* Over at Marvel.com, I’ve got a piece up regarding real-world “superflu”-style epidemics, tying in with The Stand: Captain Trips #4. I’m finding it’s a real pleasure to be able to write about one of my favorite books and get paid for it.

* While I’m on the plugging my own stuff tip, I suppose I should be reminding people about my short comics collection Murder on a more regular basis. Won’t you please consider buying it?

* Behold, The Top 50 Horror Films of All Time as voted for by 32 horror bloggers, including yours truly, and compiled by the great and terrible B-Sol of The Vault of Horror. I must say, it’s a rather more conservative and old-skewing list than I expected, though I think the top 15 are all rock-solid members of the canon. That, of course, presupposes that one can disagree with the quality of a film but still think it’s canonical, which would be my take on Halloween, our little group’s number one.

* I am rather impressed with the high ranking we gave to The Blair Witch Project, though a little less impressed that it’s only the second-most recent film on the whole list! I think that’s probably because we voters were limited to listing our top ten films; more recent movies probably need a little more time to stew with us before a lot of us are comfortable putting them near the top. I know that was the case for me with Hostel, 28 Weeks Later, 28 Days Later, The Descent, and the remake of Dawn of the Dead, just to name a few. The one movie to break the millennial barrier is The Mist, which probably owes a lot to the familiarity bred by having the original story around for a couple decades beforehand.

* Big ups to the group also for including the video for “Thriller,” and for not getting hung up on whether or not this or that movie is “really” horror–if enough people voted for it, on it went. Of course, this mostly applies to stuff that’s scary and gory and involves monsters but some people believe to be simply science fiction or action, like Alien and Aliens. There’s no David Lynch or David Cronenberg or anything like that. And I myself didn’t pitch things like Eyes Wide Shut or Heavenly Creatures or Barton Fink–my own list went no further afield than Lost Highway and Deliverance.

* Anyway, check it out, check out CRwM’s analysis (I was struck by his point regarding our affinity for sequels and remakes), and check out the lively comment thread, where a second list consisting solely of films from the past 15-20 years is suggested. I second!

* They say it’s your birthday: The Beatles’ White Album turned 40 recently. The White Album is my favorite Beatles album, and my favorite album by anyone ever. It contains pretty much every emotion I’ve ever felt. I honestly could think about it and read about it all day long, and now I can actually come close: PopMatters celebrates the album’s anniversary with a lengthy, multi-part look at the record and all its songs. All five official parts can be found here, and there’s a postscript here. (Via Matthew Perpetua.)

* Is Sylvester Stallone’s upcoming movie The Expendables, which just added Dolph Lundgren to a cast that includes Jason Statham, Jet Li, and Sly himself, the Manly Movie Mamajama-est Movie Ever?

* Midnight Meat Train finally comes out on DVD on Feb. 17th, which means I’ll finally get to see it shortly thereafter.

* The new blog Top Drawer: 10 Questions serves up interviews in the titular ten-question style with Hans Rickheit and John Hankiewicz, two of my absolute favorite young-ish cartoonists. (Via Mike Baehr.)

* Strange Ink’s Sean B. reviews Let the Right One In. I sure do wish the Angelika were playing the movie at times other than 5:15 and 7:45pm–those really don’t work for me!

* CRwM reviews Videodrome. The title of the post, “The new old flesh,” reveals a bit of how he approaches the film.

* Did I link to the first installment of Tim O’Neil’s series of posts on the business and aesthetics of mainstream superhero comics in the early ’90s? If not, I should have–I really liked it, because it echoes my overall perception of how the major industry players looked at the time, if not necessarily the specifics of how that perception did or didn’t drive my buying habits.

* Go, look: Kate Clark’s taxidermized human-animal hybrids.

The link is via Tor.com’s Irene Gallo, who complains of the exhibit:

Certainly they are disarming for a moment but, surprisingly, the effect of a human face grafted onto the animal body does not seem to ennoble either species. They are neither wild nor intelligent…mainly just a little sad.

That’s a feature, not a bug.

“I think LL Cool J and Canibus are both fantastic!” – MC Paul Barman

Over the past week I watched, for the first time, Quantum of Solace, The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy, and The Bourne Ultimatum. (Yes, it was an action-packed week for me, courtesy of Netflix and numerous interminable Long Island Rail Road delays.)

