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Hey, everyone!  Just wanted to let you know that I’ll soon be a regular poster over at awesome new pop culture action-oriented website 30 Ninjas, the pet project of Hollywood director Doug Liman!  They’ve got all kinds of cool geekery going on, so tell your friends! I already have a review of the fantastic grindhouse sexploitation flick Bitch Slap posted there, as well as an article lamenting the loss of practical FX in Hollywood.

And just as a friendly reminder, I’m still writing pieces for online magazine Suite 101, and my list of articles can be found …right here!

UPDATE: My column is up and running, invading the interwebs on a weekly basis! Come read my musings on everything cool and not so cool in the world of pop culture.  Click here for “It’s All Geek To Me” !

Hey, Gary Oldman…

Your movie, The Dark Knight just earned $1 billion, as announced by Warner Brothers on Friday.  Woo hoo!!

…well, the first 18 minutes of it, anyway.  Yeah, I was one of the lucky ones at the New York Comic Con this past weekend who saw the footage of the first two scenes, one later scene, and the opening credit sequence of Zack Snyder’s Watchmen movie, introduced by the comic’s original artist, Dave Gibbons.  By now you may have read about it, or even seen it yourself.  I think it looks fantastic.  The opening with the Comedian is dramatic, exciting, and appropriately sets the tone for the gritty tale about to unfold.  The credit sequence is almost like a mini movie itself, and conveys a huge amount of information and detail in ridiculously stylish fashion.  The extra scene with Rorshach is one of those fanboy fist-pumping, cheer-inducing moments that makes you glad movie going still exists as a communal experience.  The Snyder slo-mo is back, and put to good effect (“This…is…dystopian New York!!”), though I worry in the final product it may be overused.  One thing I’d also like to point out is the sound design, which is unbelievably detailed.  Maybe it’s ’cause I was right in front of the speakers, but every tinkle of glass, every punch, every ambient noise was distinct and filled with purpose.

To say this movie is anticipated is like saying the economy is on somewhat of a downward trend.  But anticipated by whom?  Will it do crazy business like Dark Knight? I don’t know.  It’s getting a lot of press as the Next Big Movie, but it has a lot of work to do to get non-diehards into the seats. First off is brand recognition.  People know Batman, Spider-Man, Superman, Wonder Woman, etc.  But Rorshach?  Dr. Man-what-now?  Secondly, I read Watchmen again last year, and while it is an excellent piece of superhero fiction, it is 20 years old, with everything it’s influenced having come out and been explored since then, including Dark Knight. One of the reasons Watchmen was such a sensation was its timing in the industry, and in society.  The idea of seriously and deeply flawed superheroes, the cold war themes, the perception of “superpowers” in the spandex and global context; all of these at the time were revolutionary for a comic book.  Most who are learning about this for the first time might see it and say, yeah it was a great movie, but huh, I was expecting more.  The production, unlike most modern comic films, also rightly does nothing to change the design of some of the sillier costumes that populate this world, which may also add an obstacle to being taken seriously.

Or perhaps, like 300 did to the mostly uninitiated, it’ll come out of nowhere, sneak up behind them and kick them right in the nards.  Figuratively, of course. In the good way.

Now that the suits at Fox and Warner Brothers have made nice nice, we’ll get to find out in a few weeks…