The other day I noted the absence of the lauded-to-the-heavens No Country for Old Men from many a year-end best-of list, a backlash seemingly in full effect. On a related note, There Will Be Blood tops a lot of them and is on many more. Now, over the past couple of months it was tough to find a critic capable of mentioning one of those movies without mentioning the other in the same breath, if only to say “Paul Thomas Anderson will have his work cut out for him to top the Coens” or what have you. So I wonder: Does Blood‘s Christmas release date keep it in the sweet spot for the year-ender lists–smack in the first major flush of adoration, before the emperor-has-no-clothes contingent has a chance to coalesce?

Apparently Ted Rall decided to reprise his “King Maus” shtick with regards to the comics that have been running in the New York Times, repeating his absurd hyperbolic accusations of censorship because someplace is running the kinds of comics he doesn’t like as opposed to the comics made by him and his friends, and indulging in the sort of “altcomix are all navel-gazing stories about depressed white people for the New Yorker set” hogwash you’d expect from a Newsarama comment thread troll. Why are we acting like this argument is worth engaging? Why am I even posting about it? About the only worthwhile thing Rall’s rant has to offer is that it might make other critics think twice the next time they’re tempted to talk about how great “bombthrowing” or “just starting the conversation” is.

This charmingly lo-fi hack of the original Super Mario Bros. is the most hilariously mean-spirited video game I’ve ever seen. It’s really a rather brilliant Bizarro take on the basic philosophy of gaming: Instead of rewarding exploration, this game punishes it.The sadistic booby traps make that Super Mario Bros. 2: The Lost Levels thing look like a game on your nephew’s Leapfrog. When the floor dropped out from under the poor sap–that’s when I lost it. And when he eventually starts maneuvering through the level with evident fear, well, you’ll believe an avatar can cry.

Many more video clips can be found at Wiifanboy. Via the illustrious Justin Aclin.

Speaking of video games, I showed this astonishing unedited four-minute Tony Jaa steadicam slobberknocker to the Missus, who rather astutely pointed out that it’s like a video game: the guy navigates a multi-tiered environment, battling the bad guys who pop out at set intervals and benefiting from clever use of the environment they fight in.

And speaking of my ToyFare compadre Justin, Poe Ghostal has posted the final pair of interviews in his series of chats with TF staffers, photographer Dylan Brucie and Price Guide Editor/Twisted ToyFare Theater co-writer Jon Gutierrez.

The father of a teen who was killed by a tiger at the San Francisco Zoo questioned the facility’s safety on Thursday, as police reportedly considered whether one of the victims taunted the deadly jungle cat.

Sources close to the investigation told the San Francisco Chronicle that police are probing whether one of the Siberian tiger’s three victims climbed over a fence Christmas Day and then dangled a leg or other body part over the moat.

Police said Carlos Sousa, 17, of San Jose was killed just outside the tiger’s enclosure. The two others, who were injured, were about 300 yards away by a cafe.

A shoe and blood were found between the fence and the moat, the Chronicle reported, and a footprint has been found on a metal fence at the zoo. The investigation is looking into the possibility that the tiger escaped by latching on to a leg or other body part, the paper reported.

“Somebody created a situation that really agitated [the tiger] and and gave her some method to break her out,” zoo director Manuel Mollinedo told the Chronicle. “A couple of feet dangling over the edge could possibly have done it.”

—“Victims may have dangled leg over tiger’s moat, says report,” CNN.com

Comicdom’s continuing enabling of Dave Sim astounds me, not necessarily because his beliefs are crazy and evil but because those crazy and evil beliefs so directly inform all his work. Actually, it’s more than that: His work is about his crazy and evil beliefs. I’m not sure why otherwise bright people would “look forward” to a comic about women by a man who espouses any number of noxious, vile, misogynist, almost paranoid-schizophrenic beliefs about women. I wouldn’t look forward to listening to an opera about the Jews by Wagner, either.

And that’s without getting into the fact that his idea of fashion-based illustration apparently begins and ends with Patrick Nagel and the design of the book’s promo piece looks like something from an RPG fanzine circa 1991.

Until Tom Spurgeon’s beleaguered site is back online, you can find his excellent interview with the excellent Cold Heat and Storeyville cartoonist Frank Santoro over at the Comics Comics blog.

I was struck by this post on Bloody Disgusting declaring new release and major Bloody Disgusting advertiser Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem “horrible crap,” because not only does it tell readers “please, please, please save your money,” it also explicitly takes a shot at the presence of AVPR advertising on the site itself. I’m just not used to that kind of candor or courage in the context of fannish entertainment news media, I guess.

* This was a neat idea: horror site Bloody Disgusting is presenting a year-end pictorial tribute to 2007’s best horror movie posters…

…and 2007’s worst horror movie posters.

