I'm going to start posting over at WordPress. Right now, most of it is reprints of my most recent posts here, but there have been a few new articles, including some commentary on the GL, Cars 2 and Cowboys & Aliens trailers.

I'll be leaving LJ open for my Friends page, but probably won't actually be posting much here.

In a word: Ew. I cannot fathom the stuff they're able to get away with nowadays on basic cable. I'm not saying it's bad, just... this seems like it really should be HBO programming so they can just get over the hump and not worry about how close to the line they can push the sex and gore.

I think I really like Rick Grimes. He's taciturn, but not closed off, and he knows when to lead and when to listen. He's still behind the curve on the rules of surviving in this new world (obviously dude never watched Zombieland) but he seems to be aware of this deficiency and willing to learn. I loved that he took a moment to remember the humanity of the zombie they butchered for their gore-covered escape plan. That was a wonderful little grace note.

On the other hand, I hate hate hate hate hate Merle Dixon. Not just because he's an obnoxiously hateful character without even a single frame of redeeming value to his name but because even I, an all around "live and let live" kind of guy who seriously takes to heart sentiments such as Gandalf's admonition to not be "swift to deal out death and judgement", have a hard time fathoming allowing such a person to consume precious dwindling resources in order to waste them spewing hateful, divisive bullshit. Perhaps if there'd been some indication of how he helps the group, I might feel differently, but at this point all he's done is threaten other members of the group with physical violence and made it implicitly clear that he intends to kill Rick as soon as he gets out of the handcuffs. This may seem in stark contrast with my stance on the trial of Gaius Baltar in Battlestar Galactica, but I think the difference is that there were at least pretensions of civilization in the Rag Tag Fugitive Fleet, and if the survivors there wanted to continue living under the laws of the Colonies, than they needed to respect the Rule of Law and could not simply descend to mob justice.

But the survivors of The Walking Dead have no such pretensions, and not even the glimmer of hope that the RTFF had that they might one day outrun the threat to their existence. The survivors of this series are barely a noticeable fraction of a percent of the remnants of humanity in BSG and they are penned in on all sides by an annhilating force that hasn't even the level of rational thought present in a Cylon Centurion. In such a situation, even I have to bow to pragmatism - someone should have just put a bullet in Merle Dixon's brainpan and been done with it.

Ignoring the stain that is Merle, though, this episode was great. The gut-covered stroll down the street to the truck was far more intense to me than anything in the pilot episode, though I don't know that the rain would have washed the zombie scent off Glenn and Rick quickly enough to have mattered - even the torrential five minute cloudburst that area of the country gets. At any rate, wow, GROSS, and also inventive and also a bit muddled. I thought they set it up last week that you needed to be bitten by a zombie in order to get infected; here they were all paying lip service to keeping the titular guts out of contact with their skin, and then doing not nearly enough to protect themselves.

The rain gear was fine for the torsos, but they covered it so thoroughly that Rick and Glenn should have gotten been smearing zombie blood on their faces every time they turned their heads and rubbed their neck and cheeks along their collars. Not to mention that the only person wearing facial protection when they were chopping up the corpse was whoever was holding the axe - was their no concern that splatter might fly up on the people who were standing less than a yard away?

Anyway, that's not really here nor there. It doesn't concern me too greatly. To put it in perspective, I'm far more annoyed by the use of the word "geeks" as a synonym for "zombies". I read somewhere that Robert Kirkman, author of the comic book this show is based on, has not read Max Brooks' brilliant World War Z and does not want to until he's finished with the comic, so I get that he's trying to avoid any accusation of theft. But I think one of the greatest touches in Brooks' novel was the understandable etymology of nicknames for the walking dead - "Z", "Grays", "Zack" to name a few (the last being one of those that's brilliant in hindsight as a continuation of US military nicknames like "Jerry" and "Charlie"). I was wondering if maybe a few of those might get picked up here. But more bothersome than the lack of a decent synonym for zombies is the fact that they aren't even using the word zombie for zombies - this seems borderline obtuse to me. TVtropes.org likes to argue that "tropes are neither good nor bad", but in my mind the "Don't Use the 'Z Word'" trope is just dumb dumb dumb and I had hoped that a writer of Darabont's caliber would avoid it.

