Hi-def version here.

Eh, a lot of slow motion and superhero/trailer cliches, and they call the “team” “The Watchmen” which is like if someone sat around thinking up the best example of a dumb thing Hollywood would do. As the trailer began to load I suddenly realized I’m pretty bored with this movie already. My friends Rickey and Sam point out, however, that this could be a pretty exciting trailer for people who haven’t read the book, haven’t seen the first trailer (although thanks to The Dark Knight that doesn’t describe too many people), haven’t seen the San Diego footage, haven’t seen the Scream Awards teaser, haven’t seen the promo posters, and on and on and on…

Let’s watch as all-time A-#1 Sean T. Collins style icon Gary Numan shows us how it’s done:

Jesus jumped-up Christ in a chariot-driven sidecar, that is essentially the coolest thing that ever happened in human history. Daft Punk and Beck need to be sending regular royalty checks.

That footage is from 1979, I believe. A couple of years later, having decided that his set’s Metropolis light towers were insufficiently gigantic and extravagant and his own personal mien was insufficiently supervillainous, Gary decided to revamp his performance of this song as follows:

The sort of complete commitment, totality of vision, and lack of fear or self-deprecating irony required to perform a song about androids whilst seated in a mobile throne you’re piloting around the stage is impressive beyond words to me. Great tune, too.

This is our bedroom. I’m told it’s rather Twin Peaks-y, and I can see it in this picture, sure.

I think that one of the reasons I’m writing so much about my decision to stop watching the film Inside because the killer was gonna kill a cat is because on some level I’m ashamed of that decision. As I described in my follow-up post yesterday, cruelty to animals isn’t something I’m phobic of. It’s not something that triggers an on/off switch where I just can’t bear the sight or thought of it. It’s not Room 101 for me. (Although if that’s what was waiting for me in Room 101 I would not like it AT ALL…but nor would I like watching someone be sliced to ribbons either, and obviously I can handle that in films just fine.) I think that for me, cruelty to animals does exist on some kind of overall cruelty continuum. And to the extent that I believe horror is about cruelty–to the extent that cruelty is the aspect of horror I find so compelling–then I feel like on some level I’ve failed by refusing to watch it.

Now, failed as what? A viewer, a critic, a genre buff, an artist, a student of the human condition, a blogger, a film lover, a former film student? I’m not sure I know. But I’d be lying if I didn’t say that concern was going on internally, to the point where I immediately felt bad about sending the movie back to Netflix and will likely put it back on my queue and try it again soon. Maybe I’ll try to watch it during a time of day that’s less conducive to an immersive horror-movie experience–a day-lit lunchbreak instead of at night with the lights turned down alone in the house.

Keep in mind that this isn’t the only time I’ve been really upset by something only to want to try and “best it” with a rematch. Perhaps you recall that horrifying Coney Island ride I went on, the Topspinner? I guarantee you I go on one of those again to prove to myself that I didn’t need to be so scared the first time around.

Also keep in mind I’m talking about make-believe animal cruelty, not actual animal cruelty done for the purposes of entertainment a la Cannibal Holocaust. Fuck that with something hard and sandpapery.

* I know what I just said about cat-killing, and I know that a movie about a lady getting trapped in a house with a man-eating tiger can only end one of two ways, but still, Burning Bright is so crazy it just might work.

Someone’s been reading Stephen King’s “Here There Be Tygers,” huh?

* Lotta list-making and list-mulling going on in the horror blogosphere lately, inspired by B-Sol’s reprint of HMV’s top 50 horror films list. B-Sol’s in the process of compiling a list out of weighted submissions from all of us Tana Tea-swilling elitists. CRwM goes Nate Silver on the very idea of list-making drawn from polls. Curt Purcell hasn’t seen a lot of the “classics” you’d think he would have, including such films of bona fide groovy-age provenance as The Wicker Man, The Texas Chain Saw Masscare, Night of the Living Dead, The Exorcist, etc etc. Stacie Ponder posts her personal top 10. FWIW I submitted my own Top 10 to B-Sol, and if he posts it I’ll link to it, but paring down the amorphous mass of my favorites to a ranked list of 10 was a pretty arbitrary process once you got past the first handful.

