Variety says:

After “Drag Me to Hell,” Raimi is expected to go right back up the mountaintop and take the helm of “The Hobbit” films for New Line and MGM now that Peter Jackson has made it clear he won’t direct.

“Expected”?

* Entertainment Weekly’s Nicole Sperling breaks down the Hobbit movie deal between New Line, MGM, and the Peter Jackson camp with a mixture of fact and kind of sloppy speculation. Points covered include potential directors (Sam Raimi, Guillermo Del Toro, and Alfonso Cuaron are all mentioned, as usual with no real evidence to support any of them), the role the failure of The Golden Compass played or didn’t play in the rapprochement, and the plot of the second planned film, inaccurately described as “imagined entirely by Jackson and [Fran] Walsh” (it’s going to be drawn from supplemental materials and all the stuff that was going on off-screen during the events of The Hobbit, according to everything else I’ve read). (Via Jason Adams.)

* Matt Maxwell revisits Day of the Dead in a fascinating posts that tackles experiencing the “Reagan Era” of horror as a child, the fright potential of mockumentary and mockumentary-esque horror, military stereotypes, the difference between Day, Night, and Dawn, and the role of Bub the “smart” zombie.

* Rob Zombie is “seriously considering” making a full-length version of the movie from his Grindhouse trailer Werewolf Women of the S.S.. The existence of a movie touted with the phrase “Starring Nicolas Cage as Fu Manchu” would constitute rock-solid evidence of a benevolent God.

* Comics Comics/PictureBox luminaries Dan Nadel, Tim Hodler, and Frank Santoro engage in a critical “cage match” over Jonathan Lethem & Farel Dalrymple’s Omega the Unknown. I really like these writers and this format.

* Real life meets torture porn, part one:

Coalition forces found 26 bodies buried in mass graves and a bloodstained “torture complex” with chains hanging from walls and ceilings and a bed connected to an electrical system, the military said Wednesday.

—“Torture house, mass graves discovered in Iraq,” CNN.com.

* Real life meets torture porn, part two:

The MPAA has rejected the one-sheet for Alex Gibney’s documentary “Taxi to the Dark Side,” which traces the pattern of torture practice from Afghanistan’s Bagram prison to Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo Bay….The image in question is a news photo of two U.S. soldiers walking away from the camera with a hooded detainee between them….According to ThinkFilm distribution prexy Mark Urman, the reason given by the Motion Picture Assn. of America for rejecting the poster is the image of the hood, which the MPAA deemed unacceptable in the context of such horror films as “Saw” and “Hostel.”

—“MPAA rejects Gibney’s ‘Dark’ poster,” Anne Thompson, Variety. (Via Jon Hastings.)

* Slate’s Daniel Engber makes the case for Eyes Wide Shut as a Christmas movie.

* Rob Humanick adds to the ever-popular “ostentatious display of virtuoso filmmaking equals emotionally false bullshit” genre, this time regarding the retreat at Dunkirk in Atonement.

* Giallo Fever’s Keith Brown highlights an interesting-sounding book called After Hitchcock, a scholarly look at the Master’s influence as seen in post-Psycho horror, giallo, ’70s paranoia thrillers, The Silence of the Lambs, the work of Brian DePalma (duh), and more.

* “Rodents of unusual size? I don’t think they exist.” Wrong again!

* CNN’s Ismael Estrada reports on how Missouri-based serial killer Timothy Krajcir used his education in criminal justice to evade police for years.

* Finally,

A few weeks ago I noted the tendency of big horror websites to overstate the communal nature of horror. When Hostel: Part II tanked, for example, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth about the future of “our genre” and not enough pointing out that it was a bad movie. Today we see the flipside, as the enormous box-office success of I Am Legend leads Bloody Digusting to wax rhapsodic in a post entitled “Horror Takes #1”:

In the midst of all of that holiday garbage (Alvin and the Chipmunks, Golden Compass, Enchanted, The Perfect Holiday, Fred Claus, This Christmas and more) horror has proven that it’s king of the world as Warner Bros. Pictures and their Will Smith starring post-apocalyptic thriller I Am Legend…took over the box office with an astounding estimated $76.5 million this weekend! If that’s not cool enough, next week DreamWorks is releasing Sweeney Todd, so expect the top two slots to be horror! Only time will tell how 20th Century Fox’s Aliens vs Predator: Requiem will do, but can you imagine horror taking over Christmas?