Glad to see Rick is going to be back at the camp with his wife and son by next week. Here's hoping he puts the kibosh on Shane and Lori quick, because Shane - while nowhere near the level of Merle Dixon - is absolutely radiating "asshole" all over the place.

Something about the spelling of that title gets under my skin. Maybe it's right and I've just been assuming it's "by" as in "drive by", but whatever. That's pretty much the worst thing I have to say about this zombie disaster pilot.

Not that I'm quite getting the level of rave that this show has gotten in advance hype, either. It was solid, but it was also a lot less riveting and intense than I had been led to believe. Seeing a cute, blonde six-year old zombie girl get "put down" (to use the show's parlance) in the first scene is definitely up there with CapricaSix killing a baby in the minutes before the Fall in Battlestar Galactica in terms of "Wow, that's pretty gutsy", but while I'm intrigued, I'm in for a few more episode, if no one had mentioned Frank Darabont's name in all the preview buzz, I wouldn't have pegged this for his work.

Which is to say that maybe the worst thing (aside from the aforementioned title deal) this show has going for it is that in the first 90 minutes, it's no Shawshank Redemption. There's some excellent make-up work on the zombies (especially Biker Girl... wow) and Andrew Lincoln does good work as the POV character, especially in the moments when his character, Rick Grimes, first wakes up from his coma. I have to say it's a *little* frustrating that we don't know how long he was under - surely at some point one of the first things he could have asked the father and son he links up with momentarily what year it is. Maybe the producers don't want to nail the show down to "X numbers of years in the future", but still, some notion that he'd been gone for six months, a year, longer, would have been nice.

Speaking of the father and son, I really liked Lennie James' work as the father, particularly his final scene as he tries to target his undead wife. It's a shame that he and his son appear to have been a one-off characters, particularly upon noting the considerable lack of color amongst the main cast in IMDB. He sold me on the intensity of the situation, of the seriousness of his protective measures, and he really handled the exposition - what little of it he was able to share. I'm hoping that the lack of details - the where and when and how of the initial outbreak - is a sign that we'll be getting into it in important ways further on.

As to the non-Rick Grimes moment, wherein we learn the fate of Rick's wife and son and see the bulk of the remainder of the regular cast for the first time, I hope they're more interesting going forward to justify trading in Lennie James for them. Obviously, we didn't get to spend time with most of them so that's a fairly presumptive criticism, but the "big reveal" - that Rick's ex-partner is in a relationship with his wife - wasn't all that much of a reveal. I'm not sure if it's Jon Bernthal's performance, or simply the douchebag-tastic opening scene wherein he talks about how the difference between men and women is that women don't know how to turn off a light that soured me on the character from the start, but that scene with him and Rick's wife in the tent was just skeevy. It makes me wonder if they weren't involved in some kind of hanky panky before Rick went comatose; I hope not, but then again... this show shot a little (zombified) kid in the head in the first five minutes, I don't hold out much hope that it's not going to full-on out-dark BSG at every opportunity, especially where awful character choices are concerned (that is, the characters making awful choices in-character, not the writers making awful choices for the characters).

LEGO Universe is the first LEGO video game I have ever regretted purchasing.

The idea of a LEGO MMORPG sounded so... perfect. The compulsive quest-collect model of a World of Warcraft tied to the infinite customization of LEGO bricks? Yes, please.

In practice, it's not even in the neighborhood of that concept.

It is, in fact, two distinct games, and calling either of those games an "MMO" is generous on the level of post-carol Scrooge. Sure, there are a lot of other players running around in the environment with you, but because LEGO (understandably) has a massive jackboot on the neck of chat communications, there's almost no talking going on. On the plus side: you don't have to put up with jackasses telling you about what they did to your mom as you suffer through the Barrens on route to someplace more visually interesting and less populated with juvenile conversation. On the negative side: for an MMO, it feels freakishly lonely.

But there's little reason to chat even with the limited vocabulary LEGO provides because there's no true multiplayer in this massive multiplayer game. There's no group system, there's no guild system. The only reason this game gives up for why it's not a single-player experience is racing - each of the zones has some kind of kart-racing area and when you go into it, your automatically pitted against any other players who happened to wander into it around the same time.

