After a bang-up start inspired by the League of Tana Tea Drinkers’ roundtable on the subject, CRwM of And Now the Screaming Starts’ has posted two more entries in his “A Defense of Torture Porn” series, and frankly I’m so knocked out by them I don’t know where to begin other than by saying “go read them from start to finish.”

First, he(? just assuming here) advances a five-part definition of the subgenre, calling attention not just to “there’s torture in them” a la my own attempt at playing Webster, but also characterizing their emotional tone, visual style, sociopolitical approach, construction of suspense through paranoia and helplessness, and absence of supernatural actors.

Next, he counters the frequently leveled assertion that torture porn is inherently inartful, crass, and exploitative by rebutting the idea that it’s a subgenre of dreary realism as opposed to the horrifying heights reached by supernatural (or “High”) horror. It’s really so marvelously constructed that you should read it yourself, but just let me call out this passage:

First, let me defend my claim that torture porn is fantasy by focusing on the visual style that has become torture porn’s most distinctive trait. The look of torture porn is not realistic, but hyper-realistic. It is a highly artificial approach that takes the trappings of realism and blows them all out of proportion. The result is a lavish, over-stuffed look – most often taking an archetypal image and stuffing it to the breaking point. This is most apparent in the dungeon settings of the two Hostel flicks and the bathroom set of the first Saw. Both sets are not just dirty, but absolutely coated in grime and slime. One imagines you could get tetanus of the eyeball just from looking at them. But neither represents what (sadly) we know torture looks like. Real torture, when governments undertake it, is conducted not in sewers, but in relatively orderly places that look disconcertingly like hospitals. Why leave a filthy crime scene behind? Mud and crud tends to trap potential clues like hair, foot and fingerprints, and so on. The answer, of course, is that these aren’t “real.” They visually represent the feelings the idea of torture evokes. Men in rubber aprons, faces hid behind monstrous brass and steel facemasks, power tools inexplicably left to rust (despite the fact that they are supposedly the property of an elite club of super rich people) – it all suggests the moral, spiritual, ethical decay of what’s happening. The whole visual approach adopted by Roth and Wan is not realistic some much as it represents the typical strategies of film realism – a little grime here, some busted glass there – and invests it with symbolic purpose. The very fabric of their films’ worlds reflects the mental state and fate of their characters.

Man oh man. Read also for his (accurate) attribution of the look of torture porn to David Fincher’s Se7en, his analysis of the significance of that miscellaneous torture device on the cover of the DVD for Hostel, and much, much more.

What do I make of all this? Well, it’s a much more effective “defense” of torture porn than my own. But to be fair to me, I wasn’t defending the genre, just the term. What CRwM is doing is making the case that the genre’s defining characteristics have the potential for great horror art. My only concern is that in so doing, he perhaps allowed himself to fiddle with his designation and delineation of those defining characteristics so as to reach that conclusion.

Maybe it’s possible that the only torture porn movies are the Hostel and Saw franchises, as he argues. But in a way, what he’s doing is the same kind of definitional sleight-of-hand that so irks me when mainstream critics do the “If It’s a Horror Movie and It’s Good, It Must Be Transcending the Genre” rag–in other words, they define the genre so as to preclude the possibility of good art, so that when good art comes along it’s not part of the genre, it’s something else. You’ve seen this done with “torture porn”-as-pejorative, by the way; CRwM is, in a way, offering the flipside of that. Now, he isn’t saying that torture porn movies are good, just that they can be good–but he’s doing so by reducing the definition to being applicable only to a very, very narrow set of films, which to me is kind of a cheat. If “torture porn” can’t also be used to describe Audition, Turistas, The Passion of the Christ and so on, what good is it? Don’t we on some level instinctively understand that the goals of those films, in terms of the torture content, is largely the same? Would we settle on (or for) a definition of “slasher” that only included Halloween and Sleepaway Camp? Whatever you might say about my definition of torture porn, I think it’s a lot more useful–it’s basically just a film in which the primary fear engine is the immobilization and brutalization of somebody. To me at least, the conceptual richness of those two “-ization”s gives you all the freedom you need to make a more elaborate case for the genre’s inherent interest.