I hesitate to say “of course,” but of course, Will Smith proved he’s king of the world this past weekend. Horror proved no such thing, and one need look no further than to the similar The Mist for evidence there. Moreover, viewing the theoretical box-office triumph of three films as different in tone, origin, and intent as I Am Legend, Sweeney Todd, and Aliens vs. Predator 2 as a world-beating landmark for horror as a genre is just silly, like those posts you come across that lump together the success of Marvel’s Dark Tower prequel and TV’s Heroes and Drawn and Quarterly’s Exit Wounds as “good for comics.” The notion that AVPR or whatever they’re calling it is inherently more worthy an effort than, I dunno, The Golden Compass–even in terms of the fortunes of genre filmmaking–makes no sense to me at all.

* This week’s Horror Roundtable is about our favorite horror-related experiences of 2007. It was actually a pretty big year for horror, if not a pretty great one, so it was fun to cull through my memories to pick out the best.

* It’s not where I’m coming from, but if you’re interested in a review of I Am Legend written from the perspective of someone who really loves the book and is judging the film by how it matches up with it source material, you could do worse than Pete Mesling of FearFodder’s take. (Note that he too compares the monsters unfavorably to video-game enemies.)

* Jeet Heer criticizes the embrace of libertarian economist Ludwig von Mises by Paul Pope and his Berlin Batman, recently touted as presidential candidate Ron Paul’s favorite superhero.

* On Friday night I went to see the GZA/Genius at the Knitting Factory. Pitchfork has photos and a brief review of the previous night’s gig.

* Finally, these World War II-style Battlestar Galactica propaganda posters are pretty cool, and pretty cheap too. (Via Justin Aclin.)

The biggest thing I Am Legend has going against it is its title. Simply change the main character’s name and call the movie something else (I dunno, Fresh Prince vs. the Vampires has a nice ring to it) and I’m pretty sure you’d see most of the objections being flung at it from the horror-cognoscenti corner evaporate. As it stands now, it takes someone who isn’t attached to the source novella–someone like me, in other words–to appreciate that while as an adaptation of the book it’s pretty terrible, as a post-apocalyptic survival-horror film it’s pretty damn good.

As you’ve no doubt heard, the differences between Francis Lawrence’s film, written by Mark Protosevich and Akiva Goldsman, and Richard Matheson’s iconic novella are not a case of “they cut Tom Bombadil and made Faramir a bit of a jerk.” Goodness, no. With the exception of the title, the name of the protagonist, and the very basic concept–sole human survivor in a world full of people who’ve been transformed into monsters that want to kill him–virtually everything has changed, frequently radically, and in several crucial instances to the diametric opposite of what was present in the original. The setting has changed from the California suburbs to Manhattan. The hero, Robert Neville, has changed from just some guy to the scientist the world was counting on to stop the plague before it got out of control. The antagonists have changed from more-or-less intelligent, weak bloodsuckers to acrobatic engines of full-fledged cannibalistic destruction that come across like hybrids of the critters from The Descent and the infected from 28 Days/Weeks Later. Their origin shifts from largely mysterious with a few nods in a viral direction to being made clear in the film’s opening scene (an experimental cancer cure involving rerouting the measles virus to attack cancerous cells ends up giving its recipients rabies-like symptoms that end up either killing them outright or turning them into monstrous, infectious killing machines themselves). Neville’s reason for killing them has changed from a drive to exterminate to a drive to cure. Most fundamentally of all, the key plot twist, the ending, and the meaning of the title itself are all complete 180s from what they are in the book. It’s honestly a bit baffling why they bothered to “adapt” the thing at all.

But as I mentioned, I’m not a huge devotee of the book. (I read it, enjoyed it, never thought much about it since.) Therefore my bafflement stems not from outrage on the original’s behalf, but from a vain wish that the movie could have headed the inevitable objections from the book’s partisans off at the pass by simply making the exact same movie they ended up making without waving the title around like a red flag in front of a bull. That’s because the movie they made is a sophisticated, moving, and unique take on the post-apocalyptic genre, a bait-and-switch job that at first comes across like the ultimate survival-horror competence fantasy only to reveal itself as an examination of the massive psychological toll such competence takes.

