* IGN’s Dan Philips speaks at length with Grant Morrison about Batman and Robin. And so help me god, Morrison cites Crank: High Voltage as an influence:

I went to see Crank: High Voltage when we were in Los Angeles. I had just watched that, and I thought everything else just looks like slow motion, really. I wanted to get that effect into the comics as well. To me that was just a great action film, and every action film after is going to have to try and move at that speed. I really wanted to get that into Batman and Robin.

The only way a “Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely on Batman using Crank and Twin Peaks as influences” could be purer Collins Crack is if it came with a collaborative soundtrack by David Bowie and Underworld.

* Jason Adams gets about one plot-hole into a review of Terminator Salvation before giving up and washing his hands of the whole mess. I’m sympathetic.

* Turns out it’s hella hard to blow up a planet.

Tom Spurgeon has posted his annual guide to San Diego’s Comic Con International. This year it’s a shortened version, with a mere one hundred tips and tricks of the trade. To call it a must-read is to woefully understate the case–it’s a looked-forward-to annual event for me nearly on par with Comic Con itself. And in years like this when I’m not going to the Con, it takes on an added bittersweet dimension, like the comics blogging equivalent of “Soon” by My Bloody Valentine. Go and enjoy.

SPOILER ALERT – I talk about these early episodes as someone who’s seen everything, so if you’re not completely caught up with the end of Season Five, read no further

[Watched 1.1 – Pilot Part 1; 1.2 – Pilot Part 2; 1.3 – Tabula Rasa; 1.4 – Walkabout; 1.5 – White Rabbit]

* After Season Five wrapped up, The Missus and I thought it would be neat to re-watch the entire series from the beginning in the months prior to the sixth and final season. Meanwhile The Missus’s parents, who are in town for Memorial Day, had decided to watch the show for the very first time, plowing all the way through the series so they too could watch the final season. Call it fate, call it luck, call it karma, but this was a pretty good excuse to start watching the show from the first episode onward this weekend.

* I’m still amazed at just how involving these first few episodes are. I’ve told the story about how The Missus and I caught the sneak preview of the first episode at San Diego Comic Con 2004 a million times, but seriously, we went in there with less than no expectations and left true believers proselytizing to all and sundry. That whole first sequence with Jack waking up in the middle of the jungle, seeing a labrador retriever, and then running into a horrific plane crash on the beach with shrapnel flying every place and people getting sucked into jet engines–magnificently intense television. The rest of the episode was a balance between further shocks–the giant monster roaring through the jungle, the death of the pilot–and deft little (well, okay, played to the balcony) character moments–Jack asking Kate to stitch him up, the “count to five” story. I half-worried that the show wouldn’t be much fun to watch over again since I know the answers to so many early questions, but it’s still a ton of fun.

* And oh yeah, there’s plenty of death. I remember a big part of my attraction to the show being how it showed people dealing with the plane crash, the dead and the dying. That was actually a big plot driver in these first few episodes, especially by episode four, when the bodies in the fuselage are cremated and Claire leads her memorial service. Yet oddly, it was a much lighter show, too. Action-packed and heavy on carnage, yeah, but not the relentless parade of murder and failure that it’s since become. Back when Charlie, Claire, Boone, Shannon were on the show, it was much younger and funner-seeming, even if all Boone and Shannon did at this point was bitch at each other. It was also a much less dense show, both visually and narratively–during the J.J. Abrams-directed pilot you had shots of fields of stars and sunsets, while in lieu of the non-stop mythology-exploration and multiple timeframes of Season Five you had lengthy sequences of people just climbing up stuff. Everything’s bright: the white of the beach, the blue of the ocean and the sky, the green of the jungle. For pete’s sake, episode three ends with a musical montage in which various pairs of characters do nice things for each other–Sayid tosses Sawyer some fruit, Jin brushes a lock of Sun’s hair, Boone finds Shannon’s sunglasses, Michael brings Walt his dog, etc. It’s bizarre to think that Boone and Shannon won’t last till the middle of Season Two, Michael will murder two people in cold blood and die estranged from his son, and Sawyer will fall in love with a woman who dies in an attempt to never have met him.

* Back then it really did seem like much more of a Lord of the Flies set-up than a science fiction one, even though even at this early stage we knew that Locke had seen the monster and been spared by it, we’d seen a polar bear, and we were catching our first glimpses of ghost-Christian. Debates about what to do with the bodies, figuring out how to get food, arguing with Sawyer over the ethical way to divvy up supplies, all of that presented the island as a lowercase-i “man vs. nature”-type antagonist that would give rise to internal power struggles. I dug that! Though I grant you it might have been difficult to sustain for six seasons. Anyway that seemed to be the implication of Jack’s big “live together; die alone”

* The show also hadn’t quite settled into itself yet. The pilot had a slightly different look to it, The music in the pilot, though composed by Michael Giacchino just like everything else, was much heavier on percussion, from drums to vibraphones; to my ear, the string-heavy sound we’re used to didn’t fully emerge until episode four, while the first recognizable theme didn’t show up until episode five. Ditto the flashback structure: the pilot’s flashbacks were limited to shots of the plane in mid-flight, while Kate’s flashback (in addition to having unusual slow-mo lead-ins) lacked the big revelatory twist, which was instead presented in the island material (she’s a criminal!). Not until that wonderful, wonderful moment in episode four where you learn Locke was in a wheelchair did the Lost flashback come into its own.

* And speaking of Locke, they were rather ambiguous as to whether or not he was a bad guy back then. That musical montage that capped off episode three ended with sinister sounds and a close-up of his scarred face. He was just one of several rather creepy things going on, from the endlessly repeating distress call to the Shining-like apparition of the man in the suit in the distance. It was quite a scary show and still can be from time to time.

* I only caught one Easter Egg: After the Monster’s first run through the jungle that first night, the next morning you hear some of the characters discussing in in the background. You hear Rose (love you Rose!) say that something about it sounded familiar, and then she tells another character she’s from the Bronx. I guess she recognized the taxicab receipt-printing noise the sound guys built into the Monster’s clickings and whirrings. I did, however, dream that Richard Alpert was hanging out among the castaways in the early episodes, but so far that hasn’t panned out.

* The first thing you should do is go read Ben Morse’s thoughts on the finale. Seriously, go. I’ll wait.

* Waiting.

