This week’s Thursday Morning Quarterback at Wizard is the place to be if you want to know what I think of the latest issues of Ultimates 2, All Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder, Justice League of America, Batman, Battlestar Galactica, B.P.R.D.: Garden of Souls, and Ex Machina.

And this week’s Horror Roundtable at The Horror blog is a virtual sacred-cow abattoir, as each participant names a horror movie (or several) that everyone else seemed to like but they didn’t. A lot of the choices had me all but yelling at my computer screen–“How could anyone not think THAT movie was scary?” It’s a pretty kick-ass read.

Let’s get the non-spoilery stuff out of the way up front:

Again, wow.

I first heard about plans for a sequel 28 Days Later in the context of an announcement of the formation of Fox Atomic, a new shingle dedicated to the teen market. And Danny Boyle wouldn’t be returning. Neither would Alex Garland. Or any of the original cast members. I figured a textbook Hollywood Bastardization was in the offing complete with boo-scares subbed in for genuine horror, maybe some blandly attractive early-20s leads, lots of explosions, the whole shitty schmear.

I feel like I’ve been saying this a lot about horror movies lately, but boy, was I ever wrong. Simply put, this is probably the most brutal, most nihilistic, saddest major-studio horror film I’ve ever seen. It’s also beautifully shot, powerfully acted, and very, very scary. And it hammers home the notion that any of us can fail, catastrophically, in the face of horror and death harder almost than one can tolerate.

I liked it better than the original. Go see it.

Okay, now that that’s out of the way, the SPOILERS will commence. Caveat lector.

Ah, how to begin? As with Hostel, I was so taken aback with how strongly I reacted to this film, how much I liked it, how deeply it resonated with what is important to me in the horror genre, how much it moved me, that it took me several days after seeing it to feel up to the task of writing about it, and another several days to recharge enough to finish it. I started this post (ill, up past my bedtime, this past Tuesday, five days after seeing the movie) mostly because I felt like I was slipping in through a very narrow, rapidly closing window between times when my thoughts would be incoherently fresh and incoherently faded. I got about halfway through and gave up, exhausted, revisiting it only now that the new weekend is upon me and I can devote the time and energy needed to say everything (as well as the hours to sleep it off).

So, let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start. If for some bizarre reason you watch movies with my approach to them in mind, it was probably obvious to you by the conclusion of the opening sequence that 28 Weeks Later had already hit my specific post-apocalyptic horror button squarer and harder than any other movie I can think of. Don is presented with the choice of trying (and probably failing, and dying in the process) to save his wife or running and saving his own hide, and he chooses the latter, and she sees him do it and dies knowing he’s abandoned her.

Well, as far as I’m concerned you could end the movie right there.

That, that is the fear, the terror, the gnawing abyss of horror at the heart of the entire genre, for me if for no one else. It was really the topic of the entirety of my own stab at post-apocalyptic zombie fiction, The Outbreak, if you recall. Here’s how I put it when Sam Costello interviewed me about the blog:

a big part of what I wanted to address in The Outbreak was the notion that tragedy and catastrophe and death are not inherently ennobling, and that instead of being Jake Weber’s character from Dawn of the Dead (or, on the flipside, some total nutjob psychopath a la some of the bad guys from The Stand) we’re just as likely to be the asshole guy who ditches them when the bus flips over, or Barbara from Night of the Living Dead, or (this might have been the biggest touchstone of all for me) Bill Paxton’s Marine character from Aliens. We might react in a really venal way, we might be mean or cowardly, we might just fall apart…. my biggest fear, my sort of existential fear, is that there are some things you can do or mistakes you can make that can never, ever be fixed. You can’t make up for them, you can’t make amends for them, you can’t undo them, you can’t fix them. You’re left with the consequences for the rest of your life. The guilt of that haunts me and frightens me more than any zombie. So that’s really what the blog became about–finding and focusing on anything I’d done in my life that had me frightened that it might be irrevocable and unsolvable and disastrous.

To discover that this was going to be the lynchpin and prime motivator of an entire zombie film? O joy, o nihilistic rapture. I’ll admit I was a little troubled by his said-to-himself reaction to what had just happened at the end of the sequence: Instead of breaking down sobbing, as I probably would have had him do, he let loose a torrent of “Shit! Oh fuck! Oh fuck! Oh shit!”, like a housecat owner who just realized he’d left the window open with no screen in place. In my theatre at least, this was treated like a laugh line, and I got nervous as to the ultimate approach the filmmakers would take. But in retrospect, perhaps I shouldn’t have been. Perhaps the verbal inadequacy of his response to the tragedy was commensurate with the moral inadequacy of his reaction to its onset?

