* My pal Zach Oat at Television Without Pity is the reason why I was able to see Watchmen the other night in the first place, and many of the points I make in my review were first aired in conversation with him after the screening, so perhaps it’s no surprise that his review of the film is my favorite so far. I thought this was a clever point:

…while many reviewers might disagree with me, the film version of Watchmen is not your standard superhero movie. True, it has guys in costumes fighting street-level thugs — and, later, other costume types — with the same martial-arts moves you’d see in any of the Batman flicks. But the big difference is that this isn’t an origin tale, like Batman Begins or Iron Man or most other superhero films. It’s the opposite of an origin, where the heroes are out of the spotlight on the other side, slowly dying and being forgotten about as they reflect on their lives.

* Meanwhile, Frank Santoro’s read of Watchmen over at Jeet Heer’s blog is so good, and so in sync with what I’ve been trying to get across about the movie and the book and Moore’s superhero/superhero-ish work generally, that I’m going to quote it in its entirety:

Watchmen is a Lutheran reformation text knocking on the door of the Catholic establishment by a devout believer. Or something like that. And why I think scholars of comics don’t really enjoy it because they aren’t superhero fans. The text is an indictment of the form, the laws, by a believer in the form. I don’t know if anyone who wasn’t a “true believer” to start with really “gets” the full impact of the text. It’s like a Muslim saying he doesn’t enjoy the New Testament.

That’s exactly right, and exactly what I’ve been saying: No matter what Moore himself says today, Watchmen is not Eightball #23.

* When my former boss Gareb Shamus wasn’t busy firing everyone who works for him who isn’t his brother Stephen, he apparently collected all 12 original Watchmen covers. I had no idea! That’s a pretty terrific collection.

* Closed Caption Comics member Ryan Cecil sings the praises of the Wachowski Brothers’ stunning Speed Racer. Man, is that movie ever a grower. Actually, thinking about my experience watching Watchmen, Speed Racer is the film I think it’s the closest to. Some kind of cross between Speed Racer and Rambo, which is a pretty heady brew.

* Another altcomic bites the dust: Tom Spurgeon reports that Ted May is canceling the completed Injury #3 until further notice. That’s a travesty, because look at the goddamn cover. That’s the best thing I’ve ever seen him draw. Damn.

* Speaking of May, sorta, USS Catastrophe has reopened and is selling Rumbling a new Kevin Huizenga mini containing the continuation of a story from the now-defunct Or Else. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* Also via Spurge, Jeffrey Brown has a blog! And he’s drawing G.I. Joe. Sheeeeeeeeeeit.

* Scott Tobias’s New Cult Canon column returns with a look at Femme Fatale, a film best described as Brian DePalma’s tribute to Brian DePalma. That’s no faint praise, I assure you.

* Matt Maxwell Shelf Porn!

* Paging Bryan Alexander! If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There’d Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats begins a new photo series: Abandoned Places.

Todd VanDerWerff’s latest weekly Lost review is just lousy with insights, so I’m just going to spend a whole post quoting and agreeing with it if you don’t mind. On Josh Holloway:

This dude should be a movie star.

Agreed! And I’m the last kind of person to say that because I tend not to really care about the devil-may-care badasses with the hearts of gold. I love Han Solo like I love all Star Wars characters, but I’m not a “HAN ROOLZ LUKE DROOLZ” type. Ditto Batman and Superman. Megaditto Jack and Sawyer. But something about the way Sawyer is written, and about the way Holloway portrays him, imbues him with an approachability that many such stock characters lack. It’s perfectly believable that he’d be friends with Hurley, for example, you know? He wouldn’t be posing during the times they hang out, either, he’d just wanna have a nice time with him. That’s what I like about the character, and Holloway.

After the [love] triangle resolved itself, though, he retreated into the background simply because the show wasn’t quite sure what to do with him anymore. He was too much a leader now to simply go back to playing a foil to Jack, but he also didn’t really have a credible idea of what the castaways should DO to counterpoint Jack’s fervor to get off the Island and Locke’s fervor to stay on.

Yep. That’s why it’s so much fun to see him come into his own, and why it’s disheartening to see Kate and Jack come back and start the love quadrangle dynamics up again.

Lost, of course, makes a big deal out of names….A lot of this is just silly spot-the-reference gaming, like you might see on, say, Family Guy, but Sawyer’s voyage has had as much to do with the idea that he takes on different names to suit different occasions as anything else. When he was just Sawyer, the agreeably Han Solo-esque rapscallion, he was a pretty basic riff on the con man with a heart of gold. Once his real name came out as James Ford, however, the show felt safe in giving him a few inches of vulnerability. And now he’s Jim LaFleur, and he’s essentially become a respected member of society. He’s got a stable relationship with a loving live-in girlfriend and a great job (head of security for DHARMA).