* Back? Good. Now you know how flattered I must be that Ben claimed my goofy posts as an inspiration and model for that sucker. He wrote it with the episode much fresher in his mind than it currently is in mine–I watched it last night and then quickly switched over to have my heart destroyed by American Idol and I still haven’t quite recovered from the trauma–so it’s just going to be much, much better than what I’m gonna write. Plus it’s just legitimately excellent, and I hope he makes a regular thing of it next season. Fair warning.

* Anyway, can you believe the stuff with Nate and Madchen Amick, and the fake boyfriend out in the Hamptons, happened this season? It feels like it was on another show! Obviously the breakneck pace of this show has been a running theme in these posts, and I think that in this episode it was clearer than ever. To use the finale’s central storyline as an example, how many times have Blair and Chuck had heart to hearts just in the past few episodes? Hell, they had two or three in the finale alone, with different results each time! To swipe a term from Grant Morrison, Gossip Girl is supercompressed television.

* As I’ve said, this pace has some drawbacks. For one thing, the stories can get repetitive, with the same characters doing the same things with diminishing returns. For another, it can grind up supporting players–their stories move so fast that none of them seem to last longer than a three-episode arc. And of course the latter problem is a major contributor to the former.

* That’s why I’m glad to see the show potentially setting up Georgina, Carter, The Missing Brother, and Eric (finally!) as main characters next season, even though I’m not wild about Georgina or Carter. The show just needs some new blood! And as Ben points out, having Georgina and Carter around will either help soften the loss of perpetually scheming Chuck and Blair to their romance, or force them out of retirement.

* Speaking of Chuck and Blair, Chuck and Blair! Yay! That said, it was spoiled for me by the damn internet, so it lost a little impact. I will say that I thought Blair’s big speech to Chuck when he turned her down was very well written, though–over-the-top and epic in the way that a particularly articulate teenager might actually be, and moving.

* Ben was also right to note that this episode was SEXXXAY, the hottest we’ve had in quite some time. Loved Blair’s striptease, loved the Serena Sideboob Showcase on graduation day and the Serena Cleavage Spectacular on graduation night. Here’s the thing though: Aren’t the ladies and gays in the audience getting royally gypped on the eye-candy front, just in terms of the flesh on display? Penn Badgely, Ed Westwick, and Chase Crawford are all lovely-looking guys, but how ’bout they take their tops off once in a while, huh? Hey Chuck Bass, put ’em on the glass!

* Back to the pace question, I think it was kind of hilarious what this episode allowed to go down off-screen. Nate getting hit on by the deputy mayor could have been a whole storyline! And I suppose they’re saving whatever Georgina did to Poppy for later–perhaps keeping Poppy in reserve as an archenemy, like the role Olivia D’Abo plays for Vincent D’Onofrio on Law & Order: Criminal Intent–but you’d think that might have merited depiction.

* Ben gets at this in his excellent observation about Dan’s peripheral role lately, but I do feel like the episode dropped the ball by not keeping Dan and Serena at least within striking distance of its emotional center. I know that Chuck and Blair are really special characters, but Dan and Serena are Our Hero and Our Heroine, and I think the show really has to watch its step in terms of keeping them interesting, involved, and central to the story. Chuck and Blair are a bit like Ben and Locke on Lost: breakout characters who are actually closer to the central appeal of the show than the leads (the mysteries and mythology in Ben and Locke’s case, sleazy scheming decadence in Chuck and Blair’s case). Gossip Girl will ultimately have to work just as hard to make Dan and Serena matter as Lost does with Jack and Kate.

* NYU: the affordable alternative to Yale! LOL

* In much the same way that Ben wonders if the soft-pedaled, weed-enabled rapprochement between Lily and Rufus (whose music is truly a turtleneck in music form) was done that way because of expectations for the Lily flashback spinoff that’s now not happening (thank god), I’m curious as to whether the sudden season-ending interest in Daddy Van Der Woodsen stems from the character’s apparent role as a villain in the spinoff. As it stood it was a bit random and kind of threw off the balance of the very end of the episode.

* I loved the Nelly Yuki quasi-reveal. I actually think Dan/Nelly would be kind of hot. Fuck it, I’m shippin’ it. Delly is my OTP.

* I really liked that this was a high-school graduation episode, and that so much of it revolved around who would be Queen Bee of the Mean Girls next year. Part of the allure of the show is that it’s about kids who can afford to act like grown-ups, but they’re not actually grown-ups, and all these storylines about corporate intrigue and marriages in Spain and Junior Varsity Eyes Wide Shut and so on kind of obscure that. Letting them drink in ritzy bars without getting carded is one thing, but it all works much much better when the show reminds us that they’re 17 and 18 years old. I mean, that’s why Cruel Intentions is such a fucking scream, you know?

* Maybe having Vanessa go to school with these clowns will make her feel a little less like an afterthought. Don’t forget she’s still a little bit infected with interestingitis courtesy of Chuck’s junk, so maybe they’ll actually pick up on that instead of just throwing it out there alongside Blair being an unclefucker and how our homework was never quite like Dan’s.

* I have to say I had beef with the way the ep handled the Gossip Girl/Serena grudge match. First of all I had The Missus sitting next to me the whole time complaining that what GG did to them during graduation wasn’t actually all that bad, and that normal kids would probably be like “Fuck it, I’m graduating, high school’s over, I don’t have to care about this shit anymore, and I’m never gonna see half these people again anyway.” But mainly, I feel like the show should have shat or gotten off the pot. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how they’d continue to use the character and the conceit (and Kristen Bell’s voice) after outing him or her, but I definitely wanted them to out him or her. But of course they couldn’t, so they didn’t, and they ended up having to resolve the storyline in a way that didn’t really make sense. (Serena threatened to out GG unless GG showed up at the bar. Serena didn’t actually know who GG was, but GG didn’t know that–that was the whole point. So why was GG confident enough not only not to show up, but to drive every single other person in the class to the bar instead?) I suppose we won’t find out who GG is until the final episode, and perhaps not even then, but that’s really the only time they could do it–so that should have been the only time they brought it up. This just felt like wasted time.

* That said, I loved how the only people GG mentioned in her graduation-day blast were the main characters. Are we sure Gossip Girl isn’t Jacob, and that text wasn’t another one of his lists?