* I can see why the makers and stars of the Bourne movies might want to slag on nu-Bond, but I don’t understand why viewers and critics give into this weird Beatles/Stones, Blur/Oasis artificial rivalry. While it’s true that I watched both Daniel Craig James Bond movies before any of the Bourne films, even in retrospect I don’t see what the former directly owe to the latter, really. Frenetically filmed action sequences and using the supposed “good guys” as bad guys aren’t trademarkable, I don’t think; they certainly didn’t originate with Bourne.

* Regarding those action sequences, I’ve read enough about the Bourne films’ supposedly borderline-experimental use of “shakicam,” both pro and con, to have me half-convinced I was signing up for Stan Brakhage Does an Action Franchise. I was prepared to be convinced that making your fights and chases unintelligible conveys savagery and emotional turmoil, but fortunately i never had to be, since everything was perfectly, rather beautifully easy to follow in all three Bourne films, including the two Paul Greengrass-directed sequels that tend to be singled out for this. Anyone who’s watched Christopher Nolan’s woeful Batman Begins knows what an unintelligible fight scene or chase seen looks like, and the Bourne movies’ balletic, claustrophobic martial arts slobbernockers, ruthlessly efficient redshirt-cop takedowns, and meticulously chaotic car and foot chases are nothing of the sort. (Neither, for that matter, were any of the throwdowns in Quantum of Solace that were supposed to be so Bourne-indebted as to be embarrassing.)

* There is a pretty obvious difference between the two franchises: Bourne strives to keep everything both real and “unconsidered,” as Greengrass states in the special features, meaning he aims for realism in plot, setting, and mise en scène alike. As de-cheesified as the Bond movies have gotten, however, they’re still recognizably Bond movies, creatures of a heightened, high-tech, glamorous “reality.” Q and his gadgets may be gone, Bond may be spending less time cracking single-entendre quips with Miss Moneypenny and more time murdering people in the Third World, but there are still stunning women, stunning menswear, stunning hotels and beaches and casinos and villas and whatnot, and stunning shots of all of the above. Joan Allen aside, Bourne doesn’t do stunning. I think both styles work for their respective franchises. I mean, obviously it’d be goofy of someone who had as much fun with GoldenEye and The World Is Not Enough as I did to suddenly insist that Bond be played like The Battle of Algiers. My point is that I greatly enjoy the mainline injection of “realism” the Bond movies have received at least in part because of how it plays off of the traditional Bond business. It adds a sense of stakes, and an anchor for the flights of fancy if you will.

* Another obvious difference, at least as the respective series go by, is that Bourne is a reluctant killer while Bond is fairly enthusiastic about it. To a fault, in Quantum of Solace’s case. The storyline of the Daniel Craig Bond movies has James Bond driven to become more of what he is in response to the death of a loved one, while Jason Bourne is driven to become less of what he is under similar circumstances. Eventually Bond puts the breaks on when faced with just how little solace straight-out vengeance would afford him, but basically, he doesn’t give a damn, while Bourne gives a damn deeply. Maybe that attitude is why the Bond movies are still recognizably Bond movies.

* One virtue shared by both the Bond and Bourne characters in these movies is physical genius. What these men do with their bodies is the combat equivalent of lateral thinking, a sort of instinct resting somewhere in their muscle tissue or something that enables them to almost always be three or four steps ahead of where our feeble audience brains have us in any given fight scene or chase sequence (let alone the bodies of their antagonists). Anticipating the needs of the battle in five seconds or ten seconds and doing what’s required to be on top at that juncture–that’s the stuff of the action scenes in these movies. Think of Bourne’s precision takedowns of countless cops and intelligence officers, or how you’ll see him grab objects during a chase (a bottle of vodka, shirts hanging to dry on clotheslines) for god knows what reason only to use them in just the right way (spitting the vodka in the face of a policeman to blind him, wrapping the shirts around his hands so he can vault off a glass-shard-lined wall). Think of Bond using the fact that his plane is mortally wounded to out-fly the pilots sent to shoot him down, or how he uses a combination of split-second decision making and brute force to out-chase that bomber in the construction site and embassy. It’s really remarkable how well done this is in both franchises, ginning up a sort of wide-eyed admiration among viewers. (Well, among me, at least.)

