* Another illustration of the breakneck pace that makes Gossip Girl so satisfying a serialized-narrative experience despite having so much less going on than Lost, let alone your great HBO show of choice: Amount of screentime that passed between learning Gabriel was a double-agent last episode and having Chuck and Blair discover it in this episode? One segment. They didn’t even let a commercial break pass this ep before Blair snapped Gabriel and Poppy canoodling on her cellphone. When they keep things moving at that rate you feel like you’re getting your money’s worth.

* Of course that also necessitates hitting certain beats over and over and over again, just because you need something to do. So by the end of the hour I was wondering if Nate and Blair would almost break up in every single episode.

* But back in the plus column, it means that predictable plotlines move along so quickly they don’t have time to get too annoying. It was easy to see that poor, well-meaning, ineffectual Rufus was gonna get rooked by Gabriel and further fuck up Dan’s chances at getting into Yale and his own ability to hang on to his art-gallery dreams, but I imagine all those cards will be on the table before the next episode is halfway over.

* I liked Georgina’s return, which surprised me! I thought they’d play it for too-easy laughs more than they did, but her conversion was treated semi-sincerely, and she actually articulated a rationale for her newfound faith that made sense given what her experiences were. Plus it makes her essentially a new character, and it should be funny to see where she ends up.

* The cast-wide team-up against an archnemesis teased in the promo for next week’s ep must mean we’re getting close to the end of the season, huh?

* What was in that six-pack Dan and Vanessa split that laid them both out like that, grain alcohol?

* Oh, there’s another case in point about the show’s speed: Vanessa coughed up the truth about her Chuckfucking right quick.

* Speaking of Chuck, Ed Westwick had some priceless reaction shots in this episode. I particularly liked when he orchestrated the big Gabriel-Serena-Poppy confrontation, then sat down on the bed to watch the show. But he hasn’t said “I’m Chuck Bass” in a long time, has he? I guess they don’t want to overdo it. He’s the best there is at what he does, but what he does isn’t very nice.

* “Serena getting changed” scenes could fit alongside “Blair wears lingerie” scenes quite nicely. I’m just sayin’. Now we just need to add “Nate and Chuck finally make out” scenes to the mix.

* Just a couple more thoughts about the passing of Bea Arthur: The Golden Girls‘ Dorothy Zbornak is one of the all-time great sitcom characters. Her staunch, iconoclastic personal and political progressivism undercut by her actual lived experience, she was easily embarrassed by her own mistakes and shortcomings but never less than passionately proud of the person she had become–and her potential to become something even more–despite them. Her ability to acknowledge her flaws but power past them made her the perfect foil for Rose’s naivete, Blanch’s narcissism, and Sofia’s provincialism, all of which she parried with her own trademark characteristic: bullshit-deflating sarcasm. As The Missus put it last night while we were discussing Dorothy, “They took the ‘straight-man’ character and made her funny.'” It was a brilliant maneuver brilliantly handled by Arthur, and I don’t think any sitcom has done it as deftly. There’s more value in a single Bea Arthur Golden Girls reaction shot than in entire episodes of How I Met Your Mother. She was the real deal.

* Mark Waid names names (Levitz, Ross, Jemas, Alessi, DiDio) in this uproariously candid interview with AICN. At this point Waid’s been off the reservation so long I’m not sure he remembers where it was, but even so, these kinds of comments still offer the frisson of on-the-record smacktalking in an sub-industry whose professional class rarely indulges in that sort of thing:

The biggest challenge [of working on 52] was actually, wisely, kept from us by Steve [Wacker, the series’ editor]. EIC Dan Didio, who first championed the concept, hated what we were doing. H-A-T-E-D 52. Would storm up and down the halls telling everyone how much he hated it. And Steve, God bless him, kept us out of the loop on that particular drama. [Subsequent editor Michael] Siglain, having less seniority, was less able to do so, and there’s one issue of 52 near the end that was written almost totally by Dan and Keith Giffen because none of the writers could plot it to Dan’s satisfaction. Which was and is his prerogative as EIC, but man, there’s little more demoralizing than taking the ball down to the one-yard line and then being benched by the guy who kept referring to COUNTDOWN as “52 done right.”