This sort of brings me around (finally!) to Curt Purcell’s provocative response to my monumental horror-image theory/essay. What sticks in Curt’s craw about it is how far I swing the pendulum in the opposite direction of violence and gore in terms of trying to get at the images that “define” horror. Might not seeing ostentatious violence as a sort of Freudian doubling of the monumental horror-image–the actualization of such an image’s potentiality, the yang unconsciously called to mind by the yin–enable us to construct a Grand Unified Theory of Horror?

The answer: yes, it might. But I fear that the drive to do so stems from me overstating my case in my original essay. That essay’s genesis was pretty simple: Over the years I discovered that certain types of images–the Shining twins, the Wicker Man–scared me more than anything else in horror movies. But when I turned to the literature to see what had been said about it, the answer was, basically, nothing. Most horror scholarship focused on gender- and sexuality-based explorations of horror violence and horror monsters, rather than these kinds of images. So I went about cobbling together an explanation for how and why such images did what they did. Again, they were, to me, the scariest images to be found in horror; meanwhile, contra the “transcending the genre” crowd, I believed that a genre should be defined by its best works–in this case, its scariest. Hence, calling the monumental horror-image the “definitive” horror-image, heavily implying if not stating outright that this is as opposed to the violence and gore.

BUT! It’s that “as opposed to” that gets me in trouble. Never did I intend my praise of the monumental horror-image to mean that other kinds of horror images should be excluded, that they didn’t count, that they couldn’t also be super super scary or creative or effective or disturbing or Art with a capital A. The gore and violence that Curt attempts to loop into an expanded conception of what makes horror imagery tick is perfectly valid and requires no such expanded conception, at least as far as I’m concerned, because I was trying to define a very precise set of images, not the genre overall. Those images work best for me for (I think) the reasons described in the essay, but they’re not the only images that work, for me or for anybody else, and I have no ambitions to state otherwise. Similarly, there may be torture porn films that work best, or even just embody certain principles the best, but ironically the less ambitious definition covers more ground and is therefore more useful, I think.

* Steven Wintle has posted the farewell edition of The Horror Roundtable. I stole my entry from My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult’s Buzz McCoy’s contribution to the liner notes of the WaxTrax! box set, but my favorite valedictory has to be T Van, who drops the greatest, and most underutilized, Seinfeld quote of all time.

* Apparently Battlestar Galactica‘s ratings are up, but what really struck me about the Hollywood Reporter article stating as much was this passage about the show’s current direction:

The numbers are also surprising since “Battlestar” has as many fans frustrated with the current season as enthralled. The storylines have turned the show’s longtime shades-of-gray character morality into a muddy and often indecipherable quagmire of interlocking mythology, with a slew of formerly down-to-earth human and cylon characters elevated to quasi-deities pondering their higher purpose.

I don’t think it’s all that indecipherable–I don’t find Lost hard to follow either–but other than that, yeah, that’s kind of a downer, isn’t it? Not surprisingly, the focus on mythology seems to have completely energized various BSG fans of my acquaintance who made the transition over to the show via Netflix’d DVDs after hearing “Hey, you like Lost? You’ll like BSG too!” The current Battlestar storyline seems tailor-made to fan the guessing-game flames that mark Lost‘s most ardent fans. (Via Whitney Matheson.)

* I’m fond of saying I didn’t read comics as a kid, and this is basically true. However, around the time that I saw Batman and read The Dark Knight Returns, I was massively into Marvel trading cards. In one of the all-time great acts of cluefulness, my buddy Ryan Penagos at Marvel.com has posted every single Marvel Universe Series I trading card. I found this via Gary Wintle, who writes that he took the cards so seriously, he thought the “joke” cards were canonical. I’d imagine there are a lot of us out there whose ideas of heroic fantasy were shaped in a fairly fundamental way by these cards.

* Quentin Tarantino’s gonna shoot and complete his long-mooted World War II epic Inglorious Bastards in time to premiere it at Cannes next year? I’ll see it when I believe it. (Via AICN.)

* Behold, Watchmen‘s Minutemen! Folks, this is why they didn’t give the modern-day superheroes spandex costumes. (Via AICN again.)