Totally, and wow. Well done. (BTW, I couldn’t help but think that his pseudonymous surname is a relatively meaningless reference to Myron LaFleur from The Mist by Lost-writer fave Stephen King.)

While I thought “The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham” was one of the series’ better efforts, the last two episodes have both had a crippling failing in doling out lots of exposition in the clumsiest way possible (i.e., just handing giant speeches to people pretty good with exposition and hoping for the best). “LaFleur,” written by Elizabeth Sarnoff and Kyle Pennington and directed by Mark Goldman, however, handled exposition in the best way possible: It dropped the characters right in the middle of it.

Matthew Perpetua, call your lawyer.

DHARMA (or, as I like to call it, the Television Character Actor Economic Recovery Plan) has always been one of the bigger mysteries on Lost (somewhere up there with questions on the Island itself, the smoke monster and the Others), and its abandoned facilities lent a nice haunted house quality to much of season two, which is easily the show’s SPOOKIEST season, if nothing else. There’s something about out-of-date technology and abandoned research facilities wasting away in the middle of a tropical paradise that gives the show that extra level of intrigue (think of those oddly unsettling training films, for instance)…

Agreed on all counts. That’s one aspect of the show I really miss. Remember when the countdown clock revealed those hieroglyphics? Remember when you first heard “SYSTEM FAILURE”? Remember when “Walt” said hello on that ancient computer?

Sawyer and the others have gone through a lot of pain in the past while, so to see him having a moment of happiness at the successful delivery of Amy’s (Reiko Aylesworth, late and much-lamented of 24) child by Juliet, who had to overcome her professional jitters, was nice…

And the show obviously knew it, which is why they risked the loss of a cliffhanger or a big dramatic moment by cutting to commercial on Sawyer’s grin. It was worth it.

I figured pairing off Sawyer and Juliet was inevitable, but I didn’t think it would work as well as it did here. Their relationship has a maturity that Sawyer’s pairing with Kate (based as it is on adolescent crush-level dramatics) just DOESN’T have. This being TV, where adolescent crush-level dramatics hold sway, I expect this will turn into a wacky love quadrangle, but I also sort of hope Sawyer and Juliet just jilt Jack and Kate and say, “Thanks, but we’re much happier now.”

Oh, indeed! In fact I think that the show has painted itself into a bit of a corner here, since Jack and Kate have been shown to be such selfish sad-sacks while Sawyer and Juliet are running around rescuing people and caring about people and saving babies and drunks and creating a happy life for themselves. The show needs to hope that the collective energy of Skater and Jacket shippers formed over the course of three to five seasons can overwhelm the goodwill engendered by whatever they’re calling the Juliet/Sawyer pairing in the space of one episode. As far as I’m concerned that’s an uphill climb!

Really liked that scene where those left behind anxiously discussed their fates around the small table in DHARMA village, particularly the way the image of young Charlotte disappearing off into the darkness with her mother was shot. That whole moment could have been unbearable, but it just wasn’t, thanks to some interesting directorial choices.

That scene was really well done, wasn’t it? The sandwiches and milk, the outdoor lights illuminating the early summer evening as children run inside–really evocative of eating dinner on your porch on a lovely summer night. They didn’t have to set the scene in that environment, but they did, and it made it all the stronger.

The word “regret” implies several things: pain over your past, contrition over your role in it, and the wish that you could go back and make sure it never happened. As a vocalist, as a melodist, as a lyricist, Brian Molko’s gift is conveying a kind of “regret,” or maybe a whole new word is needed, where you feel that pain and contrition but just can’t bring yourself to want to have done things any differently. In some ways that’s even sadder.

This video, which I hadn’t seen before now, takes a lovely, sexy idea and executes it beautifully, and Molko never looked better. Pretty perfect.

* Look, I’m a person who likes Lost a whole lot, I think I’ve been up front about that. And I liked this episode a whole hell of a lot. Several moments had me laughing and cheering with delight, sitting there on my couch with my cat: The glimpse of the Statue, the revelation that Sawyer is a Dharma Initiative bigwig, and of course the Sawyer/Juliet hook-up. Woo!

* On that last point, I can’t stress enough how happy hooking Juliet and Sawyer up makes me. That’s a goddamn stroke of genius is what that is: “Hey, how about we take the two romantic leads you could actually stand to be around for longer than 30 seconds and put them together?” By all means, Lost writers! I have a bad, bad feeling that Sawyer’s 100 Days in Heaven with Kate are going to trump his three years with Juliet, unfortunately, but I’ll take what I can get. (Particularly if it means we get to watch Elizabeth Mitchell lazily roll around in bed with her shirt off. Sigh.)

* So for that reason, and just the kick of seeing our heroes in Dharma jumpsuits rubbing elbows with poor doomed Horace and the rest of the gang, I really like how this three-year jump has been handled. Plus, as my pal Matthew Perpetua pointed out to me, this was a way to invest the Dharma/Others War backstory with a sense of urgency, instead of relegating it to flashbacks or infodumps.