Place your bets on which issue that was. I’ve got a hunch myself.

* Related, in some ineffable way: Tom Spurgeon on how the direct market depends on the buying habits of a small group of big spenders whose spending might be getting less big.

* Also vaguely related, by way of contrast: Tom Spurgeon (again) on the 10 Best Long-Running Comics Series of All Time. A tough list to argue with, especially when you factor in his runners-up. Mostly, as always, it’s just a pleasure to read a long post in which Tom holds forth about a variety of different kinds of comics in short order.

* I feel like this is related too, somehow: Dan Nadel mulls over the life and career of Rocketeer creator and Bettie Page cultural archaeologist Dave Stevens. Dan’s read of Stevens’s aborted autobiography-cum-art book is that Stevens died disappointed that his output failed to live up to his ambitions; Dan then argues that those ambitions were inherently proscribed by Stevens’s own artistic and aesthetic self-limitations, primarily driven by nostalgia for an outmoded illustration tradition, and further, that those limitations were ignored and their ramifications actively celebrated by Stevens’s subcultural fellow travelers. It’s a depressing series of thoughts. But you know what? I still see it playing out today. Creators who act as though they know better continue to play squarely within the aesthetic and financial playing field of the direct market’s clients, despite any number of other options available at this point in the medium’s history. And new order cutoffs be damned, Previews will still be crammed full of work by writers and artists who you just wish would take their brains and think bigger thoughts with them.

* Also also related: Chris Butcher liveblogs the April Previews. Headscratching and hilarity ensues.

* The final vaguely related link: Curt Purcells reviews Douglas Wolk’s Reading Comics from the perspective of someone who enjoys reading comics but finds himself so baffled by their current state that he can’t honestly refer to himself as a fan.

* Monster Brains previews Johnny Ryan’s upcoming non-stop-action comic Prison Pit.

* They’re remaking Videodrome. Oddly, I’m…kind of intrigued by the prospect of a thoroughly Hollywoodized versions of David Cronenberg’s orificetravaganza. The world could use a little more high-gloss perversion.

* Robert Rodriguez talks to AICN about the Predator sequel he’s allegedly producing, Predators. I’ll believe it when I see it, as I say. I hope it contains the words “get to the chopper” in some configuration if and when it gets made.

* Jason Adams celebrates the swine flu pandemic as only someone with an extensive knowledge of postapocalyptic movies and a great love of screencaps can.

* Finally, a very happy birthday to TheOneRing.net, an amazing 10 years old today. That’s an uncountably long time in Internet years. And gosh, I actually remember checking the site out back when Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies were first announced in 1999, from the computer lab on Old Campus where I had to go to use the Internet because our ramshackle off-campus house didn’t have it. TORn was a trailblazer for franchise-specific fansites, becoming a genuine industry powerhouse as far as all things Rings are concerned without ever devolving into attention-whoring or the meanspirited aspects of fandom in the process. I’m grateful for it and wish them 10 more years of success.

Art by Matt Wiegle, color by the illustrious Rickey Purdin. Original comic here. Thanks, Rickey!

Dorothy just wrecked shop over and over again. Man she was wonderful on this show. I’m really sad she’s gone.

* I expect to get my computer back from the shop this evening, so that’s good news.

* My pal Kiel Phegley has a bunch of stuff up right now that’s worth your time: a two-part Ed Brubaker interview on Captain America and a collection of the best quotes from his year-long Q&A series at Marvel.com.

* Tom Spurgeon reviews Hellen Jo’s fun Jin & Jam #1.

* “Now in Stock: Luba by Gilbert Hernandez.” The seven most beautiful words in the English language?

* Robert Rodriguez is “officially” making a new Predator movie called Predators, and now I can’t find the link but supposedly he’s also “officially” making a feature-length version of his Machete trailer from Sin City 2. Given Rodriguez’s recent track record (Sin City 2, Barbarella, Red Sonja, the long-gestating Machete) I’ll believe all of this when I see it.

* Yucky Tuna is a tumblr that’s a fun NSFW way to spend some spare time.

My favorite song ever?