The lynchpin here is obviously Will Smith’s Robert Neville. For about 50% of the movie he’s the closest cousin to James Bond or Batman the zombie(ish) genre has ever seen. He’s a high-ranking Army officer, brilliant scientist, loving father and husband, loyal dog owner, stunning physical specimen (the ladies reacted to his shirtless workout like wolves from a Tex Avery cartoon), Bob Marley fanatic (a major plot point!), art aficionado (one of the film’s best running visual gags (and it has several, including a big Times Square billboard for a Superman/Batman movie “coming soon”) are that his walls are lined with masterpieces from abandoned NYC’s museums), and ridiculously proficient survivalist all rolled into one. His house, with a lovely view of Washington Square Park, is tricked out with all the security devices of a brownstone-sized panic room, including a few square blocks’ worth of booby traps and emergency lighting–not to mention a fully-stocked pantry and arsenal, keys to dozens of different vehicles arranged alphabetically, and its own supply of electricity and running water. He hunts for deer in Times Square, grows corn in Central Park, fishes in the reflecting pool in the Metropolitan Museum, and has every AM frequency in New York broadcasting a message for survivors to meet him at the South Street Seaport at midday, an appointment he keeps without fail even though no one’s ever come. Best of all, he’s got a basement laboratory where he continues his quest to derive a cure for the plague from his own natural immunity, and has capturing live specimens for his research down to a Rousseau-from-Lost-like science. The guy keeps busier as the last man on Earth than I do right now.

But there’s a price to be paid for being on top of your game all day every day with no one to fall back on. At first it’s glimpsed only in quirky, funny behavior like Neville’s one-sided conversations with his dog (relatable to any pet owners; I myself actually provide the voices of my cats in such exchanges) and his slightly stranger yet understandable use of mannequins as the staff and patrons of the video store he visits every day to stay entertained. But where both the film and Smith–who’s asked to carry about 70-80% of the movie as the only human being on screen, and pulls it off–are most impressive is when the competence cracks.

So much of Neville’s skill as a survivor is predicated on routine. This obviously includes vital tasks such as waking at sunrise and shutting down his house at sunset, being at the potential survival rendez-vous point at midday, and of course the rigorous testing and experimentation involved in attempting to find the cure to the virus. But it also includes everything he does that passes for recreation: practicing his golf swing on the deck of the Intrepid, renting his way alphabetically through the video store, cycling through The Today Show‘s daily archival tapes, playfully bantering with his mannequin acquaintances. The film’s astute visuals drive home the fact that everything must be in its right place, from the keys to his cars to the Polaroids of all his dead monster guinea pigs. So all it ultimately takes to put him on a crash course with disaster is for one of those mannequins to be mysteriously moved from its customary place outside the video store, so that Neville finds it standing, silent and eerie and wrong, at the steps of the Met. Within seconds he’s hallucinating that it’s looking at him, screaming denials and warnings at it, spraying it with machine-gun fire, strafing the surrounding buildings. Finally he makes moves that result in a sequence that’s every bit as heartwrenching as you’d imagine it would be yet not as crass and manipulative as I feared when I initially detected where it was heading. (I won’t spoil it.) From there it’s a short trip to the best scene in the film, simultaneously its most moving and most disturbing, when Neville, stoned and half-incoherent thanks to a handful of antidepressants, literally begs one of the video-store mannequins to say hello back to him. Now, I’m sure it helps that the only Will Smith movies I’ve ever seen are dimly remembered viewings of the execrable Independence Day and the empty-calorie Men in Black back in high school, so I’m not associating his depiction of grief and misery here with his reaction to, I don’t know, something that really upset him in Bad Boys 2. But he’s all bloodshot eyes, slurred speech (“promised my friend” comes out like “I miss my friend,” which I’m sure is intentional), and desperation in this scene, and it’s lovely and sad.