* That said, my big concern about this move is something that always happens on TV, especially on Lost, which is that the writers and audience alike tend to conflate screen time with actual time. So while Sawyer’s relationships with Juliet, Miles, Daniel, Jin, and even some Dharma people should probably be more intense and important to him than his relationships with Hurley, Jack, Sun, and even Kate, they’re not going to be treated that way because those years together happened off screen, while his 100 days with the castaways took place over the space of four seasons in the real, non-fictional world. It’s a bit like how the characters rarely seem to think about the deaths of Boone or Shannon or Ana-Lucia or Libby (let alone Nikki, Paulo, or any of the redshirts) even though they happened just a few weeks ago in screen time, because those episodes were written, shot, and aired years ago in some cases in actual time. (Though it seems to me that Terry O’Quinn seems to keep Boone in mind when appropriate even though it’s not explicitly called for in the script, simply because he’s a talented and intelligent actor.) I mean, this whole thing is sort of a quibble, and I admit it’s entirely possible for brief but intense relationships to trump long-term but less traumatically engendered ones, but it’s still gonna irk me a bit.

* But who knows, maybe Sawyer will be like “hey, nice to see you, but don’t fuck things up for my pal Horace.” Maybe someone will have gone native, so to speak, and genuinely feel allegiance to and affinity for Dharma. It’s a surprising show, and stranger things have happened.

* I’m glad to see more Dharma stuff in general. I’d always felt like they’d ended up getting short shrift–having the origin of their use of the Numbers and our only solid glimpse of Alvar Hanso relegated to the not-quite-canon Lost Experience ARG, having Ben and the Others kill them and take their shit D&D-style, simply revealing that they had little or nothing to do with anything that was happening to the castaways. But I was always still interested in who they were and how they came to be, to quote Batman–how did they find the Island? What were they really trying to achieve there? Were they the hippie-science commune they seemed to be, or were they sinister in some way, as implied by the deception in many of “Dr. Marvin Candle”‘s orientation films? How do they tie in to Widmore and/or Paik? What’s the source of their conflict with the Others? Is it merely their presence on the Island, or something more? What happened during Ben’s years with them that we haven’t seen? What caused characters like Charlotte’s mother and Annie to leave? I’m hoping we see a lot of this go down.

* Speaking of Ben, where are he and his dad during Sawyer et al’s sojourn among Dharma? Are they there yet? Have they already left? Are Sawyer and the gang simply ignoring them? Surely it’d be tempting for Sawyer just to wring the little bastard’s neck, no? Does Daniel persuade him not to? Whatever happened, happened, right?

* This show is uniformly great at casting villains. Terry O’Quinn initially, William Mapother, M.C. Gainey, Michael Emerson, Alan Dale, Elizabeth Mitchell initially, Andrew Divoff, Lance Reddick, and most notably in this episode, Nestor Carbonell. God, what an unnerving guy. And a handsome devil! Just a quiet, sensual menace. I’m glad he became a big deal and didn’t get dropped after one episode like Diana Scarwid’s Isabel.

* Unrelated theory I’ve been mulling over for the past week and that other, smarter people already probably beat me to long ago: I think Libby worked for Charles Widmore. I didn’t put it together until after Matthew Abaddon told Locke that his job was to get people where they needed to be, but of course that’s exactly what Libby did with Desmond, and presumably that’s why she was watching Hurley inside the asylum.

* I wonder if the presence of various ’04 castaways back here in the ’70s is what gave rise to the various “lists” that the Others referenced a couple seasons back. Perhaps they were on the lookout for these specific people to come back.

* Who do you think Amy and Horace’s baby is? Anyone we know? If he was born in ’77 or so, that would make him a little older than me–who matches that description? Charlie, Boone? Maybe Hurley (too young?) or Daniel (too old? already has a mother but she could have adopted him?)? And of course time travel complicates things further. I wonder.

Best known as a hidden track on Nine Inch Nails’ Broken EP, “Suck” actually started life, sounding very differently, on the debut album from Martin Atkins’s industrial supergroup Pigface; here’s Trent Reznor singing the song with Skinny Puppy’s Nivek Ogre during a P-face tour. The arrangement is basically the NIN version, though, complete with “Funky Stuff” bassline. Happier times for the industrial world, that’s for sure. Two of the band members you see here, Killing Joke bassist Paul Raven and Ministry guitarist William Tucker, are now dead.

I liked it a lot!

