Glamour magazine, that publication beloved of George Costanza, has posted a list of their Sexiest Love Scenes of All Time. (Swayze count: two!) I’m actually pretty impressed. The scenes they cite from Cruel Intentions, The Departed, Titanic, and The 40 Year Old Virgin (that’s right) are all pretty hot stuff. They don’t go too far afield, of course–no Anna Falchi fucking Rupert Everett in a graveyard, I’m afraid, and everything’s hetero and fairly vanilla at that–but still, good for them, and good for your Netflix queue. (Via Cinematical.)

When critics and “educated” audience members find themselves enjoying something that is disreputable (nihilistic black comedy, backwards foreigner ethnic jokes, horror movies), they need to rationalize it by attributing to the movie some kind of redeeming social message….I think this is also why Eli Roth talked about Hostel in terms of its anti-American message. The movie paints a pretty dismal picture of Eastern Europe (which, admittedly, many critics pointed out), so it’s probably better for the American filmmaker to go out of his way to show that the movie is really a criticism of America.

–The great Jon Hastings, free-associating a recent viewing of Borat, critical reaction to the same and to Pulp Fiction, and my reactions to The Host and Hostel to come up with a Grand Unifying Theory for Mainstream Appreciation of Outre Art and a sort of halfway point between the “Eli Roth made a movie better than himself” and “Eli Roth is a legitimately great filmmaker but a piss-poor interpreter of his own work” schools of thought regarding Roth’s hamfisted political pontifications vis a vis his film.

My favorite comic book creator ever, Frank Miller, takes on the Hollywood establishment, squeamish DC and WB executives, critics of his recent balls-to-the-wall Batman books, black ice, and, of course, The Terrorists in this really rather awesome profile in the L.A. Times. It’s refreshing to read an article about someone from comics in a mainstream publication that can intelligently articulate the differences between the work of the creator in question and that of comparable contemporaries–in this case, Miller’s use of space is contrasted with that of John Byrne and George Perez, believe it or not. I’m so impressed that I’ll forgive them for comparing The Dark Knight Returns to that graphic novel masterpiece The Watchman. (Hat tip: Cookie Jill at The Mystery of the Haunted Vampire.)

With Hulk, Lee brings what has been churning in his oeuvre for a decade to a boil. In the commercial American film industry, it takes guts, after 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, to let a man of color (albeit green) take on the United States military in the desert and survive. Given Hollywood’s bottom line of profitability, the fact that Lee would let an out of control non-white “alien” rip army helicopters out of the sky and escape into the camouflage of a Third World jungle needs to be given credit. The A-bomb be damned–the Hulk condenses the Viet Cong and Osama Bin Laden/Saddam Hussein into one gargantuan challenge to the U.S. military-industrial complex.

–Gina Marchetti, “Hollywood/Taiwan: Connections, Countercurrents, and Ang Lee’s ‘Hulk,'” FilmInt

Um, okay.

(Via Matt Zoller Seitz, who by the way is killing the game with his Sopranos recaps.)

I had a conversation with a buddy of mine this week that really made something click for me. After hearing how much I liked Hostel, he warned me that Saw, a movie I haven’t seen but to which Hostel is frequently compared, actually really sucks. He then worried that because of its success it’d cast a long shadow over horror movies. Suddenly I realized that while this may be true in terms of the horror movies that the studios get made, it doesn’t have any long-term effects on the health of the genre itself, because horror aficionados ignore the crap and concentrate only on what they like. So sure, you saw a million Scream knock-offs in the 90s. Then you saw a bunch of Sixth Sense clones. Then a bunch of Ring rip-offs. Now, I suppose, we’re on to Saw and Hostel wannabes. But in each case, while commercial product was cranked out, people who really cared about the genre focused on what worked, eschewed putting out ripoffs, and continued to help the genre develop and grow. And this will always be the case, no matter how many bad torture movies get thrown at high-schoolers.

Sean: What do you think of Lost this season, anyway? We haven’t really talked about it before. Do you think it’s lost momentum? That’s what people are saying.

Sean’s Missus: …I think it’s different than it used to be. I don’t think it’s lost momentum.

Sean: Do you think it’s better? Do you think it’s worse?

Sean’s Missus: I just think it’s changed. It’s not better or worse, just different.

Sean: A lot of people have complained about that this season.

Sean’s Missus: But shows have to change as they go on.

Sean: You’re right–it’d just be treading the same territory over and over if it was the same as it used to be. Still, people think it’s too Others-centric now…

Sean’s Missus: I’m sure The Sopranos has changed, hasn’t it?

Sean: Absolutely, and people complain about that, too.

Sean’s Missus: Okay, but look at The X-Files. That show didn’t change, and look how that turned out.