That’s actually the mood of most of the movie. With the exception of some flashbacks (which is where the bulk of the trailer and commercial pyrotechnics hail from) and the very occasional run-in with a monster and/or pride of lions, it’s virtually a meditation on deserted New York City and all the awe and loneliness such images evoke. I for one have no idea how they pulled all those scenes off; it’s got to be digital, I guess, and it’s stunning. It also made for a great opening-night packed-theater New York City movie-watching experience, evoking laughs and gasps in equal measure any time a recognizable landmark or neighborhood was shown overgrown with vegetation and frequented by animals larger than squirrels, pigeons, and rats. (I saw it in that theater at Union Square, so a shot of the nearby subway entrance completely deserted practically got a standing ovation.) Heck, the poor woman next to me was practically manifesting some sort of pre-traumatic stress disorder every time you saw empty Midtown or decrepit Upper East Side, occasionally commenting to no one in particular that we’re just a couple years and one dirty bomb away from just such a scene. It was a fun spectacle, but after a while it began to weigh on you, too.

It is in fact the use of Manhattan that’s the film’s most successful generator of chills. There’s one memorably suspenseful cat-and-mouse game in which, like many similar, successful sequences, our vision is limited along with the character’s, and one creepy image involving a hyperventilating “hive” of dormant creatures. But other than that, to be quite frank, the monsters kind of suck. Part of it is that we’ve seen their like before, and in more frightening movies, as I mentioned above. Part of it is a strange decision to do them in what looks like 100% CGI, and not the greatest at that. I’m sure it has something to do with the need to distort and amplify their physicality to the point where the filmmakers felt humans in suits and masks wouldn’t do, but nuts to that action. If Neil Marshall can do The Descent–hell, if Peter Jackson can do the orcs and uruk-hai in The Lord of the Rings–this guaranteed blockbuster can do creatures that don’t look like something you’d shoot in a Resident Evil game (and I’m not even talking about the infected dogs). Thankfully, the movie itself seems to realize its limitations, and the monsters probably get no more than fifteen minutes total screen time. I know I’ve given that line about how “the human stuff was the best part of this horror movie” the business recently, but boy was it ever true here.

And it remains true up until just before the very end. In fact the movie’s most interesting exploration of the perils of competence come in its final quarter, when Neville is forced to by circumstance, in the form of a mysterious pair of fellow survivors, to radically reevaluate his view of the post-plague world. To the film’s eternal credit it never beats you over the head with the fact that his repeated, heated insistence that “everyone, everyone, is dead” is ridiculous given that he’s saying it to people who, like himself, are alive; they just hang there, uncommented upon, the words of someone who obviously would never accept information to the contrary even when it’s literally staring him in the face. His initial attempts to interact with his newfound companions are at once vulnerable and bizarre, stripped of the sense of proportionate response that human interaction inculcates us with–he smashes the breakfast they prepare for him to pieces because of both their belief in a survivor colony up in Vermont and because (one of the film’s big laugh lines) he’d been saving, for reasons delightfully unspecified, the bacon they cooked; he tries to win them back over by flawlessly reciting about two minutes’ worth of dialogue from Shrek along with the movie as they watch it. The underlying emotion to the entire segment, I think, is fury. Fury that this woman and this child survived while his wife and his child did not. Fury that someone survived to bear witness to his failure at finding the cure, or “fixing this” as he constantly puts it. Fury that they stopped him from killing himself, and fury that he tried. Fury, perhaps, that anyone less competent than he survived at all, and fury that others might have survived completely independent of whether or not he succeeds in his quest for a cure. In the view of Neville, the apotheosis of survivor types, survival can only exist through him, with him, and, literally, in him.