But let’s pause here for a moment: I don’t mean to judge him. In fact, I refuse. And if that makes me responsible for the decline and fall of Western civilization, so be it. Seriously, I thought almost instantly of the astoundingly callous reaction in some circles to the Virgina Tech shootings, where the perceived failure of the students to Cowboy Up and take down the heavily armed shooter with their bare hands was deemed by commentators predominantly of a conservative/interventionist stripe as indicative of the feminization or wussification of American culture, or of straight-up cowardice–as was any attempt to point out that there’s no way for anyone to know how they’d react in a situation like that unless they were in it. But that was all brushed aside and lambasted and ridiculed since people had Clint Eastwood fantasies to live out.

So when I saw Robert Carlyle’s Don sprinting away from that house and his wife, I didn’t think “what a bastard.” I thought, “what would I do?” If I chose to stay and try to help, would it be out of some highly developed sense of bravery or morality–or, Hostel-style, simple terror of having to live with the guilt of not having helped?

As I said, the film could have ended there. But it didn’t, and because it didn’t and because Robert Carlyle had top billing I assumed that at some climactic point Don would have to make this choice again, probably involving his children, and this time he’d chose to stay and try to help. And I figured there’d be a good chance that this would be the wrong choice this time around and his attempts would be in vain or would even be worse than not trying to help. But yeah, that’s what I thought would happen.

Wrong. Don’s wife Alice turns up alive. It should be noted that she does so courtesy of a plot device, a twist in the mechanics of the rage infection, which is one of the big differences between this film and the original. In Days, the main characters were just random people of no particular geopolitical importance; there were 8 million stories in the naked post-apocalypse, and this was one of them. In Weeks, the four-person family unit who collectively comprised the lead roles are, in essence, the most important people on the planet, capable of radically altering the course of the virus’s progression. Save for a fleeting fool’s hope about the soldiers in Days, we have no reason to believe that Jim and Selena et al will find a cure, or on the flipside spread the virus to the wider world. In Weeks, either could happen. So anyway, now I find myself believing that this will be a film technically about those possibilities, but mainly about the family’s attempts to mend from the horror of what happened between Don and Alice, and what happened to them both because of his choice.

Wrong again.

Infecting Don was a shocking move, one straight out of the Psycho playbook. (Why is it still so surprising, even now, by the way? Is the language of cinema that deeply ingrained in us that we take main characters not dying until the final reel, if at all, as an article of faith?) But it’s more shocking, in its way, because he doesn’t die a propos of nothing, he doesn’t die because of someone else’s psychodrama working itself out. He dies because he seeks forgiveness from the woman he loves–and she, loving him, grants it. In other words, they die–ultimately, the world dies–because they did the right thing.

That really only had the chance to strike me after the transformed Don beat his wife to death. Can you remember a scene in a mainstream film more brutal, more savage, more unrelentingly awful than this? Both Boyle in Days and director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo up until this point in Weeks had chosen to obscure most of the infected-on-uninfected violence with grainy images, quick cuts, and flailing movements. But here–after a masterful transformation by Carlyle that truly captured the tragedy of his infection, making the rage feel like an outward manifestation of the trauma his betrayal of his wife and the irrevocable damage it had now obviously done–the violence is brought home in clear, relatable terms. Here, we have a husband beating his horrified and helpless wife to death with his fists. As she screams and cries, he puts out her eyes with his thumbs–an “I’ll see you and raise” response to Jim’s execution of a soldier gone wild by the same means in Days, one where the equivalent roles are reversed and it’s the soldier blinding and braining Jim. I could hear audience members turning away from the screen, and I thought, “Every decision is the wrong decision. He was wrong to abandon her, and she was wrong to survive, and he was wrong to beg forgiveness, and she was wrong to forgive him, and they were wrong to love each other. In some cases it was wrong for moral reasons, in some cases it was wrong for physical reasons they couldn’t possibly anticipate, but in all cases it was wrong. It’s all a wash.”

This is not necessarily new territory for a post-apocalyptic zombie film. For some reason this fact is frequently overlooked–or more likely overwhelmed by the film’s powerful sociopolitical subtext, even as it intriguingly complicates that subtext–but that’s more or less the point of Romero’s original Night of the Living Dead. Ben, the film’s handsome, self-assured, intelligent, charismatic lead, is dead wrong when he insists that his band of survivors stay on their abandoned house’s ground floor rather than hole up in the basement, and again when he sends some of them out to gas up a nearby truck to help them get out of there rather than sit tight; Cooper, the ugly, hot-tempered asshole, actually had the right idea (and Ben pretty much kills him for it, and we cheer).