Normally I don’t like to be disarmed by musicians but she’s pretty damn disarming in this song, which she uses to her advantage to say some weird things and sing them weirdly.

I’m really happy for Elbow’s success and don’t begrudge them for it one bit, especially since they’re really awfully good at the uplift for which they have rightly won renown, but I do wish they’d kept sinister in their repertoire. They were really awfully good at that too.

I’ve never understood why we were to believe the audience would stand stock-still for this song.

Something about the way the groove, the lyrics, and Zombie’s voice interact in this particular song has always hooked me. It’s confident, sexy, and a bit unpleasant at the same time. The way he says “living dead girl” is halfway between sneering condescension and mortal terror.

* I interviewed The Stand: American Nightmares artist Mike Perkins about the Stephen King adaptation’s upcoming all-Larry-in-the-Lincoln-Tunnel issue for Marvel.com. This is maybe my favorite Stand thing I’ve done, as it presented me with the opportunity to talk to Perkins about various horror-comic issues I’ve been thinking about for a long time. I hope you enjoy it.

* It had been a while since I read Cameron Crowe’s 1976 Playboy interview with Thin White Duke-era David Bowie, and I’d kind of glossed over just how amazing and hilarious it is. Seriously, it may be the best interview ever given by anyone ever. From homosexuality to Hitler, Mick Jagger to Elton John, the whole thing is one giant pullquote. It makes Grant Morrison sound like Billy Bob Thornton. I beg you to read it. (Via Whitney Matheson.)

* Speaking of Bowie, Matthew Perpetua did a great little piece for New York on why it’s tough to love Lady Gaga. Unsurprisingly, I’ve given a lot of thought to Lady Gaga, and my take is basically the same as Matthew’s: She’s admirable, but the music’s not there. In many ways she’s comparable to Ziggy Stardust-era Bowie, sans Bowie’s already extensive artistic past at that point (but complete with affinity for lightning-bolt face paint): a self-consciously arty weirdo trying to be subversive but also, equally importantly, determined to make giant hit records for the kids. Which is great! But the difference is, if you played “Hang On to Yourself” or “Moonage Daydream” to a theoretical me who didn’t know who recorded them and told me it was the Bay City Rollers, I’d still be interested, whereas if you took a Lady Gaga song and told me it was by Britney Spears, i’d get about halfway through and then be like “Okay, that’s enough.” I mean, they’re fine, but it’s her that makes them interesting, not the music itself.

* David Cronenberg on horror at MTV News. Covered: remaking his own movies, torture porn, Blair Witch, Scream. Via Jason Adams, who reposts some highlights.

* Here’s a semi-interesting interview with Lost masterminds Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof, tackling 10 popular questions from the readers of Variety. Nothing you haven’t heard before, for the most part; what stuck out most for me is their continuing regret that they couldn’t do more with Mr. Eko due to the actor’s desire to leave the show after one season. (Via The House Next Door.)

* ADDTF blogfather Bill Sherman reviews The Monster Squad. They don’t make ’em like that anymore, man.

* So maybe Sin City 2 isn’t sticking with the Weinsteins? Who the fuck knows. I can’t imagine years of will they or won’t they regarding the making of the sequel augur well for its future regardless. (Via Heidi MacDonald.)

* Letterer Todd Klein’s posts on designing the Amalgam Comics logos strike me as pornography for a certain subset of my friends. There are more posts to come in the series, too! (Via Robot 6.)

* For a connection so obvious, this is underused, so I’m glad someone else made it, and even gladder they made it on a badass T-shirt. (Via Topless Robot.)

* Carnival of Horrifying Torture Revelations: Between the release of the CIA/OLC memos and the Senate Armed Service Committe’s report (conclusions here), we’ve learned that Condoleezza Rice, John Ashcroft, Dick Cheney and other all-the-way-to-the-top Bush Administration officials personally approved torture. We’ve learned that the United States implemented, as policy, torture techniques reverse-engineered from the program used by the military to train soldiers how to handle being tortured, techniques that were in turn derived from the torture techniques used by the Communist Chinese on American prisoners during the Korean War for the express purpose of eliciting false confessions. With that in mind, perhaps, we learned that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld encouraged torture specifically to produce “evidence” of links between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. We learned that spiders were another phobia American torturers were encouraged to exploit Room 101-style. We learned that a galaxy of conservative stars openly applaud the use of torture and/or deny its existence, sometimes simultaneously and/or accidentally. I would like to apologize, once again, to everyone who read this blog from 2001-2004.