He ends up being righter than he has any right to be, which is where the film falters–right at the end. A climactic monster attack suddenly has us in Signs-land, where a fortuitous coincidence gives Neville the sign he needs to do the right thing and restores his faith in God and the fundamental justness of the world. Now, this worked in Signs (I know, I know, your mileage may vary, but this is my blog) because that was the whole point of the film–Mel Gibson’s character’s bitterness and faithlessness, its effect on his family, and its ultimate reversal when heroism is called for. Here, however, that theme is slapped onto the film in the final reel, with the first mention of both belief in and denial of God taking place about ten minutes before the closing credits. (Timeline compresson trips up the film a bit elsewhere, actually, as Neville notices anomalous behavior from the monsters for the first time only one day before that anomalous behavior is shown to have evolved to a point beyond this brilliant scientist and tough customer’s wildest expectations.) We’ve already been shown that his behavior is heroic, and through his impassioned exegesis of the music and message of his beloved Bob Marley we’ve even been shown that he has a boundless faith in humanity’s ability to do the right thing, despite the virus’s manmade origin (thanks, minute-long cameo by Emma Thompson as the well-meaning scientist who uses condescending metaphors to explain her innovation to the hoi polloi and accidentally wipes out humanity!). I know that those with deeper faith than mine might disagree, but gilding the lily by forcing a road-to-Damascus moment misses the point and throws the balance of the film ever so slightly out of whack at the last moment. All we really wanted to know is not if he can connect with the Almighty, but whether he can connect with anything at all that isn’t himself. And yes, there’s the kind of happy ending that should have people who love the book, hated the end of Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, or both throwing their popcorn at the screen. (Soundtracked by church bells, no less!) I have no intrinsic problem with a happy ending, in fact I found Smith’s Neville so likable that I was practically praying for one, but this was laying it on kinda thick.

That said, I feel like this is a film I’m much more likely to return to than, say, the recent and comparable The Mist. Actually, I tried to see that movie again yesterday, figuring I’d be able to enjoy the things I enjoyed about it more now that I know what to expect, but it’s all but gone from theaters. That’s probably not a fate you need to worry about befalling I Am Legend, in part because it stars Will Smith and has an ending in which the phrase “happily ever after” wouldn’t feel entirely out of place, but only in part. Unlike the characters in The Mist, the character (no plural necessary) in I Am Legend surprises. He’s something I hadn’t seen before. And while, yes, that includes the film’s ostensible source material, it sure would be a shame if you let that get in the way.

Not so much a Carnival of Souls since I’m not sure any of them are horror-related, really. And while there’s some comicsy stuff in there it’s not a Comix and Match either, if you’ve been around long enough to remember what those were. Just some stuff of interest.

* Reading this description of author J.M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year, which features three separate narratives arranged in tiers on each page between which readers may bounce at their discretion, made me think that the inherent aspect of comics that excites me the most that excites me the most is juxtaposition–words with images, one image with another.

* As recently as last week I was thinking that as a storyteller, you can pretty much get away with placing any kind of human behavior in the setting of a New York City subway. These non-stationary, non-transient spaces beneath the most fascinating city in the world are pretty much magic for readers–they can be staging grounds for serial killers feeding cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers, people can have sex on them, street gangs can rumble in them, people can breakdance in them, vigilantes can kill people in them, sad gay clowns can give speeches in them (I’ve actually seen this happen), and people will buy it. This story and video of hipster girls giving pole dances and lap dances on the subway for cash, which I saw a link to on CNN.com’s front page a couple of days ago, seemed tailor-made to prove my point.

* Jeff Lemire’s painting of Mister Miracle is excellent.

* The other night I went to this:

This raises two points:

1) The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is the most important comics-related organization in America and you should donate to it.

2) Paul Pope was there and the story of Ron Paul (or “Ron Paul” via some savvy assistant) citing Paul (Pope)’s libertarian “Berlin Batman” as (Ron) Paul’s favorite superhero was much bandied about, but it wasn’t until I saw Andrew Sullivan blogging about it (complete with panel scans!) that I grokked that it had become quite a story.

* Finally, I was watching The Two Towers today and a wonderful piece of acting by Viggo Mortensen stood out to me: Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli are wandering through Fangorn Forest in search of Merry and Pippin. Suddenly Legolas halts them all and says “The White Wizard approaches,” meaning the evil Saruman. The look on Mortensen’s face in the subsequent shot radiates “Oh Jesus, am I about to have to hit out of my weight class or what” just as surely as if he’d started shivering and chattering like Shaggy and Scooby, but it’s shot through with an inability not to at least try to physically defeat this entity, basically the second-most powerful being in all of Middle-earth. The look in his eyes and the line of his mouth basically says “I’m going to do this even though I’m scared shitless, but let’s be honest, I’m a few seconds away from dying.” It’s fascinating.