* Speaking of Watchmen, you know the pirate story Tales of the Black Freighter from the comic? A direct-to-DVD animated adaptation by Zack Snyder and company will come out days before the Watchmen theatrical release. Clever. (Via SciFi Wire.)

* Also at SciFi Wire, Incredible Hulk director Louis Leterrier says his movie is both a reboot of and sequel to Ang Lee’s Hulk film (I guess he does, it’s not a direct quote), sources the movie’s inspiration to the ’70s TV series and the Jeph Loeb/Tim Sale graphic novel Hulk: Gray, and promises you won’t have to go 40 minutes into the movie to see the Hulk for the first time.

* Comic Book Resources has a preview of the latest Mike Mignola/John Arcudi-scripted B.P.R.D. miniseries, War on Frogs. The B.P.R.D. banner is basically the best ongoing superhero comic on the stands for the past three years or so–better than Hellboy proper, if you ask me. Bonus points for old-school artist Herb Trimpe’s Guy Davis impersonation.

* My experience with actor-director Sydney Pollack is basically limited to his role as Ziegler in Eyes Wide Shut and his black-comic bluebeard cameo in The Sopranos. That being said, I loved Matt Zoller Seitz’s two-paragraph comment-thread obit, not just as a reminder of how great a film writer Seitz is, but for the way it effortlessly implies an ocean of interesting work beneath the surface of every “So-and-So Dead at 73” headline.

* Go, look: New Anders Nilsen comics.

* Go, read (and disagree vehemently at least twice): Tom Spurgeon on this summer’s blockbuster movies.

* The Vault of Horror’s B-Sol reviews Inside, the French horror film I’m clearly the last person in the horror blogosphere to see.

* The humor of recognition: Ten Arcs That Most Superheroes Must Endure Even Though Almost None of Them Should. (Via Matthew Perpetua.)

* Finally, the owls are not what they seem.

* The next best thing to being there: Tom Spurgeon has posted his utterly epic annual guide to attending the San Diego Comic-Con. Updated and hilarious, it will really, really make you wish you could go.

* A different kind of guide: Cryptomundo’s Loren Coleman has complete coverage of a controversial recent Bigfoot-expert conference at which analyst M.K. Davis more or less asserted that the specimen seen in the famous Patterson-Gimlin footage is a) human b) wearing a braid c) the victim of a gunshot to the leg that was inflicted by one of the filmmakers. Yes, seriously.

* B-Sol at Vault of Horror takes a look at the modern zombie movie’s famine years, the 1990s.

* At her blog, actress/eccentrix Bai Ling reviews Andrew Lloyd Weber’s The Phantom of the Opera. Yes, seriously.

* Curt Purcell takes a whack at the wack notion that the only really scary fiction is about stuff that can actually happen, preparing to argue why supernatural horror is the sine qua non of the genre. The post is also a slight walk-back from his position regarding the overvaluing of fear among horror fans–worth a read if you’ve been following Curt’s thoughts on that matter.

* By the way, I owe Curt a response to his post on my “monumental horror-image” theory.

* Go, look: Mat Brinkman art at the Stairwell Gallery (via Monster Brains.)

* Guillermo Del Toro and Peter Jackson did an online Q&A about the two upcoming Hobbit movies, and the transcript is here. (Via AICN.) Kristin Thompson runs down some of the highlights–John Howe, Alan Lee, Howard Shore, Andy Serkis, and Ian McKellen are all confirmed for both films, for example–but for my money the most interesting thing (not necessarily good, just interesting) is Del Toro’s comments regarding supplementing the Weta design and effects teams with his own staff.

* B-Sol at Vault of Horror says that The Strangers‘ tendentious “inspired by a true story” claims indicate a studio with something to hide, but isn’t that just the exact same hyperbole used to promote The Texas Chain Saw Massacre back in the day. For me it has more to do with the film’s deliberately old-school promotional campaign rather than trying to pull the wool over people’s eyes (though based on a conversation with my non-horror-fan little sister about the movie, that’s happening too).

* AICN has links to some fun clips from The Incredible Hulk. Looks like a good time to me.