* When I first started seeing Emily the Strange merchandise, I thought she was a character I dimly remembered from the children’s book series Nate the Great. But at some point it became apparent that she wasn’t, so I thought I must have been hallucinating that Nate the Great character, because in my mind they were so similar that there was just no way they could be two different things. So it was with great relief that (via Tom Spurgeon) that I discovered that the Nate the Great character I was thinking of, Rosamond, did in fact exist. I’m not losing my mind! On the other hand, the reason I know this is because the company that owns Emily the Strange, caught dead to rights in ripping off Rosamond, is now suing Rosamond/Nate the Great creators Marjori Sharmat and Marc Simont in order to prevent them from saying “we wuz robbed.” This is so loathsome I hardly even know where to begin. I mean, look at this:

Or as writer/illustrator Doc Pop puts it:

The chutzpah of these people! They should be ashamed, and made to feel shame.

* Christopher Handley has pleaded guilty to child pornography charges for possessing manga. Just a horrible, horrible precedent. A drawing of a crime is not a crime. And next time they’ll come for something that “real” comics fans care about.

* Tucker Stone compares the superhero-succession stories in Ed Brubaker’s Captain America and a cast of thousands’ Batman and its related titles. Guess which comes out on top? As a separate issue, it turns out Tucker buys Batman comics like Paul O’Brien buys X-Men comics, apparently. That’s interesting to me because if there were a superhero I’d do that sort of thing for, it would be Batman, but I’ve never been remotely interested in doing so. Batman is my favorite superhero by a country mile, yet I’ve spent years as an active comics reader (let alone time away from comics altogether) not buying any books with him in it, and I’ll probably do so again. (Via Kevin Melrose.)

* Bruce Baugh liked the director’s cut of Alex Proyas’s Dark City. I remember liking the film well enough when it came out but haven’t come back to it. I think I was on some level a bit offended by the at times shot-for-shot lifts from Hellraiser. Of course, these days I really like Doomsday, so this isn’t exactly a principled objection.

* This week at Scott Tobias’s New Cult Canon: Brick, Rian Johnson’s high-school noir. That’s the kind of killer idea you see a lot of “new mainstream” comics try to make a go of but never come up with anything remotely as interesting in the execution as the idea itself, so I remember being really delighted that the whole movie was good.

* Thanks to an in-law who hails from Austin, Texas I discovered the joys of Shiner Bohemian Black Lager last summer, but to my dismay the Tri-State area is one of the few remaining regions in the US where you can’t purchase Shiner products. Imagine my delight, then, when I saw McSorley’s Irish Black Lager on sale at Stop and Shop circa St. Patrick’s Day, and ever since. A black lager is a bit like combining the flavor of a porter or stout with the drinkability of a lager–it’s like drinking smoke, and I love it. Anyway, turns out Drew Friedman drew the label. You can’t escape comics even when you’re just trying to get loaded. (Via Eric Reynolds.)

* Torture Links of the Day: President Obama gave a big speech today on national security, civil liberties, treatment of terror suspects and other detainees, and transparency. It seemed mostly designed to smack down and ridicule the current conservative framework for the topic, encapsulated in the high comedy of being lectured on these issues by the grotesque moral moron Dick Cheney and his fellow torturers and torture enthusiasts. Reaction among civil libertarians has focused on pointing out the disconnect between Obama’s words and his actions, which may have the happy effect of pushing the frame for this debate in the direction of long-established norms of human rights and the rule of law.

* Finally, I’m desperate to go see Nine Inch Nails when they play nearby Jones Beach on Sunday, June 7th, in part because it’s so close by, in part because I really like the tight, heavy four-piece configuration they have right now, in part because it’s supposedly NIN’s farewell tour for the foreseeable future, but primarily because their setlists have been absolutely bonkers. During the first three nights of their American tour I believe they played over 40 different songs, including some they’d never before played in concert and old favorites of mine you just never hear (“The Becoming,” “Last”). They’ve also been reviving the covers they’ve done on record (Gary Numan’s “Metal,” Joy Division’s “Dead Souls,” Adam & the Ants’ “Physical (You’re So)”–we can’t be far from Soft Cell’s “Memorabilia”), not to mention Trent Reznor taking lead vocals on the version of “I’m Afraid of Americans” they did with David Bowie. And apparently they’re also doing things like covering the MC5’s “Kick Out the Jams” with Boots Riley from the Coup and Street Sweeper. ¡Jesus Marimba!

In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things. He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness. The story is his adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in.

If there were enough like him, I think the world would be a very safe place to live in, and yet not too dull to be worth living in.

–Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder”

Time takes a cigarette, puts it in your mouth

You pull on your finger, then another finger, then your cigarette

The wall-to-wall is calling, it lingers, then you forget

Oh, oh, oh, oh, you’re a rock ‘n’ roll suicide

You’re too old to lose it, too young to choose it

And the clock waits so patiently on your song

You walk past a cafe but you don’t eat when you’ve lived too long

Oh, no, no, no, you’re a rock ‘n’ roll suicide

Chev brakes are snarling as you stumble across the road

But the day breaks instead so you hurry home

Don’t let the sun blast your shadow

Don’t let the milk float ride your mind

They’re so natural – religiously unkind

Oh no love, you’re not alone

You’re watching yourself but you’re too unfair

You got your head all tangled up but if I could only make you care

Oh no love, you’re not alone

No matter what or who you’ve been

No matter when or where you’ve seen

All the knives seem to lacerate your brain

I’ve had my share, I’ll help you with the pain

You’re not alone

Just turn on with me and you’re not alone

Let’s turn on with me and you’re not alone

Let’s turn on and be not alone

Gimme your hands ’cause you’re wonderful

Gimme your hands ’cause you’re wonderful

Oh, gimme your hands

–David Bowie, “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide”

* Like me, my movie buddy Jason Adams tries and fails to review Crank: High Voltage. It’s review-proof if you’re trying not to ruin it for your readers. All I can do is promise that its opening sequence is more entertaining than Terminator Salvation‘s entire duration.

* Speaking of which, Harry Knowles spends most of his hilariously stereotype-fulfilling “review” of Terminator Salvation talking about the movie shitting directly onto his eyeballs, but I actually think he’s onto something in comparing it to the lifeless, insight-free Alien Resurrection, and his line about Bryce Dallas Howard is dead-on.

* I’m going to link to Jason’s post containing some images from and links about Lars Von Trier’s new horror movie Anti-Christ just so I can say I’ve done so. Having seen Dancer in the Dark I believe I’ve plumbed what passes for Von Trier’s depths as much as I need to–I think he’s a phony, I think his misanthropy applies to everyone but himself which is incredibly dull (I mean, just contrast the Von Trier quote Jason reprints with the Roger Ebert quote he reprints and see if Von Trier himself doesn’t give lie to Ebert’s entire point about the film’s “despair”), and just like Jackie Treehorn I think he treats objects like women, man. There’s not much I’ve read, pro or con, about Anti-Christ that makes me feel like I need to reevaluate this. Still, I’m a sucker for beautifully composed shots of severe genital mutilation, so who knows.