Unfortunately, this kart-racing only highlights the second major deficit facing LEGO Universe: the lack of customizability. I understand that this game is aiming for a younger demographic than World of Warcraft or Lord of the Rings Online, but in a game based on the ultimate "freeplay" toy, I can't believe how limited your options are. There are only three stats in this game - health, armor, and imagination. All of the clothing in the game affects one or more of these stats, but as you can imagine, most of them effect the stats the same way. There is no functional difference in the dozen or more shirts I picked up that offered a +1 to my armor. The specialty sets you get when you choose a faction offer special bonuses like the ability to see where treasure is on your mini-map, but set bonuses kick in only so long as you're wearing the complete set, so if you find a hat that offers a point more armor than your faction set, you have to weigh whether that one point of armor is worth not being able to take advantage of the sole special ability conferred on you by choosing a faction to begin with.

The only "LEGO" in the game, really, comes from building up your own property, and this is where my accusation that this is two games in one comes from. On the one hand, you have a LEGO MMORPG which pales in comparison to other LEGO games like LEGO Star Wars and other MMORPGs like World of Warcraft. But then you have a second game - a near perfect LEGO simulator, where in you can build and build and build like you do with real LEGOs and the only limitation on you is the number of bricks you own. And that is the only influence exercised by one part of the game on the other - you collect bricks for the simulator by playing through the MMORPG. But nothing you do with them in the simulator confers any kind of effect or bonus on the MMORPG - it is simply a place to "play with LEGOs". And while other players can visit your property and interact with your creations in some ways, again - it's not really a multiplayer experience. And for all the frustration that rotating and flipping and placing LEGO bricks with a mouse and keyboard engenders, your better off taking the $40 you spent on this game and getting a couple of buckets of real LEGOs and just going to town.

This game has been wildly praised all around the game critic community, and I just cannot see why. When it comes to playing a LEGO video game, the console-based, controller based games like LEGO Star Wars are more polished and more inventive and more entertaining than this loose, sloppy mouse-and-keyboard gameplay. When it comes to playing an MMORPG, it's not advanced enough to entertain experienced MMORPG players and yet in so many ways it's too advanced (or at least, not intuitive enough) for younger players to simply pick up and play on their own. And when it comes to freeplay with LEGO bricks... well, why not just freeplay with LEGO bricks if that's what you want?

There are so many possibilities for how developer NetDevil can turn this game into something brilliant, but considering what they've put out thus far, anything that would turn it into a game I'd be interested in paying $15 a month to play would be nothing short of a ground-up revamp of the entire game. And given the understandable over-protectiveness of LEGO to make sure that this is an absolutely perfectly safe kid-friendly gaming environment, I doubt NetDevil has the freedom to implement most of the changes I'd want to see anyway.

Holy shit.

I had no idea that "Batman, Inc." was meant to be taken *literally*. That Bruce was going to franchise the Cowl publicly.

I... I honestly don't know how I feel about this. Obviously, the notion that "the Batman" is an urban myth is right out. And conveniently, Dick gets to keep being Batman even if Bruce decides to take up the mask himself again and *how* does that not get confusing? Batman-1, Batman-2, Batman-Europe? Are the various Batmen going to *be* Batman, or is it going to be an updated "Club of Heroes" thing, with Knight & Squire and Chief-Man-of-Bats and all that?

And damn, that Morrison plays a long fucking game, bringing the "Club" back into continuity almost a half-decade ago as groundwork for this.

I do like that this can play one of two ways: either everybody and their cousin is now in on the "open secret" that is Bruce's dual identity OR this is masterful "hide in plain sight" misdirection that perfectly explains why the trail of Batman keeps leading back to Bruce without compromising the secret. The first one is more realistic, the second one is more "Clark Kent is Superman in glasses" comic theory, but I think either one works for me. Provided, of course, that the actual story works, which is completely up in the air at this point.

Okay, so over in Action Comics, we have the big deal with Neil Gaiman's Death of the Endless coming over from Sandman to have a pre-death chat with Lex Luthor after he apparently gets his bald head handed to him by Gorilla Grodd. Naturally, she doesn't tell him he's not going to die upfront, and his reaction is hilarious, but the more important thing in this issue is the first appearance of Chloe Sullivan in the New Earth portion of the DC Multiverse (taking a page from mmaresca here to assume that Smallville is canon somewhere in the multiverse).

