Remember when I reviewed Brian Chippendale’s Galactikrap 2? It didn’t used to be available at the PictureBox store, but it is now…

* I really like the new trailer for M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening, both because of the subject matter and because I admire the man’s chutzpah for including what in the ADD world of trailer editing have to be considered long takes. (Via Dread Central.)

* Bruce Baugh offers a thoughtful review of Eli Roth’s Hostel. I really appreciated his insights about the look of the film, the redeeming qualities of the American characters, the lingering effects of torture…just a wonderful analysis. Also worth reading is the comment thread where various people explain why they refuse to watch the film.

* Shock Till You Drop’s Ryan Rotten really liked Ryuhei Kitamura’s adaptation of Clive Barker’s Midnight Meat Train, which may be a good sign.

* Kevin Huizenga discusses the difficulty of making comics starring himself…in comic form!

* This week’s Horror Roundtable is about non-horror movies that hold their own in the horror department. It’s interesting to see the different directions people went with this.

* Infocult’s Bryan Alexander tracks developments in the case of Josef Fritzl, the Austrian man who imprisoned his daughter and their inbred children in hidden chambers in his cellar for over two decades. I’m as astonished by this story as I have been by anything I’ve read in all of my years following macabre crimes. To my surprise, the most outlandish details of the initial reports have not just been confirmed, but surpassed.

* Though I haven’t seen any of the Masters of Horror films that And Now the Screaming Starts’ CRwM is talking about in his review of John Carpenter’s Pro-Life, I greatly admire the way he goes after mainstream critics for myopically focusing on “horror as current-events report” and horror filmmakers for catering to that particular fixation.

* I like the sound of I Love Sarah Jane, a short film about a lovestruck junior-high kid’s experiences during a zombie apocalypse, screened at the Independent Film Festival of Boston and reviewed by Not Coming to a Theater Near You’s Katherine Follett.

* Finally, amen. (Via Topless Robot.)

* Big, sad news for film and TV blogospherians: Matt Zoller Seitz, proprietor of the best film and TV blog on the web by a country mile, The House Next Door, is retiring from journalism and criticism to become a full-time filmmaker. Frequent co-blogger Keith Uhlich will take his place as editor of the site.

* At his official website, there’s another huge interview with Clive Barker. He announces a new, wholly original upcoming comic book project with his frequent publisher IDW, touches on his upcoming film projects, his paintings, the delayed release of Midnight Meat Train, and Abarat Book 3, but the bit I was most interested in, and happiest to read, was about his voice. If you’ve listened to any interviews with the man lately, quite frankly he sounded terrible, even more gravelly than usual. Turns out he had benign polyps on his vocal cords that have since been removed, making it easier for him to talk, sleep, and breathe. I sure do wish him well. (Via Dread Central.)

* Actresses Shauna MacDonald and Natalie Mendoza will both be returning for The Descent 2, which is…interesting.

* There’s a new Incredible Hulk trailer out there, and I know I’m supposed to say I’m soooooo over this movie (and Edward Norton), but I’m not. I want to watch CGI Ed Norton smack around CGI Tim Roth and I don’t care who’s feuding with whom. (Via Arrow in the Head.)

* B-Sol at the Vault of Horror serves up Part 2 of his look at the history of the modern zombie movie, starting with Dawn of the Dead and working its way through the Italian zombie flicks and the splatstick horror-comedies of the ’80s.

* Finally, Bryan Finoki muses at length about the physical and aural architecture of America’s torture chambers. (Via Andrew Sullivan.)

* Tom Spurgeon interviews Comic Book Legal Defense Fund Executive Director Charles Brownstein about the dismissal of the Gordon Lee case. As I read the interview I thought of a different kind of dismissal the case received–from a former coworker of mine who, when word of the first charges first broke out, sneered that the Nick Bertozzi comic involved was pornography, that Lee deserved what he got, and that the CBLDF should never have taken the case. Not to put to fine a point on it, but suck on it, schmuck.

