BilmBlog500

It seemed possible with issue #703 that the J Michael Straczynski run of Superman might be getting interesting. No such luck. After a good single issue fill-in the story goes nowhere in #705. The thread of provocative thought -- that the populace is at risk when Superman decides to slum with the people because the villains will be where Superman is -- from the prior issue is picked up and dropped so that Superman can intervene to save a kid and his mother with an abusive father. Serious issue, yes, but should Superman #705 be the place for it?  It is also completely at odds with the theme introduced in the prior issue. It is sloppy. Look at the final four panels and you can't see how/when Superman gets from inside to outside or who the final lines of the issue are being addressed to.  Red Hood doesn't have the aspirations of the Superman run, but it does a good job of being what it is, and the final issue of the six issue miniseries was perfectly and pleasantly in line with the...

Updated twice, final 4:07 EST. The New York Times Week in Review section reprinted this Pat Bagley cartoon from the Salt Lake Tribune, which is one of the few comparisons in the TSA debate that I don't find utterly false. In fact, I find it rather funny. In the midst of all of its columnists telling us to take our pats and shut up, their Sunday Outlook section has a column by Jeffrey Rosen that dares to flat-out call the current regime unconstitutional. And Rosen is not a hypocritical Republican, he's not some immature person for Ruth Marcus to yell at, he's a long-time legal affairs writer, a professor at George Washington School of Law, legal affairs editor for The New Republic, often published in the Times as well, check out his GW bio here . Click here to find the 2nd quarter earnings release from Barnes & Noble. Same store sales were down a relatively modest 3.3%, loss was $12.6M, with the expectation that the lion and lamb will lie next to one another and s...

On Thanksgiving weekend I gave thanks for the excellent first issue of the new Superboy ongoing series by Jeff Lemire and Pier Gallo. Lemire first came on to my radar with his recent work on Atom in both a special and an Action Comics backup feature.  There is much to like here. Some sentiment in the whole small town Smallville thing, a kid wearing a cape with dreams of flight, the Ma Kent thing.  But for modern times; when Phantom Stranger comes on the scene,Superboy treats him the way a good adolescent should treat Phantom Stranger. Something for the traditionalists with a classic Superman villain, Parasite, providing the fireworks. Good pacing. Quiet in parts, but when Conner Kent finds out someone knows his secret identity hardly a moment to enjoy before the battle with Parasite is underway. Krypton is well used and that ain't easy. The fight involves both brains and brawn. Not sure I like the idea of bringing Poison Ivy in, but since we seem in very good hands I will trust in ...

My client Jim C. Hines has a new post on TSA policies and procedures here http://www.jimchines.com/2010/11/responding-to-the-tsa/ which I highly recommend. It has links to an ACLU petition, to the e-mail address to contact the TSA with your thoughts, links to a round-up of approving "shut up and take your body scan" editorials, and much, much more. I'm getting more involved with this than with just about anything else. I've dashed off letters to the NY Times, which suggested in an editorial last week that profiling was a civil liberties issue that was to be avoided by subjecting all of us to full body screening. Um, isn't that a civil liberties issue as well? I've been very clear that I don't consider profiling to be a solution because terrorists are adaptive. Please see the film The Battle for Algiers, if you want to advocate profiling. I've dashed off an e-mail to Ruth Marcus, who suggested in a Washington Post op-ed column that it was immature...

Comic Book Guy seemed to be a miniseries with great promise, and the first issue with it's multitude of covers and the story inside kind of lived up to it.  But things faded fast. The 4th of 5 issues wasn't funny, wasn't understandable, whatever it was supposed to spoof was hard to find.  At least with the fifth issue things rebounded some. The grand reveal didn't make any sense but it wasn't supposed to, and I had a smile on my face while reading it instead of a look of utter mystification.  Bongo does better with Futurama #51, which is a typically amusing issue that takes us from the Donner party to Vegemite in entertaining fashion.  Bongo is much more successful with the delightful laugh-filled joyful holiday romp in issue #172. The script is from a not-obvious source, the longtime writer Mike W Barr, whom I associate with various DC heroes over the years or with his own Maze Agency "fair play" mystery comics. This issue of The Simpsons so thoroughly ca...