I largely agree with the selections on both ends. Down with the giant-face one-sheet!

* I Am Legend star Will Smith is angry that a recent comment of his about Adolf Hitler was misinterpreted. I know that’s the sort of response you usually associate with someone whose comment was in fact interpreted quite correctly, but Smith is really in the right here.

* It’s an Ana-Lucia Christmas: former Lost star Michelle Rodriguez has started her six-month prison sentence for violating her probation after a DUI conviction.

* Chris Mautner concludes his interview with comics critic Joe “Jog” McCulloch. Surely it’s only a matter of time before a contrarian anti-Jogger emerges?

Hope you got something good and gave something good!

(Warning: Mild SPOILERS follow for Twin Peaks and Lost, but really only in the form of lists of names and discussion of time frames that won’t really mean anything to you unless you’ve watched the shows and probably won’t ruin them for you if you haven’t. I certainly don’t say who killed Laura Palmer or anything like that.)

On the flight out to Colorado to visit my in-laws today I watched some of the special features on the Twin Peaks: The Definitive Gold Box Edition DVD set, an early Christmas gift. Ironically, the feature-length making-of documentary “Secrets from Another Place” makes the best case I’ve ever heard for “Season 2 sucks,” and right from the mouths of the cast and crew! I’d of course known that when the network forced David Lynch and Mark Frost to reveal the identity of Laura Palmer’s killer early in Season 2, their hearts and the hearts of many viewers were no longer into it, and I knew that the network started shuffling the show around in the schedule, causing it to bleed audience like crazy. And while I noticed both a slight dropoff of quality and the presence of new, superfluous storylines that didn’t tie into either Laura Palmer/Bob or the various schemes surrounding the Hornes and Packards–James Hurley’s road trip, the egregious Andy/Lucy/Dick Tremayne love triangle and Little Nicky business–I was so compelled by the later episodes and the deepening supernatural elements that I’ve always been a pretty staunch Season 2 defender. But “Secrets” lays out a point by point indictment of the post-“Who killed Laura Palmer?” Peaks, including a lot of stuff I either didn’t know or had never thought about in quite those terms.

* Both Lynch and Frost essentially abandoned the show to shoot movies after the first few episodes of Season 2 (Frost did Storyville and Lynch did my least favorite Lynch movie, Wild at Heart, and knowing this now makes me like it even less), leaving the creative reins in other hands. They both came back guns blazing for the final hours, but by then the show’s decline and fall with the network and audience was a fait accompli.

* The outbreak of the first Gulf War preempted the show something like six times. I always thought the time frame for the show’s collapse was portrayed as too rapid to make sense–a half a season was all it took to go from pop-culture phenomenon to the chopping block?–so the extra bumps in the schedule make that click for me a bit more now.

* The show unwisely expanded beyond its core cast to bring aboard guest star after guest star. Some of these were really just cameos, like the David Warner and David Duchovny characters, but others–Windom Earle, Annie, Evelyn Marsh, the aforementioned Dick Tremayne–ate up tons of screen time and added new elements to a show that pretty much had everything it needed in place already with its existing cast.

* It got jokey. The show was always very funny, but it wasn’t silly until you started having things like Nadine joining the wrestling team, the crusade to save the pine weasel or whatever that was, (say it with me) Dick Tremayne, and so on.

* It also started attracting performers (and presumably crew) who thought of it as a chance to “be weird,” which led to material that felt less like Twin Peaks and more like a parodic mischaracterization of it. Lynch, of course, never chooses to be weird–he simply can’t help it.

* The creative team waited too long after the revelation of Laura Palmer’s killer to introduce the second major antagonist, Earle, losing a lot of momentum. And when he did show up he was in the jokey/self-consciously scenery-chewing weird mold of late Peak, until perhaps his final episodes, where his old, erudite wild-man demeanor was finally harnessed as a frightening counterpoint to Cooper’s young, intuitive straight-shooter.

Anyway, I was thinking about all of this in the context of another Christmas gift, Lost: The Complete Third Season. It seems like at a few key points, Lost zigged where Peaks zagged. First and foremost there’s the brilliantly portrayed late-innings antagonist, Ben. I’ve said for a long time (and online, too, though I can’t find the post) that it’s hard to imagine how hard a hit the show would have taken had that character been written or played too broadly. In Kenneth Welsh’s Windom Earle we have just such a counterfactual example.