Foremost, I think it got all the characters across in all their lovable fucked-uppedness. They are lovable, at least to me, even if most of them are sociopathic creeps. I’m fond of them, and the movie reminded me of why. Jon is unnerving and sad, Dan is adorable and a little off in a nutty-professor way, Laurie’s a sexy mess, Sally’s a formerly sexy mess, Rorschach is extravagantly over the top (a lot of his journal’s more outré pronouncements became laugh lines, something the character’s admirers in fandom may not be prepared for), and (my biggest pre-screening worry) Ozymandias is basically David Bowie crossed with Lex Luthor. No complaints on any score.

Second, you may have noticed the legend at the bottom of my blogroll reading “KEEP COMICS EVIL.” With that in mind, I have to admit that I’m simply chuffed that there’s a full-fledged superhero movie out there now with a hard-R rating. And man, is it ever hard! Unbelievably graphic violence for a superhero action movie–I think that’s important to keep in mind when reading criticism of the violence in this movie, just that it’s never been shown to be like this before. To the extent that the violence is glorified or fetishized, well, isn’t that what the superheroes are doing? Literally, in Dan and Laurie’s case? Speaking of, there’s a pretty graphic sex scene between the two of them. There’s boobs, tons of man-ass, a little woman-ass, and of course, Lower Manhattan. (Which was not nearly as distracting as it’s been made out to be, by the way–the movie had a way of cutting away from it when it might become so, and rumors of its kinship with Dirk Diggler’s claim to fame have been greatly exaggerated.) Sex, dismemberment, and superheroes…I mean, look at my movie-review sidebar, obviously this is delightful to me in someway.

Maybe my favorite aspect of the movie is how it riffed not just on superhero conventions, but on ’80s sci-fi action dystopia movies, too. I think it was Harry Knowles or Moriarty who pointed out that the score was designed to evoke the likes of Vangelis, Tangerine Dream, and John Carpenter–it’s not super heavy-handed at it, nor is it as obvious as, say, “Machine Gun” by Portishead, but it’s there. Meanwhile, during the sex scene, the flick uses a super-duper-conspicuous romantic pop song (Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” getting a big laugh from the audience), in much the same way that basically every ’80s movie starring Tom Cruise did. The Road Warrior and that 1984 Macintosh Super Bowl ad figure prominently on Ozymandias’s TV screens toward the end. It’s cleverly done.

Speaking of ’80s movie connections (and even The Road Warrior, given that the snippet we see is of the masked Lord Humungus shooting his big gun), the movie made explicit something I noticed upon my last re-read, which is that Rorschach’s design owes as much to masked killers like Michael, Jason, and Leatherface as it does to the Question or Mr. A. How does it do this? By changing around the climax of the sequence where Rorschach “becomes Rorschach” in a way I won’t spoil, but suffice it to say is a pretty direct link to slasher films. (Not to mention less of a ripoff of the climax of the original Mad Max, just to bring things full circle.)

But it’s very much a superhero movie–the costume tweaks, the action sequences, the glory shots, Big Figure–and that’s totally fine by me. I think it’s easy to forget that for all its distrust of the genre, for all its deconstruction of the genre, for all of Moore and Gibbons’s formal achievements in it, and for all of Moore’s later ambition and achievements outside the genre, Watchmen is not Eightball #23. It’s very, very much a superhero comic, and much of its pleasure derives from how effectively it can deploy that aspect of itself in contrast to the other things it’s doing. The movie isn’t wall-to-wall X-2 or anything, it saves the most superheroey stuff for after Dan and Laurie get back into costume and start kicking ass again (Patrick Wilson plays the transformation beautifully, going from sad-sack to Batman seamlessly), but it’s there, and good!

Everything that was cut could afford to be cut and everything that was changed made sense in its new version. Yeah, you may notice the absence your favorite detail or line what have you. I wish Comedian’s close-up “Somebody EXPLAIN it to me” plea during his drunken confession to Moloch had stayed in; ditto “The light is taking me to pieces.” But I didn’t exactly miss any of it, nor did I miss the ancillary characters, or having Captain Metropolis head up the ill-fated “Crimebusters” meeting, nor did I care that they called the non-existent group the Watchmen instead of the Crimebusters–what difference does it make what you call a team that never existed? The ending is the biggest change, obviously, and while I am a passionate defender of the shaggy-dog-joke punchline of the original, this solution is far more elegant and, honestly, the kind of thing Moore would totally do. I think it helps sell Dr. Manhattan’s decision at the end, too.

I had a lot of fun and would happily see it again. I imagine that if you suspect you won’t like it, you’re not gonna like it, it’s not gonna change your mind. But as I always said, my Watchmen calculation was simple arithmetic: I love Watchmen the comic, I really liked Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake and 300 adaptation, so I’d probably like Zack Snyder’s Watchmen adaptation. Sure enough!