The Horror Blog’s Steven Wintle, bless him, was very patient with me during the months I’d bust Hostel‘s chops without actually having seen it. Now that I have, and changed my tune accordingly, he writes regarding my earlier reticence:

I can completely understand people not wanting to see it because of the gore, or even the context of the gore. I find many slasher and giallo films to be far worse in depicting brutality and demeaning acts against human beings, but the idea of someone being tied down and having things happen to them as opposed to, I don’t know, running through the woods and being impaled on a tree by a machete really freaks some people out. And that’s fine. I don’t think anyone should expose themselves to something they can’t handle (I know I do). I just couldn’t get over the idea that most people criticizing Hostel hadn’t seen it! I mean, House of Wax was probably more cringe-worthy in its violence then Hostel, for me at least. Hostel is a long movie with little flashes of violence, not a non-stop parade of carnage. And it plays out like a straight-up suspense story, as if Hitchcock decided to throw in some splatter. That whole final segment, where Paxton is trying to escape with very little dialogue and that fantastic score, had me at the edge of my seat, and not because I wanted to see someone’s head smashed in.

As for Roth’s comments on the movie, I understand where you’re coming from. I find that happens quite often, in that the creator either accidentally made something that was better then him, or, more likely, he or she just isn’t a very good orator. I lean more towards the second cause mainly because I’m a very visual person, and I find communicating my thoughts through words to be extremely difficult. If Roth, or Tarantino, or most of those guys could shoot a small film whenever they wanted to make a statement to the press they’d probably come off a whole lot better.

His point about the context of the gore in a torture film is a really good one. Without the element of a chase or an ambush or the other usual settings for violence in a horror movie, the brutality is kind of in its purest form, and it’s off-putting in a way that even really over-the-top violence in other contexts just isn’t.

The final sequence to which Steven refers reminded me a lot of similar sequences from Children of Men. Now THERE’S a double feature.

Finally, which is it: Did Roth make a movie that was better than him, or is he just kind of an inarticulate doofus when it comes to talking about his work? I’m really not sure.

Long-time reader Josh, noticing my love of all things wet and frightening, alerted me to Peter Watts’s undersea, online sci-fi mythos, Rifters.com. Surprisingly, I’m not much of a science fiction fan when it comes to reading–unless you count 1984, I don’t think I own a single science fiction novel–so I’m not sure this very hard SF is my cup of meat. Still, I do love me some water monsters, and I’m always interested in ways the Internet can be used to tell scary stories, so I’ll be digging around. Perhaps you might want to do so too.

It’s been a full week for the ol’ ADDTF mailbag. First, one of my favorite (and all too infrequent) horror bloggers, Joakim Ziegler of Mexploitation, writes:

Not to toot my own horn here (ok, yes it is to toot my own horn), but if you liked that Panic O’ Clock book cover, you’re going to love the two mexploitation posters from my collection that I’ve posted on my blog.

First the hippie one…

…And then, the illegal alien sex one.

I don’t think it gets much trashier than that.

He’s not wrong!

This week’s Horror Roundtable asks us to name some bit of horror-related ephemera we couldn’t bear to part with. I came up with a pair of items from the same source…

It’s getting to the point where scientists finding giant squid specimens is no big deal. Finding them in the Atlantic Ocean–where they’ve never before been reported–is a cephalopod of a different color. The Winston-Salem Journal has the scoop.

(Hat tip: Craig Woolheater at Cryptomundo, the blog where those of us who love water monsters go to find ’em.)

One of my all-time favorite weird factoids is that Chris Ware, author of Jimmy Corrigan and the world’s greatest living cartoonist, and Robert Rodriguez, director of Sin City and El Mariachi, were friends and fellow student-newspaper comic-strip artists at UT Austin. That wonderful bit of information and loads more–including updates on Sin City 2 and the Madman movie–can be found in a very comics-centric interview with Rodriguez over at Wizard.

My thoughts on the latest issues of Justice Society of America, 52, Daredevil, Astro City: The Dark Age Book Two, Fallen Son: The Death of Captain America, Powers, and The Walking Dead may be found at this week’s Thursday Morning Quarterback.

(One spoilery note about 52, by the way: I can sort of see where Dirk’s coming from, but in terms of dreariness, there’s kind of a world of difference between, say, Dr. Light raping Sue Dibny and an evil alien intelligence trapped in a nearsighted worm’s body transforming into a Cthulhoid butterfly that eats universes, isn’t there?)

My New Plaid Pants blogger and longtime ADDTF chum Jason Adams insists that Mike White’s Year of the Dog is a tragedy rather than a feel-good film. But like Reihan Salam (and as opposed to my uninformed concern, derived from what in retrospect was a misreading of Salam), he thinks White is fully aware of this, and that the critics who are getting it wrong are doing so all on their own.

