* IRL mishegoss continues to interfere with my ability to see either Iron Man or Speed Racer, but apparently the former's second-weekend performance obliterated the latter's debut. We're talking all-time, legendary, Cleopatra/Heaven's Gate-level failure, not just in terms of the financials but the role that hubris played in the film in question's creation (separating it from, say, The Adventures of Pluto Nash). My completely uninformed opinion is that this is probably a damn shame. Without seeing the movie I can't know if this is an Ang Lee's Hulk-style noble-failure arthouse-popcorn experiment gone bust or a work of sheer awesomeness that a mainstream critical consensus I've come to find increasingly irrelevant to my own experience can't possibly appreciate, but because I am a misanthrope I'm leaning toward the latter. Anyway Jog reviewed the thing and I enjoyed it without even having seen the flick.

*LOST SPOILERS FOLLOW, SO IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE LAST FEW EPISODES, PLEASE DON'T READ THE NEXT THREE PARAGRAPHS

On the "genre art I've actually seen" beat, I thought last week's Lost was a good-but-not-great episode. It lacked the emotional heft that Alex's matter-of-fact execution gave the previous mythology-centric ep a couple weeks back. However, it benefits from the return of two shaping-up-to-be-terrific villains in a show that's seen its share. First, there's so and so's Keamy, the intensely amoral mercenary whose beady eyes and slightly sibilant speech make him seem like nothing so much as an insecure alpha-male lacrosse-team stud from high school gone overgrown and rancid. Then there's Nestor Carbonell's ageless Richard Alpert, whose beatific smile and seemingly kohl-lined eyes exude this warm, calm, almost androgynous handsomeness that nonetheless comes across as latently threatening and incredibly creepy. When they held on that close-up of him outside Baby Locke's nursery I nearly lost my shit.

* If you're interested in further discussion of last week's episode you could do worse than to check out the following pair of links. First, E!'s Kristin Dos Santos does the Damon Lindelof/Carlton Cuse joint-interview thang. "Darlton," as they've come to be known in the abbreviation-happy lingo of shippers (now there's an untapped slashfic pairing--at least I hope it's untapped), do their usual interview balancing act of recounting how the show's now-set-in-stone scheduling and now-resolved writers' strike impacted their storytelling; teasing sexytime secrets for the Skaters, Jaters, and Jackets among us; and addressing the Theory School of Lost Fandom by simultaneously fanning the flames and knocking down some castles made of sand.

* Second, I found this week's "Best of the Lost comment thread" selection at Whitney Matheson's Pop Candy a particularly enjoyable batch. Just for example, I had no idea of the origin of the little item-selection ritual Young John Locke is put through by Richard, while the notion that the Island is Atlantis (or at least the basis for the Atlantis legend) delights me to no end (and is about a billion times more plausible than your average Grand Unified Theory of Lost to boot).

END LOST STUFF SO NOW YOU CAN READ AGAIN

* Casting information for the Battlestar Galactica prequel pilot Caprica has been trickling out; three intriguing cast members I've seen are Eric Stoltz, Esai Morales, and Deadwood and Lost's Paula Malcolmson. (Via Whitney Matheson.)

* Go, look: More comics by Anders Nilsen!

* Your video of the day is "Vienna" by Ultravox.

* Finally, meet Patrick Batman. (Via Topless Robot.)

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