When good movies happen to good bloggers, part one: Bill Sherman reviews Cemetery Man/Della’morte, Dell’amore.

When good movies happen to good bloggers, part two: Stacie Ponder reviews The Exorcist.

My single favorite music writer, Fluxblog’s Matthew Perpetua, interviews my single least favorite music writer, Rolling Stone‘s Rob Sheffield: Part One / Part Two / Part Three.

Fantagraphics, the best comics publisher in the world, needs your help.

Loren Coleman, the best cryptozoology blogger in the world, needs your help.

You can see my favorite horror comics at this week’s Horror Roundtable. And that’s not the only things of mine you can see there.

Good news/bad news: Scientists have discovered a vast ocean of water deep beneath the surface of the Earth/All that water is trapped within solid rock rather than forming a contiguous body of liquid, so it’s not like there are any pleisiosaur/icthyosaur battles going on all Jules Verne style. (Hat tip: Carnacki.)

Here’s a long-overdue link to Eve Tushnet’s latest post on Eyes Wide Shut, a film we’ve been discussing for a while now. In it she clarifies her take on the character (or lack thereof) of the Harford’s daughter Helena (it’s not that she thinks there’s some sort of crucial moral or religious component lent a marriage by the children it produces, but basically that if you show a kid in act one, it better go off by act three), as well as the difference between her sin-based approach to Bill’s misadventures and my guilt/shame-based ones (sin accounts for the possibility of redemption, so an ending where that isn’t wrestled with is disappointing; shame doesn’t, so it isn’t).

Here’s the thing, though, and this just occurred to me as I was driving back from the oil change place: Doesn’t Helena play a major, if subtle, role in the film’s denouement? As I’m fond of pointing out, there are no accidents in Stanley Kubrick films, and the final scene of this one takes place in a toy store where the Harfords are shopping for and with their daughter. The part she plays in their rapprochement doesn’t get spelled out, of course, but setting the scene in this environment Kubrick appears to be saying that their marriage has produced something that will out-last and out-love the temptations and degredations Bill has come across. Right? I remember thinking that the setting gave Alice’s final prescription for their marriage’s woes–“Fuck”–an extra, naughty, earthy frisson, and that wouldn’t have been the case if the scene took place in the self-help section at Barnes & Noble.

To shift gears to the not safe for work portion of this post, Eve also links to critic and sock-puppeteer Lee Siegel’s take on the film. Siegel argues that the sequences in which Dr. Bill pictures his wife in flagrante with her sailor fantasy-man are the most erotic in the film; Eve disagrees, and I’m with her:

…I didn’t find the Alice-fantasy scenes erotic at all. The black-and-white felt cliched; the whole thing did. That actually worked for me–I’m thinking that jealous fantasies, like most projections of the self onto the beloved, are usually cliched.

That about nails it. (The sailor was in his dress whites, for pete’s sake!)

Looking back, I find Eyes Wide Shut to be a very sexy film (beautiful, nude women are beautiful, nude women), but not a very erotic one–and that’s fine, for all the reasons I’ve enumerated before. There is one exception, though, and I’m wondering what exactly it is that makes it so. Why is it that in a film chock full of images like these…

…the most (indeed, perhaps the only) truly arousing scene looks like this?

Dr. Bill’s encounter with Sally, the roommate of the prostitute named Domino he met early in the film, is hot. Not to put too fine a point on it, but in my case it’s the only scene in the film that elicited the physical response sex scenes are supposed to elicit, with nary a nipple in sight. At least one other friend of mine reported the same basic reaction to the scene. Why? It’s probably a vain exercise to try to nail down or (over)analyze–you know hot stuff when you see it. But if we’re going to be all close-reading about it, this is probably the only sexual encounter Dr. Bill has that’s spontaneous. It’s certainly “casual,” to use the pejorative term applied to sex without emotional commitment, but there’s nothing cold or transactional (or illegal, for that matter) about it. Bill and Sally have chemistry–even without watching the scene again I can still hear her sultry breathing and speaking as they slowly-but-speedily melt into a touch-but-not-too-much clinch. And I think the chemistry comes from the fact that, however little, Bill and Sally have to work for it. She’s not a prostitute whose services he can purchase, let alone a child prostitute offered as a gift by her father, let alone a masked and dehumanized orgy participant served as a party favor. However you may feel about her seeming readiness to hit the sack with a total stranger who’s actually there to see her roommate, it’s a decision she’s making with her mind and her body, not a customer-service decision. She’s a woman, which is to say she’s a person.

The fact that so many of the other sexual encounters in the film lack that resultant heat has a moral dimension.

