Behold, the image that renowned political commentator Eli Roth has selected as the emblem of his next searing allegorical indictment of Bush Administration malfeasance…

Take that, Dick Cheney!

(Thanks, Jason and Horror-Movies.ca)

Good lord, that’s a big-ass squid.

Fishermen from New Zealand appear to have caught the largest squid ever–it weighs half a ton and measures 39 feet long. I mean, its species is actually called “colossal squid” (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni).

FanTAStic.

(Hat tip: Jason Adams.)

You can watch me attempt to make sense of the most recent installments of Civil War, Amazing Spider-Man, 52, Battlestar Galactica, Powers, Sock Monkey: The “Inches” Incident, and Superman at this week’s Thursday Morning Quarterback.

It would be Clive James’s essay on torture, which uses a critique of the Michael Palin character in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil as a springboard for challenging the notion that evil is really all that banal at all. Must reading.

Police announced they uncovered a plastic bag stuffed with the skeletal remains of at least six newborns Sunday after searching the grounds of a Christian missionary hospital in the central Indian town of Ratlam.

—“Newborn baby skeletons found in bag,” CNN

It’s high time I linked to Monster Brains, a delightfully deep repository of monster/creature/beast illustrations. Think of Fantagraphics’ Beasts book, but online and drawing from centuries of work from all over the world rather than just the current hipster art scene, and you’ll have the idea.

…that’s exactly what Robert Humanick is doing with A Clockwork Orange over at The House Next Door.

Eve Tushnet continues our discussion about Eyes Wide Shut. She and I are pretty much at the “agree to disagree” point regarding whether or not EWS lives up to the “with a great big boner comes great responsibility” issue at the core of her objections, but to me that only makes her criticisms more interesting. I must say that I hate how much I’ve been centering my response to Eve’s on her personal history of sexuality-related activism, because in a way that doesn’t seem fair to me, and I don’t mean to dismiss her objections at all. But I think in the same way that saying “Sean is a horror fan” can help explain why I love the film so much, those biographical facts can help explain why narrative oversights that don’t phase me at all knock Eve right out of the movie.

Maybe I’m just arguing from a place of ignorance, I don’t know. Eve’s response to my argument that Bill and Alice’s daughter doesn’t feature in their sexual landscape is essentially “wrong!” As a childless married man, maybe I just don’t know what I’m talking about. But in reading Even on sexuality before, I’ve always thought she oversold the importance of the reproductive/”generative” aspect of sex. But to not do so is a sin, is what I believe she thinks (man, am I out of my depth in this discussion–if I’m mischaracterizing you, Eve, please say so!), so, yeah. Now, while I’m all for guilt, even for shame–both of which I maintain Bill feels in abundance; indeed they drive his confession, and as someone who’s made his share of guilt-and-shame-driven sexual confessions I can state without fear of contradiction that I’m on solid ground with that assessment–sin is entirely alien to my conception of how the world works. My guess is that that’s the page Kubrick is on, too (not to resort to the intentional fallacy, but hey, if you’re gonna do it with any director, Stan’s your man).

Anyway, go, click, read, especially (if you’re a genre fan) the part where Eve counters the notion that EWS is a dream narrative.

V for Vagina

This week’s Horror Roundtable focuses on our favorite Eurohorror films. Here’s a hint about mine.

My pal Andy Serwin interviews Battlestar Galactica honcho David Eick and gets some intriguing hints about both upcoming storylines and upcoming spinoffs–among other things, he confirms plans for a direct-to-DVD BSG feature film!

My other pal Ben Morse interviews New Avengers and Mighty Avengers writer Brian Michael Bendis (one of my faves). The questions regarding Bendis’ handling of Marvel’s now-bifurcated flagship title are pretty blunt, and the writer’s answers are pretty candid.

And finally, you know what time it is–time to find out what I thought of this week’s issues of Stormwatch: Post-Human Division, Justice Society of America, Astonishing X-Men, Batman, Battlestar Galactica: Zarek, The Pirates of Coney Island (technically from a couple weeks ago, but there was a mix-up with the issue), and Tales of the Unexpected in Thursday Morning Quarterback!

Eve Tushnet, one of my favorite bloggers in the world, has just posted a review of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. Among other things it links to my old essay arguing that the film is a horror movie with the violence replaced by sex, with which Eve agrees. However, she’s much less impressed with the movie overall than I was/am: “Deep on the outside; shallow within” is her final verdict. To counter her two specific objections, briefly:

1) “How are its protagonists changed by the end? What have their experiences cost them? I can’t think of anything.” Well, they’re not dead or divorced (yet, in the latter case, to bring up at least one post-credits possibility). But those aren’t the only options. To return to the horror framework, we can consider Bill and Alice Harford (but mostly Bill) to be this film’s “final girl.” Sure, he survived, but I challenge you to listen to the way he sobs “I’ll tell you everything,” or see the red eyes of his wife after he does so, or listen to that sadder and wiser conversation they have at the toy store in the film’s final scene, and say nothing has changed for them. (For an example of a character who truly doesn’t change, and is therefore to be considered evil, see Ziegler.)

PS: With regards to their daughter, the absence of any major plot points concerning which was a big sticking point for Eve, I just didn’t think she played a particularly relevant part in their erotic and sexual lives. Given what I know to be Eve’s political and philosophical bedrock, I can see why this might strike her as a lacuna; given my own sexual outlook, it didn’t.