* Similarly, these movies are very much about Bond and Bourne outwitting antagonists with vastly superior numbers and resources. Particularly in the Greengrass Bournes, a real point is made to show Jason making monkeys out of the CIA goons who are tracking him. By the third film, the degree to which Bourne puts himself at risk in order to send a message that amounts to “PWND!!1!!” actually gets a little distracting, or it would if it weren’t so damned entertaining. Bond behaves in much the same way–I can’t be the only person who laughed out loud when he barged in on Quantum’s opera-house conference call. But in that case he did it for a reason, to flush the members of the group out of hiding and take photos of them. Ultimately, though, the point in both films is just that having the underdog make the overdogs look like outclassed nincompoops is a lot of fun.

* Regarding the Bourne movies, each one has something going on that’s a little bit pat. In Identity, it’s the simplicity of the “he stopped wanting to be an assassin because his target had kids with him” reveal. In Supremacy, it’s the coincidence of Bourne’s mysterious dreams being directly related to why people are after him, and it’s the woman-in-refrigerator bit with Marie, though I’ll grant it was beautifully shot and returned to on a consistent and emotionally true basis throughout the rest of the movies. And in Ultimatum, it’s the return to the mysterious-flashback well literally still in the middle of the events of the previous movie (revisited with fill-in-the-gaps material), and it’s the hambone supervillain psychiatrist played by whatsisname. But in each case this is all offset by the films’ strengths, most of which lie in their willingness to be openly emotional and even troubling. Many times, Bourne and his ersatz allies fail to save the people we want to see him save–in Marie’s case it was easy to see coming, but damn if that journalist in Ultimatum wasn’t a punch to the solar plexus. Bourne’s mano a manos with fellow assassins nearly always have the feel of “domestic violence,” as Greengrass describes that fight in the kitchen in Supremacy; they’re intimate and unpleasant even as they’re thrilling. I thought Bourne’s apology tour with the daughter of the assassinated Russian reformer and the brother of Marie was a refreshingly strange and uncategorizable addition to the films. Obviously, and especially by film three, the bad guy is basically the U.S. government; it’s tough to watch a guy in a government building order the murder of a journalist. And on a fundamental level, Bourne himself is really up against it–as we learn in the final film, it really was his choice to become a monster, and watching him try, well, not so much to redeem himself as to form an account of why he did what he did has to resonate with any of us who’ve said or done things we wish we could un-say or un-do but know we have no way of doing so.

* Perhaps where the Daniel Craig Bond movies break most definitively with the past are in two memorable scenes where the characters are basically broken down by the brutality of their world. They’re similarly staged: Bond and Vesper on the floor of the shower, embracing as Vesper weeps from the violence she’s seen and her narrow escape from it; and Bond and Camille on the floor of the burning hotel room, preparing to commit suicide rather than burn to death. I think that’s the equivalent of Bourne’s apologies.

* I think both franchises are remarkably well cast. This is perhaps most obvious in the Bourne movies, whose supporting casts Greengrass has likened to a fleet of high-end automobiles, and for good reason. But I’m thinking mostly of the two leads. Though my wife disagrees with me, Daniel Craig strikes me as a fabulously handsome man, combining a steely-eyed glare, a battle-damaged face, and a confident swagger that is more Bond than Bond has ever been before. And the dude is cut out of wood–there’s a reason the big “rising up from the ocean in a skimpy bathing suit” shot in Casino Royale was of Bond and not a Bond girl. (Though I certainly wouldn’t have objected to Eva Green going for a dip. Best Bond girl ever.) Yet I think his body is put on display as often as it is in order to drive home just how vulnerable it is, that it’s just a slab of meet you can really pulverize the hell out of–witness the nude torture scene in Casino. Meanwhile, it took me a long time to come around to Matt Damon, but between the Bourne movies and The Departed he’s really learned to use his sort of vacant Abercrombie-model looks in the most perverse way possible, suggesting a ruthlessness beneath the all-Americanness. And as the depths of his crimes are slowly revealed to him, he does “dazed” very well, too, almost a panic about what he’s learned he’s capable of. Both Craig and Damon sell it, mentally, physically, emotionally.