Somewhat predictably, this point is once again being ignored by many viewers of Weeks. My friend Jim Treacher (who, incidentally, spent a shitload of time and energy and sanity trying in vain to argue the “the VaTech victims were cowards” crowd out of their moral degeneracy) notes that mainstream film critics (surprise, surprise!) latched on to the movie’s obvious political overtones–it is, after all, about a disastrous failed occupation of a foreign country by the American military–to the exclusion of all other considerations (including, in one memorably ridiculous case, the gender of one of the leads). Jim notes that if they’d succeeded in their war-crime drive to exterminate every civilian in London, infected and uninfected alike, the Americans would have saved the world. In the end it’s the soldiers who don’t act brutally–the sniper who abandons his post, the helicopter pilot who disobeys regulations–whose actions unleash the infection upon the rest of the world. The people who do the right thing are wrong; the people who do the wrong thing are right.

But this in turn overlooks the colossal mistakes and failures that created the situation in which brutality is the correct course of action in the first place. And here’s where the political daggers cut deepest. In normal circumstances I’d pick the lapses in judgement and basic common sense by the military characters apart as poor writing. You recover a survivor from the hot zone and fail to leave an armed guard to watch her while you test her for the infection? Your big plan for an outbreak within the quarantine zone is to lock all the civilians in a parking garage in the dark with the doors unguarded? You firebomb the island on which the outbreak is located without blowing all the bridges and tunnels first? You don’t go nuclear the second the extent of your failure becomes evident? But here’s the thing: In a world where the consequences of dismal planning and gobsmacking incompetence stare us in the face everywhere from New Orleans to Sadr City, would any of these fuck-ups actually surprise you? I sat there and thought “this isn’t terribly far-fetched, is it?” and found that as saddening and frightening as nearly anything in the film. The message is summed up in a bold, stunning editing choice: an ostentatiously slow wipe (!) that gradually replaces a shot of the cold, haughty, ultimately useless military commander, locked in a bunker and resigned to his failure, with a shot of the streets swarming with infected. He blew it; he’s irrelevant; we never hear from him again.

So while we’re on the subject, let’s talk about the military brutality. It truly is brutal, matching the assaults in Children of Men in intensity (if replacing that film’s continuous takes with rapid-fire (pun intended) editing). Director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (and it’s criminal I’m just mentioning him for the first time now) uses the limited sight and sound range of both the snipers and the targets to gradually escalate the chaos, snapshot by snapshot, into a cacophony of bullets and death; the effect is breathtaking. Later the use of fire to purge the area is depicted with unflinching frankness, epitomized in the sequence where heroic AWOL sniper Doyle (played with understated kindness by Dahmer‘s Jeremy Renner, whose still-waters-run-deep face should be seen in as many films as possible from here on out if there is a God in Heaven) is burned alive by his fellow troops: We watch him ignite, burn, flail, fall, die, wishing the whole time that the filmmakers would spare us the next second.

But no one is spared of anything, at all. “No one” in the sense that this isn’t an anti-American film per se, or only. Yes, the resonance with Iraq is intentional, obvious, and accurate. But there’s no future in England’s dreaming either; the statue of General James Wolfe that gazes silently as the Isle of Dogs burns and the dead monarchs (including Prince Charles) who grin atop a carousel that will never again carry laughing children on the backs of its horses appear to implicate the self-regarding grandeur of this earth, this realm in its own demise as well. The poster for American punk act NOFX’s protest record The War on Errorism that adorns young Tammy’s wall goes to show what all that amounts to in the face of armageddon as well.

But “no one” also in the sense of the audience. It’s not an overstatement to say that this movie is intended to assault us. Don’s murder of Alice, Doyle’s immolation…awful, unwatchable, inescapable. And in the climax, we ourselves are placed behind the “camera” of a sniper rifle’s scope as it’s used to bash selfless military doctor Scarlet’s head in, over, and over, and over, and over, and over. See? says the film. See.

That the climax revolves around just four people is part of the film’s genuinely innovative structure. After the initial burst of gut-wrenching violence and terror that kicks off the film and provides its back story, a long, peaceful interlude follows. Once the violence erupts again, it balloons almost instantly to a massive level, featuring thousands of infected and victims and soldiers in a chaotic free-for-all with the protagonists in the middle of it all. But from then on, the scale of the set pieces gets smaller and smaller, with fewer and fewer infected involved. The final two lethal encounters–between the protagonists and the soldiers, between the protagonists and one last infected–are quiet, even intimate.