* Film scholar and Tolkien-film expert Kristin Thompson weighs the enthusiasm for his new Hobbit gig expressed by director Guillermo Del Toro in this MTV interview and elsewhere against the skepticism expressed by Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir. If O’Hehir’s piece stuck with its initial focus on Del Toro’s previously voiced distasted for heroic fantasy, or a critique of his existing films, I’d be right there with him, but instead it veers off into things that really have nothing to do with the potential quality of his Hobbit film, like the fact that lawsuits had been filed and Peter Jackson is successful.

* David Bowie’s legendary live set from a 1972 gig in Santa Monica is being officially released!

* Sea monsters in Manhattan! It’s an inflatable art piece by Joshua Allen Harris. (Via And Now the Screaming Starts.)

* Clive Barker made some news at Fangoria’s Weekend of Horrors convention this past weekend regarding his “Books of Blood” film series. In addition to the upcoming Midnight Meat Train and in-the-works Book of Blood, Barker announced that Anthony DiBlasi has been tapped to write and direct the long-gestating adaptation of “Dread,” once again confirmed the also long-gestating plan to adapt “Pig Blood Blues,” and revealed that the fifth film in the series will be an adaptation of an unlikely choice (to me at least), “The Madonna.”

* Real life horror: An Austrian man kept his daughter prisoner in his windowless cellar for 24 years–along with the seven children he fathered with her through rape. All of this was unbeknownst to the man’s wife, supposedly. The story is so horrifying and unbelievable that it is, well, hard to believe, and I wouldn’t be surprised if initial reports turn out to be substantially inaccurate. But for now, here is your quote of the day:

Once inside the dungeon, police reported, they found all the passages extremely narrow, the ceiling is no higher than 5ft 6ins (170cm) and the floors uneven. They have found a makeshift shower room, cooking rings for the secret family to heat food, and a room lined entirely in rubber whose use is unknown.

(Via Keith Uhlich.)

* Go, look: An Anders Nilsen comic strip!

* Water monster news: Scientists are defrosting and preparing to examine the 34-foot colossal squid they found a while back. (Via Rob Humanick.)

* Finally, Fantagraphics has a pair of incredible deals up on their website: Get a set of all seven (totally, totally awesome) Love & Rockets digests for $85, and/or a set of all ten volumes (so far) of Mome for $100. Either option is such a terrific gift idea it’s not even funny.

My present from Matt Wiegle!

* Guillermo Del Toro is directing The Hobbit and its sequel. I don’t know how to feel about this.

* I am at least enthusiastic about the idea of the second film in this particular package, which lots of people seem really confused about but which seems to be pretty clearly about both Gandalf’s doings when he wasn’t hanging with the dwarves during the events of The Hobbit proper and the subsequent doings of, I’m guessing, Gandalf and Aragorn prior to the start of The Lord of the Rings. That’s what I got out of Del Toro’s interview on TheOneRing.net, anyway. (Via Kristin Thompson.)

* “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” Absolutely hilarious.

* Battlestar Galactica‘s Nicki “Cally” Clyne blogs her (spoilery, duh) thoughts on last week’s episode.

* Tom Spurgeon thought the New York Comic Con was a terrible place for people who enjoy comics.

* The Onion A.V. Club’s Scott Tobias has a piece on The Blair Witch Project, the scariest movie I’ve ever seen, that’s one of the better things I’ve read on the movie to date. (Via Keith Uhlich.)

* Here’s the second half of Jimmy Kimmel’s interview with Lost‘s Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof. I like the tone of it better than the first half.

* Final Girl’s Stacie Ponder presents a Clive Barker edition of her regular feature, Awesome Movie Poster Friday.

* Ken Parille has put together a striking collection of images to illustrate the influence, unconscious or otherwise, of cartoonist Daniel Clowes on cartoonist Rich Tommaso.

* Jordan Crane’s cover for Uptight #3 is fantastic.

* Finally, this week’s Horror Roundtable is about the one horror-movie prop we’d most like to own. I’ll give you three guesses as to what mine is, and the first two don’t count.

Yesterday, two interviews with Lost head writer Damon Lindelof and showrunner Carlton Cuse popped up that seem almost tailor-made to be illustrative of two conflicting schools of Lost fandom.