* Well now, here’s a treat: A very, very entertaining interview with Michael Emerson, aka Ben from Lost, by the Daytona Beach News-Journal‘s Tom Iacuzio. It’s full of both spoilers and speculation, so be careful, but the adorable thing is that the speculation comes from Emerson himself rather than the interviewer! Emerson also has some interesting things to say about Deadwood and Battlestar Galactica. And then there’s this wonderful little exchange:

What kind of reaction do you get from fans on the street?

Mostly people react to me with pleasure but in general it’s a kind of guarded pleasure. They are happy to see this face and voice that they know belongs to a character that they enjoy but part of them can’t fully disassociate me from the part I play. So they worry a little bit that I might actually be somewhat dangerous.

Do you ever just shoot them that patented Ben stare?

(pause) I don’t even know what you’re talking about.

Read the whole thing. (Via The Tail Section.)

* Buncha Marvel movie news that has me kind of excited. First, there’s a film adaptation of Runaways on the way, with a screenplay by series writer and Lost ass-kicker Brian K. Vaughan himself. (Via JK Parkin.) Second, displaying an admirable level of cluefulness, Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige sez the upcoming movie versions of Captain America and Thor will take place during World War II (entirely) and in Asgard (partially) respectively. Sweet.

* Artist Robert Burden is selling prints of his awesomely over-the-top portraits of action figures! (Via Uncrate.)

* You’ll never not be entertained while reading Rick Marshall talk about Wizard.

* CRwM of And Now the Screaming Starts has some really interesting things to say about torture porn, specifically regarding how the audience is implicated by the events taking place, and whether we who debate the term agree at all on what we’re referring to when we use it. Since a chunk of it is based on an interpretation of my definition of torture porn, I respond and defend myself here.

* Finally, Kali Ma!

My friend Kiel Phegley was let go by my former employer Wizard yesterday. This stinks, not just because Kiel is a terrific person and a very, very good writer who you’d think they’d bend over backwards to hang onto, but also because it reduces to just David Paggi a cadre of indie-friendly staffers that as recently as last September included Dave, Kiel, myself, Rick Marshall, Brian Warmoth, and Rickey Purdin.

Anyway, Kiel would be a great hire, were I some sort of comics-related entity looking to find one.

* Much anticipated by me Clive Barker adaptation The Midnight Meat Train is now headed for a July 11 release, up against Guillermo Del Toro’s sequel to his own egregious Hellboy. Bloody Disgusting’s report hints that the film may have a super-limited release.

* In a post about an unrelated project by Del Toro, Variety reports that Ian McKellen, Andy Serkis, and Viggo Mortensen have all been approached to reprise their Lord of the Rings roles in the Hobbit movies. This appears to indicate that Aragorn’s stealth adventures in Rohan, Gondor and the like will play a role in that not-as-mysterious-as-everyone’s-making-it-out-to-be second film. Kristin Thompson caught it and offers further thoughts.

* Say it ain’t so! Strange Ink’s Sean is officially hanging up his blogging spurs. Bad news for fans of strange pop-culture ephemera and/or naked ladies. (Why choose?)

* There’s an awful lot to disagree with in Ted Pigeon’s essay on Frank Darabont’s adaptation of Stephen King’s The Mist.”Sociopolitical policies” are not the “most important” aspect of adapting this story, nor is it the case that “no single image in The Mist is more frightening than the sharp blade grasped on one end by human hands plunging into the stomach of a fellow man.” Indeed I think the film’s hamfisted focus on the former and misplaced belief in the latter is part of what hurt it in the end. Face it, people like The Mist (or at least this person does) because it features giant, ugly, disturbingly unique monsters plucking people out of a grocery store and eating them, not because of anything the character of Mrs. Carmody tells us about religious fundamentalism; and to the extent that the opposite might be true, the movie version has a spotty record at best with treating such elements with the deftness they require. That being said I’m happy to have found Pigeon’s essay (courtesy of The House Next Door’s Keith Uhlich), because it’s clear he’s actually taking the film seriously on its own terms rather than as a tee of which to smack the wiffle ball of “reflectionist” pontificating. I look forward to browsing through the reviews listed in his sidebar.