* My ongoing quest to reblog pretty much everything Bruce Baugh writes about World of Warcraft continues: First up, Bruce tells the story of another one of those in-game memorials for a player who died in the real world, in this case an 11 year old boy. But unlike that classic funeral raid, this one’s not blackly comic so much as out and out adorable–897 players decided to create minotaur-type characters who would run from the Tauren capital en masse in an attempt to sack the Alliance capital Stormwind in the kid’s honor. They crashed the server, but the idea, and the images captured before the thing went kablooey, is just as ridiculous and delightful as you’d expect.

* Next up, Bruce gives us a you-are-there view of the invasion of the Alliance and Horde capitals by the Lich King’s zombie dragon things. It’s fun to watch a game build a sense of anticipation for some upcoming super-duper-event via smaller but still holy-cow events like this. Somehow it feels less cynical than when comics do it.

In the comment thread for my post about Inside, Bruce Baugh writes:

I’ve thought for a while that the distance metaphors like “too far” don’t really serve. In my head there’s a taxonomy that builds on the image of pushes and shocks emerging from the zero point that is the movie, heading out in all directions. Things that could be measured, notionally, include the direction of the push, its speed, and its relentlessness – the difference between a single bottle being lobbed in the direction of someone’s head and a bulldozer blade crushing everything that might resist it.

Each of us in the audience rests behind a set of barriers that surrounds the movie point. In some places are barriers are close up to the point and flimsy, so that not much gets through – like you, I’m that way with cruelty to animals, and also with certain specific kinds of head and face deformities. (Which is why one part of the excellent Vanilla Sky was so grueling for me, and why I just can’t go see The Dark Knight at all.) In other places, our barriers are far back and well supported, so that we aren’t overwhelmed even by a lot of whatever it is.

I think Bruce is probably right about the utility of “too far.” It’s tough to argue that killing a cat is “further” than, I dunno, hanging a girl on a meathook while you dismember her boyfriend with a chainsaw, just to name the first example that comes to mind. (Although I’d imagine the cat was dispatched in a far more visually explicit fashion than either of those unfortunates from Texas Chain Saw ultimately were.)

Regarding Bruce’s notion of different barriers for different things, I’ve thought about that before in terms of phobic reactions, which to me are very different things than one’s usual gradated responses to various scary or disturbing or unpleasant things in horror movies. For example, my wife is emetophobic, so vomiting, gagging, dry-heaving, and certain kinds of throat-trauma, choking, or coughing just plain hit the panic switch in her brain. It’s not a question of the imagery being one level too extreme or too frightening for her to take, being just powerful enough to break through a given barrier–there is no barrier.

I am the same way, not quite as bad but getting worse even as she gets better with her phobia, about skin growths and growth-like structures, and to the extent that their bodies and multiplicity can evoke growths, bugs. Again, it’s not like there’s a level at which I can handle it that can be surpassed–I go from zero to curling up and shaking in a second. If it hits that anti-sweet spot for me, panic! Based on what Bruce is saying, I think that’s what’s going on for him with facial deformities, though I could be wrong.

On the other hand, I think there’s something different about animal cruelty, which you and I and my wife are all very sensitive about. My wife also has a real problem with people soiling themselves with fear. I’ve thought about this hard and I’m pretty sure that there’s something different going on here than there is with my phobia. It feels more thoughtful, more considered, more fleshed out a reaction to the stimulus than the reflex response of a phobia, you know? Like I said, I really do think there are contexts in which I’d be able to accept animal cruelty in film, because it’s happened with me before, though I would always find it very, very troubling. But there’s no context in which I’d be able to handle my phobia–if it’s triggered, it’s triggered. That to me says that there’s something different at play, even if my reaction when the animal-cruelty barrier is violated can be just as extreme and binary.

* Wolf Man and Rocketeer director Joe Johnston will apparently be handling the obnoxiously titled First Avenger: Captain America for Marvel Studios. I am filled with lack of feelings about this, although I will say that I remember his Jumanji being pretty effective in a “My First Movie About Uncontrollable Hordes of Hungry Things Trying to Eat People” sort of way.

* This strikes me as being pretty weak tea to actually be worth reporting, but for now at least, Danny Boyle himself may direct the sequel to 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later. I have a bad feeling that this will set up a reductive and unhelpful “skip the second movie” sentiment somewhere down the line, but still, it’d be neat.