* There’s some fun footage from the upcoming remake of V popping up here and there: here are two clips and here’s a longish trailer. I’m catching a Battlestar Galactica vibe here and there, in particular an echo of the Baltar/Six relationship during one of the clips, which is nice; I’m also pretty happy about the casting for reasons that I’m not going to go into here for fear of it coming across as a spoiler for another show, but you’ll probably know what I’m talking about when you see it. This is not to say that there’s no “network TV does alien invasion” hokum in there, because there’s plenty…I dunno, man, it’s lizards under human masks, that’s rad.

* I’m bookmarking Ben Morse’s thoughts on the Gossip Girl season finale until I’ve seen the episode, which should happen tonight in between Adam Lambert fixes.

* Tom Spurgeon’s review of Jason’s Low Moon collection may be the closest thing to a pan I’ve ever seen a Jason book get.

* Torture Link of the Day: The notion that the Guantanamo detainees will waltz out of prisons in the continental U.S. like the Joker from Arkham Asylum is indeed one of the most bizarre and ridiculous contentions to become the default position for the political and media establishment in quite some time.

* A Grant Morrison documentary? Sure, I’ll eat it. (Also, after seeing what they did with Bai Ling in Crank 2 I couldn’t help but chuckle about the subtitles they use to help the viewer decipher Morrison’s accent. I wonder who he considers to be his shiny lunchbox?)

* I saw Crank: High Voltage on Monday night and Terminator Salvation on Tuesday night; click the links for my take on each.

* Please note that this means I have seen neither the Gossip Girl season finale nor my entirely unironically beloved Adam Lambert’s American Idol finale performances yet. All in good time, my pretties, all in good time.

* Captain Britan and MI 13 has been cancelled. I was enjoying this book more with each subsequent issue, as I got to know better characters with whom I had zero personal history, and as, y’know, Dracula invaded from the Dark Side of the Moon and conquered England. So this is a bummer.

* The ’80s-based Gossip Girl spinoff has been cancelled. This one I’m not so upset about.

* Hail, hail, the gang’s all here except Ivan Reitman: Dan Aykroyd says Sigourney Weaver and Rick Moranis will be rejoining himself, Bill Murray, Harold Ramis, and Ernie Hudson for Ghostbusters III, which is sounding more and more it’s actually going to happen. Ghostbusters remains the best New York movie of all time. (Eat it, Woody and Marty and Spike.)

* Oliver Stone re-adapting Helter Skelter? Sure, I’ll eat it. “Manson beat ya.” “Well, you can’t beat the king.”

* Torture Links of the Day: Meet some of the men we tortured: Dilawar and Habibullah, an Afghan taxi driver and mullah respectively who were tortured to death in Bagram; and Javaid Iqbal, a cable guy and small-business owner from Long Island who was imprisoned and tortured for nine months, in Brooklyn, while guilty of absolutely nothing.

* Tom Kaczynski draws the hell out of a Throbbing Gristle concert! I love writing sentences like that. This reminds me of an old maxim of mine, learned through bitter, bitter experience: People who own Throbbing Gristle albums shouldn’t fish.

I’m almost positive I’ve written this exact thing in the past, but even if so, it remains true: You can put up with a lot of plot holes if they’re holes in something otherwise worth preserving. That’s why it almost always feels cheap to kick the crap out of a flick I don’t like for its lapses in logic. Certainly many of Terminator Salvation‘s lapses are built right into the very structure of the Terminator concept, from “Why don’t the Terminators just reach out and crush their targets’ skulls with their enormously powerful metal hands instead of playing them a little chin music first?” on down. These are things you’d be willing to look past in exchange for other compensatory values.

In the first Terminator film, such values abounded. The genius Stan Winston’s unimpeachable T-800 design. Genuinely rich and sad performances from Michael Biehn and Linda Hamilton, performances that reward repeat viewings not in that they reveal layer after layer, but in that they offer a sort of warm human comfort each time. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s star-makingly brutal “performance” as the Terminator. The almost absurdist violence–fists punching all the way through human torsos, post-apocalyptic automated tank treads crushing a field of human skulls, a shootout in a discotheque, a guy killing L.A. housewives he looked up in the phone book. (I’d imagine that last bit resonated on a Richard Ramirez level, by the way.) Brad Fiedel’s wonderful theme music, juxtaposing elegiac synths against clanging percussion just as the Terminator juxtaposes living flesh against a metal skeleton. James Cameron’s rapidly peaking talent for blending action and pathos. But most of all, the terrifying simplicity of the basic concept:

Listen, and understand. That terminator is out there. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.

Terminator 2 has a lot going for it as well. Don’t get me wrong, I saw it a couple years back for the first time in ages, and a lot of it is 100% pure government cheese, the seeds of schmaltz that would eventually blossom into the two hours or so of Titanic that weren’t innocent people plunging to their deaths down the deck of a vertically sinking boat or Kate Winslet’s nude scene. But T2 (the first tentpole film advertised via acronym?) was a true cultural moment–between the morphing and the Guns n’ Roses song it came to define the modern summer blockbuster more than any other film this side of the Tim Burton Batman that kicked off the era–and there’s something to say for being a part of that. And while the process of sanding the weird brutality of the first film down into a glossy studio sheen was already in full effect (best encapsulated in turning the Terminator into the good guy and having him shoot people in the knees) there were memorable moments and images galore: That DePalma-esque slow-motion shootout in the shopping-mall corridor, complete with sly G’n’R visual shout-out. The truck chase down the aqueduct. Danny Furlong’s Public Enemy t-shirt. Linda Hamilton’s survivalist-Ripley transformation, accompanied by guns that put Michelle Obama to shame. (I was also at just the right age for the scene where the orderly licks her seemingly catatonic face to strike all kinds of chords.) The T-1000 itself, dated though it might seem now–the way its head blossomed when Arnold hit it with a shotgun blast, the way it oozed into that helicopter. Robert Patrick’s entire creepy gestalt–the way he’d ask passers-by if they’d seen this boy, the fact that the villain of the piece in this post-Rodney King, post-riots action romp was dressed as an LAPD officer, and that relentless full-tilt run, as courage-sappingly unstoppable in its sleekness as Arnold and his Stan Winston skeleton were in their bulk.