Rue Morgue’s blog, the Abbatoir, has a pretty bitchin’ mini-interview with Hostel director Eli Roth on how he got his fake trailer for Grindhouse, Thanksgiving, to look so awesomely decrepit. Am I the only one who didn’t realize it was shot in Prague, by the way?

Matt Zoller Seitz’s weekly Sopranos recaps/reviews/analyses remain second to none. I was particularly taken with two passages from this week’s post:

[Tony’s] back to being beat-up-’em, bed-’em-down Tony, except more of an automaton, a bad boy reverting to type but not really reveling in it.

I think that might be overselling his return to his old self a bit, but the part about not reveling in it is astute. Even better:

…was [this week’s episode] “Remember When” really that muddled, or have the show’s writers just gotten more confident, more inclined to let scenes and lines of dialogue complement each other obliquely, without the Playwriting 101 symmetry that many TV series (even The Sopranos) equate, often speciously, with Art?

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. This is what makes The Sopranos brilliant–and, incidentally, why I’ve always enjoyed but never loved that “College” episode from Season One wherein Tony balances taking Meadow on a tour of prospective colleges with murdering a rat he happens across; it always seemed a little easy for me.

I’ll tell you, I wish I had this passage to hand a few weeks ago when I was trying to explain to a coworker why my appreciation for the work of Alan Moore has dimmed somewhat over time. If one were in an uncharitable mood, “Playwriting 101 symmetry” would feel like an appropriate way to refer to an awful lot of his ostentatiously writerly and artifice-ial work, wouldn’t it?

Two theories that involve slightly spoilery information about Lost and The Sopranos, so if you’re not all caught up with both, you might want to tune out now:

1) In the Slate.com dialogue for the latest Sopranos ep, Jeffrey Goldberg airs a suggestion from his friend David Segal that Paulie is a rat. Anything’s possible. What grabbed me here is that in the dream Paulie has, he asks slain snitch Big Pussy, “When my time comes, will I stand up?” People have been assuming this to mean that he wonders if he’s got what it takes not to be a rat if the offer is presented to him. But Pussy’s last words before Tony, Paulie, and Silvio killed him were to ask if he could sit down.

2) Since he finally got back from the Others’ compound and got a change of clothes, Jack from Lost has been wearing…a red shirt. Given the fact that the show’s writers are giant nerds who indeed have referenced the redshirt phenomenon during this very season, are we to interpret this as coincidence, fate, or fake-out?

I was reminded, in some ways, of Planet Terror, a outbreak flick (zombies, not madness, but still–) which has been reproached in similar terms by a lot of clueless critics. But Rodriguez artfully foregrounds those “flaws,” and transmutes such dross into the solid gold of an awesome, exhilirating movie experience. Here, they’re just annoying. There’s a difference between gonzo intensity that never lets little things like character or plot get in the way, and simply poor writing.

So says Curt of The Groovy Age of Horror about the book Panic O’Clock, the latest in the neverending stream of vintage trashy horror pulp to grace his blog. I like the way Curt gets right to the heart of good trash, pointing out its almost alchemical nature, though as one of those “clueless critics” I’ll have to disagree about whether Planet Terror pulled it off.

Mostly, however, I wanted to show off the truly badass cover for Panic O’Clock that Curt scanned, and encourage you to visit Groovy Age if you’re interested in loads more where that came from…

PS: Does anyone else who’s experienced Hostel‘s blend of sex, violence, fetishism, and Eurotrash think it would actually be right up Curt’s alley, despite his arguments to the contrary?

If I learned anything this past weekend, it’s that I should probably shut my mouth about movies until I’ve actually seen them. That being said, Reihan Salam’s complaint about Mike White’s Year of the Dog–namely that what it presents as liberating is actually just kinda fucked up–reminded me an awful lot of my own beef with Steven Shainberg’s Secretary. Beats me whether this is a legit crit of White’s flick, but given the usual blind spots of mainstream film critics, I wouldn’t be surprised. Okay, shutting mouth now.

Kiel Phegley interviews Kevin Huizenga, the most compelling new alternative cartoonist of the decade.

Keith Giffen offers 52 closing thoughts on 52, one of the most interesting mainstream comics of the past year.

Oddweek.com brings you 10 horrible deep-sea creatures. (Via Rue Morgue.)

CNN reports that the remains of a missing Chinese child were found inside a slain crocodile.

MSNBC reports that Florida fisherman have landed a half-ton mako shark.

What the fuck?

In the wake of Monday’s massacre at Virginia Tech in which a student killed 32 people, Dean of Student Affairs Betty Trachtenberg has limited the use of stage weapons in theatrical productions.

—“Weapons to go offstage; Trachtenberg cites Virginia Tech attack,” Courtney Long, Yale Daily News

My alma mater, ladies and gentlemen.

(Hat tip: Glenn Reynolds.)