bring it to life are excellent, and held up well to director Joon-ho Bong’s decision to keep the thing well lit and in our face rather than hiding in the water or the shadows. But that doesn’t compensate for a design that’s silly rather than scary and calls for the creature to move in ways that make no physical sense given its size and primary method of movement. (Why would a giant river monster flip around bridges like a trapeze artist, anyway?)

Then there’s the fact that the film, to me at least, was quite frankly boring. Its profligate use of slow motion made even 300‘s look judicious, and nearly every shot and sequence involving the put-upon dysfunctional family at the film’s heart lasted twice as long as it needed to. Thematically the film was very similar to the parental trauma of last year’s Great Monster-Movie Hope, The Descent. Unlike Neil Marshall, Bong seemed to believe that showy bloat would better convey this than no-frills relentlessness, a mistake that sinks the film.

Interestingly, the tonal inconsistency didn’t bother me–to a point. One of my all-time favorite movie-watching experiences was viewing Arthur Penn’s all-over-the-map Little Big Man while cataclysmically stoned, so I’m open to radical shifts in mood and even genre within the confines of one film. (I am a big fan of Kill Bill, after all.) It helped that for the most part, the funny stuff here–Gang-du’s Kafka/Brazil-esque attempts to get someone, anyone to listen to him; that hilarious shot where he breaks out of that medical trailer and shocks a parking-lot full of American soldiers away from their barbeques–was actually pretty funny. But where it did bother me–indeed, where it pretty much lost me for the rest of the movie–was when it played the ostentatious grief of the family over the death (“death”) of their little girl for laughs. Killing a child, especially one with whom we’ve spent time and for whom grown to share an affinity, is extremely dangerous ground for any movie; this goes double for horror, a genre that essentially presupposes that the audience, on some level at least, enjoys watching people get killed, and therefore has its work cut out for it if it’s going to depict the killing of a child, the least enjoyable killing possible. At first I was impressed by just how raw and unfiltered that scene in the crisis center was getting with its sobbing, screaming, inconsolable, mind-shattering grief–so imagine my dismay and disgust as it devolved into slapstick. Call me crazy, but I don’t think the death of a little girl is funny. And unkilling her later in the film doesn’t get you off the hook–especially if you’re going to re-kill her during the climax and want that to be the emotional lynchpin of the film.

I’ve written about enough movies I don’t like to realize that I tend to give them the business for plot holes and logical flaws to which, were they to appear in a movie I did like, I wouldn’t give a second thought. There were plenty of them here–the fact that the monster was able to grow to enormous size without ever having appeared at the surface and devoured countless human beings before this particular day; the fact that the filmmakers couldn’t seem to decide what, if any, effects “Agent Yellow” actually had on anything other than the monster; Gang-du’s ability to recover from some sort of trepanation and escape from a heavily guarded military installation filled with armed soldiers who honestly believed him to be the carrier of a deadly contagion–but none of them, obviously, were deal-breakers in and of themselves. The bizarrely bad fire effects at during the climax might have been deal-breakers considering the pivotal moments they mar, but again, I could probably look the other way if the rest of the movie demanded it. But its distasteful mockery of grief, lugubrious pacing, and fundamentally unfrightening creature left me in less than a charitable mood. Indeed, if it weren’t for mainstream critics’ erroneous belief that adding some melodramatic pathos and unsubtle (though funny) political allegory to a genre picture makes it A Great Film, I very much doubt whether we’d even be talking about it. As it stands, I’ll remember it as kind of like a Jaws remake that replaced Robert Shaw with tedium.

I hope Lou liked it, though.

Here’s cool news I helped break in the latest issue of Wizard, now on the website: Goonies director Richard Donner and his one-time-assistant, current-comics-big-shot Geoff Johns will be creating a sequel, Goonies: The Search for Sloth, as a comics miniseries. Booby traps!

This week’s Horror Roundtable asks its participants to name undiscovered horror classics that deserve wider release. My suggestions bridges two of my all-time favorite things…

If you’d like to know what I thought of this week’s issues of Daredevil, Green Lantern, Guy Ritchie’s The Gamekeeper, Action Comics, Batman, Superman Confidential, and Ultimate Spider-Man, then Thusrday Morning Quarterback is the place for you!