I’m glad someone remembered Eastern Promises!

and

Johnny fucking Cougar?

From Where the Wild Things Are, Spike Jonze, 2008

(image via Jason Adams)

From The Monster Squad, Fred Dekker, 1987

“I didn’t even know what the term serial killer meant — I thought it was someone who went after Cap’n Crunch.”

–Detective M.C. Hughes (retired), quoted in “Cape Girardeu Killer Studied Police Routine,” AP, KCTV5.com, via CNN.com

I should mention that I have a one-page-or-so piece on Lawless, the new collection of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’s series Criminal, in the equally new issue of Maxim. It’s the issue with Mischa Barton on the cover; the piece is on page 34 IIRC. Enjoy!

I’m not at all convinced this is anything but a Grindhouse-style fake trailer, but I still don’t care.

(Found at EW.com–thanks, Ryan Penagos!)

* When good comics critics collide: Chris Mautner interviews Joe “Jog” McCulloch. Hearing that my blog helped inspire Jog to start blogging himself made my weekend.

* Fearfodder’s Pete Mesling resurfaces to give Clive Barker’s new novel Mister B. Gone a rave review. (At least I think he did–I haven’t read the book yet so I really just scanned the review.)

* Tom Spurgeon has gone on one of his occasional review rampages, critiquing 57 comics in one go. Holy moses.

* The Golden Compass reached number one at the box office but with a disappointing $26 million haul. I have a hard time thinking about this business story without also thinking about a number of disheartening factors: the naked desire of its studio, New Line, to replicate its Lord of the Rings franchise’s success, all the more irksome given that same studio’s treatment of the architects of that franchise; the leeching away of the source material’s anti-theist philosophical oomph; the odious Catholic League riding shotgun; a possible glut of fantasy film set in CGI snow. Add it all up and it doesn’t equal “good time at the movies,” at least for me.

* Finally, after the recent Finnish school shooting involving a young man who posted videos implying his intentions on YouTube, resulting in the media making hay out of that fact although it really had nothing to do with the case itself, I noted that you never see headlines like “Massacre linked to pen and paper” when killers chronicle their thoughts in a more traditional fashion. Sadly, life, in the form of mall shooter Robert Hawkins, has provided us with proof. Note moreover that as far as I can gather, you’re also not seeing voices from the Right decry the victims as exemplars of the feminization of America and the decline of the West this time around, perhaps because it’s politically trickier to dance on the graves of Midwestern Christmas shoppers–or Christian missionaries and megachurch members–than on those of college students.

A day earlier, [Georgina] Papin’s three sisters cried and clutched each other’s hands in court while the judge reviewed the testimony of witness Lynn Ellingson, who said she walked in on a blood-covered Pickton as Papin’s body dangled from a chain in the farm’s slaughterhouse.

Prosecution witness Andrew Bellwood had testified that Pickton told him how he strangled his alleged victims and fed their remains to his pigs.

—“Canadian pig farmer found guilty of 6 murders,” AP, CNN.com

Authorities plan on charging Robert “Willie” Pickton with a total of 26 murders, primarily of prostitutes and junkies; while in prison he boasted to an undercover police officer of committing 49.

Normally I’d put this under the heading “The state of the beast” rather than under the title of the short story from which that phrase came, but in this case I’m making an exception for obvious reasons:

On the slaughterhouse floor at Quality Pork Processors Inc. is an area known as the “head table,” but not because it is the place of honor. It is where workers cut up pigs’ heads and then shoot compressed air into the skulls until the brains come spilling out.

But now the grisly practice has come under suspicion from health authorities.

Over eight months from last December through July, 11 workers at the plant all of them employed at the head table developed numbness, tingling or other neurological symptoms, and some scientists suspect inhaled airborne brain matter may have somehow triggered the illnesses.

—“11 Minnesota Slaughterhouse Workers Fall Ill; Pig-Brain Removal Technique Is Suspected,” Martiga Lohn, Associated Press, ABCNews.com

(Via Bryan Alexander)

* The teaser poster for the next M. Night Shyamalan movie, a natural-disaster-apocalypse movie called The Happening, is out. Needless to say it hits my buttons.