On the one hand you have comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s interview with the pair for TV Guide. This is the first question he asks:

The island heals some people and doesn’t heal others. For instance, Ben needed an operation from Jack to beat cancer, but it seems like Sawyer gets injured every sixth episode and by the next, he’s fine. Is that just a TV thing?

The last sentence kind of skews the question in a process-oriented direction rather than just an “OMG what’s going on???” one, but I still think it points to the outlook of the kind of fandom that has me so flummoxed lately. To the extent that they do have considerations other than plot those considerations are still focused on logistical issues–trying to figure out why and how things happened behind the scenes. Simply mulling over and discussing the emotional, intellectual, and certainly the aesthetic impact of what we’ve seen doesn’t enter into it. In many ways, it’s like interviews with superhero comics writers, where nearly all the questions are dedicated to either “What’s gonna happen to Wolverine next?” (in-world questions) or “How did you decide to do that to Wolverine?” (making-of questions), with no real critical response to speak of (unless you count “tearing the internet in half,” whether positively or negatively, as a qualitative observation, which you shouldn’t).

But Kimmel’s interview gets at some of these distinctions itself. For example, there’s this blockbuster section:

Kimmel: People come up to you all the time with theories. Has anyone come close to cracking the code?

Cuse: I think there are two assumptions that people make that are incorrect. One is that the whole answer to Lost reduces down to a sentence. It’s not like searching for Einstein’s Unified Field Theory. And the second is that you have enough information to “crack the code.” The flash-forwards completely changed your notion of the show. So how could you do some accurate theorizing before you even knew those existed?

My sentiments EXACTLY! Seriously, it’s almost eerie to be echoed by one of the show’s head honchos just, like, two weeks after this first even occurred to me. But the best part of Cuse’s quote is that it goes beyond refuting the Theorizers on a logistical level (you can’t possibly know because you don’t have all the information yet) and rejects that approach on a philosophical level as well (you can’t possibly know because it doesn’t work that way anyway).

Furthermore, when Kimmel presses the issue, Cuse responds:

Even though we get asked a lot of questions about the mythology, Jimmy, we’re really trying to write a character show. We spend about 80-90 percent of our time talking about how the characters are lost in their own lives as people. The mythology is kind of the frosting on the cake.

About the only discussion of Lost I’ve seen that treats the show this way was from Andrew Dignan’s now-defunct weekly Lost reviews at The House Next Door, which really bums me out. Now, I don’t think the show would be as important to me if the mythology weren’t there–as a character show it’s not up there with the great HBO dramas–but this is such an amazingly undervalued way of approaching the series–including by the creators themselves, no matter what they say to the contrary, so long as they continue to participate in stunts like USA Today’s “post your theory, get comments from the producers” contest.

(Now there is, of course, the “Lindelof’s Mom” viewer, who supposedly tunes in to the show to see who hooks up with whom and cares not one whit for the monster or the Hatches or any mythology aspects. But as a friend of mine pointed out to me, the kinds of people who fixate on “who falls in looooooove” are almost as bad as the clue-hunters, and they’re certainly a different beast than people who consider the overall effect of the show rather than the romance aspect alone. Theorizers and Shippers–the Scylla and Charybdis of contemporary genre fiction.)

And I also appreciated this bit from Lindelof, regarding the freeze-framed, digitally processed search for “clues” in every episode:

We would love in moments like that to go, “Yes. We knew we’d be introducing the idea of the Dharma Initiative in the second season premiere and we wanted people to go back to the pilot and see that the symbol had been burned into the fuselage.” But if we had known, we wouldn’t have done it in such an oblique way. Sawyer would’ve went [adopts Southern twang], “Hey, what’s this?” We want people to see our Easter eggs.

This is a separate aspect of clue/theory-based fandom that irks me: the tendency not just to see hoofprints and think of zebras instead of horses, but to invent zebra prints when there aren’t any there. Perhaps the most infuriating discussion about Lost I’ve ever had took place on a message board I hang out on, where I spent two or three weeks being told that there’s no way baby Aaron could be one of the Oceanic Six, basically because he wasn’t a ticketed passenger. Now, the label “Oceanic Six” is, in the world of Lost, a media-generated nickname for the survivors, so for Aaron to not be considered one of them would therefore mean the international news media ignored a baby born on a deserted island to a plane crash survivor–basically the greatest human-interest story ever–on the kind of technicality that only people who sit around making anagrams out of supporting characters’ names would appreciate. The adamant refusal to consider basic tenets of human behavior, instead focusing on clues and rules and regulations like the show is a board game, is so baffling to me.