* I’m not going to read Jog’s review of The ACME Novelty Library #19 until I read the book itself, but for now I want to note that I like the Jog-suggested idea of being “that guy in the comics blogosphere who really loves animals.”

* Tim O’Shea interviews Frank Santoro of the mighty mighty Comics Comics and the anxiously awaited completion of Cold Heat. Tim also reveals that there’s a Cold Heat blog/webcomic on the horizon. Memo to my friend Josiah: help me out with this bit?

Comics, how they are composed, is like an architecture, right? Well, I’ve become obsessed with the structure of comics of how one reads comics and how comics spreads are composed. I’ve also come under the spell of Pythagorean Theory and how it applies to image making and Architecture. That all might sound really pretentious but it’s really the most un-pretentious approach to creating images ever. Basically, it’s all the perspective tricks that we all learned in 6th grade art class but way more complex than three point perspective. Pythagorean Theory and The Golden Section are the building blocks of Renaissance perspective. In oil painting all of these compositional techniques have been used for centuries. There are “harmonic points” on a canvas that can be used like one would use harmony in music. These points can be measured. In comics, these ideas are often used WITHIN the borders of each panel but the overall design of the page is often muddy and bottlenecked and this undercuts the power of the image inside the panel borders. The whole structure of the spread should be “in key” with the images. And, for the page or the whole two page spread (all comics are read as two page spreads when they are in a book) to “sing”, to really be clear, the structure has to be “open”, and have a symmetry that is dynamic as opposed to static. Again, it’s like Fractals. I’m writing a book on it for Picturebox. People go nuts, in a good way, when I show them how simple it is to do. It’s like comics are just figuring out certain approaches that Painting and Architecture have understood for centuries. It’s fun stuff, and I wished someone would have hepped me to it years ago. But, honestly, people just look right past it. Who needs to learn perspective when a digital camera and a illustrator program will do it all for you?

HALP!

* Monster mash: Stacie Ponder reviews The Mist and CRwM reviews The Cave.

* Why does Zack Snyder hate gigantic telepathic exploding squids?

How far is too far? At what point does a horror movie cease to be entertainingly disturbing and become just plain unpleasant and unenjoyable? I wondered this going into Alexandre Bustillo & Julien Maury’s Inside/À l’Intérieur, given that what little I knew about it was that it was a movie about some nut or nuts menacing a pregnant woman. The bloody scissors on the DVD itself, moreover, indicated it would be a movie about someone’s attempt to cut the baby out of the pregnant woman’s stomach. This is all, needless to say, rather difficult material to “enjoy,” but you know me, I’ve probably seen worse. Did I mention we had a miscarriage a couple months ago? God help me I actually thought I’d enjoy the movie more because of that. It’s a trauma I’m close to, and I come to horror for the trauma.

Anyway, given the air of menace that surrounded the very idea of the film for me–reminiscent of Hostel in that regard–I knew I’d be in for a rough evening, but like I said, that’s what I’m here for. And early on the movie didn’t disappoint. I mean, hey, it starts with a fetuscam view of a fatal car accident in which the pregnant star’s husband is killed. Then there’s some obligatory business at the hospital and with her mother and her editor (she’s a photojournalist) to show that she’s lost the lust for life. Then she goes home and someone starts menacing her, sure enough. There are the expected homages as one would find in pretty much any indie-ish horror movie these days–Aliens, Hellraiser, The Descent, Halloween. There’s the expected business with threatening the pregnant woman’s belly with sharp objects. It’s all pretty tense and engaging. Then it gets a little silly when some unexpected guests arrive, and things go down in sort of the most pat and/or over-the-top ways possible, but hey, lots of horror movies have missteps here and there. The gore is unflinching and, for the most part, not splattery but genuinely brutal; the score is creative and impressive, clearly building on John Carpenter but doing its own unexpected things with some frequency. Like all great kill-or-be-killed thrillers it seeds little clues here and there as to what will happen later in the film, and keeps you guessing as to which guns on the mantel will go off and which won’t. It makes you wonder what the killer’s connection to our heroine is and why she’s so nuts, and whether her vague ethnicity has something to do with the banlieu riots constantly being referenced by the news reports and the editor character or whether that’s just a headfake. In other words, it’s disturbing but in a good way.