Via Bloody Disgusting. And Jason Adams points out something about the poster’s tagline that never even occurred to me.

* Riffing off a recent post of mine about the reaction to No Country for Old Men, Jon Hastings talks film-critical aversion to craft.

* It’s still Krampus Week over at Monster Brains, and this particular postcard of the Christmas devil is stunning. Dig that color design!

* Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell turn a skeptical eye to Beowulf, focusing on whether the tech really works. I disagree with many of their observations (duh) but it’s the most thought-provoking negative review of the film I’ve read; the effects-based comparisons to The Lord of the Rings were particularly specific and illuminating.

* Jonathan Bennett brings our attention to HitchcockWiki’s 1000 Frames of Hitchcock project, which breaks down every one of the Master’s films into 1000 screen grabs.

* Breaking news: Jeph Loeb is not a very good writer.

* I love that Kevin Huizenga keeps posting his Powr Mastrs fan art. I really just love when any artist shows unabashed enthusiasm for the work of one of his contemporaries by creating homages to it (that’s why I’ve been happy about the recent return to quick-response pop-music cover versions–for years and years I thought we were losing something by not having the equivalent of Joe Cocker’s within-the-year Beatles covers, you know?) Anyway, his seemingly extradimensional Jellyfish Emperor is really blowing my mind.

* Apparently in response to the infamous Gordon Lee case, which at this point looks more likely to end in a misconduct conviction for the prosecutor than an obscenity conviction for the retailer, all Free Comic Book Day books must now be all-ages. I’m no retailer, and I dunno, maybe FCBD really is geared all-but-exclusively to children already. But my first instinct was that this is a profoundly dopey (and cowardly) decision equivalent to the film industry having a free-movie day that only includes PG-rated movies.

* For a glimpse of the kinds of things that went down before video-game culture fully calcified as a children’s affair in the public mind, take a look at some naughty “adult” Atari games courtesy of Kotaku. (Link via the Daily Gut.) The combination of the ultra-lo-res graphics we associate with the game-playing experiences of our youth and the crassly pornographic subject matter leads to some fascinating cognitive dissonance.

* Finally, this week’s Horror Roundtable is all about our best creative achievements of the past year. Come listen to us toot our own horns!

Blogging is not hard, and don’t believe anyone who says that it is. Blogging is easy. Getting all the way through the Dark Tower series was the hardest thing I’ve ever done bloggingwise, and it was still easy as pie compared to virtually anything else I’ve ever done that doesn’t involve a blog–getting my driver’s license, finding a good brand of store-bought salsa through trial and error, graduating Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude, hooking up my TiVo, learning how to French kiss, waking up at 6 every morning to feed my cats, deciding which KMFDM CDs to leave on display and which ones to store once I ran out of room on my CD shelves, working in publishing, washing my face before I go to bed, buying tickets to the GZA show at the Knitting Factory next Friday, anything.

* Sad news: While wrapping up “Scarred,” his great series of mini-interviews with horror luminaries about their formative scary moments, Steven Wintle of The Horror Blog takes the opportunity to announce a scaled back blogging presence. That bums me out.

* Speaking of Steven, I Am Legend, the Will Smith-starring, seemingly Hollywoodized adaptation of Richard Matheson’s novella that has become Mr. Wintle’s archnemesis, boasts the voice of none other than Faith No More’s Mike Patton, who did the vocalizations for all the vampire creatures. The gentle art of making enemies indeed!

* Slate’s Jody Rosen celebrates the 25th anniversary of Michael Jackson’s album Thriller by trying to get across both its quality and its impact. That’s as good an excuse as any to link to my essay on why the video for “Thriller” is a horror landmark.

* Finally, I am completely infatuated with the trailer for Speed Racer. It’s like an adaptation of the old Super Nintendo racing game F-Zero, or even Mario Kart. (Via AICN. Thanks to Jim Treacher for alerting me to how crazy this movie looks.)

Proposed (Classified) Bill Will Defend Against Flesh-Eating (Classified)