2) Blockquote time:

the strictures of Hollywood stardom (maybe?) required that Kidman never get quite as naked as her female cohorts. So we see them from the front, but she’s only naked from the back. That difference reinforces the sense already invited by the movie’s ending: There are good girls and bad girls. Good girls shouldn’t be cheated on, even in your head, and you should have sex with them and display their nudity tastefully from the back. Bad girls may get killed and raped and even photographed in full-frontal, and your only responsibility is to avoid them. No guilt attaches to you if you leave them to be destroyed.

In all fairness, you do see Nic’s boobies, albeit nothing below the waist as far as the front is concerned. So let’s call that a draw. Do I think there’s supposed to be a distinction being drawn between Alice and the orgy girls in that regard? Yes, now that Eve brings it up, probably. But that fits the demented fairy-tale logic of plot and character witnessed throughout the rest of the film. If Bill is our focalizer here, it stands to reason that if the mere suggestion that his wife once wanted to fuck a sailor is enough to send him off on a long dark night of the soul, we’re not going to be seeing her bush anytime soon.

But the dichotomy is one of how Bill views the women in his life, not how we should view them. Again, I definitely don’t think we’re supposed to feel that Bill had no responsibility to the woman at the orgy (or Leelee Sobieski, for that matter) other than “to avoid them,” nor that he was untouched by guilt over what befell them thanks to his unwillingness to do anything about it. In an ideal/real world he’d have called the cops the next day, but in the dream logic of the film, he woke up, and by then it’s too late to go back and rescue characters from your nightmare.

Godzilla, avenge your people, for crying out loud. Japanese researchers have captured yet another deep-sea creature on film for the first time–Tanigia danae a seven-foot squid that uses bioluminescence to hunt and can move at speeds clocked at up to 8 feet per second, a far cry from the “slugs o’ the deep” rep our tentacled friends once had. The BBC has the scoop, while Nature has the unbelievably cool-looking footage. (Hat tip: Clive Thompson.)

And while we’re on the sea monster tip–octopus vs. shark!

And Vampyroteuthis infernalis–the vampire squid!

(Hat tips: Cookie Jill and Carnacki.)

“Cascading consequences” is one of those elegant phrases that disaster planners use to refer to very bad stuff happening later on

In Myanmar — formerly known as Burma — a boy who was 11 when he was recruited to the national army, had to watch as older soldiers gunned down mothers and then killed their babies. “They swung them by their legs and smashed them against a rock. I saw it,” Kim Muang Than told Human Rights Watch.

—“Stolen kids turned into terrifying killers,” Ann O’Neill, CNN

Courtesy of Loren Coleman comes this clip from Incident at Loch Ness, a mockumentary written, directed, and co-starring X-Men 2 and 3 screenwriter Zak Penn. Apparently the conceit is that Penn (co-starring as himself) dupes real-life documentarian Werner Herzog (again, co-starring as himself–!!!) into making a documentary about the Loch Ness Monster that Penn secretly plans to Hollywoodize with everything from a steamy love-story angle to an animatronic Loch Ness Monster in the water; the plan goes out the window when the real Nessie attacks the crew’s boat. None of this is particularly relevant to this clip, which pretty much nails the creepy frisson of seeing a large something emerge from the depths. The gravitas and verisimilitude lent to the clip by the presence of Herzog doesn’t hurt, either.

One thing has become clear over the past year or so, and that’s that the Japanese are very, very good at capturing water monsters. First there was the giant squid, then another giant squid, then the frilled shark, and now another rarely sighted, prehistoric deep-sea creature called the goblin shark.

Plesiosaurs of the world, consider this a warning.

Who cares if you’re out of it? This constant pressure to keep up, to adopt the latest and most fashionable attitudes toward cinema (or to anything else for that matter) is pretty unpleasant. It doesn’t feel all that different from the pressure we get from Big Media to stay on the cutting edge of consumable crap. And there’s something a little bullying about their “get on the bus or get run over” language.

—Jon Hastings, “Blog Chat: Film Buffs”

That’s probably the most succinct rejection of the vogue for the newestyoungesthippestlatest in critical circles I’ve seen in a long time. The funny thing is that what Jon’s responding to, a portion of that dialogue between Matt Zoller Seitz and Keith Uhlich on the Year in Cinema I linked to a few days ago in which the pair go after critics who turn their noses up at television series or at movies shot on digital video or videotape, isn’t something I even object to–of course you shouldn’t write off entire swaths of a particular artform on the grounds that they’re d

(It will take a very specific type of ’90s-era music nerd to get that reference.)

Over at the day job, my colleague Paul Florez has an intriguing interview with Battlestar Galactica‘s Helo, actor Tahmoh Penikett. I’ve always really liked that character, and apparently I’m not alone: There were no plans for him to show up after the initial miniseries, but viewer reaction (among fellow industry pros, let alone fans) led creator Ronald D. Moore to bring him back. Penikett clearly puts a lot of thought into his role on the show, and you can see that in the interview. Check it out.

A while back I said that the Postal Service’s “We Will Become Silhouettes,” both the song and the narratively divergent but thematically similar video, were among my favorite science-fiction works of recent memory. They remain so.