The line from the initial explosion to those moments is a straight one. Unlike Days, Weeks doesn’t alternate scenes of action and horror with ones of passion and humor. There’s no campfire near a field full of horses, no romp through an abandoned supermarket with pop music playing on the soundtrack, no toasting with creme de menthe, no teenage girls getting entertainingly stoned while all hell breaks loose. Once the infection returns, the movie is relentless. I’ve heard some viewers bemoan this relative lack of poignancy, as one message-board friend of mine aptly put it. But the trade-off is the urgency: All the characters want to do is survive. That the characters haven’t bonded the way Jim and Selena and Frank and Hannah did and still want each other to survive is perhaps the one glimmer of hope afforded in the entire film.

And that will bring us back to Don. Another complaint I’ve heard is his placement in the narrative as “the king zombie” (another apt description, care of a coworker this time). He’s this outbreak’s patient zero, and he shows up to coincidentally, repeatedly, and improbably menace his own children. Doesn’t bother me. Even putting aside the fact that Saint George of Romero went there all the time (Johnny coming to get Barbara, Flyboy showing the zombies the way to the hidden chamber, Bub bringing down Rhodes… (and hey, now that you mention it, he replaced his entire cast from film to film too)), I think we can sacrifice logistics for poetry occasionally, can’t we? Especially in a genre as thick with allegory as the zombie tale. Don’s irreparable betrayal courses through the veins of this movie like the rage virus through the veins of the infected; in both cases there’s no cure, and that’s as it should be. That’s why the film’s most powerful scene is the one where the two bloodstreams mix: Don’s transformation. Here at last we see the Rage take hold of a person whose reasons to be full of rage have been made painfully clear to us (and to him). Like Renner, Carlyle had previously starred in an overlooked horror mini-gem, Ravenous. In a movie loaded with powerful performances (from Renner, Carlyle, Catherine McCormack, Imogen Poots–I admit to occasionally wishing Rose Byrne were Sarah Polley, but that may not really be Byrne’s fault), this is the finest scene. Carlyle coaxex from within the freshly infected Don the self-hatred, the abject terror and disgrace he feels toward his failure, and externalizing it, like it’s those feelings that possess him rather than a sci-fi disease. Better to kill everything and everyone than face that failure. Better to embrace it than ever entertain the too easily dashable hope of escaping it. This Guardian article on Fresnadillo and the film puts it this way:

Fresnadillo says he is dramatising a statement of Aristotle’s: “rage occurs when a person gives back their own suffering”.

Winding down now: I discovered that Guardian piece just now, after the entirety of the preceding portion of the post had been written. In the article Fresnadillo discusses a lot of the same things I did here: domestic abuse, Virginia Tech, survivor’s guilt, the point that the capacity for committing horrific acts is in everyone and not just in one’s own pet target demographic. (Again, it’s no wonder I liked a film that’s so obviously on my same wavelength.) The thoughtfulness of the ideas he’s presenting in the film threaten to overwhelm the strength of the images, which, again, is criminal. Occasionally when I watch a horror movie there’s a moment of such clearly smart, skilled filmmaking–something that goes above and beyond the simple need to be scary–that I say to myself “Okay, this is a real film we’re watching here.” In the case of The Descent, for example, it was that hospital-corridor collapse of grief; here, it was the overhead shot in Don and family’s new apartment. There’s plenty more where that came from (and so begins the trademark STC List of Stuff I Really Liked): The hazmat-suited soldiers emerging from the gas; the way Doyle’s sniper scope lingers on the family longer than he does on the couple having sex; infected Don’s profile in the foreground while the fire rages in the background; the line of infected appearing out of the tall grass; the statue shot; the carousel; the J-horror crawl of Alice from behind the bed; the Silence of the Lambs/Blair Witch nightvision sequence; the empty stadium; the thumbs in the eyes. They all linger. And the final shot, needless to say, was perfect and inevitable given the message of the movie that led up with it. The world is betrayed with a kiss, and it’s all a wash.

(Postscript: Try the comments, if you’d like.)

Feast your ears, glut your soul on this montage of the high notes from 30 different Christines in various productions of Sir Andrew Lloyd Weber’s The Phantom of the Opera. After a while, you’ll start to feel like you’re going insane. Sing for me, my angels of YouTube! (Note: This blog not responsible for shattered eardrums.)

How do you like it? How do you like it?

