* The same IRL issues that have prevented me from doing a lot of blogging over the past few days have also prevented me from seeing Iron Man, which I think makes me one of five people online who haven't. So I can't really speak to Jim Henley's review of the film other than to say that Jim's nerdblogging is always a treat and that this passage, about the much ballyhooed in nerd circles post-credits cameo by Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury, is quite applicable to similar moments in comic books that rely solely on costume recognition rather than inherent drama for impact:

Downey and Mister Cameo are both great big comics fans, and the irony of Mister Cameo performing in the role that was literally drawn for him is a huge pleasure, but as a scene it’s inert. They give each other nothing. There’s nothing there that you, the fan, haven’t brought yourself.

* Speaking of superhero movies, I thought Batman Begins was absolutely dreadful and I think Tim Burton's Batman film costarring the Joker is the best superhero movie ever by a country mile, so I've had a really hard time mustering any enthusiasm for Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight. However, I did enjoy the new trailer, and not just because Heath Ledger's Joker sounds a lot like David Lynch. (But it helped. I wouldn't say "exactly," though, Jason--let's hear him pronounce "chihuahua" first.)

* Neil Marshall's eminently enjoyable post-apocalyptic action flick Doomsday arrives on DVD July 29th. Note to self: pre-order a copy for Steven Wintle.

* There's viral pictures of Cloverfield critters circulating around the Internet thanks to the already-underway campaign for Cloverfield 2. I am totally down with this as long as the focus remains on the monsters, which were excellent.

* This reminds me that I re-watched The Mist last week and found myself able to enjoy it more, since I knew what the problems were (Mrs. Carmody, the terrible CGI for the tentacles, a lack of genuine horror-scares, the awkwardly paced ending) and could basically brush them off and focus on the fact that it's a movie about grotesque monsters killing and eating people trapped in a grocery store, one of the all-time great horror concepts. Focus on the monsters, that's my motto.

* Kristin Thompson, big-time film scholar and (I still can't get over this) LotR fangirl and author of The Frodo Franchise, rounds up recent rumors regarding production troubles on Peter Jackson's adaptation of The Lovely Bones, most of which now stand debunked.

* In his latest update on the horrendous rape/incest/imprisonment saga of Josef Fritzl and family, Bryan Alexander engages in some amusing alternate-reality headline writing for a world in which the case somehow involved the Internet. That sort of thing is always instructive.

* Here's a lovely, evocative drawing of some kind of water monster by the great Renee French. One of the things I find so powerful about water monsters is the way that depictions of them can play off size and depth so as to make not only the monster itself but its very environment a locus of horror, and that's what this drawing does.

* Bruce Baugh points out something I'd really never considered about Hostel and its crappy sequel, namely that they never really explain how and why the torture ring came into existence. It's a welcome lack of exposition, and I'm almost surprised that the dopey sequel didn't ruin it along with virtually everything else that was good about the original. Speaking of, I hope Bruce is gonna review Part II at some point.

* Apparently the guy who directed the Saw sequels will be directing the Hellraiser remake. I think the guys who wrote them will be writing it, too? Anyway this makes me--and based on his statements on torture porn, probably Clive Barker--markedly less interested in the prospect of remaking Hellraiser.

* Finally, Mahnola Dargis's New York Times article bemoaning the lack of worthwhile female characters in both superhero/action blockbusters and arthouse/critical darlings alike is mostly just finger-wagging that also happens to be annoyingly written (last lines: "...you might think that Hollywood would get a clue. [hard return] Nah."). It does, however, really hit on something when it lists No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood alongside Iron Man, The Dark Knight, and The Incredible Hulk (which she obnoxiously refers to as "Big Angry Green Man" as though no one's supposed to know who the Hulk is). A while back my wife was listening to a commercial on the radio for Michael Clayton and said, "This is really unappealing." When I asked why, she said, "It's just the same thing as every other movie. There's some guy, and he's an alpha male, and he's really tough and serious and he says tough and serious things...blah blah blah." That made me think that even most of the movies I watch that are outside the various subspecies of the fantastic (there aren't many, admittedly)--No Country, TWBB, Children of Men, The Departed, Eastern Promises, A History of Violence--could almost all be described as "angry men being mean to each other." (Link via Keith Uhlich.)

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