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best movies of the year? i don’t see any upcoming contenders on my list. maybe quantam of solace, but i doubt it’ll be as solid as royale.

the day the earth stood still looks great, except keanu is acting really wierd and stilted and kind of off, even for keanu. and he looks a little round in the face? i can’t quite figure it out. but it looks amazing otherwise, and i’m sure he’ll be as fine as ever. giant spherical spacecraft? fuck yes.

watchmen on the big screen is infinitely better than on youtube. the details are ridiculous. i cannot wait for that.

was hoping for a new star trek teaser, probably in front of the day the earth stood still. or clone wars. speaking of, new trailer for the clone wars? awful. i think the movie is going to be cool, but you wouldn’t know it from that trailer.

so, the dark knight. intense. relentless, even. the escalation was amazing. right when any other movie would have ended, nolan ramped things up yet again for the final act.

i can’t even imagine doing another without heath ledger as the joker.

wall:e was absolutely amazing, but in such a completely different way than the dark knight, they’re not even comparable. it should be in the running for best picture, instead it’ll sweep best animated. at least they’ll both get to win.

i wasn’t expecting iron man to be my number three for the year.

Future Tents

Despite whatever eased into the ether regarding what we’re working on at Bungie, speculative hunches and guesswork certainly don’t tell the full tale. I’d go so far as to say these ramblings are barely even a Prologue, not even a Foreword to the storybook we’re putting together. Rest assured, there are multiple machinations afoot at Bungie, one is so close you can feel its familiar warmth on your cheek while you sleep; another so far off and foreign that like a faint star in deep space, you can only look to the heavens as its light speeds ever closer.

Lo, there is still another.

while i like they way they manage to word their carefully constructed non-news, seriously, motherfuckers, listen; this is the EXACT OPPOSITE of radical transparency. and how the hell is bungie consistently able to pull this off?

i’m not even talking about this. news was going to be announced, wasn’t. this could be lame, but at the end of the day, no change in status quo. except that they gave us a totally rad new map for free last week. so we’re actually coming out ahead.

but the elaborate secrecy in the weekly updates runs counter-productive to a heavy web presence. it runs counter to the purpose of even having a weekly update.

valve doesn’t have a blog. valve doesn’t have a front-end focused on valve games that promotes discussion of valve gameplay and news within the gigantic valve fan-community. consequently, when valve doesn’t tell us anything, we don’t even notice.

bungie not only doesn’t tell us anything, but goes out of their way to tell us that they aren’t telling us anything.

it’s also important to remember that since the release of halo shot bungie into the highest echelon of popular game developers, they’ve used their vast powers to deliver two products upon the masses, and one of them was halo 2. so there’s still that lingering doubt that their oblique whispering is just more smoke and mirrors.

so i’m inspecting a fascia (bumper cover) that’s come in from out of town, looking for damage because the box was kind of trashed.

ick, i think, as i run my hand over some thick webbing. i turn the part over, then drop it back on top of it’s box and step back as i spy three things in rapid succession.

the spider is still in there, hanging out on a bit of web where i was about to put my hand.

it’s a pointy mean looking jet black number.

with a red >< hourglass on the underside.

fuck! i’ve never actually seen one. i was going to try to catch it in a jar or something, but realized there was no way i was going anywhere near it. so i knocked it onto the floor with a stick and smashed the hell out of it.

i’ve inspected hundreds and hundreds of panels and parts in the four years i’ve been here. god. i could have been killed at practically any moment.

[there's actually a debate right now over whether the brown recluse or the hobo spider are actually dangerous or even particularly venomous, but the black widow is still a potentially lethal little bastard.]

you do! quickly. before they take it down.

[update - 9:24pm]

and we’re done. no surprise there.