* Finally, let’s end on an up note: gorgeousness

and

gorgeosity.

From I guess Music for the Masses onward, the message of Depeche Mode’s music is that sex is the only thing cool enough to temporarily disrupt depression. That’s kind of an adolescent approach to these subjects, but also a mightily entertaining one.

* In this single episode alone, Serena got together with a guy, broke up with him, pretended to go out with another guy, “broke up” with him, got back together with the first guy, and got betrayed by him. In one episode! Similarly, Blair agreed to try to dupe Nate, decided against it, got snitched on, got dumped, and got back together with him. I don’t think Lost‘s entire five-season Jack-Kate-Juliet love triangle was this eventful.

* Speaking of Lost, the whole unnecessary-secret-keeping thing was taken to ridiculous new heights during that seder scene. I definitely felt Wallace Shawn’s frustration. Dan lied to his dad about working as a seder cater waiter (LOL), Lily lied to Rufus about why she brought him along, Serena lied to her mom about getting married, Serena lied to whatsisname about Dan being her boyfriend, Serena lied to Blair’s mom about why she was there…did I miss anything? And other than Serena not wanting to tell her mom about getting married, did any of it make sense? Less of that kind of ridiculousness, please.

* Wow, I did not expect them to address Chuck’s sexual assault on Jenny ever again. I really did believe it was akin to Batman shooting criminals to death in his early adventures, something that happened before the writers really had a handle on the character, which they’d chalk up to experience and simply move past. (Following that little righting-the-scales gag in season one where Jenny stranded Chuck on the roof in his underwear. Well, that takes care of that!) Bringing it up again is a very tricky thing. Obviously they still have to gloss over the severity of what occurred, and just how upset one would expect Jenny and her friends and family to rightfully still be, or the show wouldn’t work anymore. But nor can they make it some horrifying Rihanna/Chris Brown situation. What they seem to be doing is using it to help establish just how emotionally isolated Chuck is under his billionaire playboy exterior, which actually is kind of an interesting thing to do with a post-Blair Chuck, certainly more interesting than the My First Eyes Wide Shut storyline was. Now, is it just me, or did I detect some groundwork being laid for a Chuck/Jenny romance, though? Is that possible? Is Gossip Girl on some Comedian/Silk Spectre shit?

* I still feel like the show is pretty clumsy at introducing new viable non-Wallace Shawn characters. This clown Serena banged in Spain doesn’t seem to have much to offer personality-wise, and no, making him some kind of double-agent for Poppy, who is also underdeveloped, doesn’t help. Meanwhile Nate’s cousin still seems destined to disappear. I guess maybe they’ll try to do something with Jenny’s Monopoly buddy and his sister? I don’t understand why they don’t just make Eric a full-fledged cast member and build some more stories around him for crying out loud. (Admittedly I want to see some all-male make-outs on this show.)

* And hey, I didn’t realize until I wrote that last paragraph that Vanessa wasn’t even in this episode. She wasn’t missed!

* This was actually an oddly heartwarming episode of Gossip Girl, when you think about it. Serena made up with her mom. Serena made up with Gideon(?) (even if he’s a fink and a phony). Blair rejected Nate’s grandfather’s scheme. Nate seemed to have made up with his grandfather, at least a little. Blair made up with Nate. Nate made up with Chuck. (If only Nate made out with Chuck.) Blair and Serena snuggled. (See previous note.) Chuck apologized to Jenny. Rufus ended up in a pretty good place. Dorota is apparently in love (and royalty). Not even a bible-thumping Michelle Trachtenberg can take this moment away from us, friends.

I would like Adam Lambert to perform Pink Floyd’s “The Great Gig in the Sky” during this year’s American Idol finals.

Press Release from Buenaventura Press:

The Comics Revival!