* When I think about my “favorite movies,” I have a whole lot, and I tend to separate them out into groups. For example, some of my favorite movies are millions of people’s favorite movies: The Godfather Parts I & II, The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, etc. Then there are horror movies: The Shining, The Exorcist, Hellraiser, The Blair Witch Project and so on. I’m not sure that either list is all that unique to me. That’s the job of my “Idiosyncratic Favorites” list, consisting of movies that are uniquely my bag in a big way. Three of those movies, Heavenly Creatures, Velvet Goldmine, and Eyes Wide Shut, are the subject of recent installments in Scott Tobias’s New Cult Canon series at the Onion AV Club. (The others, if you were wondering, are Lost Highway, Barton Fink, and Casino. Actually I’d probably throw Hellraiser on there as well.) Go read all three please.

* Happy Seventh Blogiversary to ADDTF Blogather Bill Sherman!

* Chris Butcher notes that the Final Crisis hardcover is now slated to include Superman Beyond and Submit. No Batman: Last Rites, but I’ll take what I can get.

* Looks like longtime Romero-movie composter John Harrison’s directorial adaptation of Clive Barker’s Book of Blood will be going straight to DVD. Somehow that seems less ignominious than what happened to The Midnight Meat Train.

* I think we already knew that Cloverfield director Matt Reeves was remaking Let the Right One In, but I don’t think we knew that he was calling it the far less elegant and evocative title of Let Me In. Character-driven horror is not exactly what I would set the director of Cloverfield up with as a follow-up project, but hey.

* The making of a masterpiece: Geoff Grogan explains how he created his collage comic Look Out!! Monsters. (Via Chris Mautner.)

* Douglas Wolk reviews several notable superhero collections of late: Omega the Unknown, All Star Superman, and the Greg Sadowski-edited Supermen! In this piece Wolk seems to subscribe to the theory, advanced here and there around the internet, that there’s a twist ending in All Star Superman in terms of a certain character and a certain other character and perhaps a relationship of some kind between them. I’m not convinced and I think Morrison has more or less denied it in interviews, though not in so many words because he’s never been asked it in so many words, but still. Ah, does anyone even know what I’m talking about?

* Todd VanDerWerff does his weekly-review thing with the most recent episode of Battlestar Galactica, focusing on the Starbuck material. Always worth a read.

* Rick Trembles reviews Tim Lucas’s book on David Cronenberg’s Videodrome in his inimitable comic-strip style. Full of fascinating insights and what-ifs.

* Stacie Ponder is right: This trailer for The Shining is astonishing.

* Good lord Tom Neely can draw.

* The Bush Administration’s legal team asserted that virtually no law or legal principle applied to the President’s conduct towards you provided he believed you to be a terrorist, so in that light it’s not surprising that recordings of almost 100 interrogations of terror suspects were destroyed. Somewhat more surprising is how little the Obama Administration has deviated from some of the Bush Administration’s more jawdroppingly authoritarian policies.

* I’ve got a fever! And the only prescription! Is more Kate Winslet!

* Which reminds me: As promised, here’s the first installment of The Best of Bowie Loves Beyoncé. I’ve come across a lot of wonderful images during my first week and a half of running this tumblelog, but I think this is my favorite pair of all:

Beyoncé and her team are not here to win news cycles, they’re here to win the election.

And of course, if you’re not in it for the clever juxtapositions, it is of course a blog containing nothing but pictures of two human beings who look like this:

Join me, won’t you?

I love how driven this song sounds.

1 – Go to Wikipedia. Hit “random”

or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random

The first random Wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 – Go to Quotations Page and select “random quotations”

or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3

The last four or five words of the very last quote on the page is the title of your first album.

3 – Go to Flickr and click on “explore the last seven days”

or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days

Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4 – Use Photoshop or similar to put it all together.

SPOILERS BELOW

* Much, much, much stronger episode this time, even with the umpteenth imaginary-friend reveal (which to be fair was better than Romo Lampkin’s cat). I guess I didn’t realize how shaken I was by the lousiness of last week’s ep until I sat down to watch this one and discovered I was dreading it. It was entirely possible that with so few episodes to go, last week could have set a tone from which the show would never recover. Fortunately that wasn’t the case.

* Before I say anything else, my big “whoa” moment from this episode was Athena’s really wrenching and awful cry of despair toward the end of the episode. Holy shit but did Grace Park sell that. Even just watching her underfed form stumble into the briefing room in her underwear, beaten to a pulp–ugh, tough to watch and beautifully performed. Park was just as strong as Boomer, playing the character’s singular mix of longing and deceit like a slow-burning fire. I was really impressed with her, particularly considering she was arguably the ensemble’s weakest link early on.