Interview number two is conducted by the Onion A.V. Club’s Noel Murray. This interview is distinguished from every other interview I’ve seen with Lost creators, including the two I myself have conducted, in that it doesn’t as a single in-world question. Also, the making-of questions aren’t all variations on “do you know where this is going?”, which is in a way just an in-world question in disguise. The resulting answers make for fascinating reading, and I’m so enthusiastic about it I’m basically going to reproduce vast swathes of it while encouraging you to click over and read it yourself.

For example, here’s Lindelof on the difference between flashforwards and flashbacks as storytelling mechanisms:

…whereas the flashbacks before had been an emotional storytelling technique—like, “Here’s how Sawyer became a con man, here’s the time that Jack ratted out his father, here’s when Kate held up a bank”—on a story level, they weren’t that complicated. They were sort of the one thing the audience could grasp onto, no matter what sort of wackiness was happening on the island. The flash-forwards are the exact opposite of that. When you see [Character X] in the future killing people for [Character Y], that’s all story. Or when you see [Character A] being approached by [Character B], that’s all story. So the show actually becomes vastly more complicated.

All the flashforwards so far have shown the characters involved in extremely tense and discomfiting places emotionally so it’s easy not to notice that they’re now plot pieces as well as character pieces, but this is a point well taken.

Then there’s Cuse on the different difficulty levels, for want of a better term, for the show’s mysteries:

I also think that it’s rewarding for the audience to not always be frustrated and behind. We have certain mysteries on the show that we hope the audience figures out on their own, and can have the satisfaction of saying “Aha! I knew that! I knew that the guy on the boat was going to be [Character Q]!” But there are other times when we have real surprises, like [Character U] shooting [Character V] and [Character W], where we go to great pains to make sure that nobody sees it coming, so you’re genuinely surprised. We intentionally mix up the degree of difficulty in solving the puzzle.

I still find it immensely frustrating when the show is spoiled by its own opening credits, but again, this is a point well taken.

The pair also talk candidly, and to my mind somewhat disappointingly, about the impact fan reaction can have on the story itself. While they both disavow Lost messageboards as overly plot-centric and nitpicky, they also admit that the public reception of characters–they call this “market fluctuations”–can lead to their premature exit from the show. So too can outside considerations like actors simply wanting not to live in Hawaii anymore, which bums me out enormously, as such things have ever since I found out that the Frankie Pentangelli role in The Godfather Part II was originally supposed to be Clemenza. On the other hand, actors who really click in a role sometimes see their parts get beefed up, and for whatever reason I have no problem with that–I suppose because it’s an issue of collaborating artists, rather than a business concern or an audience concern.

There’s a lot more, including the now ever-present discussion of how having a set endpoint has altered and reinvigorated the storytelling dynamic, an interesting passage about how the DVD/download viewing model is really going to be the norm once the show ends and the actual week-to-week airings are a historical fluke by comparison. You should read the whole thing.

(Links via Whitney Matheson)

* A whole bunch of Frank Miller/The Spirit news came out of New York Comic Con, including some more posters and an enjoyably Sin City-ish teaser trailer. (Via AICN.)

* For my money the most interesting Miller tidbit has to do with another project entirely: Miller himself is hoping/planning to direct an adaptation of his and Geof Darrow’s gonzo sci-fi masterpiece Hard Boiled. As MTV points out, this project was originally associated with Nicolas Cage and David Fincher. (Also via AICN.)

* And at Entertainment Weekly, Miller and his producer Deborah Del Prete talk turkey about the Spirit adaptation, while Miller reveals he’s 122 pages into a new book that’s a “love letter to New York”–presumably not Holy Terror, Batman!, then–and that he’s finished writing Sin City 2 with an eye on an eventual third film as well. (Via Kevin Melrose.)