[Terminator 3 I skipped. I understand there was a naked lady?]

What you’ve got in Terminator Salvation, by contrast, is kind of like what you might get if Neil Marshall’s Doomsday had been made not by a bunch of Scots gorehounds who spent most of their budget providing Bob Hoskins and Malcolm McDowell with an all-you-can-eat scenery buffet from the craft services truck everyday, but by a committee of life-imitates-Entourage suits and former Sugar Ray video directors who refer to ideas as “properties.” There’s nothing in here that’s outwardly insulting to your intelligence, nothing that feels like it’s pandering to the lowest common denominator, nothing that demonstrates obvious contempt for the fanboy audience; in short, it’s not a Michael Bay film. It’s simply uninspired. It does what it’s supposed to do, and nothing more.

Knowing its place as the latest iteration of one of the past 25 years’ key works of pop-speculative fiction, the movie hits its genre marks, but mechanically, unsurprisingly. Michael Ironside shows up to make the kinds of people who get really excited about Michael Ironside excited, but that’s essentially all he does. The existence of The Road Warrior is duly noted, while Aliens is pillaged for its mute little girl and its into-the-lion’s-den denouement, The Matrix for a robot design here, a close-quarters shipful of survivors there. A bunch of cool new robots do what you’ve seen them do in the trailers and nothing more. The truly unpleasant, real-world evocative aspects of the holocaust wrought upon humanity by the machines are reduced to cattle-car imagery you’ve seen depicted much more disturbingly by, say, Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds. Speaking of the Tim Burton Players, Helena Bonham-Carter pops up (I’m not spoiling it, you find out in the opening credits and she’s in the first scene) to do exactly what you’d expect Helena Bonham-Carter to do in a movie like this. It has a “humanistic” message in the same way as Disney movies about sports teams who overcome tragedy and win the big game for the Coach. The cornpone quotient of the ending elicited audible snorts and titters of derision from the audience. There’s even the full-on Republic Serial Villain speech your Ozymandias warned you about.

Performance-wise, there’s nothing remotely as interesting as what Schwarzenegger, Biehn, Hamilton, Patrick, or even Furlong brought to the table. Christian Bale commits with the same level of utterly sincere, borderline-homicidal intensity he’s brought to all his recent roles, but you’re left feeling that all that distinguishes his John Connor from his Batman is post-apocalyptic stubble; I liked him better in Reign of Fire. Common and Bryce Dallas Howard look and sound Very Serious. Moon Bloodgood has a legitimately awesome name and showed some spark, but in a thankless role constructed to showcase the bland tan good looks that Hollywood still considers exotic, the kind of part that if better written could have given Maria Conchita Alonso or Jenette Goldstein something to run with. Only Sam Worthington as human-machine hybrid Marcus distinguishes himself, as sort of a slightly less reptilian Dean Winters in a matinee idol’s body, but he’s consistently undercut by undercooked writing that avoids the most interesting aspects of his predicament and leaves his words and actions little more than cliches.

Of course the movie pushes all the franchise-specific buttons you’d expect it to, but in as rote a fashion as it does anything else. The weather-beaten photo of Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor makes an appearance, as do her prophetic cassette-tape messages to her son, but they come across as just another reason for Bale to brood. Terminators are defeated in manners that call back to the previous films’ methods of dispatch, only to surmount them this time around because…because it’s the fourth film in the series, I guess. Danny Elfman riffs on the original film’s score in a manner just as forgettable as everything else Elfman has done in a decade. The much ballyhooed Resistance is reduced from the first film’s memorably desperate underground community to an international military committee straight out of the “It’s a Small World” U.N. sequences in Spider-Man and X-Men, a redux of the Nebuchednezzar crew from the Matrix movies, and metonymized groups of fighters gathered around their radios a la Independence Day. Some people cheered for the requisite utterings of “come with me if you want to live” and “I’ll be back,” but I sure wasn’t one of them. Admittedly, the movie’s hulking, skeletal, soon-to-be outmoded T-600s cut an impressive figure, with the tattered remnants of their human-clothing camouflage attempts lending them a zombified air, and there’s one bona fide moment of genuine wish-fulfillment movie magic–though it’s been spoiled everywhere, and the film (or more accurately its budget) seemingly couldn’t wait for it to end.

But despite all those attempts at fanservice, Terminator Salvation just completely whiffs on the key component of the first two films, their set-up: An implacable killing machine is sent to kill a vulnerable person, and a vastly outmatched protector is sent to stop it. Instead of that relentless chase-movie structure, you have a convoluted morass of constant, bloodless explosions and gunfire, amid which two separate heroic protagonists drive two separate storylines that are artificially grafted together during a completely narratively unnecessary action sequence. (It features the second of the film’s two you-are-there helicopter crashes, for crying out loud.) Moreover, no one is yanked from the everyday world into a nightmare war of man vs. machine, giving you something to ground yourself with–it’s all nightmare all the time, but an indistinct nightmare, like a twelfth-generation copy of more vivid material strewn with shards of rebar at random. There’s no hook, it’s just…there.

So yeah, I could regale you all night with the movie’s logical pitfalls and dropped balls, its “but why didn’t they…?”s and “what was up with…?”s and “shouldn’t he have just…?”s. And honestly, in some cases they’re so glaring I wouldn’t be able to overlook them even in a movie I otherwise loved. (Keep in mind this is no Crank: High Voltage, a film so ludicrous it can begin with its main character plummeting to his death; Terminator Salvation Is Serious Business, and therefore must rise and fall with the Maximum Seriosity of its plot mechanics.) But it’s all small beer compared to the generally dull character of the film itself. I actually came close to getting up and leaving, not because I was so outraged or disgusted, but simply because about two-thirds of the way in, I knew the movie had nothing more to show me. I don’t doubt that everyone involved wanted to make a really good movie, and again, I never felt insulted. But with no compensatory warmth or weirdness to make it feel less like a product and more like the product of someone’s barely controllable imagination, Terminator Salvation does what it’s programmed to, and that’s it. It thinks it’s human, but it had better think again.