* Whereas last week felt like a struggle just to string together a conversation that made sense from one sentence to the next between any two characters, this week felt masterfully controlled by the writers–each of the characters upon whom it focused left the episode with us having a clearer understanding of him or her when than when it started. For Chief, this mainly consisted of establishing a through-line for him that connected both his Herculean efforts to save the ship earlier in the half-season with his 180-degree decision to abandon the fleet last week: He’s just badly, badly shaken by the combined emotional assault of discovering he’s a Cylon, realizing he wasn’t super-in-love with Cally, losing Cally, discovering his kid isn’t really his kid, losing Earth, discovering he lived there thousands of years ago, and so on. Unlike, say, Tory, who was instantly gung-ho about being a Cylon, or Tigh, who decided just as instantly that his life as a member of the fleet was the paramount thing to him, the Chief never really had that moment of clarity regarding his life from here on out. This episode showed that in his way, he’s just as adrift as Dee or Kara or Gaeta have been shown to be this season.

* The next character we got more of a handle on was Boomer. In this case the ep was, seemingly at least, deceptive. For the longest time it seemed like she was genuinely contrite about her role in the attempted assassination of Adama, the regime on New Caprica, the betrayal of her fellow 8s in the Cylon Civil War and so forth. Not only had she changed her political tune, but on an emotional level she seemed to have come to grips with the fact that much of her behavior had been a reaction to feeling rejected by the Chief way back when. Even after she went buck-wild on Athena and frakked Helo, I figured this was just the behavior of someone who’s profoundly fucked up, maybe even crazy at this point, but not evil. And even once she kidnapped Hera, I thought it was some shared plot between her and the Chief to keep the kid safe from all the turmoil in the fleet lately or something. Maybe some of this will still turn out to be true–I feel like quite a bit of it might–but as it turns out, Boomer was once again an enemy agent, there to kidnap Hera for Cavil’s side; even freeing Ellen and bringing her to the fleet was a ruse. Suddenly Boomer’s behavior makes that much more sense.

* The final character we learned more about, of course, was Starbuck. I guessed that the piano player was all in her head during his first scene and almost had to admire the sheer chutzpah of this show to dip into that particular well yet again, but I thought all that material was so well acted, well lit, and well scored that I didn’t even mind. So the theory that Daniel the Missing Cylon was her dad turns out to be correct, making her, what, a Cylon-human hybrid like Hera? That would explain why the show’s staff could be so unequivocal in saying “Kara’s not a Cylon” despite the fact that doing so rules out all the previously established ways she could possibly have returned from the dead on this show–she’s a half-Cylon, and for all we know they can regenerate too. Katee Sackhoff, of course, is the show’s big discovery acting-wise; much of her work is simply taking advantage of how she looks on the screen. There’s something really physical and present about her big watery eyes, pillowy lips, and curvy body, and that physical presence enhances all three of Starbuck’s main personality poles–violent, horny, and melancholy (“drunk” rides shotgun with all three at varying times).

* Speaking of Starbuck’s physical presence, that was some shower scene, huh? And despite being glimpsed through the crack in the door of a bathroom stall and the blurry eyes of a concussion victim, the sex scene between Helo and Boomer was hot, surprisingly explicit stuff too. Battlestar Galactica love scenes tend to be pretty memorable, and I’m not sure they get enough credit for that.

* What with all the fine character work, the show was able to elegantly advance the plot to the next stage: Boomer’s deception devastated the Chief but it also brought Hera to the enemy and inflicted a terminal injury on the Galactica; the mystery of Kara’s situation is if not solved than pretty close to it; Roslin’s psychic connection to Hera rears its head again just in time for her cancer to knock her down to the mat for what I assume is the last time. Compare how smoothly all that happened to those weird, stilted conversations last week, or the bizarrely rushed death of Tigh and Caprica Six’s baby, or the forced feeling to Ellen’s attempts to break the couple up. If anything I’m guessing that the character stuff here was so deft that the plot-fans won’t even notice how far downfield the various balls in play got moved.

* Great effects shots toward the end there, as usual. The production value this show gets out of its effects budget is unequaled in television as best I can tell.

Nine Inch Nails – “Gave Up (Live)”

Note the presence of Marilyn Manson and Richard Patrick on guitars and vocals.

* This is so commonsensical I don’t know why I haven’t seen anyone else put it exactly like this, but here’s Tom Spurgeon on those pesky Bookscan numbers and the innumeracy of attempts to use them against the bookstore market:

Just the fact that a number for a book that came out in January is going to be different than for the same book had it come out in November should discredit these numbers’ use.

* Todd VanDerWerff refers to this week’s episode of Lost as “The Passion of [Character Redacted].” Meanwhile, fun stuff is discussed in the comment thread on my post.

* They’re remaking The Neverending Story and Total Recall. Also, SciFi Wire should really provide links to the trades when it takes stories from them; the fact that the trades never return the favor when stories are broken on the nerd sites is no excuse. And yes, I realize I’m being a fat hypocrite because I was too lazy to use Google News to track down the original articles. I may not get there with you, SciFi Wire, but I’ve been to the mountaintop and I’ve seen the netiquette promised land.