Most of her time is spent rubbing Jimmy's nose in how not-cool he is and how much better she is. Unfortunately, she comes off as more "Watchtower" Chloe than "Wall of Weird" Chloe, and while "Watchtower" is a neat idea in Smallville because of the utter lack of Barbara Gordon, on New Earth we have Babs as Oracle, and hardly need another of her. Here's hoping first impressions are wrong; or that since Chloe is being tied into Cadmus that she's going to be the "anti-Oracle", which would be interesting, if antithetical to the character her fans from TV are going to want to see in the books.

I demand to be cremated.

So with Morrison exiting Batman & Robin and a new team not quite ready to take the reins, Paul Cornell is stepping in for a three-issue arc that sees Dick and Damian encountering a new villain while investigating the desecration/looting of the grave of one of Bruce's old girlfriends.

Obviously, that list could be lengthy, but I wouldn't take any bets against it being the grave of Vesper Fairchild.

At any rate, in the Bat-titles alone over the last few years we've had Jason's gave desecrated by Clayface acting on behalf of Hush, we've had Jason's grave dug up and investigated by Bruce himself in the wake of Jason's apparent resurrection, we've had Bruce's grave messed with in order for Tim Drake to prove that the body interred was not actually Bruces, and now one of Bruce's dead girlfriends no longer gets to rest in peace.

Not to mention all the mass zombification going on in the DCU at large as a result of the Black Lantern Corps.

If I were to die in the DCU, my last will and testament would demand cremation, because seriously... if you can't stop being victimized when you're dead, what's the point?

And I mean everybody, like it's the biggest bit of news that dropped this week that didn't come out of Chile. Even my morning DJs were discussing it.

Eric Stoltz as Marty McFly.

I'd known he had been cast, shot, and fired before, but hadn't realized it was five weeks into shooting.

FIVE WEEKS. In those days, that was pretty much anywhere from 1/3 to 1/2 of the average principal photography schedule for an effects film. How do you get that far into a project - millions upon millions of dollars, thousands upon thousands of worker hours - before you realize that it's just not happening and you have to start over?

I haven't hunted down the footage, figuring I need to leave something for me to look forward to besides the films themselves when I get the Blu-ray pack on Christmas (hint hint hint). Maybe it's just atrocious. But even if it is "so, so wrong" as one of the DJs put it while talking to their weekly film critic, that seems to me more a reaction to seeing stuff we're familiar with featuring Michael J. Fox suddenly turned on its head with a different actor.

I've heard people say that the movies wouldn't have done as well if Stoltz hadn't been let go, but really... maybe they wouldn't have made quite so much money, since it's hard to overstate how massive Fox's Family Ties following was at the time, but would it really have been that *different*, that *bad* of a movie? It's not like Stoltz is a nobody - he's had a full, busy career all along, and is still going with Caprica and a new career as a director (he directed the 10/12 episode of Glee, the day all of this news really started to break... coincidence?). Arguments that the movie would have failed with him seem strange - maybe it would have been the break he needed to go from "reliable, journeyman actor with some amount of name recognition" to "high profile teen heart throb". Obviously, we'll never know, because it's impossible to judge the existing footage that will be shown on the Blu-rays as their own piece of work - they can only be seen in light of having seen it all with Fox many times over the course of 25 years, so naturally it will seem "so, so wrong", regardless of any questions of quality.

But I'm still hung up on this five weeks nonsense. Zemeckis, I don't know about - I don't love him as a director, even though I love many of his movies, so I can't speak to his eye for casting. But Spielberg as a producer... I wouldn't expect him to be the kind of guy who could let things go that long, to let a "failure" get to the point of being that expensive. I just don't see how you shoot almost half a movie with someone before realizing that you have to scrap everything you've shot (and seriously, there's maybe five minutes total in that movie that Marty isn't in a shot) and start over.

So way back in the forgotten days just before Inception released, I made the following comment in a post on Snarkfest:

Which is to say that I'm excited about the premise of this movie and how trippy it looks, but I'm probably going to spend a large chunk of it trying to figure out which new faces from this movie could carry over into Nolan's Batverse, and as what characters. Tom Hardy as Killer Croc (obviously as a heavy thug with serious eczema rather than a literal human-crocodile circus freak)? Marion Cotillard as Selena Kyle?

In a previous paragraph I had commented that Joseph Gordon-Levitt could easily be the Riddler, but that I actually would prefer to see him pick up the torch from Heath Ledger as a re-cast Joker, since I think he could play the same character Ledger played without feeling like he was "taking" something away from Ledger's last iconic role.