Yesterday evening, in a moviegoing experience that was like the blogger equivalent of the Yalta conference, Jason Adams, Matthew Perpetua, and I saw Crank: High Voltage. I am thisclose to slapping my hands down on the table and saying “Sorry, folks, that’s it, that’s all I got!” I don’t even know where to begin, I honestly don’t. I just wrote a long list of all the amazing, at times almost literally unbelievable things that appear on screen in this film, but deleted it when I realized what a tremendous disservice that would be to you, the readers, who really, really, really need to walk into this movie having as little idea what to expect as possible. Shit, Matthew hadn’t even seen Crank 1! And I’m sure that just made the experience all the more, literally, amazing. Like an unholy cross between Chuck Norris’s Invasion U.S.A., Troma, and Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, the movie was wildly and needlessly experimental, and was offensive even to me at times, and had no redeeming social value whatsoever except to punch you in the face repeatedly with a fist made of entertainment. I’d be amazed all over again if I see a movie I enjoy more than this one for the rest of the year. I beg you to track it down if it’s still anywhere near you and see for yourself.

* Bruce Baugh serves up a one-two punch of superhero blogging, reviewing Brian Michael Bendis and Olivier Coipel’s House of M and last year’s Iron Man and Incredible Hulk films. It’s interesting to read such reviews from a guy who’s plugged into the genre and its fandom and yet is coming at the specific material in question from a remove of months or years, given how much superhero commentary is aimed at the here and now.

* Tom Spurgeon reviews The Walking Dead Compendium Vol. 1. I really just love reading Tom on The Walking Dead. I don’t think very many writers who take the book seriously have ever approached it outside the usual zombie-movie framework, myself included, while I don’t think very many of the great writers-on-comics take the book seriously to begin with, making Tom’s reviews a double treat.

* The movie version of Clive Barker’s Book of Blood may get a theatrical release of some kind after all.

* Here’s a synopsis of Gamer, the upcoming 21st-century Running Man-style action flick starring Gerard Butler and directed by Crank impresarios Neveldine & Taylor. Yes please!

* I really need to watch Bram Stoker’s Dracula again.

* Torture Link of the Day: Former Vice President Dick Cheney publicly touted bogus links between Iraq and al-Qaeda “revealed” by detainees whose torture he appears to have authorized specifically to produce such linkage.

* Have you ever heard a more awful sentence than “Daddy ate my eyes”? (Hat tip: Kennyb.)

Pink Floyd – “The Great Gig in the Sky”

Queen feat. George Michael – “Somebody to Love”

Peaches – “Talk to Me”

Iron Maiden – “The Number of the Beast”

* Todd Van Der Werff tackles the Lost season finale. He notes something I picked up on as well–resonance with Battlestar Galactica.

* My pal TJ Dietsch weighs in as well, and there’s a pretty lively discussion going on in the comments of my review/recap.

* Here’s a trailer for The Road. They appear to have changed the implied nature of the apocalypse quite a bit, which I’m not super-thrilled about. On the other hand, the cast is nuts, and I’m pretty sure I heard The Gut-Wrenching Scream.

* The latest entry in Scott Tobias’s New Cult Canon series for the A.V. Club is a doozy: The Big Lebowski. It’s weird: I feel like I’ve internalized so much of that movie that Tobias’s quote-heavy take on it doesn’t tell me anything I don’t already know. But perhaps you’ll get more out of it than I did.

* Finally, I am not a political blogger (thank your lucky stars, believe me and anyone who was around for the comics blogosphere’s early years), but I have been blogging a bit about political issues that touch on the pop-cultural areas that are my usual province. I blog about torture because it’s horrifying, just like I blog occasionally about real-world serial killers or atrocities or animal cruelty or even fun stuff like giant squids and sea monsters and paranormal stuff and suchlike because they’re horror-related, or like I blog occasionally about drug policy because of recreational drugs’ connection to making and enjoying art. (And while we’re on that subject, the new White House Drug Czar says the “war on drugs” is being abandoned as a term and a rubric, which is just wonderful.) But just like I’ve never become a true-crime blog despite the activity of any number of gruesome murderers, and just like I’ve never become an animal-rights blog despite the daily avalanche of pitiless cruelty on both individual and industry levels, and just like I’ve never become a cryptozoology blog despite the rumored presence of any number of weird critters out there, I don’t think it’s in the best interest of anyone to turn every carnival of souls into a collection of links to the latest news about America’s devolution into a torture state under the Bush Administration and the degree to which this will or will not be reversed under the Obama Administration. I already subject The Missus to nightly minutes-long obscenity-laden diatribes on the topic, for one thing, and her pain is your gain; meanwhile it’s impossible for me to separate the issue from my years of cheerleading for the people responsible and my current and overwhelming and perhaps preening self-disgust over that, so I fully trust neither my motives nor my judgment. I also generally don’t feel like talking about it with strangers or stranger-esque people. But most of all, there are any number of vastly better informed sources out there doing actual reporting on this vital matter, rather than simply stealing Glenn Greenwald’s links and calling it a day like I’ve been doing. So if you notice a decrease in posts and links about the less sensational aspects of this soul-destroying story, that’s why. I expect I’ll continue to note the worst parts, though, because that’s me all over.

SPOILER ALERT, SPOILER ALERT

* When it emerged in the course of Sawyer’s conversation with Jack that he was going to detonate a nuclear bomb and change the course of time because Kate broke up with him, I can’t be the only person who shook his head in utter dismay. My first recourse was to the old “nobody cares about the love quadrangle anymore” saw, but you know what? I doubt that that’s true. Nobody on the Internet may care about it anymore, but I’m sure Lindelof is right and that his mom and people like her are totally tuning in week after week to see who Kate chooses and suchlike. (Granted there are a lot fewer people like Lindelof’s mom in the audience for Season Five than there were for Season One, but still.)

* So no, that’s not ultimately what bothered me about it. What really irked me is something I’ve been talking about for weeks now, which is how utterly selfish and irresponsible the main characters’ behavior has become with regards to anyone who isn’t a main character. It’s fine to care about the love quadrangle, but doesn’t the whole “some people are more equal than others” aspect of how much more important who Kate chooses is than whether or not the other 30 or so non-main-character castaways live or die kind of creepy? In this episode it was particularly pointed. Even Sawyer, who momentarily looked good when in the midst of beating the bejesus out of Jack he pointed out that Jack was out to steal the best three years of his and Juliet’s life from them, is really just looking out for him and his when you give it more than two seconds of mid-fight thought.