* I haven’t yet mentioned the fact that the two franchises are derived from books by Ian Fleming and Robert Ludlum respectively. What does that say, and who or what does it say it about? I don’t know.

* One thing I learned from watching all of these movies in such close proximity is that I really love movies about psychologically wounded men who become ruthlessly efficient killing machines and murder their way to justice. In addition to Bourne and Bond, I think you can loop the late-model John Rambo into that group; as Matthew Perpetua pointed out to me, take out the killing and replace it with ass-kicking and Batman works there too. Movie-version Aragorn wouldn’t be out of place either. I think I appreciate the way that violence and regret intertwine for these characters. Perhaps that’s as it should be.

* Here’s a by-definition SPOILERY promo for Battlestar Galactica Season 4.5, as I suppose they’ll be calling the show’s final stretch of weekly episodes. (There’s still the prequel pilot/potential series Caprica and at least one TV movie to account for, of course.) One thing that looks promising is increased screen time for Richard Hatch’s Tom Zarek, one of my favorite characters.

* Tom Spurgeon explains what he doesn’t like about Final Crisis. I agree with his points about how the series is conveying hopelessness, and disagree with but appreciate his observation regarding Morrison’s interpretation of the Anti-Life Equation. (Actually, in the sense that Tom’s interpretation of Kirby’s original idea allows for an even more hopeless universe than Morrison’s, it’s probably something I’ll cotton to myself eventually. You know how much I love hopelessness!) But Tom’s main beef, in a nutshell, is that he doesn’t care about the DC Universe or the vast majority of its characters anymore. As this has long been his position regarding the big corporate superhero farms, it’s not exactly a surprise. It reminds me a little of my friend who today told me she thought Let the Right One In was overlong and overrated and generally terrible, but maybe someone who doesn’t hate vampire movies the way she hates vampire movies would like it. No kidding!

* However, one aspect of Tom’s critique for which my response goes beyond “agree to disagree” is whether bad comics set in a particular character’s or mythos’s continuity hurt comics like this. I’m honestly not a whole lot more invested in the idea of “The DC/Marvel Universe” than Tom is, but I do still hold some affinity for a lot of the ideas contained in both, and I’ve never understood why I have to pay any attention at all to bad comics about them. I haven’t said to myself “But wait, that contradicts Countdown #3!” or “man, this would be good if I hadn’t known what happened in that lousy Countdown #3!” a single time while reading Final Crisis, because long ago I realized that no matter what Dan DiDio or Joe Quesada say, it’s entirely up to me what I choose to treat as canon when reading big superhero books. In that light, some crappy comic that steps on a good comic’s thematic or narrative toes no more ruins my enjoyment of the good comic than the fact that there are stinky comedies set in New York City ruins my enjoyment of Ghostbusters or Annie Hall.

* Speaking of disagreeing, I enjoyed Neil Marshall’s Doomsday a bunch, but the movie just won a reader-participation contest at Topless Robot for Stupidest Fantasy World–not, I have to admit, without reason. The phrase “Sir Knight of Eatingpeopleshire” is deployed.

* Four things Becky Cloonan draws well are hair, tentacles, pretty girls, and skeletal toothy mouths. Put them all together and you’ve got a recipe for delight.

* The Dark Knight is doing the For Your Consideration bit in the trades, and I thought this ad was really lovely because of how normal it looks. This image is like if a friend of yours had snapped a picture some dude on the street, only the dude is the Joker. The Dark Knight is not a perfect film by any stretch of the imagination, and to me the idea that it’s a Godfather-level masterpiece is utterly cockamamie, but there’s not a whole lot involving the Joker it got wrong. In this case, the idea that he’s just some clown off the street (heh, no pun intended) is quite creepy.

* This David Lynch short film shot with a cinematographe camera is horrifying.

(Via Stacie Ponder.)

* Timothy Olyphant is going to star in the remake of George A. Romero’s The Crazies. That’s nice, but mainly what struck me about the Dread Central article where I found this out is the picture of Olyphant as Seth Bullock. Good God was Deadwood a great television program.

* Renee French is talented.