* Speaking of films that irritate Ron Rosenbaum, Uma Thurman tells MTV that Quentin Tarantino is indeed working on that big final all-in-one deluxe DVD version of Kill Bill, aka The Whole Bloody Affair, AND at least one of his proposed anime prequel/sequel/whatevers involving the KB characters–the latter will be used as a bridge/intermission to create the former. Based on Tarantino’s previous statements and Thurman saying she hasn’t done any voice work for the cartoon, it seems like Bill will be the subject of the new material rather than the Bride. (Via Rob Bricken at Topless Robot.)

* Ammon Gilbert of Arrow in the Head pays homage to one of the two great ultraviolent Communist-invasion action films of the ’80s, Red Dawn. (That’s the one involving teenaged Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen, C. Thomas Howell, Lea Thompson, and Jennifer Grey avenging the imprisonment of Harry Dean Stanton–and who wouldn’t?–not the one involving Chuck Norris shooting people in shopping malls.)

* The Blot‘s Tom Neely keeps on killin’ the game with his weekly comic strips. Goddammit, look at those palm trees.

* Water Monsters in the News: Loren Coleman notes a report of an alligator in a New Hampshire pond, which is neat enough, but in so doing he breaks down the differing types of unusual-alligator reports: stray pets or zoo animals vs. expanding habitat vs. actual out-of-place breeding populations vs. genuine cryptid lake monsters. Dreamy stuff.

* All Too Infrequent T-Shirt Blogging: Whitney Matheson notes that CNN.com now has T-shirt-making functionality for some of its video-news headlines. That is very bizarre and very cool.

* Finally, I hope to have a nice Lost post up later today in time for the return of the show–I was gonna include that stuff here but it probably merits its own post. So stay tuned.

My debut post at the wonderful nerd-culture site Topless Robot is up: The 11 Most Awful Songs from Geek Movie Soundtracks. I’d say “enjoy,” but I’m not sure that’s applicable.

* I’ve seen a lot of OUTRAGE from horror fandom about the recent successes of PG-13 horror movies, perhaps best represented by the Prom Night remake from a few weeks back. Most of it consists of mouthbreathingly simplistic “BLOOD AND TITS EQUALS WIN”-type extreme-mongering rather than any kind of informed consideration of whether PG-13 movies might possibly be scary. But B-Sol at Vault of Horror takes an entirely different view of the problem with PG-13: They’re slasher movies explicitly geared at young teenagers.

* Jim Henley defends 24 against the accusation that it’s directly responsible for torture at Gitmo and elsewhere, as recent reports have claimed. I totally agree with Jim: as with other cases involving movie-inspired violence, I think it’s a case of people predisposed to violence gravitating toward violent art, not violent art inspiring violence in the first place. And while I don’t give a good goddamn about the show itself, some regular viewers in Jim’s comment thread point out temporal discrepancies in terms of what was going on in the series by the point it was supposedly inspiring torture techniques.

* Scott Pilgrim creator Bryan Lee O’Malley reviews Cloverfield! I think he’s right about the film’s visceral impact and wrong in saying the characters aren’t vapid (man, that’s kind of leaving things wide open for people with the same complaint about SP, isn’t it?), but you’ve gotta love his disclaimer:

Note to complainers: don’t take this as an invitation to pontificate on why you hated this movie, because I don’t actually care

* This week’s Horror Roundtable is all about horror movies we remember watching as kids. Between the Roundtable proper and the comment thread, the moral of the story is clearly that everyone loves The Monster Squad and The Blob.

* Todd VanDerWerff at the House Next Door has posted a very thoughtful and in-depth review of Friday’s excellent Battlestar Galactica episode.

* Tom Spurgeon does another one of his must-read review rampages.

* Big news: The Gordon Lee case has been dismissed, presumably due to egregious prosecutorial misconduct. This is a big day for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and a big day for comics, a medium that stands on shaky ground with regards to free speech issues. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* Fangoria speaks to Clive Barker about the current status of the Hellraiser remake, his Harry D’Amour/Pinhead epic The Scarlet Gospels, the next Abarat book, and the film adaptation of The Thief of Always.

* Tom Spurgeon reviews Joshua W. Cotter’s knockout Skyscrapers of the Midwest.