But that's neither here nor there, because I want to go back to the quote I posted and then talk about this, wherein we learn that, sure enough, Tom Hardy is joining the cast of Nolan's third Batman movie. No word on who he's playing, but given that it was recently announced that filming would begin in April with location shooting in New Orleans... well, New Orleans = bayou = alligators, from which it's barely a hop and a skip to crocodile (even though in America, crocs are limited to the southern half of Florida).

The current backstory of Croc in the comics is that he suffers from genetic atavism crossed with an active metagene (so... he's both an evolutionary throwback AND a mutant?). But that's just stuff that's kind of accrued on the character as new writers play up the increasingly bestial side of the character. When he first appeared, pre-Crisis, killing Jason Todd's parents (before the post-Crisis reboot put that onus on Two-Face instead), he was exactly what I picture Tom Hardy playing - a physically imposing gangster looking to become the new "boss" in Gotham who suffers from a severe skin condition like psoriasis or something that lends him his nickname.

(And to those who contend that Killer Croc already exists in the Nolan-verse: No. Gotham Knight is not the Nolan-verse. It used Batman Begins as backstory, but nothing in it actually connected Begins to The Dark Knight, and... really, it just wasn't very good, even as filler).

Now, that's total speculation - the casting announcement apart from the New Orleans announcement has a lot of people jumping on Hardy as the Riddler, though no one involved in the production outside of Michael Caine has even *mentioned* the Riddler. For all we know, Hardy could be playing a more physically fit incarnation of Harvey Bullock.

It goes without saying that I'm still waiting with bated breath for the announcement that Marion Cotillard is joining the cast. Because that pretty much would be a lock for Selina Kyle; I just hope they put her in the current costume, which, being the most Nolan-esque costume in the whole of the DCU, I think, is a no-brainer.

5 Minutes of Young Justice.

I'm looking forward to this show, really. I'm especially jazzed that, unlike the anime-inspired Teen Titans of a few years back, this show isn't ignoring the adult heroes completely - I was completely surprised to actually see Batman in this.

But... and there's always one of these, I guess...

Apparently, Robin in this show will be Dick Grayson and Kid Flash will be Wally West. Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong. At this point, the only thing that defines this show as Young Justice as opposed to Teen Titans is the inclusion of Kon-El as Superboy (or, for that matter, the inclusion of any version of Superboy at all). I'm glad the Siegel/Schuster brou-ha-ha got worked out so that DC could bring Kon/Conner back and put him in a spotlight animated series, but if it's not Tim Drake as Robin and Bart Allen as Impulse (NOT Kid Flash), then it's hardly Young Justice.

I wonder if the series is going to have the Peter David signature "comedy" the comic title had - that might make up for screwing up the identities of two of the core three characters, though I don't think I'll be able to take a character named Mighty N. Dowd any better on TV than I did in the comics. Still, of the various books to which Peter David has applied his "whimsy", Young Justice was the one where it worked best.

Going a bit further afield on my "Not Young Justice" complaints, none of the girls on the team are from the actual team in the books. I don't know that I've *ever* seen Miss Martian - I didn't even know she was an actual character in the DCU, since so far as I know J'onn J'onnz is still the only surviving Martian. And Greg Weisman, who I can't hate even for all the things I'm nitpicking here because of Gargoyles and The Spectacular Spider-Man, says that the character they're using here called Artemis is not the Amazon of that name, nor is it Wonder Girl or Arrowette under a different name. So two of the three guys aren't the same "person" underneath the mask, and not one of the girls is even the same mask as the girls in the comic. The "theme" of the first season will apparently be "secrets and lies", which hopefully indicates that we'll be meeting the Secret at some point, so at least that will be one more tick in the "feels like Young Justice" column, but since the first episode is about meeting Superboy, I don't think we're going to be seeing Suzie in the series until later on, which is disappointing, since keeping her "secret" was integral to the formation of Young Justice to begin with.

ALL OF THAT SAID, I do have to say that I almost want to retract every single nit I picked because this show is officially "canon" in the new DCMultiverse, being designated as "Earth-16". So all of my complaints are really "beside the point" because they're not really trying to recreate the Young Justice of the mainstream DCU, they're creating a completely parallel - but equally canonical - Young Justice. And that is all kinds of sweet.