* If you watch Heroes live every week as it initially airs, creator Tim Kring thinks you are “saps and dipshits.” Thank goodness superhero fandom doesn’t get riled up that easily, or else he could catch some flack for this!

* Did you know that Phoebe Gloeckner is blogging again? She is. Did you expect it to be sad? It is.

* CBR’s Alex Dueben speaks with Ross Campbell, creator of the weird, wonderful Wet Moon and Water Baby. Campbell is a really unique artist in comics right now and hearing about his mental process is pretty fascinating. There’s a great bit where he reveals his Minx effort, Water Baby, was originally planned to have a raunchier story but less sexy visuals:

Actually, looking back on the artwork just now, I still really like it, but I think I went a little overboard on Brody’s breasts. Even though Louisa’s are even bigger, Brody’s particularly seem overly prominent, not specifically because of their size since obviously tons of girls have these proportions and they’re fine and normal, but just the manner in which I drew them. Maybe it’s just Brody’s nipples, which always seem to be pushing into her shirts (I guess I was trying to show that Brody never wears a bra, too), I don’t know. Maybe if I could go back and fix up all the nipple protrusion it would be perfect. [laughs]

He also reveals that Tokyopop is resolutely fucking him out of being able to do anything further with his excellent goth-zombie graphic novel The Abandoned, which is a crime. (Via Dirk Deppey.)

* Chris Mautner speaks with Ivan Brunetti about his two-volume Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons and True Stories. Once again, we see that anthologies of this sort eschew good superhero comics not out of choice, but out of necessity, courtesy of those comics’ publishers:

Then there were things that were prohibitively expensive and just impossible to track down the rights on. It’s really hard to get a hold of Marvel Comics. I would have loved to have stuff by Jack Kirby in there. You can’t even find who to contact to get those rights, plus they would have been so expensive. The recent Best American Comics —

Q: — wanted to get in Paul Pope —

A: Yeah and DC wouldn’t even want it reprinted. There were those kinds of issues to consider.

Another crime.

* Fangoria speaks with World War Z author Max Brooks about the coming film adaptation, directed by Quantum of Solace‘s Marc Forster and written by Spider-Man: The Other‘s J. Michael Straczynski.

Brooks is also pleased with the latest WORLD WAR Z script draft by J. Michael Straczynski, whom some predict will win an Oscar nomination for his screenplay to the Clint Eastwood film CHANGELING. The scripter managed to distill Brooks’ wide-ranging collection of journal entries, interviews and anecdotes detailing the ultimate battle between man and zombie into a cohesive screenplay. “I’m thrilled that the man who created BABYLON 5 is working on this movie,” Brooks said. “I can’t give it away, but Straczynski found a way to tie it all together. The last draft I read was amazing.”

Another crime?

* David Bordwell sings the praises of that golden age of edgy Hollywood filmmaking…the ’80s?

* Look! I’m a highlight!

That’s from an SPX retrospective strip by Dustin Harbin, who sure can draw. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* Frequently you hear comics people talk about DC’s iconic heroes. If I made a list in my head of who those are, it would map exactly to this drawing:

From a DC Comics color guide, drawn by Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez. (Via JK Parkin.)

* A Ghostface Killah Greatest Hits featuring a song called “Ghostface Christmas”? Oh, indeed.

* Quote of the day:

‘Tis the season to be crazy!

–Some crazy lady on the train to work this morning. Unfortunately, being actually crazy, she didn’t know to quit while she was ahead, and used the line (by which I mean shouted it to no one in particular) twice. So now it’s unable hang in the collective memory of her fellow passengers as a singular, spontaneous flash of shamanic-savant brilliance the way I’m sure we’d all prefer it to.

* Finally (via Whitney Matheson, Chinese Fucking Democracy.

* First-time director Mark Poirier will be remaking The Host. Fans are worried he’ll deviate too much from the original by making the remake a good movie. (Via Dread Central.)

* Looks like Damon Lindelof and Leinil Francis Yu’s Ultimate Wolverine vs. Hulk will finally finish! Good–it was a good comic so far. (Via Kevin Melrose.)