* Scrubs: The New Class? No thank you. (Via Whitney Matheson.)

* Sylvester Stallone says there may be a director’s cut DVD release of Rambo down the pike, which would restore the film’s original title, John Rambo. That’s the newsworthy(ish) part of AICN’s story, but perhaps more exciting is their reposting of a YouTube clip comprising the climax of Rambo in its entirety–the most insanely violent five minutes of film you will ever see. I’m serious, this thing is completely…wow, words are literally failing me. Now I DO NOT RECOMMEND WATCHING THIS IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE WHOLE MOVIE FIRST. It’s a very unusually structured movie that kind of explodes into this climactic sequence, and seeing it by itself before you’ve seen the rest of the movie will really dilute one of the most unique action-movie-watching experiences you’re likely to have. So be warned. But if you have seen the movie, this is heaven.

* While I enjoyed shopping at his enormous, perennial San Diego Comic Con booth as much as anyone, I never met nor knew much about late comics retailer Rory Root. Tom Spurgeon’s thoughtful obituary (accompanied by testimonials and remembrances from several industry figures) gave me a much clearer picture of what made Root a likable, interesting, and important figure.

* Here’s your first look at Viggo Mortensen in the upcoming Oscar-bait film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road (via Shock Till You Drop:

* Here’s another red-band trailer for The Happening. Visual spoiler warning duly noted. (Again via STYD.)

* It’s a big day for remakes of ’80s sci-fi/fantasy cult classics with kick-ass Queen theme songs, as the Hollywood Reporter, uh, reports that remakes are afoot for both Flash Gordon and Highlander–the latter from the writers of Iron Man.

* B-Sol at The Vault of Horror draws our attention to a casting call for The King’s Stilettos, a making-of docudrama about The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Neat! Here’s their website.

* Now here’s an odd one: Guest posting at Carnacki’s The Mystery of the Haunted Vampire, Arbogast of Arbogast on Film offers an interpretation of Wes Craven’s ultraviolent Virgin Spring riff The Last House on the Left as a modern-day blood libel, pointing out how various elements of the film can be seen as (probably unintentional) echoes of anti-Semitic propaganda. Really fascinating stuff.

* And speaking of both Carnacki and Arbogast, as well as many more of your favorite horror bloggers, I’ve been inducted into the League of Tana Tea Drinkers, an elite cadre of horror-blogging types. I’ve celebrated by perusing their recent roundtable of mini-essays on torture porn, which contains viewpoints both pro and con–and both insightful and retrograde (on both sides!). For example, I was sort of shocked by T Van’s dismissal of the use of torture on Battlestar Galactica as “ridiculous” simply because some of the characters are involved are “fucking robots”–this, of course, pretty much invalidates any fantastical genre as a legitimate mode of discussing important ideas. On the other hand, while I still disagree with Curt Purcell’s assertion that fear is overvalued as a criterion for horror, I find his theory fascinating and well constructed. And then there’s a lot of longing for the good old days of more wholesome fare like the Friday the 13th movies, which seems a bit like grown-ups complaining about those crazy kids and their rock and roll to me. A few writers make the connection between torture-porn horror and torture in non-horror films–including whoever wrote the introduction, which insightfully mentioned the likes of Irreversible, The Passion of the Christ, and BSG–but few of them have seen enough of the current torture-porn wave to feel confident enough to tease that connection into a thesis of any kind.

As I’ve discussed before, I think torture porn is a perfectly fine phrase that horror fans are using almost exclusively pejoratively, in ways they didn’t do with other seemingly dismissive terms like “grindhouse,” “exploitation,” or “slasher.” So that’s problem one: these discussions lump the “good” torture porn movies (Hostel, Wolf Creek) in with the bad (Hostel Part II, the Saw sequels). Problem two is this weirdly reactionary response to torture in horror, dismissing its appreciative viewers as mindless gorehounds in ways that these critics would not tolerate for other more “traditionally” gory horror movies, while simultaneously ignoring the fact that torture porn is at least as connected to Deliverance and the climax of Nineteen Eighty-Four as it is to Halloween, at least if it’s done right.

Anyway, enough rambling from me.

