INDELIBLE FRECKLES

Been saving these up, oh yes I have.

• The last swords-and-sandals epic I saw was Gladiator. Since then, Troy, Alexander, Rome and 300 have come and gone with nary a flicker of interest on my part. But The Incomparable’s review of Rob Tapert and Sam Raimi’s Spartacus has sparked a guilty, pulpy, what-the-heck kind of interest:
  …Spartacus won’t win any awards for the originality of its premise. Hunktacular warrior dude loves his superhot wife, but is reluctantly called away to battle for the good of his people. Hunktacular warrior dude is betrayed by sleaze-weasel Roman general and branded a deserter. Hunktacular warrior dude escapes and is reunited with his superhot wife just in time for them to be captured (notably, while in the altogether) by sleaze-weasel Roman general. Sleaze-weasel Roman general sells hunktacular warrior dude into the employ of agreeably amoral gladiator owner. Hunktacular warrior dude must wage a muscly, well-oiled, tiny-pantsed struggle up the ranks of the gladiator circuit to find his beloved wife and gain his whoa that guy just took a giant axe to the face!
• The always excellent xkcd webcomic has this heads-up for those writers out there putting the final touches on their denouement:

  

• And go here – now – for the rest of this brilliant bat-take on Memento:
  
  

(Yeah, okay: eight days since my last post is more than a few days – more than several days – more, even, thana week. Sorry.)

It’s been so long since we’ve rolled into 2010 I won’t bore you with -0

This is my blog – and in the world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Hooah.

2009 was really a year for the goggle box –

– but cinema had some new – and old – pleasures –

– and when not glooed to a flickering screen, there was always –

I won’t be disclosing stats because they’re pitiful and I have no excuse. But if you break my run of comment spam (three figures and rising this past month) and ask nicely, I’ll consider it.

2009 was an okay year for watching and reading – a better year for writing – and 2010 awaits my conquest domination attention.

Overall rating: Satisfactory – but must try harder.

Okay this isn’t post-dated.

I’ve got fifteen minutes spare.

How quickly can I cut and paste and make sense?

• How about ten best film endings? (Fedora-tip: Infinite Monkeys by way of The Incomparable.)
• I’ve been a fan of Dylan Horrocks since Hicksville (a phase of forcing myself to try some homegrown comics fare). He’s got a blog. With serials and stories, too! Recommended for civilians and comic aficionados alike.
• PhD student Gareth James is very generously sharing some of the fruits of his research into the history of HBO original programming, 1997-2007 at Gareth On…. (Fedora-tip: Lynden Barber.)

Time’s up already. Must be a slow linker.

Mr Hilton at The Editing Room has just put up an abridged script for Watchmen.

And this excerpt is for the benefit of The Goddess who wondered what the heck the story was with Bubastis the wondercat:

This link/post is dedicated to Mr Molloy.

A bit of a backlog of a collection, attributions for which I can’t remember, sorry – though a pretty good bet would be the sidebar, but.

• Billy Mernit makes a good case for bad screenwriting.
• There are such things as happy endings for screenwriters in Hollywood – just ask Robert Mark Kamen.
• Salman Rushdie writes about adaptation.
• Thanks, I suspect, to Nick Grant of Onfilm, I have discovered The A.V. Club’s excellent The New Cult Canon series, in particular this article about the commentary between The Limey’s writer Lem Dobbs and director Steven Soderbergh.
• Oh, is nothing sacred, Mr Rogers?
• Another Kiwi screenwriting blog! Lyse Beck gives us Birds With Nuts. There’s a nice thread about Watchmen here.
• And speaking of the Minutemen, after all my build-up, The Goddess and I went to see Watchmen a week or so ago. She enjoyed it; I hankered for some interpretation rather than faithful replication. Thanks to Mr Slevin I’ve read people who can say what I’m thinking much better than I could here, here and here. (And no one’s mentioned it’s been two whole decades since Tim Burton gave us Michael Keaton as Batman – didn’t that kickstart the mainstreaming of comic-book adaptations?)

Oh alright. Despite whatever I said before, I’m in a… high state of anticipation.

Lynden Barber’s whip ’round of reviews, along with the L.A. Times‘ Patrick Goldstein’s post, have lowered expectations somewhat. Roger Ebert has given it four stars and a review that saw past the “cerulean genitalia” and picked up on a whole lot of the original comic’s subtext (and I don’t think he’s read it).

I must note, however, that Mr Ebert gave each Hellboy film three and a half stars. After reading Guillermo del Toro’s script prior to seeing the first one, I was rather… crestfallen at the finished product. The Goddess has never forgiven me for choosing Hellboy on one of our precious nights out. I’ve already asked Her to accompany me to Watchmen but the 163-minute running time is worrisome. Should I push my well-thumbed trade paperback on Her in preparation? Hurm.

The possibility of watching Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons‘ creation on the big screen is high this weekend next week this month.

Decades’ of comic-reading made me pick up 500 Essential Graphic Novels the other day. Two hundred, I thought to myself, I bet I’ve read two hundred easy.

I barely managed ninety*.

And that was by including characters I knew I’d read but couldn’t exactly recall if I’d read the title listed in the book. I definitely remember reading Lucky Luke and A.B.C. Warriors but I can’t recall specifically chuckling over A Lucky Luke Adventure: Billy the Kid or acting-out mek-carnage from A.B.C. Warriors: The Black Hole.

Meantime, I plan to work my way through a list that includes -

• Bryan Talbot’s Alice in Sunderland<,/li>
• Dave Sim’s towering Cerebus,
• Frank Stack’s The New Adventures of Jesus: Second Coming,
• Keiji Nakazawa’s Barefoot Gen series,
• Roberta Gregory’s Life’s a Bitch: The Bitchy Bitch Chronicles,
• Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch’s The Ultimates,

- and, based on its premise and the cover art, Jason Shiga’s Bookhunter:

*  Eighteen lousy percent. At least I did better with the IMDb top 250 list, making 67.6% (though I suspect if that list went to 500, my batting average would drop significantly). (Film Addict link courtesy of Dan Slevin.)