Then the killer grabs the heroine’s cat.

Sorry, folks, that’s all she wrote for me! I’m not trying to make any kind of grand sweeping political statement about what’s okay to show in movies and what’s not. In the past I’ve enjoyed a decent number of movies in which pretty rotten things happen to animals–usually at the hands/paws/claws/teeth of other animals/dinosaurs/xenomorphs/whatever, but certainly not always, right, Christofuh and Cosette?–and I expect it can and will happen again. But no, no thanks, not for me, not in this movie, not when the point of the movie truly is to be maximally brutal and unpleasant about everything it touches. I mean, on one level it just reduces everything to a kind of bloody white noise, like an attempt to push every button and it all cancels each other out–you could object to it that way. On another level it seems like a bit of a gimmick, like “hey, this lady’s really awful, look, she’ll kill an innocent cat, what a psycho, look out for your unborn baby there, heroine!”, like cheesy. On still another level it was predictable in that gun-on-the-mantel way–I swear to god, the second the pregnant lady opened the door to her house and the little black cat meowed a greeting to her I said to myself “Oh Christ, they better not hurt the goddamn cat.”

You can object on all those levels. Maybe I object to it on all those levels! But really the only level I object to it on that matters is that I just don’t enjoy watching movies about people killing cats. Maybe, maybe if I felt like the movie was up to more than just trying to be really scary and brutal, maybe. I think there are horror movies that have Something To Say, and not just in the American Nightmare/George A. Romero way, I mean something to say about life, something to say about the real horror of life, the horror that strikes you at 1 in the morning or 1 in the afternoon and you look at the world and you imagine your life stretching in front of you like a gray ribbon into the future and all around you and all in front of you are death death death, that horror, I think there are horror movies that have Something To Say about that. And to those movies, I say, if you wanna kill a cat, I’m probably okay with it. I think Inside is a movie about how scary it is when psychos chase pregnant ladies with scissors, and I don’t want to watch them kill the cat. I turned it off without finishing it, without letting them finish, and I’m gonna send it back to Netflix and in my head, the cat’s still alive, Schrödinger be damned, the cat’s still alive.

What order should I read all of the Hellboy and BPRD books in? I’ve been wondering about the answer to this question for a while. Fortunately I’ve read them all already, most of them in the order they were released–as should you if you enjoy genre comics at all, because all of them really are that good, whether Mignola’s drawing them or not at this point–so it hasn’t been that pressing a problem for me. However, I now have a nice empty bookshelf with all the Mignolaverse books’ name on it, and I really wanted to shelve them all in proper order. After all, they are meant to be part of one massive overarching storyline and should probably be treated as such. And with character-specific collections starring Abe Sapien and Lobster Johnson now joining in, it’s getting more and more complicated to keep everything straight. However, I’ve googled high and low for a proper reading-order list and come up empty.

So, I did some digging around on the official, if sporadically updated, Hellboy site and on Amazon.com’s Mike Mignola search-results page, and I think I’ve nailed down the order in which to read everything that’s been released in trade paperback so far.

Hellboy Vol. 1: Seed of Destruction

BPRD Vol. 9: 1946

I think this will be the next release, by the way.

BPRD Vol. 10: The Warning

I left off Hellboy Junior, since that’s kinda obviously not canon unless you’re feeling extremely generous (I also left out crossovers and cameos for the same reason), but it would go between Weird Tales Vol. 1 and Soul of Venice if you’re feeling like a completist.

So there you have it! The reading order for all of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy universe books. My public service of the day!

Beyonce would like to play Wonder Woman

BREAKING: Sean T. Collins would like Beyonce to play Wonder Woman

“I want to do a superhero movie and what would be better than Wonder Woman?” she asked the newspaper. “It would be great. And it would be a very bold choice. A black Wonder Woman would be a powerful thing. It’s time for that, right?”

Golly, is it ever!

“I would definitely have to keep it right for that costume.”

I have faith in her ability to do so, don’t you?