* Jog reviews Supermen!, editor Greg Sadowski’s new collection of Fletcher Hanks-y supercomics from the Golden Age.

* Real-life horror: The New York Times presents a disturbing, heartbreaking video about the misogynist totalitarian barbarian nightmare the Taliban are turning Pakistan’s Swat Valley into. Via Spencer Ackerman, who notes “it’s important to see Swat as a prologue for what the Taliban wish to do with a nuclear-armed country.”

* Finally, I’ve long harbored what I’m sure some would consider a bizarre case of the hots for a young Patti Smith, who I think was basically sex in a t-shirt. Imagine my delight, then, to discover this picture of her emphatically not in a t-shirt. What she’s wearing here’s even better!

(via Johnny Bacardi)

SPOILER WARNING

* Fucking Ben.

* If I looked up and saw Locke and Lt. Daniels staring at me from across the street, I would not walk, I would RUN in the opposite direction. Those are two scary bald motherfuckers.

* It was wonderful to have an episode devoted almost entirely to putting Terry O’Quinn in front of various other actors and having him act toward them. Man is he good. The suicide scene was marvelously tough to endure.

* I thought it was fun how at first you think Ethnic Guy and Ethnic Lady are some kind of agents, but then it turns out they’re just the Jack and Kate of the new group of castaways. (Maybe.) Clever little turnarounds like that are one of the things Lost does so well–and are also a hallmark of season openers for the show, which makes sense because last week’s episode felt like a finale (and may have been intended to be one when it was first mapped out back before the strike shortened last season).

* I was hoping for a bwahaha evil smile on Locke’s face when he discovered injured Ben at his mercy on the Island. Oh well. “‘He’s the man who killed me’ – cut to black” is pretty awesome too.

* One thing Lost tests is one’s ability to read fiction, for want of a better way to put it. That is, when it advances several conflicting theories for what’s actually going on with a character, it will eventually depict that character in a way that confirms one of those theories without coming right out and saying it, but at the same time the show’s byzantine plots and secrets will make people ignore these obvious context clues in the performance, mise en scene, score, even dialogue, and hunt for what’s “really” going on. For example, for a long long time the question among some fans of my acquaintance was “Is Ben telling the truth when he says ‘We’re the good guys’?” It always seemed obvious to me that he and his cronies could only be “good guys” in the most relative sense of the term, since they were constantly busy with the shooting and the torturing and the kidnapping and the brainwashing and the noggins and the piggins and the frikins, but when you finally got to the episode that revealed Ben to be an actual mass murderer, complete with mass graves and everything, I thought it was beyond debate. Amazingly, even after the events of tonight’s episode, in which Ben cold-bloodedly murders the fan-favorite character at his most physically and emotionally helpless, some of these fans are still saying he’s probably the good guy. It reminds me a bit of when it became perfectly clear that Aaron was one of the Oceanic Six and yet people were still holding out for some other sixth member because he was still inside Claire when the ship crashed, as though the media would ignore the baby when coming up with a numerical nickname for the miraculous survivors of a plane crash and stint on a deserted island. It strikes me that part of being able to make heads or tails out of a story like Lost is being able to look at hoofprints and think “horse” rather than “zebra.”

* Reviews of Zack Snyder’s Watchmen film are flooding in, mostly from nerd sites. So far the main line of criticism seems to be that Snyder’s reach exceeds his grasp in terms of fitting a 12-issue serialized story that bounces back and forth in time, incorporating multiple flashbacks and focalizing characters and voluminous background materials, into the framework of even a very long feature film. You can see a pretty thoughtfully expressed iteration of that general notion here, from comics writer Mark Millar, for example. That gives me some hope, since hey, if you’re gonna strike out, you may as well strike out swinging. I was far more concerned about whether the film was just gonna be cheesy, though admittedly the kinds of sources we’re seeing reviews from right now are unlikely to detect the sort of cheesiness I suspect Watchmen: The Movie would traffic in should it traffic in cheesiness, if that makes sense.

* Samuel L. Jackson has signed a nine-picture deal to play Nick Fury in sundry Marvel Movies. Hooray!

* The great Peggy Burns of Drawn & Quarterly takes my Savage Critic overlord Brian Hibbs’s much-debated Bookscan number-crunching to task, with numbers of her own to back it up. This apparently resulted in a lengthy phone conversation between the two of them that I’ve decided sounded a lot like the one between President Merkin Muffley and the Russian Premier in Dr. Strangelove. I have however not decided which one gets to say things like “I’m perfectly capable of being as sorry as you are” and which one has to turn the music down so the other can hear–you can vote in the comments if you are so inclined.