The juicy ongoing discussion of improvised vs. highly structured narratives and Alan Moore’s alleged (by me) excesses in the latter direction continues. First, Bruce Baugh writes in again, regarding my claim that Moore’s intricate plotting doesn’t say much about the human experience:

It’s certainly possible that the thoroughly structured sort of storytelling Moore does has a special appeal to people who have seriously marginalizing circumstances. Dealing with a difficult-to-diagnose, difficult-to-treat set of immune disorders, for instance, means a lot of puzzle solving, and a lot of approaching routine life situations as if they were James Bond-style traps. So stories about characters in exotic fictional circumstances who have to deal with that kind of notional maze carry some extra resonance for me. It’s a more intensified version of the appeal of straightforward metaphors (vampirism as dangerous lust, for instance). It’s not just the exercise of cracking the code, it’s engaging with the experience of life as a puzzle along with the other appeals of a good story.

Not everyone’s life resonates that way, of course, and furthermore not everyone whose life does chooses or wishes to get some entertainment with that sort of shape around it. I’m just sayin’ that sometimes it really is a thing that speaks a useful symbolic truth.

That’s a good point. I can’t put my finger on where, but I feel as though this point has been made explicitly by certain works of fiction involving ill or shut-in children who unlock various secret worlds or mysteries in puzzle-solving fashion. What am I thinking of here? Anyway, clearly that’s one way to approach books like these. It’s also entirely possible that I’m not giving Moore enough credit, and that the message of the ostentatious symmetry of, say, Watchmen is not the in-my-opinion inaccurate argument that life has a great and secret design, but that the way random things frequently come together in a way that ascribes meaning to their connections is, in fact, evidence of the universe’s meaninglessness. The proverbial monkey who types up the Gettysburg Address isn’t supposed to be taken as evidence for destiny, after all. The final scene of Watchmen, with its emphasis on chance and choice, might bear that out somewhat.

Attacking the issue from the opposite direction is T Hodler of the great comics publisher PictureBox Inc., who challenges the very notion that art should be reflective of how life works. As he says in the post, he and I aren’t really as far apart on this issue as it initially seemed. When I busted Moore’s chops, I wasn’t objecting to its artifice-iality per se, but its specific brand of artificiality, that cryptogram structure that, to me at least, enables one to exhaust the possible meanings of the work.

Meanwhile, my blogger from another mother Jon Hastings offers a pair of posts which, in their exploration of topics tangential to the Moore Question (from the perils of “big idea” comics to the vital role Moore’s of artists in undermining the potentially stultifying effects of his deterministic scripting), appear to lump Grant Morrison works like Seven Soldiers and Seaguy into the clockwork-narrative camp. I’ll cop to being one of the bigger Morrison fans on the block, but I don’t see those works in the same way I see Watchmen or From Hell. Despite its interlocking themes and tropes and plotlines and so on, Seven Soldiers is a gigantic sprawling thing, especially compared to the diamond bullet that is Watchmen. Its seven very different approaches to its genre, coupled with the way each is wrapped around the talents of one of seven (or eight or nine or ten) different artists (talk about a project where the art mitigates against the sense of an omnipotent, omniscient writer!), gives the thing a lot more room to breathe. (As does, in some fashion I can’t quite articulate, its wide-open optimism. You don’t really feel like you’re locked in a room with that book.) As for Seaguy, maybe I’m uncomfortable labeling it a decodible narrative simply because I am completely unable to decode it–but isn’t that fair? Each time I read it I feel like I’m trying to get a foothold in a perfect sphere, leaving me to slide off the surface of it a different way each time.

Finally, a quote from Andrew Dignan’s latest Lost recap at The House Next Door that resonates with what we’ve been talking about:

One of the problems with Lost‘s flashbacks has always been the way they reduce its characters into a series of cause and effect scenarios, distilling every action into a result of a single event from their past, like placing a thumbtack in a map…. It’s amazing how much more human these people feel when they’re not reduced to walking algebra equations.

It’s funny: Lost is in many ways the anti-Sopranos; it’s a show where the writers are forever promising the audience that everything has been planned out from the beginning, and that they’ll do an even better job at planning everything out from now on, honest! Unsurprising, given co-creator Damon Lindelof’s frequently expressed love for Watchmen. That said, I still enjoy the living shit out of the show, in part because the game of the narrative has been so much fun to play, in part because of the beauty of the images and sounds (overlooked just as often as the art in Moore’s comics, fittingly enough), and in part because the sheer scope of the thing makes it harder to tie it all up and be done with it. Also, no one’s arguing it’s the greatest graphic novel of all time, as it were, although as with Watchmen, the unsuccessful imitators already abound.