—–

Postscript: While digging up images for this post I came across a wonderful essay on the film by Reverse Shot’s Michael Koresky. Koresky puts a little too much stock in the role Bill’s profession plays in the film, I think (some of that is there, but I think ‘Doctor’ is mainly a talismanic title connoting privilege and power here–he could easily have been called ‘Sir’ or ‘Prince’). But a) he give the business in a big way to American Beauty, a film that deserves a kick in the junk whenever it is possible to dole one out (“The closest it comes to a moral insight is that it answers the ‘To fuck or not to fuck the teen virgin?’ debate with a conciliatory ‘No!'”; b) he calls out the film’s use of the uncanny, and amen to that; c) he says this:

A common criticism leveled against Kubrick

This and other insights can be yours if you click over to this week’s Thursday Morning Quarterback and read what I had to say about the most recent issues of Runaways, Doctor Strange: The Oath, 52, Conan and the Midnight God, Daredevil, The Exterminators, Jack Staff, and The Walking Dead.

In an absofuckinglutely fantastic, why-didn’t-I-think-of-doing-that post, Stacie Ponder calls out some of The Descent‘s visual homages and references to other classic horror films, including a couple even I hadn’t thought of, with oodles of photographic evidence. PLEASE go and see!

A couple of neato stories over at Wizard today.

First, Jenny Peters interviews 300 and Watchmen director Zack Snyder. Snyder, of course, also directed the Great Exception among the current wave of hideous ’70s-horror-classic remakes, Dawn of the Dead. Which leads us to…

Second, a six-page preview of Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard’s The Walking Dead #35, on sale tomorrow at better comic shops everywhere. I realize there may be some genre fans reading this blog who aren’t comics readers–if you like zombie films at all, The Walking Dead comes very highly recommended by yours truly.

He was leashed (a detail omitted in the log but recorded by investigators) and made to

Behold, the image that renowned political commentator Eli Roth has selected as the emblem of his next searing allegorical indictment of Bush Administration malfeasance…

Take that, Dick Cheney!

(Thanks, Jason and Horror-Movies.ca)

Good lord, that’s a big-ass squid.

Fishermen from New Zealand appear to have caught the largest squid ever–it weighs half a ton and measures 39 feet long. I mean, its species is actually called “colossal squid” (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni).

FanTAStic.

(Hat tip: Jason Adams.)

You can watch me attempt to make sense of the most recent installments of Civil War, Amazing Spider-Man, 52, Battlestar Galactica, Powers, Sock Monkey: The “Inches” Incident, and Superman at this week’s Thursday Morning Quarterback.

It would be Clive James’s essay on torture, which uses a critique of the Michael Palin character in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil as a springboard for challenging the notion that evil is really all that banal at all. Must reading.

Police announced they uncovered a plastic bag stuffed with the skeletal remains of at least six newborns Sunday after searching the grounds of a Christian missionary hospital in the central Indian town of Ratlam.

—“Newborn baby skeletons found in bag,” CNN

It’s high time I linked to Monster Brains, a delightfully deep repository of monster/creature/beast illustrations. Think of Fantagraphics’ Beasts book, but online and drawing from centuries of work from all over the world rather than just the current hipster art scene, and you’ll have the idea.

…that’s exactly what Robert Humanick is doing with A Clockwork Orange over at The House Next Door.

Eve Tushnet continues our discussion about Eyes Wide Shut. She and I are pretty much at the “agree to disagree” point regarding whether or not EWS lives up to the “with a great big boner comes great responsibility” issue at the core of her objections, but to me that only makes her criticisms more interesting. I must say that I hate how much I’ve been centering my response to Eve’s on her personal history of sexuality-related activism, because in a way that doesn’t seem fair to me, and I don’t mean to dismiss her objections at all. But I think in the same way that saying “Sean is a horror fan” can help explain why I love the film so much, those biographical facts can help explain why narrative oversights that don’t phase me at all knock Eve right out of the movie.

Maybe I’m just arguing from a place of ignorance, I don’t know. Eve’s response to my argument that Bill and Alice’s daughter doesn’t feature in their sexual landscape is essentially “wrong!” As a childless married man, maybe I just don’t know what I’m talking about. But in reading Even on sexuality before, I’ve always thought she oversold the importance of the reproductive/”generative” aspect of sex. But to not do so is a sin, is what I believe she thinks (man, am I out of my depth in this discussion–if I’m mischaracterizing you, Eve, please say so!), so, yeah. Now, while I’m all for guilt, even for shame–both of which I maintain Bill feels in abundance; indeed they drive his confession, and as someone who’s made his share of guilt-and-shame-driven sexual confessions I can state without fear of contradiction that I’m on solid ground with that assessment–sin is entirely alien to my conception of how the world works. My guess is that that’s the page Kubrick is on, too (not to resort to the intentional fallacy, but hey, if you’re gonna do it with any director, Stan’s your man).