Also, after they were forced to reveal Laura Palmer’s killer, the creators of Twin Peaks basically gave up. As someone in the making-of doc put it, that was the spine of the show, and they had nothing to immediately replace it with; it was several crucial weeks before the magnitude of the Black Lodge issue became apparent, and by then it was too late. By contrast, Lost always has a whole new vista open up every time they pull the camera back to reveal the mystery at hand. You might find the new mysteries less interesting, but they’re at least there, and usually there’s a lot of them, and they tend to blow things wide open. Just think of how little we really knew about anything when the credits rolled at the end of Season One, and the explosion of information we received over the course of early Season Two. Hell, I think we’ve only just seen the show’s Bob figure for the first time. This is not to say Lost never falters with its reveals–relegating the origin of the Numbers to that stupid ARG is almost unforgivable–but it learned from the fate of Peaks (by the creators’ admission) to always have something else in store anytime a question is even close to answered. And to go to the mattresses with the network if need be, which was perhaps the most valuable lesson Twin Peaks ever taught anyone.

If you click around the Top 10 film lists linked to by Matt Zoller Seitz and Green Cine Daily, one title that comes up a lot less often than you might expect it to–strikingly less often in fact–is No Country for Old Men. It’s backlash time, apparently.

This week’s Horror Roundtable is about our least-favorite horror experience of 2007. There’s an obvious pun on that experience’s title I could make here but won’t.

Today, Tom Spurgeon talks to Cold Heat and Storeyville creator Frank Santoro.

If the movie had finished five minutes or so before it did end it would have been a very good horror flick.

—Carnacki

And in a year that saw the awesome, singed mythicism of 28 Weeks Later (itself one of the latest in the long line of films spawned by Matheson’s novel), I Am Legend’s digitized aesthetic is too clean to convey true social and moral rot, too processed for a storyline loaded with themes of death and destruction. Likewise, the hordes of mutant zombie/vampires are a disappointing use of CG technology. They’re like digital superballs vying for menace, lacking a genuine physical presence and only superficially connected to their surroundings.

It’s telling that the film works best when Neville is restricted to permeating solitude; the eerie suggestion of the unseen villains is a threat the film is unable to justly manifest in the flesh.

—Rob Humanick

This unauthorized Batman comic by Josh Simmons made me feel very uncomfortable. I’ll be thinking about it for a long time.

Today in Tom Spurgeon’s year-end series of holiday interviews, we’ve got Comics Comics‘ Tim Hodler looking back on the year in art comics. But it’s also a pretty great interview about Tim himself.

But doesn’t Tony Jaa know that this four-minute long-take steadicam fight scene is emotionally hollow???

Here it is.

1) This is a good show.

2) I’m really upset that they’re probably only going to show 8 episodes next season, both because it screws up their meticulously plotted three-sets-of-16-episodes plan and because it just means fewer episodes of Lost in the near future.

3) Cpl. Upham and Uncle Junior’s sidekick are both up to no good again.

4) I’m surprised it took as long as it did for the “this show sucks!” crowd to show up in the comment thread over there. Before they did so it was the longest streak of unfettered enthusiasm about this show I’ve ever seen in a public online forum. In my experience, unfettered enthusiasm about this show is actually pretty common in real life, but as always the Internet brings out the asshole in everyone.

(Via AICN.)

Remember when I was talking about the magic of the New York subway system for anyone who writes fiction the other day? Thanks to my TiVo Suggestions I just watched a perfect example, the “Subway” episode of Seinfeld. Jerry strikes up a perfectly pleasant conversation with a completely naked man on the D to Coney Island, George gets seduced by a grifter who handcuffs him to a hotel bed in his underwear and robs him, Kramer picks up a can’t miss horseracing tip and then gets mugged on the way home with his winnings only to be rescued by an undercover cop dressed as a blind busker, and Elaine becomes the weirdo in some old-time New York lady’s subway story when she reveals she’s the best man in a lesbian wedding, which she subsequently misses because the train gets stranded.

New York City subways are the Rick’s Cafe, the Mos Eisley cantina, the Multiverse of fictional American life.

* I understand why they couldn’t call Will Smith’s revisionist superhero movie Tonight He Comes as originally planned, but is Hancock really that much of an improvement?

* Poe Ghostal interviews my friends at ToyFare magazine: Editor Zach Oat, Managing Editor Adam Tracey, Senior Editor Justin Aclin, and Designer Jairo Leon. Justin’s interview touches on some issues I’ve talked about regarding the thrilling craziness of concepts like He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, so definitely give it a read.

* AllTooFlat.com honcho Ken Bromberg posts on the role of expertise in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves.

* Douglas Wolk presents a brief album-by-album guide to the complete recordings of Led Zeppelin.

* Premiere’s Glenn Kenny has one of the more likeable Top 25 Movies of the Year lists I’ve seen thus far.

* Tom Spurgeon interviews Tom Devlin, formerly of my all-time favorite publisher Highwater and currently of the also very good publisher Drawn & Quarterly.

* Finally, the 10 Best Horror Movie Topless Scenes, according to Unibrow. Eh.