* You might recall that back when Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely’s All Star Superman #12 came out, I found myself slightly underwhelmed. You might also recall me mentioning that a (the) big reason for this was that the comic’s final splash page–Leo Quintum unveiling the big 2perman logo–didn’t click with me on an emotional level the way that the closing splash pages of The Filth, Seven Soldiers, and (iirc, which I may not ) New X-Men did. So I was rather pleased with myself to discover this nugget in Zack Smith’s Tim Callahan-assisted epic 10-part interview with Grant Morrison about the series:

What he’s doing at the end of the story should, for all its gee–whiz futurity, feel slightly ambiguous, slightly fake, slightly “Hollywood.” Yes, he’s fulfilling Superman’s wishes by cloning an heir to Superman and Lois and inaugurating a Superman dynasty that will last until the end of time – but he’s also commodifying Superman, figuring out how it’s done, turning him into a brand, a franchise, a bigger–and–better “revamp,” the ultimate coming attraction, fresher than fresh, newer than new but familiar too. Quintum has figured out the “formula” for Superman and improved upon it.

[…]

In one way, Quintum could be seen to represent the creative team, simultaneously re–empowering a pure myth with the honest fire of Art…while at the same time shooting a jolt of juice through a concept that sells more “S” logo underpants and towels than it does comic books. All tastes catered!

I’m glad to see that that final image is intended to be ambiguous; I’d hate to be one of those guys who “doesn’t get” Grant Morrison all of a sudden, particularly if this is due to some sort of innate failure on my part to cotton to his relentless pop-positivity, a sensibility I greatly appreciate even though I share it infrequently at best. Anyhoo, need I even say “read the whole interview”?

* That catch-all link comes courtesy of The Gold in Us, Will Survive in You, a new blog dedicated to chronicling the continuity of Grant Morrison’s DC comics with the revelatory enthusiasm of the superfan. So far the pseudonymous blogger Zibarro has focused on connections between All Star Superman and DC One Million such as the Chronovore, the Prime Superman, and Solaris the Tyrant Sun. This should be a lot of fun to follow.

* Speaking of enthusiasm: Have you ever heard me tell my comic-book origin story, about how when I was in college I more or less stopped reading comics, except for stuff I’d borrow or get recaps of from my roommate, who eventually turned me on to The ACME Novelty Library and Savage Dragon. That roommate’s name was Josiah Leighton, and he now has a blog called Consequentialart he uses for a class he’s teaching on comics. I think my favorite thing about it is how it combines really open enthusiasm and awe for the art he’s talking about, a relentless focus on art (layout in particular) as opposed to writing, and razor-sharp little insights into what makes it all tick. Here’s a sample:

When I was in Japan, I had a very long and fascinating conversation with Naoki Urasawa, the creator of Monster, about [Akira creator Katsuhiro] Otomo’s use of his characters’ gaze. Urasawa found this usage, leading the reader across the page from panel to panel, very Western. He cited this as further example that Otomo was affected to the core by European and American comics and film, not just in the superficial trappings of his style (which obviously owes much to Frenchman Jean “Moebius” Giraud.) By contrast, he showed me that most homegrown manga had the character’s eyes always facing out towards the viewer. He attributed this to the filmic style of Yasujiro Ozu, director of Tokyo Story. He said it was Ozu’s belief that the character should not avoid looking at the camera, but rather face it directly. The camera is always the first-person subjective point-of-view, he claimed, and therefore the characters should address it as a means of telling their stories directly to the viewer.

I know, right? Man I’m pleased to introduce the GZA, as he was known to us, to the comics blogosphere. You also might see some previously unreleased stuff that he and I did together in there, who knows.

* And while we’re on the subject of image-making, I think my favorite link of the past few days is this impressively sized gallery of photos from throughout Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

* Here is the trailer for the next Clive Barker-based movie, Book of Blood. The Radiohead remix adds hella production value, I think. Also, how nice is it to see a Barker adaptation retain the original English setting and accents?

* And here’s a promo reel for the next Barker flick, Dread–featuring interview snippets from Barker, director Anthony DiBlasi, and the cast, as well as boobies and some pretty horrifying things involving bleach.

* Meanwhile, I still haven’t seen Midnight Meat Train–I didn’t have it in me to try to OnDemand it the night before the election as originally planned. I know reviews from those I trust have been lukewarm, but Christ, if ever there was a movie I need to see for myself! Meanwhile, just so I can keep it straight in my head, I think the two Films of Blood on the way after Dread are The Madonna and Pig Blood Blues. Even if all of these films turn out kind of dull, I’d rather the horror section at Best Buy be filled with dull churned-out shingle-based horror movies based on great Clive Barker short stories that theoretically could find a new audience through them than dull churned-out shingle-based horror movies based on nothing in particular.