Despite the ‘industry trend’ of cancelling comic books to focus on graphic novels, Buenaventura Press boldly plans to release half a dozen actual comics over the coming year. We love the serial format that gave us masterpieces such as Eightball, Frank, Acme Novelty Library, Optic Nerve, Yummy Fur, Zap, Dirty Plotte, Palookaville, and Love & Rockets–and we want to keep alive the stapled marvel that is the comic book.

As part of this mission, Buenaventura Press is excited to announce the first in a new series: The BP Comics Revival Economic Stimulus 3-Pak! This Diamond exclusive is a throw-back to the ol’ drugstore shrink-wrapped 3-packs, but with all new comics. Offered in the June 2009 Previews at $11.95, the first Pak includes two new series–Aviatrix #1 by Eric Haven and I Want You #1 by Lisa Hanawalt–plus the return of Ted May’s Injury, with the brand new issue #3.

Working with Diamond’s Jenny Christopher, a staunch supporter of independent comics and new cartoonists, we are offering the Economic Stimulus 3-Pak at a discount price. Diamond’s distribution system allows us to maintain significant print runs that keep the price affordable. The comics will also be available individually at the BP webshop, Last Gasp, and select retailers. Issues will be priced at $4.95 each, making the 3-Pak a 3 dollar savings!

Stay tuned to Buenaventurapress.com for information on forthcoming comics, such as Matt Furie’s Boy’s Club #3, and more news from The Comics Revival!

* Topless Robot’s Rob Bricken, who I like to think is the Topless Robot, notes two momentous releases today. First up is the DVD premiere of Caprica, the Battlestar Galactica prequel pilot/movie. I’m obviously going to watch this and am looking forward to doing so, though I may hold off on purchasing it until they release a complete first season DVD set, given how they previously duped me into double-dipping on the original BSG miniseries and Razor and will likely attempt to do so again with The Plan.

* Next up is the RiffTrax for Twilight, the latest film to be mocked by the MST3K crew of Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett. The Missus is a major, though self-aware, Twilight fan–I believe the preferred term for such people is “Twatlighter,” to give you some idea of how they view themselves. And she’s also a big big fan of RiffTrax–we listened to the Road House RiffTrax for like the fourth time this weekend and did The Two Towers the weekend before that. So we’ve been looking forward to this from the moment the DVD was announced and we realized a RiffTrax was virtually guaranteed. It should be a hoot.

* Also from Topless Robot, The 12 Coolest Masters of the Universe Action Features. Holy smokes I remember these all so vividly. What’s great about the list is that it doesn’t just stop at “Hey, remember Ram-Man? He was awesome, right?”–it actually unpacks each feature it discusses in terms of how and why it clicked with kids.

* Frank Miller’s The Spirit: the movie so nice Jog reviewed it twice! Also, Mike Sterling liked it, and given Jog’s distaste for the likes of 300, Sin City, and Watchmen, all of which I enjoyed a great deal and to all of which he favorably compares The Spirit even if he can’t quite bring himself to say the latter is actually good, this is very much starting to sound like the sort of thing I’ll like a lot. And every time I catch myself kicking myself for buying the hype and not making a point of seeing this in the theater, I remind myself that I didn’t buy the hype and did make a point of seeing it in the theater, but the projection was so shitty that I left and demanded a refund, and by the time my next chance to see it rolled around the movie had disappeared.

* Tom Spurgeon on superhero-sexism cheesecake kerfuffles:

I can’t get too worked up about it, because these kinds of efforts from these kinds of companies don’t really mean as much as people who have burrowed into that world tend to think.

Brian K. Vaughan had a great line about doing Y: The Last Man because he thought there was a more productive way to address feminism in comics than debating the size of Catwoman’s tits.

* Also via Spurge, the sad life and lovely art of Anne Cleveland.

* Over at the Partyka site, Matt Wiegle is drawing Ghostbusters, while special guest star Joey Weiser is drawing kaiju, and lots of ’em. That’s Mothra (as Snoopy) below–click the link for Godzilla, Ghidorah, Gamera, King Kong and more.

* Jaime Hernandez promo art for Wendy & Lisa? Sure, I’ll eat it.