(it is, of course, still up. once they pull this one, someone else will upload it and so on until the official release tomorrow? they should just stick with ‘officially’ leaking things onto youtube, it’s more immediately accessible than a 90 meg quicktime file…)

it looks amazing. the owl-ship, doctor manhattan, rorschach… solid. completely solid.

flipping through the trade at the shop today, recognized several panels that i’d seen in the trailer. had to buy it.

ron moore’s serenity, joss whedon’s farscape, jj abrams’ caprica.

or, ron moore presents ds9 stage two: this time i can do whatever the hell i want.

outlander, wherein an alien bounty hunter recruits eighth century vikings to help him kill a ‘dragon’.

i’m shocked that this isn’t a scifi original, that it has a budget and a decent name cast. and looks good! like pitch black good. a nice little scifi action piece.

not sure about jim caveziel as the lead, don’t know him that well. and frankly, while i can get behind vikings all being white people, because, hey, you know, vikings. still. would it have killed them to include even a single woman in the main cast? or any other ethnicity?

i mean, why not cast a black man as the alien? or better yet, a black woman. that’d play nicely against expectations. they could call her a valkyrie and grudgingly accept her aid after she’d kicked the ass of their biggest and best warrior.

denzel is past that phase of his career (virtuosity), sam jackson or will smith would have overwhelmed the material. vin diesel or antonio banderas would have fit nicely.

or michelle yeoh. or angela bassett. or gina torres.

anyways. that it exists at all is still pretty great. looks like a mashup of brotherhood of the wolf (the big bad monster, traps, hunters), the 13th warrior (lone outsider joins a band of medievial warriors against an unspeakable evil), and army of darkness (monsters show up in the middle of internecine conflict, both sides must band together in the end to defeat the mutual enemy).

ron perlman is in this, i’m guessing the bald viking in the woods in the trailer. i’m calling it right now, without even researching this, he’s eric the red from army of darkness. he’s the leader of the ‘enemy’ viking group from the one our alien hero lands in, and they have to get his help by the end to defeat the monster.

from wikipedia:

Tureaud worked as a bouncer after he returned from the army. It was at this time that he created the persona of “Mr. T.” His wearing of gold neck chains and other jewelry was the result of customers losing the items, leaving them behind at the bar/night club after a fight, or being removed from the place. A customer would not have to re-enter or even have to see anyone else again if Mr. T wore their jewelry as he stood out front. When a customer came back, their item was readily visible and available with no further confrontations required. Often, the “former” customers did not return. Mr. T thus built up a large collection and earned a reputation for wearing lots of gold neck chains and bracelets.

very interesting article in the new yorker about a schism in the evangelical movement.

essentially, the hard religious right and their implied and acknowledged marriage to the republican party has led to an image of the ‘average’ evangelical as ‘i hate abortion doctors and the gays and i love the bush administration so so much but i don’t believe in evolution or global warming or anything outside of america being important’.

and a growing number of more moderate evangelicals are getting tired of being assumed to be associated with that. so they’re speaking out in favor of other issues. such as fighting global warming. to preserve god’s creation. and to prevent the possibility of horrible consequences for the very poorest nations, as a result of the inaction of the richest.

… the movement’s leaders are theological conservatives who share the concerns of the religious right about sex outside of heterosexual marriage, the preservation of the family, and abortion. However, many leaders, such as Hunter, oppose government coercion on issues of private morality, and all have what Gushee calls a “consistent pro-life agenda”—one that accords with Catholic social teachings on war, poverty, and human rights. Moreover, they lack the cultural attitudes descended from the fundamentalist resistance to modernist thought, such as a distrust of science, a rejection of institutional solutions to poverty, and the notion that evangelicals are the saving remnant of Christianity and the American tradition. Religious-right leaders have perpetuated these attitudes and done their best to see that evangelicals continue to regard themselves as an embattled subculture. The new leaders, however, embrace pluralism. Unlike the right, they don’t engage in partisan politics, but many of the policies they espouse coincide with those of the Democratic Party. What they aspire to is nothing less than an end to the culture wars and the polarization of American politics.