I’ve been waiting for this: Over at the Wizard site, we’ve posted our big juicy exclusive joint interview with Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof and Heroes creator Tim Kring. It’s pretty much full of stuff I’d never heard before I copyedited it, including the roots of their friendship during their time on Crossing Jordan, what they think of each others’ shows (positive and negative), tidbits about the season finales, and loads more. We kind of couldn’t believe our good luck in getting these two guys together, so I hope you dig the results.

According to Loren Coleman, this giant turtle is bogus. This giant turtle, on the other hand, is the real deal!

Bad news: Tom Spurgeon brings word that Cold Heat, the brilliant art-comics punk-rock sci-fi/fantasy thriller from BJ, Frank Santoro, and PictureBox Inc., is ending its serialized run effective immediately. The eventual graphic-novel collection is still on the way, though.

Finally, a reminder from Jason Adams: Whenever possible, try to avoid letting giant bugs suck on your head.

Eve Tushnet reviews The Thing and Jeepers Creepers, using my reviews of the flicks as a springboard. See how the other half–meaning the half that isn’t predisposed to like them–experiences horror movies.

No, not that Paul Anderson. This Paul Anderson.

Oh dear.

(Via Cinematical)

Listen, I’m not even one of those BRUCE CAMPBELL IS GOD people. And I know exactly what this Old Spice commercial is doing. I know it’s just pushing my nerd and kitsch buttons.

AND I DON’T CARE.

According to this SciFi Wire interview with director David Cunningham, some changes from the original novel are afoot in the highly-anticipated-by-Sean film version of The Dark Is Rising, most notably that main character Will is now an American 13-year-old instead of a British 11-year-old. That’s fine, I guess. The meat of the piece is really in this quote from Cunningham, though:

…my attempt has been is to try and do it through a more modern lens, so that the filmic style is much more today, versus much more classical, as many fantasy films are shot. And so we’re really trying to make this ride feel not like a fantasy film, feel very today, like it’s happening to someone you would know and recognize and understand.

Interesting.

A multimillionaire Muttontown couple has been arrested by federal agents on charges of keeping two Indonesian women as slaves in their Long Island home for the past five years and torturing one of them frequently for disobedience, according to officials…. The situation was uncovered after one of the woman managed to escape and was found wandering near a Dunkin Donuts in Syosset by employees who initially thought she was homeless, the papers said. When the employees attempted to communicate with her she kept slapping her face and saying what sounded to them like the word “master,” the papers added.

—“LI couple face charges for keeping, torturing slaves,” Robert E. Kessler, Newsday. Picture of suspect Varsha Mahender Sabhnani leaving Nassau County Police Headquarters by Howard Schnapp.

O’ course, it’s probably not a giant sea turtle at all, but just a funnily decomposed whale, which is usually what these sea-monster carcasses (aka globsters) that wash up tend to be. But still, for now, whoa, eh?

More pics at Loren Coleman’s Cryptomundo.

Bruce Baugh, whose earlier letter triggered yesterday’s critique of Alan Moore, writes again in the writer’s defense:

I have to add this: Moore has been one of the most incredibly responsible people I can think of when it comes to the bad effects of his legacy. He’s very up front about what he was trying to do, his dismay at being copied for bad reasons, and his desire to get attention spread around again. And of course he’s gone on to do work in a lot of different ways himself, not all of it to my particular taste, but all showing the same underlying spark let out through all kinds of different channels. I don’t think it’s his and Frank Miller’s fault that so many people were ready to turn up the grimness dial on superheroics and then leave it stuck there, nor his and Gibbons and Veitch and Totleben and et al’s fault that there was such an audience for super-carefully structured storytelling of the sort he was doing then.

I absolutely love this bit from an interview Moore did for the Onion’s AV Club:

“The gritty, deconstructivist postmodern superhero comic, as exemplified by Watchmen, also became a genre. It was never meant to. It was meant to be one work on its own. I think, to that degree, it may have had a deleterious effect upon the medium since then. I’d have liked to have seen more people trying to do something that was as technically complex as Watchmen, or as ambitious, but which wasn’t strumming the same chords that Watchmen had strummed so repetitively. This is not to say that the entire industry became like this, but at least a big enough chunk of it did that it is a noticeable thing. The apocalyptic bleakness of comics over the past 15 years sometimes seems odd to me, because it’s like that was a bad mood that I was in 15 years ago. It was the 1980s, we’d got this insane right-wing voter fear running the country, and I was in a bad mood, politically and socially and in most other ways. So that tended to reflect in my work. But it was a genuine bad mood, and it was mine. I tend to think that I’ve seen a lot of things over the past 15 years that have been a bizarre echo of somebody else’s bad mood. It’s not even their bad mood, it’s mine, but they’re still working out the ramifications of me being a bit grumpy 15 years ago. So, for my part, I wouldn’t say that my new stuff is all bunny rabbits and blue-skies optimism, but it’s probably got a lot more of a positive spin on it than the work I was doing back in the ’80s. This is a different century.”