* Monster Brains highlights models and art from a deleted stop-motion animation sequence in Clive Barker’s Nightbreed. Much more at Revelations. Sigh. What that movie could have been! Still pretty great as-is, though.

* Finally, my friend Matthew Perpetua, The Man Who Murdered the Music Industry, is offering T-shirts for sale to fund Fluxblog and his various other enterprises, and as a veteran T-shirt buyer I can tell you they’re priced to sell. Won’t you please purchase one?

I’d been thinking a bit about Zack Snyder’s Watchmen adaptation (original review here) over the past week in a very particular way, and a chance to see the movie again last night with a friend who hadn’t seen it at all yet sort of reinforced what I was thinking.

Basically, take The Godfather–not as an adaptation, because I don’t think Mario Puzo’s novel was nearly as highly regarded in its field as Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen was in comics, but as a gangster movie. My understanding from reading about Francis Ford Coppola’s film (and the last time I did that was years ago, so my memory could be fuzzy) is that prior to its release, gangster pictures were considered strictly b-movie territory. But nowadays, you’d be very, very hard pressed to find someone who’d say something like “Well, The Godfather Part II was pretty good for a gangster movie” or “as far as mafia stuff goes, The Sopranos was great.” Thanks to the first Godfather film, great art about mobsters–from Coppola, Scorsese, Chase, whoever–kind of gets considered as “great art” first and “about mobsters” second.

Longtime readers of this blog know what a skeptic I am regarding the notion of “transcending the genre,” but in this kind of case I can understand the utility of the term. The idea isn’t that The Godfather transcended the limitations of the the gangster genre–it’s obviously just as much of a gangster picture as anything, and it doesn’t make sense to claim the genre is limited if a movie like this can be constructed out of its component parts, since then you’re pretty much saying a genre movie can’t be a great movie without no longer being a genre movie. The idea is that The Godfather transcended the appeal of the gangster genre, for want of a better word. You don’t need to be someone who just loves him some tommy-gun-toting greaseball action to really get a whole hell of a lot out of The Godfather; if you’re a critic, the presence of tommy-gun-toting greaseballs won’t put you off the film, most likely.*

In that light, it seems safe to say that Moore & Gibbons’s Watchmen was the Godfather of superhero comics. It also seem safe to say that Zack Snyder’s Watchmen was NOT the Godfather of superhero movies. I think many fans and critics expected or hoped it would be, I think Zack Snyder may have thought it was, but it wasn’t. It was more like, I don’t know, The Warriors, or maybe Tim Burton’s Batman–a zesty, creative, exciting, violent, funny, sometimes lovely, and deeply, deeply weird genre movie. Its pleasures are really firmly rooted in the pleasures of genre movies. As much as it monkeyed with the usual superhero-movie tropes, as much as I think it put a lot of things on screen that no one had seen in a superhero movie before, I don’t think it transcended the traditional appeal of the superhero movie so much as it pushed the existing appeal of superhero movies in a bizarre direction that people who appreciate the bizarre could appreciate.

Now, I really enjoy stuff like The Warriors and Batman. Off-kilter genre pictures are my bread and butter. That’s why when I watch and think about the movie I don’t dwell on Snyder’s overall stylistic and tonal differences from the comic–as Tom Spurgeon has said, Peter Jackson made the boy’s-adventure version of The Lord of the Rings, and Zack Snyder made the weirdo-edgy-action version of Watchmen, and that’s fine with me. Instead, what bugs me are the “unforced errors,” simple changes that add nothing and detract from what could have been (and often what was, in the comic). Stuff like turning Ozymandias from a chiseled, beatific all-American captain of industry into a hawk-faced, preening gay Nazi; having Dan and Laurie do so much lethal damage to their would-be muggers that Rorschach’s sui generis status as the ultraviolent vigilante is lost in the shuffle; cutting the flashback where Laurie angrily confronts the Comedian after reading Hollis Mason’s book, so that her devastation upon realizing he’s her father would have more impact; not having a reaction shot of Doctor Manhattan’s face when he has his eureka moment regarding the miracle of human life; not casting better actors for Laurie or the child killer who Rorschach murders; cutting some of my favorite lines (“Somebody EXPLAIN it to me”); and so on. Of course, a lot of movies I like a lot are lousy with flubs of that magnitude, and that doesn’t stop me from liking them a lot any more than I like this one a lot. As I said, I’m pretty much fine and dandy dandy and fine with a Watchmen movie that’s more like, uh, Aliens than 2001, even if the source material could have brought you in a 2001 direction had the filmmakers so chosen and been so able.