* Strange Ink’s Sean B. makes the case for Rorschach’s seemingly Snyder-elided monotone, comparing the vigilante to such memorable flat-affect villains as Anton Chigurh and HAL 9000. I think Chigurh is an apt comparison given that I think Moore and Gibbons meant Rorschach to come across like a Leatherface/Michael/Jason-style masked slasher to his victims. That said, I think it’s a mug’s game to argue whether or not movie-Rorschach will maintain the original’s embodiment/critique of Ditko-Rand A-is-A black-and-white morality based on his accent in a trailer or two.

* Your quote of the day comes from Ta-Nehisi Coates:

It’s a funny thing to be a black kid into fantasy. Most of this stuff is ripped from Tolkien, and as much as I love LOTR, there is, indeed, something disquieting about the total whiteness of the movies. I don’t blame that on Jackson or Tolkien. If someone was doing a fantasy epic based on Xhosa creation myths, I wouldn’t expect to see any white people.

Meanwhile, this comment regarding how “race” and attractiveness have affected the evolution of World of Warcraft was pretty fascinating to me. Actually, the whole comment thread is pretty terrif and if you’re a politically sensitive follower of fantastic fiction it’s well worth your time.

* Rest in peace, Guy Peellaert.

(Via Dirk Deppey.)

By the time this song came out Danzig had already had his big crossover hit with “Mother.” I’m pretty sure America was in the throes of “Closer”-era Nine Inch Nails mania at this point, though, and the comparatively non-metal electronic vibe of this song is an indicator of that, as is the part-NIN part-Tool video. This is pretty far out of Danzig’s traditional horror-punk and Frazetta-metal comfort zone, and, I’ve always thought, rewardingly so. The primary trick here is repetition. Danzig repeats a series of negative statements on pretty much the same handful of notes without a hint of his Viking Elvis voice to be heard, and the musical backing is exactly the same throughout; the closest it gets to a chorus is just repeating the previous verse while running the vocals and guitars through distortion effects. The tone is relentless and claustrophobic, yet also seductive thanks to that industrial groove–which fits, because the song is about the growing appeal of both isolation and self-destruction, both of which are often attractive to the genuinely depressed. “Gonna live with all my soul inside,” he repeats; elsewhere, “Keep thinking of suicide.” There’s no escape and I find that rather haunting.

* Jog takes a look at one of my favorite comics of the year, Yuichi Yokoyama’s Travel.

* Leigh Walton makes the case for Rorschach’s tough-guy voice, The Watchmen, and other fan-lamented aspects of what we’ve seen from Zack Snyder’s Watchmen thus far. Bonus points for making the retrospectively obvious “Have a Cigar” connection.

* I’ve tended to think of Brian Michael Bendis’s New Avengers as follows: A strong, exciting opening arc full of solid action beats (Hydro-Man floods the basement, the Sentry tears Carnage in half) provides an interesting mix of A-listers and potentially interesting also-rans with a solid raison d’etre and mission statement, i.e. fate threw them together just like the original Avengers; now they must track down all the criminals broken out of a super-prison while finding out who’s responsible for the breakout and the subsequent massacre of slaves in the Savage Land. The book then gets sidetracked almost instantly by storyarcs devoted to explaining who the (it turns out) not terribly interesting after all also-rans are (the Sentry, Spider-Woman), messing with continuity in a pretty unsatisfactory way (House of M, the Xorn/Collective stuff, Illuminati), and the demands of outside titles and external crossovers (dropping Daredevil from the team before he could even join, splitting up the team for Civil War), all despite occasionally impressive character work (particularly with Luke Cage, who really has become a leading player in the Marvel Universe thanks to Bendis’s great work with him). Jon Hastings’s critique is a simpler yet somewhat more fundamental one: Bendis never learned how to write action scenes for large numbers of characters. True enough, whenever I think of a big Bendis team-book/event-comic action sequence, it’s a two page spread of people punching and stabbing and shooting in every direction, accompanied or followed by cutaway panels highlighting indistinct individual bits of action–just like Jon says. (Meanwhile in the comments Jon takes a swing at the basic reason for the team to exist, but I’m not ready to go that far.)