That’s pretty darned decent, I’d say.

That’s certainly true, though to me the “bad mood I was in 15 years ago” line he frequently employs is a wee bit condescending. It’s not like he’s blaming himself for his work’s limitations, after all–he’s blaming other people for not getting it, basically. Of course, that’s entirely fair, so he has that going for him. I totally agree that it’s completely unfair to blame Watchmen and Dark Knight for Identity Crisis and Spider-Man: Reign.

But I don’t get the sense he’s aware that the meticulous stuff is just as much a schtick now (for himself and for others, though it speaks to his prodigious talent that no one’s been able to pull it off as well as he) as the grim’n’gritty stuff. Most of his later work falls into one of two categories: The stuff you get the sense he regards as being his Important Statements, which do the clockwork bit, and the stuff he’s doing as a somewhat self-conscious Lark, which is all the homagey ABC stuff and Supreme and whatnot. The books that fall somewhere in between, like Top Ten (for the most part) and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, are the books I enjoy the most. They tend to be the most loosey-goosey.

What it comes down to is whether you want to decode a work of fiction. Decoding has its undeniable thrills, and I don’t mean to condescend to them or deny them or minimize them at all. The revelatory frisson of noticing all the easter eggs and hidden symbolism and syncronicitities in the days and weeks and months and, frankly, years following my first read of Watchmen is one of my all-time favorite reading experiences. But the problem with works where everything is mapped out and thought through and consciously connected is that you can hit bottom on them. At a certain point, you’ve exhausted their possibilities. Once you’ve cracked the code, the code is cracked. You’ve figured it out. That’s the only way to skin that particular cat. Compare and contrast that with the pretty much boundless possibilities within the unanswered questions of just one Sopranos episode. (Don’t click that link if you haven’t seen the most recent episode, but if you have, I urge you to click it.)

I like the wiggle room, is what I’m saying. I like the message I receive to be more or less up to me, not simply an extremely erudite version of “Be sure to drink your Ovaltine.”

Ain’t It Cool News guru Harry Knowles reports from the set of The Dark Is Rising, the upcoming adaptation of Susan Cooper’s marvelous fantasy novel. A newcomer to the franchise, he’s come away from his read of the script and his visit to the set a believer. This makes me extremely optimistic about the prospects of one-third of my Extremly Highly Anticipated Adaptations Triumvirate (which also includes The Mist and The Midnight Meat Train.)

Lots of info and waxing enthusiastic and pictures–such as the one above, of Christopher Eccleston as the Rider–at the link.

My take is that dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction has always been around (from The Time Machine to Pan in Year Zero! to Blade Runner), so what we’re really noticing now is the absence of any other kind of sci-fi, at least when it comes to sci-fi that reaches the mainstream of pop culture.

—Jon Hastings, in response to my post on the fall of optimistic sci-fi. Lots of other good “towards a definition of science fiction”-type stuff in Jon’s post, too.

The difference between Heidi and Kennedy and Tony and Christopher is one of degree, not kind. The young women had a chance to do the right thing but didn’t…. What’s important — for Chase’s purposes — is that they were presented with a moral test and they not only failed it, they didn’t seem terribly aware that it was a test.

—Matt Zoller Seitz, on David Chase’s starless and bible black cynicism as embodied in a pair of bit characters in this week’s episode of The Sopranos. None more black.

The illustrious Bruce Baugh writes, regarding my and Jon Hastings’ thoughts on “improvisational storytelling” versus “having it all mapped out” in serialized television (and other places):

Oh, man, this is such a standard rant of mine. Way too many fanboys (this is much less common a problem among fangirls) give plotting an undue respect. In comics, it’s all Alan Moore’s fault. 🙂 Okay, not really, but the famous scripts and all for Swamp Thing, Watchmen, et al, set far too many folks already inclined to favor plot at the expense of other concerns to thinking that the best work is all done up in advance. Nothing of the sort, of course, and you can cite as many good examples of improvisation as I can, I’ll bet, in film, music, comics, prose, and so on until we get bored with it.