* They’re remaking Clue as “a global thriller and transmedia event” helmed by Gore Verbinski. Oh brother. Now, Verbinski directed one of the all-time great horror films and approximately two very good Pirates of the Caribbean movies spread over three Pirates of the Caribbean movies total, so this may be great. On the other hand, there’s something inspired about the how the original recreated a murder-mystery board game as a period piece about Red Scare paranoia and ’50s sexual morés. Moreover, it was the first of two Tim Curry vehicles set in a giant Victorian mansion on a rainy night that I’ve committed to memory during the course of my life, and the combined cleavage of Colleen Camp and Lesley Ann Warren holds a special place in my, oh, let’s go with “heart,” so I’m pretty attached to it and I can’t say I’m super-excited about a do-over. (Via Vulture.)

* Delightful Tidbit of the Day: Here’s a great catch by Tim O’Neil about the genesis of the Talking Heads song “The Overload” from the Brian Eno-produced Remain in Light:

During the recording of Remain in Light, the Talking Heads came across a magazine review of a then-obscure late 70s British punk group and were utterly fascinated by the description of the music. They decided to record a song that represented what they thought the band might sound like.

… David’s contributions to this song were said to be influenced by things he had read about a British group called Joy Division. He had never actually heard their albums, but he had read about them. …*

That’s just wonderful. And I can hear it, too! (Best of all, Joy Division was originally named Warsaw, after the Eno/Bowie collaboration “Warszawa” from Low, and thus the circle is completed. Sadly, though, this makes me dream of an Eno/Joy Division collaboration that was never to be. Sigh.)

* Are Gitmo guards getting in their last licks? If so, what are the Obama administration and Gates defense department doing to stop it?

* Finally, in tribute to NeilAlien the First Comicsblogger’s astonishing NINTH blogiversary (congratulations!!!!), Tom Spurgeon runs down the reasons They should make a Dr. Strange movie. Johnny Depp, right?

I hear you’re buying a synthesizer and an arpeggiator and are throwing your computer out the window because you want to make something real. You want to make a Yaz record.

–me on Alan Moore, more or less

(Apologies to LCD Soundsystem. Again.)

* DID U KNOW: There’s a Cold Heat blog and a Cold Heat website? The site features all four issues published so far, plus a bunch of reviews including a few I wrote for Wizard’s Thursday Morning Quarterback and The Comics Journal. The blog contains awesome shit like this Jim Rugg pinup of Castle:

Better still, Tom Spurgeon reports that print copies of the remaining individual issues of the series will be available on a print-to-order basis. YES.

* In the first of his Best of the 00s series and the second of our dueling Black Hole posts (here’s the first), Dick Hyacinth reviews Charles Burns’s teen-horror masterpiece. More to come from both of us.

* Adam Rogers’s Wired piece on how Watchmen got made functions both as a behind-the-scenes saga and a general examination of the unique pressures of making a movie version of a property that nerds love. As Zach Snyder puts it:

The literati were less hard on the Coen brothers for changes they made to No Country for Old Men than the geeks will be on me for changes I make to Watchmen.

* Speaking of Snyder, he says that the zombie epic he’s producing, Army of the Dead, will have to wait until director Matthijs van Heijninger finishes directing the Ron Moore-scripted prequel to John Carpenter’s The Thing. Goddammit that is a crazy sentence I just wrote.

* Alex Proyas directing an adaptation of the lead book in John Christopher’s Tripods trilogy, The White Mountains? Sure, I’ll eat it.

* Michel “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” Gondry directing a movie version of the Green Hornet, starring Seth “Superbad” Rogen as the Hornet and former Green Hornet director Stephen “Kung Fu Hustle” Chow as Kato? Are we sure marijuana is still illegal? (Via Vulture.)

* Equally bizarre and potentially awesome/awful: The Julie Taymor-directed, U2-scored Spider-Man Broadway musical is called Spider-Man, Turn Off the Dark. Yes, the comma is part of the title, just like You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. And based on the plot synopsis, I smell a Spider-Avatar in our future. This…this is going to be a nightmare, isn’t it?

* There have been so many Ghostbusters 3 rumors for so many years that I make a point of ignoring them. Also, it’d be a lot easier to get excited about Ghostbusters 3 if it weren’t for Ghostbusters 2. Nevertheless, I will dutifully pass on Dan Aykroyd’s assertion that the movie may start shooting as early as this fall. Why? Because I believe everything Dan Aykroyd says.

* Whitney Matheson’s weekly Best of the Lost Comment Thread post returns. There’s a cute Ulysses gag in there, as well as evidence that a lot of people, like me, are wondering why we spent all that time with Grandpa Shephard out of nowhere.

* This Adam McCauley piece is pretty cool. The moral of the story is that the monsters are everywhere.

* Finally, I know what you’re thinking. “Does the creation of Bowie Loves Beyoncé mean you won’t be posting pictures of Bowie or Beyoncé over here anymore?” No it doesn’t. Stay tuned for The Best of Bowie Loves Beyoncé, a weekly series starting soon.