* This chronic case of mefirstandthegimmegimme-itis was the case not just in Jack risking the lives of everyone on Island ’77 and using the lives of everyone on Island ’04 as a maguffin for his real motive, i.e. to hopefully Pound That Pussy once more someday, but also in Jack becoming a relentless killing machine, gunning down countless Dharma guards. These guys aren’t cultlike Others or Widmore thugs but salarymen trying to protect the lives of an island full of scientists and janitors and schoolkids and so on. Dudes straight out of Dante and Randall’s Death Star debate in Clerks, more or less. Genre pieces occasionally have such lapses–Neo and Trinity’s electronica-soundtracked massacre of innocent security guards and police in the first Matrix movie is a good example–and they always bug the shit out of me.

* But ultimately, I think we have to abandon the notion that Lost is about anyone but the main characters. This isn’t Battlestar Galactica, where personal needs and the greater good were constantly weighed against one another during life-and-death choices. It’s a show about a bunch of people with horribly fucked-up personal lives who come to a place that violently forces them to confront the personal failures that got them where they are, and to attempt to fix them in the future. The personal lives are what matters here.

* So how did things look through that lens? Well, they weren’t perfect. My ears are still ringing from the pounding of the plothammer that made Juliet launch “The Great Sub Escape” to stop Jack only to end up leading the sub crew in their Wild Bunch shootout as Jack’s backup. It was particularly weird and random given that we were certainly to believe by the end of that climax that Sawyer really did love Juliet and vice versa, and that he was telling the truth when he said “it doesn’t matter who I looked at–I’m with you.” Kate’s turnaround was just as unpersuasive–she was more dead-set against blowing up the bomb than anyone, and I can’t even recall what Jack said that made her change her mind.

* Another lapse: The shockingly hamfisted Juliet flashback. The writers raced through it in order to make their pat point, and there wasn’t even the mitigating circumstance of Jacob’s presence to justify showing it any way other than “we just want to make Juliet’s bizarre behavior seem even slightly plausible.”

* But!

* The climax was really something! First of all, kudos to a setpiece that references the Sarlaac Pit fight from Return of the Jedi and the climaxes of Jedi, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Return of the King, and of course Lost Season Two all at once.

* More importantly to the show, it was really something emotionally. Smart, smart filmmaking to track the reaction to Jack’s release of the nuke solely with tight closeups of the four main characters’ emotionally wracked faces. And while it seems a shame to jettison the love story with the most believable chemistry the show’s seen so far by killing off Juliet, that same chemistry is what gave it all such an impact–that and Josh Holloway and Elizabeth Mitchell’s really gutwrenching performances. Once you saw where it was going, it actually became difficult to watch. It’s easily the show’s most powerful death scene this side of the execution of Alex.

* The point is, Lost is like opera, or superhero comics, or art-house kung-fu movies. In opera, the singing (at least the arias) is a spectacular representation of the emotional states of the characters. In superhero stories and wuxia flicks, that’s what the fighting is for. In Lost, that’s what the daring, desperate, dangerous, deadly last-ditch plans are for. Whatever its flaws, this episode made that work as well as it ever has on the show.

* And then there’s the whole Locke story. Am I a little disappointed that the Locke we saw hilariously lording it over Ben, the Locke who finally gave that compulsive liar his comeuppance, isn’t Locke at all? Hell yeah. Is it gonna keep me up at night, given that we’re now watching some kind of skin-changer waltz around settling centuries-old grudges? Hell no! That’s awesome!

* Also awesome: Casting Titus Welliver as your sinister ur-antagonist. God bless Lost and its Deadwood Cast Relocation Program. Paula Malcomson, Robin Wiegert, and William Sanderson pass the torch to you, sir!

* So that leaves us with the question of Jacob. I take it the cabin housed this other guy back when the creepy rocking-chair silhouette said “help me” to Locke? Are Christian and Claire working for him, or for Jacob? How does he get off the Island? Does Ben and Widmore’s battle have any relation to the fight between Jacob and the other guy? Did everyone notice their black and white color schemes during the opening scene? Shouldn’t Hurley have tried to throw himself out of the cab when a stranger knew who he was given that he was convinced people were out to get him? Just how many Island factions have shadowy global networks, anyway?

* The statue is nice and creepy. Well done, designers. Also? “It was like that when I got here.” LOL!

* I wonder how long Terry O’Quinn knew he wasn’t Locke anymore.

* Thinking about it now, whatever or whoever Locke is, he’s not omniscient. Otherwise why go through the whole farce of browbeating Richard into showing him where Jacob lives? That makes me feel like New Locke/Titus Welliver Character and the Smoke Monster are two separate things, given the Monster’s apparent role as a security and surveillance mechanism–if this guy had transmogrified into Smokey, surely he could have tracked Jacob down?

* A nice reversal: Ben spent the back half of season three trying to convince John to kill someone; Locke pulled the same trick with Ben in the space of one episode.

* It’s just occurring to me now how much having the Island be riddled with tunnels and secret passages is 100% pure kids playing around in the basement. Love it.

* The whole “obliviously standing in the middle of the street facing the camera when all of a sudden a vehicle comes out of nowhere and plows into you” shot is getting a little cliched at this point. Sorry, Nadia, you deserved better.

* So that’s probably the last we’ll see of Rose and Bernard. I’m fine with that. I loved those characters and this is pretty much the ending for them that both they and I wanted. I just hope they end up being the Adam & Eve skeletons.

* I’m less okay with this being the end of Vincent. Which I doubt it is, if only because Lindelof said he’s the one character you can count on being safe till the end of the show. Still, “safe” and “on the show” are not necessarily synonymous–just ask Walt!

* Walt better come back, man. He was a HUGE DEAL, you can’t pretend he wasn’t!

* Man, there are still a lot of unanswered questions, aren’t there? I figured we’d get more traction on the Christian & Claire question, just for starters.

* Desmond, Penny, and Widmore also had no role in the finale.

* Meanwhile, Sun dragon-lady’d her way to the forefront earlier in the season only to recede to the background in the back half. Weird.

* I love that Frank Lapidus is a big deal. The way he reacts to everything like “[sigh] Now what?” is so hilarious to me. It reminds me of the headshaking dismay and resignation with which Mike asks Michelle what’s goin’ on in Utah.

* I always hope that big episodes will bring back dead characters for a cameo, but no joy this time around. Cynthia Watros, call your agent, that Gossip Girl prequel was not hot!

* The fade to white with a black logo instead of cut to black with a white logo was pretty clever. It’s the opposite sketches, motherlovers! Anything can happen!