Indeed, and agreed that Alan Moore is particularly egregious in this respect, something I’ve been saying for a few years now (and also recently). The thing that most irks me about Moore’s work, even his best work, even his work I enjoy a great deal, is how ostentatiously writerly it is–the way his Godlike Authorial Hand shows in every move machination of his clockwork-precise plotting. And the thing is, to employ a criterion frequently used to lambaste superhero comics of a very different sort, what does this say to you about life, anyway? I think it’s awesome that there’s a completely symmetrical of issue of Watchmen, but it has sweet fuck-all to do with the way the world actually works. You’d never get one of those great Alan Moore “holy crap, that’s so cool!” moments out of reading scripts in which, say, Christopher Moltisanti falling on and off the wagon for five seasons of The Sopranos, or Johnny Sack getting cancer out of the blue, or whatever, but that’s a lot more evocative of the human experience than the pentagrammatic structure of different From Hell character arcs or whatever.

I remember being completely blown away when I was younger by the notion that someone could think through every aspect of his fiction so thoroughly and arrange it so meticulously. I still find it impressive, but I also find giant jigsaw puzzles impressive.

Surely the dearth of optimistic futuristic science fiction is linked to the recent rise of the fantasy genre I noted Kristin Thompson talking about. Writers of imaginative genre fiction have abandoned the future as a source for wonder and are retreating to worlds created out of whole cloth instead.

Brainfart: This doesn’t bode well for Robert Rodriguez’s live-action Jetsons movie, does it? Unless you find out Spacely Sprockets are made out of people, that is.

“I have being paid $50,000.00 in advance to terminate you”

–anonymous threatening spam email, as quoted in “E-mail threatens to snuff recipient,” Bob Sullivan, The Red Tape Chronicles, MSNBC.com

Today we seem to have trouble picturing the future, except in cataclysmic terms or as the present gone worse.

–Simon Reynolds, “Back to the future,” a review of Where’s My Jetpack?: The Amazing Science Fiction Future That Never Happened by Daniel H. Wilson, Ph.D., Salon.com

That’s certainly true. I really can’t think of the last non-Star Wars science-fiction film I saw that wasn’t dystopian or downright apocalyptic, post- or otherwise, in nature. Children of Men, Starship Troopers, The Matrix, 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later, War of the Worlds, A.I., Minority Report…and jeez, those last three were from America’s Director, Steven Spielberg, for crying out loud. Even the comparatively down-to-earth Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind had nothing uplifting to say about scientific progress. Then there’s books like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Stephen King’s Cell, comics like Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead and Paul Pope’s Batman Year 100, albums like nine inch nails’ year zero, TV shows like Heroes and Battlestar Galactica and even Lost, which is actually based in large part on the failure of an optimistic futurist utopia.

I found this link via Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds (“no relation”), who offers Quote #2 in response to Quote #1:

That’s a cultural thing, I think, brought about more by the values of filmmakers, etc. than by anything inherent in reality.

Now, I’m tempted to agree with him out of my long-held opinion that a belief in the imminent apocalypse–best exemplified by religious millenarianists, although as the excellent Children of Men and most of the other aforementioned films would indicate, that lot by no means has a monopoly on the doctrine–is 100% pure vanity, a reflection of the deep-seated conviction that one is part of the Most Special Generation EVAR. But really, there’s nothing inherent in present-day reality to make people feel pessimistic? Perhaps not for Reynolds, who doffs his rose-colored glasses only to look at Islamism, gun rights, and the Democratic Congress’s approval ratings, but for the rest of us, a lot of things do look mighty grim.

But Simon Reynolds takes the pessimism too far:

Race, gay rights, drugs, socioeconomic equality, religion — on just about every front, things either are not nearly as advanced as we’d have once expected or have actually gone into reverse.

Again, really? Look, there’s a difference between “as we’d have once expected,” and “as we’d like,” unless the “we” refers exclusively to hippies and little kids. I’ll admit that the Sesame Street watcher in me is kind of amazed that racism even exists, but the notion that we’re backsliding as a culture (as opposed to via certain current policies that stand to be subsequently backslid themselves) across a broad spectrum of socially progressive issues just doesn’t ring true to me. Maybe this is just more optimistic futurism, but for example, don’t statistics indicate that gay marriage will be a widely accepted reality within a generation? And, for another example, don’t we stand a better-than-decent chance of electing either a woman or a black man president the next time around? Don’t let’s give up on the metaphorical jetpacks just yet, folks.

Contrary to earlier reports from Edward James Olmos, Battlestar Galactica co-executive producer David Eick says no end has been announced for the show. Hooray! (Of course, this doesn’t necessarily mean that Season Four won’t be the last–just that it hasn’t been announced yet. But I’ll take what I can get.)

See 28 Weeks Later.

Wow.