to my list of shows not returning until january of next year, at least, add doctor who, which is offline until 2010 on the bbc. steven moffat is busy writing some tintin movies, having been hand-picked and wooed with promises of no studio interference by spielberg himself.

which makes me somewhat more excited about the tintin movies, at least.

gives me a couple years to get caught up on seasons two three and four. not to mention the other eight doctors. there was a movie at some point, i presume a tv-movie, with peter cushing as the doctor. since all i know him from is tarkin and a few bits of vintage hammer draculas where he played van helsing, that’d be interesting to see.

when you get your hours cut from 40 a week to 30, the first thing that goes is the excessive weekly comics budget. i had seven dollars to spare for comics last week, and i couldn’t find the zero issue of warren’s new thing, so i got thunderbolts 121 and secret invasion 3.

and now i’m done with both. as i said, i was waffling after secret invasion issue 2 dropped, the series took too long to get going, monthly for eight months, first issue 40 pages, each subsequent 20 pages for the same price, they’re just bleeding me here. and it’s not even like anything happened this issue! characters i’m not familiar with, because i hadn’t picked up any trades of the iniative or young avengers, got beat up by skrulls, then nick fury shows up with a gun from an old liefield cover and then that’s it. iron man swears he’s not a skrull, spider-woman is and says he is, and what the fuck ever. i’m done. i’m out.

there’s like twenty plotlines running through this book, and if this were a movie i could deal with jumping back and forth between them because in two hours it would all be over. but after nearly three months since issue one dropped, we’ve seen three pages of captain marvel attacking thunderbolts mountain, for example. i just can’t keep caring that long when there’s nothing there to even care about.

if i could go to marvel.com/secretinvasion six days a week and read a new page by leinil yu and keep up on the story, you know what? i’d still care. i’d probably be invested in the story.

i can’t. i’m not. you are blowing this.

i would have bought the first two issues of final crisis but the shop only had issue two. this is exactly what i was talking about in that ’save marvel’ post. i want to buy an issue of final crisis, but i can’t. because it isn’t there. and i’m not waiting weeks for my shop to reorder, when i can get online right now and get it from midtown in nyc.

(i mean, i can’t, i have no comics budget, so i’m actually trade-waiting this one already. but you know what i mean here.)

maybe i’m just depressed and that’s why i don’t care about it all. maybe if i had a good stable job and solid economics i’d be able to get excited about nick fury’s compensation gun and the can of whoop-ass he’s going to unleash upon the skrull armada for some portion of the next 22 pages in a week or so.

probably not?

anyways. thunderbolts 121 was a bit of a letdown after the pure gold that was 120. having now read the first volume of warren’s run which i picked up on amazon when i had money, i have the context for the backstory.

i kind of wish i didn’t. there’s no sympathetic characters. i don’t care about what happens, i’m not going to bother with the four issues i missed, and i’m not reading any further. i only liked 120 because it was norman osborne as the green goblin beating up other insane people. now he’s back to tommy lee jones at a desk and we got no ironic comeuppance, no collapse of the stupid system, and no justice. it’s just back to work, apprehending illegal superheroes by any means necessary, and i don’t want marvel to have a book about that. it’s a tremendously awful concept.

and while we’re on that subject, the initiative is a terrible idea. they’re treating regulated superheroes as a branch of the armed forces, when they should be a police action. you don’t make one superteam for every state, you put one superteam in every major city. they’re the seven star wanted level in gta. after the cops, swat, federal agents, and national guard have failed to stop you, they call in the supers.

so not only is iron man’s grand registration plan a crap idea, he’s doing a crap job of implementing it. and he’s got criminals doing his dirty work, and this is a horrid contrast to both any version of the character anyone ever liked, and the extremely popular movie that just came out and portrayed stark as a loveable rogue.

frankly, the idea that stark IS a skrull sleeper agent would be about the only satisfying payoff to secret invasion.

but i doubt it.