* I got a kick out of seeing the promo for the season finale of Grey’s Anatomy, which seems like it will be the second time a character has been written out of the show because the actor playing him or her is an insufferable asshole. It’s a different ballgame over there!

* Here’s the thing about the cliffhanger: If the bomb’s detonation really does change everything, then the whole scene with New Locke and Ben killing Jacob while Richard and Lapidus and Ilyana gape at Dead Locke outside would never have happened. And since I assume that that was meant to be a cliffhanger too, rather than a collection of characters we’ll never see in the same place together again, I’m guessing the bomb’s detonation didn’t change everything.

* Lost season finale tonight! I’m excited.

* Topless Robot’s Teague Bohlen counts down The 10 Most Shafted Characters from Lost. Definitely agreed on #1.

* The Onion AV Club interviews Jorge Garcia, aka Hurley.

* Well, enough happiness–this ought to get you good and depressed: James Turner is thinking about quitting comics following Diamond’s refusal to carry his new series Warlords of IO. (Via Dirk Deppey.)

* Jeet Heer reviews, at length, Guy Delisle’s Burma Chronicles. There are times where I think he swings for the fences and missess, such as when he argues that Delisle’s and Tintin auteur Hergé’s respective lines embody their era’s respective political zeitgeists, but other passages were quite eye-opening for me in terms of my own take on the book. For example:

Burma, as Delisle encounters it, is not a nakedly Orwellian police state but something perhaps more subdued although still sinister, a suffocating authoritarian regime where the population has resigned itself, uneasily, to the status quo. In trying to distil the unspoken despair he encountered in Burma, Delisle takes a deliberately understated approach, one that is at first glance deceptively casual.

* Cloverfield monster designer Neville Page’s sketch gallery? Yes please! (Via Giant Monsters Attack.)

* Jog reviews Grant Morrison & Cameron Stewart’s Seaguy Vol. 2: The Slaves of Mickey Eye #2. Putting the opera back in “superhero soap opera”!

* The upcoming He-Man and the Masters of the Universe movie Grayskull sounds like it’s going to be awful. Via Topless Robot’s Rob Bricken, who elaborates until being sidetracked by an unfortunate brain aneurysm.

* As always, plenty of horrifying torture news: The new pick to lead the war in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, oversaw the coverup of the friendly-fire death of Pat Tillman and three years of torture in Iraq’s Camp Nama. In perhaps related news, the Obama Administration is now seeking to block the court-ordered release of hundreds more photos of torture and abuse of prisoners by US troops, a reversal of his previous position on the matter. (Links via Neel Krishnaswami.)

* The bloodcurdling, “when will I wake up from this endless nightmare?” quote of the day:

One of the reason these interrogation techniques have survived fore 500 years is because they work.

—Senator Lindsey Graham, R-SC.

* Have we lost the torture debate to the torturers and torture enthusiasts? On the one hand, leading figures in one of the country’s two major political parties are now comfortable arguing in public that America should adopt the standards of the Spanish Inquisition; leading figures in the other major political party failed to exercise any oversight to prevent this from happening; the President and his administration seem opposed to practicing torture themselves but equally opposed to any consequences befalling their predecessors for doing so and bound and determined to prevent that from happening; and the he-said/he-said nature of media coverage has placed “harsh interrogation techniques” as the normative description of torture and reserved the actual word “torture” for the province of “some critics.” So that’s all in the “lose” column. On the other hand, I like to think that having unpalatable political figures like Dick Cheney out there proudly proclaiming their own brutality will cause people to turn away in revulsion. I don’t know. I have a lengthy track record of abject, shameful, willful ignorance on these matters. I’m going to go make an ELI ROTH WAS RIGHT t-shirt.

* I can’t help but feel like giving the ’80s flashback episode of Gossip Girl/backdoor pilot of Lily a hard time makes me Kurt Vonnegut’s proverbial fully-armored person attacking the metaphorical hot fudge sundae, but: This very much did not work. Not because it was an ’80s period piece, but because it was a poorly observed one.

* For example, in regular Gossip Girl you get maybe one big recognizable pop hit on the soundtrack per episode; the rest is comparatively obscure indie pop/rock. By contrast, the flashback material consisted almost entirely of songs that got their own segments on I Love the ’80s. I’ve seen some people complain about the presence of over-obvious ’80s props like the Rubik’s Cube and Jane Fonda workout video, but none of that bothered me nearly as much as the easy-peasy soundtracking.

* The writing was also much, much weaker–hokier–than normal. It feels churlish to complain that “nobody talks like that” on a show that normally features the wit and wisdom of Chuck Bass, but seriously, nobody does those self-aware “this is the moment where you fall in love with me” things, let alone does them again later on in the evening as a callback. The dialogue and behavior of the villainous Van Der Woodsen character (dun-dun-DUN!) was similarly canned, right down to yelling “Get him!” at a pack of undifferentiated preppy ’80s villain types. There was a noticeably forced infodump early on when Lily described her sister to her father and us in the audience. And so on and so forth.

* And at times the weak dialogue went beyond making the characters sound silly right into undermining the whole emotional premise of the story. The whole business about Lily trying to find her own way despite the well-meaning conformist meddling of her parents was presented in as cliched a fashion as possible in that closing “one phone call” scene, but it seemed to me the writers thought they could get away with it because of the irony that Lily will go on to do exactly everything her mother wanted her to. The problem is that that irony is just as obvious and cliched as what it’s purporting to subvert. I’m bored with this character and her sister and her bad-boy boyfriend already. (Like Lily’s mom, I too would take an army of Dan Humphreys over that pouting greaser.)

* Back in 2009, the prom stuff was all pretty cute. It was fun to see the mean girls fail one last time, and even though it felt like the latest off-again from Nate and Blair kinda happened because it had to, it was still well done and reflective of the fact that that whole relationship really has run its course. If I were Nate I would have responded to her request to “hold me” with a counteroffer to play a game of Hide and Go Fuck Yourself, but hey.

* Inasmuch as the Lily/Lily’s Mom business was really just a continuation of the flashback material, it didn’t work for me, especially that final conversation–one second Lily’s really giving mom the business about having wanted to choose her own destiny, the next second she’s demanding a hug?

* However, I walked away from this episode feeling great. Why? Because of the one big exception to the flashback’s “Obvious ’80s Smash Hits Only” rule: They ended the episode with “Doot Doot” by Freur! (That’s Underworld before they were Underworld.) All is forgiven, Gossip Girl, all is forgiven.