* I saw Iron Man and Speed Racer and then I reviewed them both!

* My friend David Paggi, one of the people at Wizard who does know who the other two guys are but alas was not in a position to stop one of the ones who doesn’t, interviews Fantagraphics’ Eric Reynolds about the company’s transition to Diamond as their direct market distributor.

* Kristin Thompson reads some tea leaves to determine that the Hobbit movies will be written by Lord of the Rings masterminds Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh (though she doesn’t mention their cowriter, Philipa Boyens).

* A trio of The House Next Door’s critics–Keith Uhlich, The Odienator, and Matthew Zoller Seitz (hopefully reports of his retirement from criticism have been greatly exaggerated!)–take on the original Indiana Jones trilogy. For my money Uhlich overwrites his piece on Last Crusade into incoherence, but Seitz is predictably compelling on the “Anything Goes” nature of Temple of Doom while Odienator nails the everything-in-its-right-place narrative economy of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

* The great young cartoonist Kevin Huizenga announces sales for several of his comics and some of his original art.

* My friend Jesse Thompson runs down the 10 Worst Album Covers by Comic Artists at Topless Robot. I think the Meat Loaf one’s worth every penny of that 45 large, actually.

* Comics wonk and commentator for hire Douglas Wolk compares the Barack Obama of those crazy email forwards your vaguely racist relatives send you to the evil mirror-image denizens of Earth-3. (Via Andrew Sullivan.)

* Tom Spurgeon reviews Grant Morrison, Geoff Johns et al’s DC Universe #0, a comic which I liked but which to no one’s surprise Tom hated. I do see what he’s getting at, though. Also, I appear to have forgotten the meaning of the word “insouciance.”

* Also on the Spurge beat, I’ve been very grumpy lately so I liked this paragraph from Tom’s post on the dire financial straits of ailing artist Gene Colan and what that portends for the industry given its history:

Comics operates under the shadow of an original sin of exploitation where caretakers and money men cash in from obliquely “managing” a property during a single quarter for greater reward than the original creator and their family might see in a lifetime. It’s an industry where elements of this kind of practice continue in the present day through, say, brutally unfair secondary rights clauses in standard contracts and no one want to talk about it because it’s unpleasant and violates some seemingly agreed-upon right that every creator must be allowed to sign a bad contract if they want or don’t know better or can talk themselves into it being for the greater good. It’s a business where some of its most devout patrons can recast what should be simple matters of creators rights and economic justice into issues of dishonor and greed based on the concern of whether or not their corporate branded fantasy fix will continue without interruption. All of this is supported by a culture of indulgence, and denial, and status based on establishing a life for oneself behind the “staff only” door without ever asking the question of whether or not that’s a life worth leading.

* But so as not to leave you on a down note, this comment from Whitney Matheson’s weekly “Best of the Lost comment thread” post put a smile on my nerdy face:

Remember in the Nikki & Paolo episode when in her flashback she was an actress in a television show and was told that they were going to reveal a major villain at the end of her show’s fourth season? It’s the end of Lost‘s fourth season.

As my passive-aggressively brief review of Iron Man the other day may have indicated, I’ve about had my fill of talking about superhero movies, because I increasingly find discussion of these films (if not the films themselves) to be nothing more than acts of self-validation by nerds seeking to wash away the sins of their insular, socially disreputable hobby in the cleansing waters of Big Money and Beautiful People. Particularly insofar as these movies tend to be seen as “better” the more “seriously” they treat their subjects I have less than no use for the prevailing inter-nerd critical discourse on them and resent feeling obligated to write about them simply because they are nerd-oriented product and I am a nerd.

That said, it’s nice to see people recognizing that what makes Iron Man a good movie was that it’s fun rather than some hamfisted attempt at constructing modern myths. To me it’s fun in a fairly conventional way. It’s well-acted–Terrence Howard’s drunken explanation of why he’s proud to be an airman is one of the best character moments I’ve seen at the movies all year, and I saw There Will Be Blood at the movies this year; meanwhile, like everyone else says, I’d go see a Robert Downey Jr./Tony Stark movie even without the superhero armor. The action set pieces are exciting and the wish fulfillment is pretty kick-ass because it acknowledges problems before overcoming them–from “the icing problem” to that unbelievable sequence where Iron Man’s armor automatically targets only the terrorists in a human-shield situation). The dialogue is funny–it’s kind of like a whole movie constructed of director Jon Favreau’s Foggy Nelson scenes from Daredevil.