* Over at my favorite new TV show of the season, Bruce Baugh continues to explore what’s up with World of Warcraft. One thing that strikes me anew with each new post is just how many major factions are involved. My fantasy background is almost solely Tolkien, where for all intents and purposes it was a strictly bipolar world; intra-faction strife (Dwarves vs. Elves back in the Elder Days, Saruman vs. Sauron in the “present”) tended to be of limited scope and duration. I don’t recall other fantasy series I enjoyed (Susan Cooper, Lloyd Alexander) deviating from that model overmuch. (Ursula K. LeGuin kinda eschewed bad guys iirc.) By contrast, WoW is lousy with rivals on every side, and it seems like part of the fun of the game is that you really never know where the next big story-driving assault will come from, or whether the alignment of powers when the next big thing is resolved will in any way resemble the current alignment.

Here’s an admirably po-faced fan-made video for a song I really enjoy. Even as a little kid, when you might expect me to connect most solidly with the fantasy-tinged heroism depicted in this song, I grokked it for the quietly brutal anti-war song it is. The contrast between the gentle grandeur of the music, with its troubadour acoustic guitar and celestial vocal harmonies, and the fact that they’re ultimately talking about this “lucky man” getting shot to death on the battlefield struck me as bracingly honest about how glorious these sorts of endeavors really are. Obviously that’s a lesson Tolkien prepared me for in this context, but still.

(via)

Robert Burden in action.

* My pal Zach Oat at Movies Without Pity is but one of a horde of nerdy critics whose positive reviews for the new James Bond movie Quantum of Solace I’ve spotted today. This is noteworthy because buzz for the film up until a couple of days ago had been pretty lukewarm. Now I’m excited for it all over again.

* Related: I’ve Netflixed all the Bourne movies, to which Quantum is said to be rather deeply indebted, and may get to watch some or even all of them before I finally hit the theaters for 007. I’ll keep you posted. (Aren’t you excited?)

* Also related: Quantum director Marc Forster has signed on to direct the adaptation of Max Brooks’s excellent zombie mock-oral-history World War Z, with a screenplay by not-excellent comics and Changeling writer J. Michael Straczynski. (I dunno, Supreme Power was good, so fingers crossed I guess. ) So now I’m invested in the success of Quantum even more deeply. (Via AICN.)

* Look, a new, short trailer for The Spirit! Looks fine. (Via Rick Marshall.)

* Haha, the star of Twilight calls the books out for their egregious Mary Sueishness. This to me is a far more acceptable framework for taking potshots at the series and its imminent film incarnation than the horror-site bog-standard “eww girls.”

* One thing I did not expect to find today was an in-depth examination of the Hellraiser series by comics blogger Tim O’Neil. Part one is an encomium to the Hellraiser concept, part two contains reviews of every theatrically released installment, and part three deals with the “apocrypha”–aka straight-to-video sequels. Sample quote:

Considering that this film was made for a reported $1 million dollars, it’s easily one of the best-looking “low budget” horror films ever made. Considering the Faustian bargain that Barker reportedly made in order to have the film made his way – signing over future franchise rights to New Line and agreeing to a paltry budget in exchange for the chance to direct his own book – the fact that it looks as good as it does is something of a minor miracle. Especially if you consider the fact that Barker was himself a novice filmmaker, with just two experimental shorts under his belt as a director. It’s a shame, in a way, that he’s not temperamentally suited to working in the film industry, because if he had chosen to focus his energies he probably could have been a director for the ages. As it is, he’s probably a better writer, but still, the prose world’s gain is film’s loss. (And the first person to mention Lord of Illusions in the comments gets bopped on the head.)

It’s true. There are images and sequences in Hellraiser that are stunning given the inexperience of its director, and frankly I think Nightbreed, despite the evident studio interference, is a pretty remarkable film at times too.

* Kramers Ergot 7 tourdates! One of the drawbacks of the emergence of Brooklyn as a hipster mecca is that now many comics events I might go to were they held in Manhattan end up in the borough of Kings, a paradoxically closer yet less accessible location relative to where I’m usually at.

* I realized while reading Bruce Baugh’s latest, picture-filled look at what’s going on in World of Warcraft right now that these posts are filling the role of “the new TV series I’m following this season” for me. Best of all? No commercials! WARNING: ADORABLE WALRUS GUY AHEAD

(courtesy of Gardner Linn)