Anyway, go, click, read, especially (if you’re a genre fan) the part where Eve counters the notion that EWS is a dream narrative.

V for Vagina

This week’s Horror Roundtable focuses on our favorite Eurohorror films. Here’s a hint about mine.

My pal Andy Serwin interviews Battlestar Galactica honcho David Eick and gets some intriguing hints about both upcoming storylines and upcoming spinoffs–among other things, he confirms plans for a direct-to-DVD BSG feature film!

My other pal Ben Morse interviews New Avengers and Mighty Avengers writer Brian Michael Bendis (one of my faves). The questions regarding Bendis’ handling of Marvel’s now-bifurcated flagship title are pretty blunt, and the writer’s answers are pretty candid.

And finally, you know what time it is–time to find out what I thought of this week’s issues of Stormwatch: Post-Human Division, Justice Society of America, Astonishing X-Men, Batman, Battlestar Galactica: Zarek, The Pirates of Coney Island (technically from a couple weeks ago, but there was a mix-up with the issue), and Tales of the Unexpected in Thursday Morning Quarterback!

Eve Tushnet, one of my favorite bloggers in the world, has just posted a review of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. Among other things it links to my old essay arguing that the film is a horror movie with the violence replaced by sex, with which Eve agrees. However, she’s much less impressed with the movie overall than I was/am: “Deep on the outside; shallow within” is her final verdict. To counter her two specific objections, briefly:

1) “How are its protagonists changed by the end? What have their experiences cost them? I can’t think of anything.” Well, they’re not dead or divorced (yet, in the latter case, to bring up at least one post-credits possibility). But those aren’t the only options. To return to the horror framework, we can consider Bill and Alice Harford (but mostly Bill) to be this film’s “final girl.” Sure, he survived, but I challenge you to listen to the way he sobs “I’ll tell you everything,” or see the red eyes of his wife after he does so, or listen to that sadder and wiser conversation they have at the toy store in the film’s final scene, and say nothing has changed for them. (For an example of a character who truly doesn’t change, and is therefore to be considered evil, see Ziegler.)

PS: With regards to their daughter, the absence of any major plot points concerning which was a big sticking point for Eve, I just didn’t think she played a particularly relevant part in their erotic and sexual lives. Given what I know to be Eve’s political and philosophical bedrock, I can see why this might strike her as a lacuna; given my own sexual outlook, it didn’t.

2) Blockquote time:

the strictures of Hollywood stardom (maybe?) required that Kidman never get quite as naked as her female cohorts. So we see them from the front, but she’s only naked from the back. That difference reinforces the sense already invited by the movie’s ending: There are good girls and bad girls. Good girls shouldn’t be cheated on, even in your head, and you should have sex with them and display their nudity tastefully from the back. Bad girls may get killed and raped and even photographed in full-frontal, and your only responsibility is to avoid them. No guilt attaches to you if you leave them to be destroyed.

In all fairness, you do see Nic’s boobies, albeit nothing below the waist as far as the front is concerned. So let’s call that a draw. Do I think there’s supposed to be a distinction being drawn between Alice and the orgy girls in that regard? Yes, now that Eve brings it up, probably. But that fits the demented fairy-tale logic of plot and character witnessed throughout the rest of the film. If Bill is our focalizer here, it stands to reason that if the mere suggestion that his wife once wanted to fuck a sailor is enough to send him off on a long dark night of the soul, we’re not going to be seeing her bush anytime soon.

But the dichotomy is one of how Bill views the women in his life, not how we should view them. Again, I definitely don’t think we’re supposed to feel that Bill had no responsibility to the woman at the orgy (or Leelee Sobieski, for that matter) other than “to avoid them,” nor that he was untouched by guilt over what befell them thanks to his unwillingness to do anything about it. In an ideal/real world he’d have called the cops the next day, but in the dream logic of the film, he woke up, and by then it’s too late to go back and rescue characters from your nightmare.

Godzilla, avenge your people, for crying out loud. Japanese researchers have captured yet another deep-sea creature on film for the first time–Tanigia danae a seven-foot squid that uses bioluminescence to hunt and can move at speeds clocked at up to 8 feet per second, a far cry from the “slugs o’ the deep” rep our tentacled friends once had. The BBC has the scoop, while Nature has the unbelievably cool-looking footage. (Hat tip: Clive Thompson.)

And while we’re on the sea monster tip–octopus vs. shark!

And Vampyroteuthis infernalis–the vampire squid!

(Hat tips: Cookie Jill and Carnacki.)

“Cascading consequences” is one of those elegant phrases that disaster planners use to refer to very bad stuff happening later on