I suppose most importantly, every single thing they do with the Iron Man concept should make the writers of his comics for the past few years hang their heads in shame. “He’s just been a guy in a suit of armor for decades, we have to bring him into the 21st century by giving him a technoorganic virus and making him see through satellites and talk about the transformative power of cellphone technology.” Fuck you! “He’s a futurist and a surveillance-state metaphor and he’s going to beat up the World War II hero and dick over Spider-Man because of The War On Terror or something.” Fuck you too! Folks, there is absolutely nothing wrong with the idea of a rich playboy genius who builds a suit of armor in which to fuck bad guys up. If you think that there is, there’s something wrong with you, and this movie proves it. God bless it for that.

Anyway as I said it’s a fun movie and I’m certainly glad I saw it; it’s in my top tier of superhero movies. But also as I said it’s fun in a fairly conventional way. There’s really nothing in it that subverts the constraints of mainstream movie making–certainly nothing like Jack Nicholson’s weirder-the-more-I-think-about-it gay-pimp-dadaist-vaudeville Joker and Anton Furst’s art direction in Tim Burton’s first Batman movie, or even the outsized romance-violence-angst of the much maligned Daredevil and Spider-Man 3. (The closest it comes is the hilarious mechanized voices of Jeff Bridges and RDJ during the climactic fight scene.) To me there’s something a little depressing about superhero art that strips away the total fucking bizarreness of your average superhero comic, your DC Universe #0’s and what-have-you–that bizarreness is the only thing keeping art as incredibly corporate as American mainstream superheroes from slipping into the analysis-defying mercenary dreariness of “The New Mainstream” and that sort of entertainment-product. Iron Man is too sharp and too buoyant for that, fortunately.

Speed Racer, meanwhile…I really don’t get the critical reaction to it. For starters it didn’t feel too long to me. I actually got antsier during Iron Man. The race/drama/race/drama/race/drama structure felt pretty easygoing to me. Nor did I feel bludgeoned to death by its relentless brightness and fastness. I didn’t feel bludgeoned at all! Again, that up-and-down structure kept it from being relentless in the first place. And I certainly don’t get the comparison of the crowd scenes to Nazi propaganda. It’s not even a “hmm, I can see that” award ceremony at the end of Star Wars type situation–that shit is simply not there. The idea that it’s one of the worst movies ever? Completely baffling.

I thought it was beautiful to look at, and frequently funny–especially when Spritle and Chim-Chim were around (yes, that’s right!). I thought Emile Hirsch was a real disappointment, with that doughy expressionless face and mumbly voice and beady eyes that marks the leading man in this the Tobey Maguire Age, but everybody else was pretty fabulous. Matthew Fox’s clipped inflection was a scream, John Goodman (completing the takeover of this summer’s popcorn movies by Big Lebowski alums started by Bridges in Iron Man) was like every lovable uncle you’ve ever had. Man oh man, Christina Ricci, arch your eyebrow my way! And I’d totally buy Susan Sarandon’s pancake recipe, youknowwhatI’msayin’??? I even liked Bad Guy Inexplicably Not Played By Tim Curry, despite the fact that he was inexplicably not played by Tim Curry. I did wish that the visuals allowed for more weight to be given to the cars so that we could truly feel their velocity–I think the decision to show so much lateral movement and fishtailing during each race interrupted what could have been a really unstoppable display of forward momentum–but the colors and “moves” of the cars (which reminded me of the “styles” of a kung-fu-movie fighter or Immortal Iron Fist Immortal Weapon) made up for it. Overall it seemed like a fan-freaking-tastic movie for kids, like the podrace sequence from The Phantom Menace freed from the shackles of pseudo-realism and allowed to run wild, with the occasional ninja and weird British gangster thrown in.

