Wednesday movie/DVD notes

1. If you're in any way interested in David Cronenberg (who, aside from being one of the stars of Jason X*, also directed a few small, touching art films), you need to read robyn_ma's excellent look at his oeuvre over here. I adore Cronenberg's work (as many of you know), and robyn_ma's post still had a lot of info for me. Read it. And rent/buy a bunch of those movies.

2. As noted by both sweinberg and robyn_ma, Amazon is selling the Warner Classics Mega Collection, featuring 237 movies, for only $1999.49. I need! Granted, I've got a few of the films, and I'd actually pay more if the set excluded the most overrated film in history. But I still need! I also need the more affordable (but still out of my range, unless I acquire a sugar mama in the near future or win the lottery) Fox Studio Classics Collection. Both collections contain movies that everyone simply must own (although only the Fox one can claim to have the movie that killed Batman's parents).

3. My wife, like many of you, was lucky enough to see a pre-screening of Serenity last night. I have not yet seen it, nor will I until Friday. I will see it then. I might even just camp out in the theatre and watch it for 24 hours straight. Yes, I'm going in with high expectations.

4. There's going to be a movie made out of Bridge to Terabithia. This could be good news, except for the fact that they'll probably give it a happy ending and sprinkle it with elves. Maybe they'll cast Hillary Duff (Hillary Duff's Diary of Anne Frank is still the best thing Robot Chicken has ever come up with).

*I'm not making this up. Well, he's not technically a star, but he does get a major scene.

Neil/Joss interview at Time

The entire interview is here, and is wonderful, dealing with all sorts of comics, but I loved this segment in particular:

TIME: I don't even remember who's in the X-men anymore. Is Colossus still in it?

JW: Which of the 19,000 books are you talking about? In mine was the Beast, Kitty Pryde, Cyclops, Emma Frost, Colossus...and the unpopular one. Wolverine.

TIME: Emma Frost is in the X-men now?

JW: She's been an X-man for some time.

TIME: They do know she used to be a villain, right?

JW: Yes they do. It's all about forgiveness.

NG: There is a tradition in these things.

TIME: Kitty was sort of a proto-Buffy, right?

JW: Kitty was a huge proto-Buffy. I mean, there was no other you could point to as strongly. And they weren't really doing anything with her, which, you know, made me happy to no end. And when they asked me to bring Colossus back, there I had Kitty and her first love. It was actually terribly romantic, to me anyway. I think I care way too much about these characters.

NG: That's also the trouble with comics characters. If you read them at a certain age, they worm their way into your psyche. They live in your head. They are as real as anybody else in there, and you care about them.

Holy Giant Evil Squid, Batman!

So it looks like they've finally managed to take a photo of the infamous giant squid, and man is it ugly:



Or maybe I just concatenated two different news stories again. My bad!

*snort*

DeLay's really doing a great job of defending himself.

"I have done nothing unlawful."

Um, gee, is that your way of saying, oh, I don't know, "I am not a crook?"

And the sentence is even better if you get it fully in context:

"I have done nothing unlawful, unethical or, I might add, unprecedented."

Lovely. So you did nothing illegal or immoral, but on the off-chance you did, well, everyone else was doing it too?

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

Roy Fucking Blunt as the GOP's "temporary" replacement for DeLay?

Isn't that a little bit like asking Freddy Krueger to babysit your kids?