Tag: DC

McKellen the White. | Dent-Worthington Heats Up.

“Encouragingly, Peter and Fran Walsh have told me they couldn’t imagine The Hobbit without their original Gandalf. Their confidence hasn’t yet been confirmed by the director Guillermo del Toro but I am keeping my diary free for 2009!” Grey Havens be damned, Ian McKellen reports he’s likely returning as Gandalf for The Hobbit (well, if he and producer Peter Jackson have anything to say about it, and they probably will.) Update: More good news: Composer Howard Shore is back as well.

Also in movie news, the viral marketing campaign for The Dark Knight is picking up again. As you may remember, a slew of new Gotham-related sites appeared last December. Now, more have arrived, of a distinctly Harvey Dent bent: A new edition of The Gotham Times, Dana Worthington for DA (a.k.a. Harvey Dent’s opposition), Maiden Avenue Report (Gotham’s Drudge, it seems), Citizens for Batman, St. Swithuns Church, and Gotham Cable News are all now online, along with the Dent campaign site linked to the other day. Also, apparently the original marketing plan was always to shift from the Joker to Harvey Dent, so this rollout hasn’t necessarily been affected by the loss of Ledger. (That being said, viral text messages seem to indicate the Clown Prince of Crime will pop up yet again before April Fool’s Day.)

The Watchdog. | Tales of the Pac Freighter.

By way of Bitten Tongue, the Peanuts characters take on the mantles of Watchmen. Charlie Brown with the power of Dr. Manhattan is a bit unnerving, and Linus seems like more of a Nite Owl-type, but Lucy as Silk Spectre and Schroeder as Ozy make perfect sense…and Rorschach is really just one bad day away from Joe Cool.

Also, via Quiddity and in keeping with the GitM theme, the plight of Pac Man gets reconfigured as a Tale of the Black Freighter. Game over, yellow fella.

Run, Harvey, Run!

“Gotham City is collapsing from a runaway crime wave and Harvey Dent can save it. But he has to run for District Attorney first, and the only way he’ll run is if he sees an outpouring of public support. So, let’s all get out there and show Harvey Dent he’s got support to take back Gotham!” I know I’ve been doing a lousy job of following down-ticket races thus far this cycle. Still, in case anyone’s interested and by way of Quiddity, Harvey Dent’s campaign for Gotham DA has hit the road. (Alas, it seems I’ve already missed his NYC stops.) Also, no doubt aware of Sen. Obama’s prodigious coattails, he seems to be plugging for an endorsement: “Be creative. Harvey Dent wants to see that we want change — and that we are ready to work for change. Harvey wants to see that people are ready to throw out the old, to break out of habits, to really do something new and different! Because that’s what taking back Gotham will take.“

I’ll say this for him, he has a honest face. By the way, it should be noted: Harvey Dent also somewhat disproves the Gerry Ferraro thesis, as he’s managed to get elected the District Attorney of Gotham City as both a white and black man.

Failing my Clinton Rorschach Test.

“I looked at the Rorschach blot. I tried to pretend it looked like a spreading tree, shadows pooled beneath it, but it didn’t. It looked more like a dead cat I once found, the fat, glistening grubs writhing blindly, squirming over each other, frantically tunneling away from the light. But even that is avoiding the real horror. The horror is this: In the end, it is simply a picture of empty meaningless blackness. We are alone. There is nothing else.” Ok, I’m not that ’round the bend. But I have to admit, when I saw this picture of Sen. Clinton on Drudge today, this immediately came to mind:




Oddly enough, the same exact thing happened a few weeks ago when this oft-used pic instantly reminded me of this.




Or is it just me?

As a disclaimer, unlike Republicans and denizens of Halloweenland — I’ll stand by that one — I’m not comparing Sen. Clinton to Linda Blair’s secret admirer or a psychotic, snazzily-dressed mass-murderer here. In fact, I think Drudge’s tendency to post unflattering pics of Hillary and Chelsea Clinton is often cruel, juvenile, and bordering on sexist (if not plunging right past that border.) So, this is not meant as a comment on Clinton per se, only on the implicit associations made by my impressionable fanboy subconscious, which would seem to trump slightly the findings of my Implicit Association Test. (And, in my defense, at least I wasn’t so irredeemably geeky as to come up with Tasha Yar.)