I saw five movies while I was in Australia in September. Four Lions is a British black satire about Islamic terrorism, very droll and very sardonic, in the tradition of but much better than last year's In the Loop.  I saw this at a classic art multiplex, four small sloped floor screens at the Palace Kino on the eastern edge of Collins St. in downtown Melbourne, and in that bad time during the mid-afternoon when the body can want to be in siesta mode. I wasn't able to resist the siren call of the siesta but liked what I did see enough to wish I had been awake for more of it, yet not so much that I wanted to see again when it opened in New York in November. In part because I could see the same thing happening again.  It's just awfully hard to make droll work for ninety minutes. And can you really stretch a joke about inept terrorists for this long. And it is one joke, slowly building to a planned suicide bomb attack on a London marathon by men dressed in animal suits. Which, ...

Family business often brings me to the Hartford area, where the bookstores are longtime friends of a sort.  First and foremost is the Borders in Farmington, store #55. Got to see it from when it was a construction site, when it was exciting to have a Borders move in during the dawn of the superstore era. It was the first of it's kind in the area, and it still does a decent business. And had a very decent selection of close to 90 non-Charlaine JABberwocky titles on the shelf. Like many Borders, not the business it did ten years ago. And like the Westwood store, which is of similar vintage, the box is too big. Back where the music used to be in the car rear corner, they have couches and chairs set up. But the space overhang isn't as bad as Westwood, the rent no doubt cheaper. I still like this store very much since it is big, full of endcaps and displays, lots and lots of books.  First in the wild sighting of Horns of Ruin by Tim Akers.  Across the street, literally across the s...

Also playing for Thanksgiving, three films inspired at some or another level by real life... 127 Hours is a specialty release that's been slowly broadening and will be in a screen or two in most major cities for the holidays. It's another book-to-film, this one based on the book Between a Rock and a Hard Place by Aron Ralston. Ralston is a hiker who was forced to cut off his own arm to escape when a boulder trapped him inside a Utah canyon, and this real life story has been adapted by Danny Boyle, the director of Oscar winner Slumdog Millionaire and many other movies including Trainspotting, Sunshine, 28 Days Later, The Beach, etc. And Boyle throws his all into making an energetic lively adaptation of the story. The movie starts out with a rush of energy, from the photography and editing and lighting and the music by A. R. Rahman, who also did the fantastic score and songs for Slumdog. There's just one problem. Once Ralston is stuck in the canyon unable to move, ther...

New York City might be one of the best cities in the world, but not on account of its movie theatres. So when I stopped over in LA on the way to Australia, I was happy to find time to see Takers at the Regency Bruin Theatre in Westwood Village. The Bruin was built in 1937, and it's distinctive outside but not so much so currently on the interior, where I'm told there were interior murals that have been painted over in the 700 seat auditorium, which is very similar in dimension to the front section of the Ziegfeld in New York. Not the nicest single screen theatre, but nice enough. If I want great in Westwood, clearly I'll need to get to the Village theatre that's across the street from the Bruin, and which goes twice as many paces across the back screen end of the theatre, bigger even I think than the main screen of the RKO Stanley Warner Rt 4 Paramus Quad. Cinema Treasures stats say The Village seats twice as many people as The Bruin. In any event, of the 700...

Love and Other Drugs is a definite cut above most of the other dreary formulaic romantic comedies that have graced our screens in recent years. This one is striving to attain Jerry Maguire territory instead of Wedding Planner territory. If it doesn't ultimately achieve Jerry Maguire, it still has considerable virtues on display. Let us start in the virtue department with the acting. I have always liked Jake Gyllenhal, but the opening scene here is revelatory because he looks for the first time like an actual adult in an adult role. This transition isn't an inevitable one; McCauley Culkin anyone? And there is energy and brio to the performance as well, vs the hangdog Donnie Darko thing he often defaults to. He is actually a leading man, and if he can hold on to that moving forward Incan anticipate some nice nights at the movies. His love interest is played by Anne Hathaway, and she too is making a nice transition which we have steadily seen in the years since Princess Diaries....