But again I found myself weighing my enjoyment of the film against my antipathy toward the critical establishment’s discussion of it. What an astounding display of aesthetic conservatism we’ve seen from mainstream reviewers of this film, once again equating technical proficiency with soullessness as they now have done with everything from 300 to Children of Men to No Country for Old Men, and equating video-game influences with arrested adolescence (as if adolescence were a bad thing!), and equating any kind of celebration of skill and proficiency within the film with fascism, and treating the Wachowski Brothers (admittedly not the most sympathetic characters) like angry gods paying back some hero’s hubris. All because this movie is ostentatiously weird, the anti-Iron Man. We need new critics, basically. To start, here’s Jog and Jon Hastings and Ken Lowery and Ken Lowery again. Go!

I saw Iron Man and it was a lot of fun.

* Jog reviews Mike Mignola, Josh Dysart, and Paul Azaceta’s B.P.R.D.: 1946.

* Bruce Baugh reviews George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead.

* B-Sol reviews Jorge Grau’s The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue.

* Sounds like up to three made-for-TV Battlestar Galactica movies (in addition to the 2-hour Caprica pilot) may be in the works. The Chicago Tribune‘s Maureen Ryan says they’ll get made this summer if they’re greenlit, leading AICN’s Hercules to speculate that they’d be prequels to the final half of season four, a la Razor.

* The penultimate Horror Roundtable is up, and it’s about horror works that changed the genre. As our gracious host Steven Wintle puts it, “Ninety-nine weeks of Roundtables; ninety-nine weeks of Sean struggling with the topic and/or answering Hellraiser.” Which one is it this time, dear readers? The answer may surprise you!

* Here’s the red-band trailer for M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening. It spoils some of the ways in which the people who are dying actually die, so be warned. Suffice it to say that the movie looks like it’s gonna earn its R rating. (Via Vault of Horror.)

* Water monsters in the news: Scientists in New Zealand have discovered a new species of jellyfish…already living in an aquarium! (Via Cryptomundo.)

* Finally, The House Next Door’s Sheila O’Malley on the genius of Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski:

It came to Jeff Bridges in a flash: “I must wear jellies when I play The Dude.” I cannot imagine why, I do not know why he made this choice, or where it comes from… who can say where genius lies? All I know is that every time I see that movie, and I watch him galumphing across a parking lot, jellies flapping on the pavement, I know that it is deeply right. It seems so right that it feels as though it must have been a conscious choice from a wardrobe department, or somehow imposed from above. But no. Jeff Bridges thought: “Jellies. I must wear jellies.” And this is why he is my favorite actor.

* Said it once before but it bears repeating: Matt Wiegle and I have a new comic that’s part of Top Shelf’s new webcomics launch Top Shelf 2.0. It’s called “The Real Killers Are Still Out There.”

* While we’re on that subject, I suppose I should say that I’m looking for artists with whom to collaborate on some additional strips. My email’s to the left if you’re interested.

* A woman in Croatia sat dead in front of the TV in her unopened apartment for 42 years after she was reported missing. In thinking about this story and the Stitzl incest case in Austria, it strikes me that the notion that people can go “missing” for decades while being right there among us is particularly horrifying, perhaps because of the way it implicates the rest of us for our failure to find the disappeared. (Via Jim Treacher.)

* Mary Elizabeth Winstead has been cast as Ramona Flowers in Edgar Wright’s upcoming adaptation of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim series. Her saying “he likes to watch me pee” in the second half of Death Proof was easily my favorite thing from that segment of that film.

* Young John Stanley turns out to have been a bit of a hot piece of ass.

* I had forgotten all about the Nintendo game Super Dodgeball until Topless Robot pointed me in the direction of this free downloadable album of remixes and reinterpretations of the game’s multi-ethnic music. You could throw the dodgeball so hard it killed people, man!

* Finally, your video of the day is “Doot Doot” by Freur. Even back then, the future Underworld had something, and I don’t just mean “Brian Eno’s wardrobe.” Listen to how effortlessly it glides into “epic.”

Today Top Shelf launched its new webcomics initiative Top Shelf 2.0, and among the strips they posted is a collaboration between myself and Matt Wiegle entitled “The Real Killers Are Still Out There.” I hope you enjoy it.