* Looks like George A. Romero’s next …of the Dead flick is, in fact, going to be called …of the Dead. I can get behind that. Please be good.

* I really admire the obvious amount of thought and heart that went into Shaun of the Dead star Simon Pegg’s Guardian-published essay about why zombies should be slow, but I also find it really silly (albeit admittedly so) when it tries to support that assertion on the grounds that fast zombies aren’t “realistic,” and really wrongheaded when it claims that speeding up zombies strips them of metaphorical power. Eve Tushnet, Bruce Baugh, and I beat up on that idea pretty good in a comment thread a while back. (Via Jason Adams.)

* Speaking of Bruce, here he runs down World of Warcraft’s creation myth. Actually, that’s an inaccurate word to describe it because in the game world, these things factually, demonstrably happened–there are Old God corpses lying around to prove it and everything. Anyway, it’s an intriguing, “art of enthusiasm”-style mix of Lovecraft, Greek mythology, and Tolkien.

* If I had to rattle off the names of, I dunno, the 10 people most directly responsible for my life being what it is right now in terms of the prominent role comics play in it, Joe Quesada and Bill Jemas would be on there thanks to their construction of so-called “Nu-Marvel” in the early ’00s. Therefore I’m really enjoying their reunion interview with Jonah Weiland at CBR. Jemas in particular is an interesting case: His ideas and approach really did shake up the company and make superhero comics much, much better on a qualitative level, but then as best as anyone can tell he kind of went a little ego crazy, and he was relatively quickly shuffled aside by his superiors. I think there are similar executive trajectories one can point to that were not brought to an end nearly as early, with the results you’d expect.

* This interview with Dan DiDio offers the first hints of an official confirmation that the art changes and scheduling delays for Final Crisis are due at least in part to tardy scripts from Grant Morrison. God knows I love the Mad Scotsman, but his work does tend to run into these kinds of problems, and the common denominator is, well, him. I’m not even complaining about the lateness (the calvacade of artists, now that I have some beef with from time to time)–it just has long seemed a shame to me that it all got laid at the feet of either the artists or the editors or the executives.

* I’m also excited to read that my friend and former boss Brian Cunningham will be involved via his new editorial capacity at DC in the upcoming Green Lantern (and i think overall DCU) event Blackest Night. If you look back at the past couple of years at DC, a lot of attention was given to Countdown and its countless spinoffs and tie-ins, none of which really merited it; but at the same time, you’ve seen pretty tremendous and momentous work on Green Lantern, Superman, and Batman from Geoff Johns and Grant Morrison. If, after 52, DC had done everything exactly the same–published Countdown, Countdown to Adventure, Countdown to Mystery, Countdown Presents the Search for Ray Palmer, Countdown: Arena, Salvation Run, Amazons Attack et al–but just made the mental and promotional adjustment of declaring Johns’ and Morrison’s main titles and events–Batman, Green Lantern, Action Comics, The Sinestro Corps War, The Resurrection of Ra’s al Ghul–the so-called “spine” of DC’s superhero line instead, I think you’d have a very different landscape to look at right now. Anyway, I think these missteps have badly undercut Final Crisis in terms of fan reception, but clearly the emphasis placed on it and Batman R.I.P. and Superman: New Krypton and Flash: Rebirth and Blackest Night indicate that DC is now aware of where its bread is buttered.

* They’re gonna make a movie out of Paul Pope’s yet-to-be-published cyclopean fight scene graphic novel Battling Boy.

* What can one say about being married to a woman whose first thought upon the election of the new president is “this reminds me of ‘The Battle of Evermore'”?

My favorite song from my favorite album of the trip-hop era is a tribute to Barry White, which I didn’t realize for a long, long time. The point of it is the liberation of dancing, and after a long build-up of groove and falsetto vocals, the keyboards finally kick in, and it’s glorious, and this is what it feels like.

Gus Gus – Barry

Oh Barry, you should have danced with me

All night long, yeah

All night long

‘Cause you’ve got so much to give