The Harry Potter movies are on the one hand much better than perhaps they need to be, and yet at the same time never particularly good, either. The essential problem I have with all of them is that they've rarely wanted to try making them into good films that would actually stand as good films apart from the experience of the books. The first film in the series had absolutely no dramatic life to it apart from the memories of the books that walked into movie theatres with the paying customers. The second film was better, it had some interior life to it apart from the book. The third film was and to my eyes probably always will be the best of the series. It's the only one I happily saw twice, and I'd happily go and see it again tomorrow. And since then... OK, you can't say that Warner Bros. has ever shorted a Harry Potter movie by a single nail on the set. That's what I mean when I say that the movies are much better than perhaps they need to be, because I'm...

I just updated a blog post about bookstores that are set to close, and as promised I wanted to talk a little more about the Westwood Borders. This was one of the very first Borders to open in Southern California, store #56, and one of the very first Borders I'd ever visited on the West Coast. That would have been in 1996 when I went out for the WorldCon in Anaheim, and made the rounds of what was then a relatively small selection of stores in the earlier days of the book superstore era. If memory serves, Borders in Westwood, West Hollywood, South Bay/Torrance and Brea would have been on the list. It wasn't a great store for sf/fantasy, but it was a major location. I mean, you didn't have a lot of superstores then, they were big news, and this one was huge. Lots of room for books, for music, for videos, for everything. A United Artists movie theatre triplex was on the next block. Godawful underground parking garage, personified why I've enjoyed LA more now that I...

OK, so to set the record on this straight, the TSA Director said at a senate hearing on Wednesday 17 November that they haven't done a good job of communicating that children under 12 are exempt from the "enhanced patdown." So aren't we all happy and comfortable now. To know that our young children can only be subjected to the regular patdown! And, really, who doesn't mind having their 14 year old daughter felt up the thighs and buttocks. If this is the security regime we have, then we do have to give people of all ages an equal opportunity to be subjected to it. The problem is that we have a security regime that routinely subjects people of any age to this. Benjamin Franklin may not actually have said “They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security” but whomever said it, says it right.

So there's this ad by Lindor, the people that make those wonderful little truffle balls that you can buy at the Borders checkouts, or with a $2.50 coupon in the latest Costco coupon book. You've got that Roger Federer guy going through airport security, and the people at the x-ray machine see that his carry-on is full of balls. "Hey, look at this, he's a tennis player" says blue-uniformed TSA person #1 to TSA person #2. Then they open the bag and see that it isn't tennis balls, but rather a big full of those delightful little Lindor truffle balls, while Roger Federer says " Swiss tennis player." Because it's swiss chocolate, get it. And then the TSA people say they're going to have to confiscate the bag, and Roger says "you've got to be kidding me," and the commercial ends with a freeze frame shot of the two TSA people looking very very serious about needing to confiscate that bag. I find this funny. I don't find much ...

News is trickling out here and there of bookstores that are set to close after the holidays or even before. Here in New York, there's a big flagship Barnes & Noble by Lincoln Center that will be closing after a 15-year run with the expiration of its lease. A fashion discounter called Century 21 quickly leased the entire space. Joseph Beth booksellers has filed Chapter 11 , and will be closing half its stores. They owe millions of dollars to Ingram, hundreds of thousands of dollars to Random House, and more. This is a real shame. I went to Pittsburgh a few years ago when Brandon Sanderson did a signing at their store in Pittsburgh that will be closing. It was a great store with great staff. Joseph Beth shares some lineage with Borders. In the dawn of time at Borders in the 1980s, Borders licensed its inventory system and may have even done warehouse fulfillment for some independent bookstores in the midwest, and if memory serves Davis-Kiss was among the chains they were d...

one man's adventures with TSA... http://johnnyedge.blogspot.com/2010/11/these-events-took-place-roughly-between.html here the NY Times travel writer Joe Sharkey talks about his fun-filled pat-down experience... http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/02/business/02road.html? and the Washington Post tells us there is starting to be some backlash against the patdown regime... http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/12/AR2010111206580.html I'm getting genuinely frightened about this. I'm not sure I want to fly anywhere any more. I got a token patdown coming back through SFO in September for no particular reason, it looked like they were just having some fun where every second or third passenger at this checkpoint was getting one for one or another reason, in my case it was because I had cargo pants with extra pockets. It's a demeaning and degrading thing. The TSA isn't the SS, but it's still worrisome that the US is now proving that you can pay peop...