As I’ve mused before, would it have been interesting to see Watchmen in the hands of a realist rather than a stylist, someone who could have muted the material’s more outre aspects instead of heightening them, someone who could have crafted the Godfather of superhero movies? Absolutely, though I think in that case it would work better as a 12-part HBO miniseries, say, than a feature film. A lot of the lurid melodrama, groany puns, and other stuff that people decried in the movie is right there in the comic, and I think that if you’re going to diffuse that you need time to let dialogue and performance breathe in lieu of that overheated directness, more time than even a really long feature would give you. I think we can all fantasize about David Simon’s Watchmen, just like I know Tolkien fans who fantasize about a lengthy, serious BBC adaptation of The Lord of the Rings regardless of whether or not they liked Peter Jackson’s blockbuster version. (Which, now that I think about it, straddled that line between transcending its genre label so that people who’d never give elves the time of day get a lot out of it and making a just-plain bugfuck adventure/horror/war genre movie with trolls and ents and whatnot about as well as anything has done.) But I’m perfectly happy with what we got.

* To use a more recent and perhaps even more directly applicable example in terms of its place under the fantastic-fiction umbrella, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is the Godfather of post-apocalyptic fiction. Maybe Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is the Godfather of horror films, or perhaps it’s something by David Lynch. You get the picture.

* Huge nerd news #1: The Hobbit and its nebulous sequel are now officially going to be The Hobbit divided into two parts, according to Guillermo Del Toro. That’s as opposed to a done-in-one Hobbit followed by a possibly Gandalf-and-Aragorn-centric “bridge” film filling in the gap between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The movies will incorporate the off-camera stuff from the books about Gandalf infiltrating Dol Guldur and rallying the White Council against the Necromancer. Here’s hoping for a Tarantino-style slow-motion walking scene involving Ian McKellen, Christopher Lee, Hugo Weaving, Cate Blanchett, and a Radagast to be named later. (Via Kristin Thompson.)

* Huge nerd news #2: Official specs and release date–July 14th–for The State: The Complete Series. I’m seeing it…

…but I won’t believe it until I can physically dip my balls in it. (Via Shaggy.)

* The House Next Door has a review of the Caprica pilot/movie up that I’m not going to read, but you’re welcome to do so.

* I love Fantagraphics. Specifically I love Portable Grindhouse: The Lost Art of the VHS Box. If I fail to get this into Maxim I will look at it as a personal defeat.

* If I were in Chicago, I’d go to this: Anders Nilsen’s art show at Home. (Via Peggy Burns.) I’d forgotten all about this Captain America piece.

* My Bloody Valentine 3D director Patrick Lussier says Lionsgate has no interest in an MBV3D sequel. This is pretty lulzy news given how comically sequel-ready he made the end of the movie.

* This comic about Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson by Mairead Case and David Lasky is both beautiful and informative. (Via Tom Spurgeon.) Because I am an ignoramus, it wasn’t until the album’s recent rerelease (which the comic was created to promote) that I discovered in “Melody” and “Cargo Culte” the origin of the astonishing bassline from the “Portishead Experience” remix of Massive Attack’s “Karmacoma,” maybe the funkiest single track to come out of the entire trip-hop movement.

* The Midnight Meat Train: closeted text? This is Clive Barker we’re talking about, so it seems like a safe bet.

* Power Rangers magnate Haim Saban: Israeli agent? That is funny in any number of ways.

* Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in the month of March 2003 alone; Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in the month of August 2002 alone. “The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”

* Also (via Andrew Sullivan) a reminder that “at least 108 people have died in American custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, most of them violently”…as of March 2005.

* Finally, rest in pieces, J.G. Ballard.

(art from The Atrocity Exhibition by Phoebe Gloeckner)

Due to computer problems, my posting schedule is apt to be erratic for the foreseeable future. Thanks in advance for sticking around…