Shadows over Gotham.

“In a political context this would politely be called an ‘unintended consequence.’ (Gotham as Baghdad, anyone?) Mr. Nolan doesn’t deny the overtones. ‘As we looked through the comics, there was this fascinating idea that Batman’s presence in Gotham actually attracts criminals to Gotham, attracts lunacy,’ he said. ‘When you’re dealing with questionable notions like people taking the law into their own hands, you have to really ask, where does that lead? That’s what makes the character so dark, because he expresses a vengeful desire.‘” The NYT checks in with Chris Nolan on The Dark Knight.

Closer to Midnight.




“Now at midnight all the agents, and the superhuman crew, come out and round up everyone that knows more than they do.” One year out from its release date, Zack Snyder releases some character stills of the Watchmen. I like the three above quite a bit (particularly the pitch-perfect, G. Gordon Liddyesque gleam to the Comedian.) But, imho, Ozymandias didn’t really pan out (Matthew Goode looks way too young), nor did Malin Ackerman’s Silk Spectre. (Besides looking rather generic and X-Men-ish, she seems way too tall and modelly for Ms. Juspeczyk.) As yet unseen, Carla Gugino’s Mama Spectre and — perhaps the real make-or-break’er — Billy Crudup’s Dr. Manhattan.

All in the Games.

By way of my sis-in-law Lotta, here’s a funky animated gif: Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton play the oldest game of all. (The text is early on from Neil Gaiman‘s Sandman, when Morpheus descends into Hell to retrieve his helmet and is challenged to a contest of wits to reclaim his prize, at the risk of unending torment.)

Strangely enough, just as she sent me this, I’d just grabbed an animated gif of a different game, which — at least imho — also has some metaphorical resonance for the primary season. (For those who don’t follow basketball, that’s virtually an automatic basket by 7’5″ Yao Ming getting stuffed out of nowhere by 5’7″ Knick Nate Robinson…Notice also (in the Youtube) how Yao tries to play the victim card after ignominious defeat…)

Heavy Freight.

“Exhausted, I slept across the grave…I saw the Black Freighter bearing down on all I loved, but I was powerless to stop it.” Zack Snyder alum Gerard Butler reveals his upcoming part in Watchmen: He’ll be narrating the Tales of the Black Freighter digression for the DVD version. “‘I’m going to do the voice of the captain,’ said Butler. ‘They’re going to do it in the style of a Japanese anime and I’m totally stoked.” Anime? Hrm.

You play with matches…

Some comic-book cautionary tales for the day: Rorschach sets fire to a would-be pursuer in a new still from Zack Snyder’s Watchmen, which has wrapped shooting. And Dark Horizons offers a first glimpse at how Aaron Eckhart will look as Harvey Dent…after the incident.

Can the Indy Card Trump the Joker?

“‘Harvey Dent is a tragic figure, and his story is the backbone of this film,’ says Christopher Nolan…’The Joker, he sort of cuts through the film — he’s got no story arc, he’s just a force of nature tearing through. Heath has given an amazing performance in the role, it’s really extraordinary.’” With the next Democratic debate tonight at 9pm EST on MSNBC, one that will hopefully help defuse the tone of the past few days, now seems as good a time as any to check on the big box office rivalry of the summer, Batman v. Indy. (Well, and the forgotten man, Iron Man.) Last we checked, the Jones camp had suggested Bruce Wayne was too wealthy and privileged to understand ordinary people’s concerns, while Batman surrogate Alfred told The Daily Planet‘s Clark Kent that Jones was too “pointy-headed and academic” to save anyone but upscale, overeducated professionals. (The missed rejoinder: The Batman camp is calling people pointy-headed?) Also, scurrilous rumors abound that Shia LaBoeuf was added to the Indy ticket merely to siphon the youth vote away from Batman’s running mate, Dick Grayson…Yep, it’s getting ugly, folks.

Anyway, as the quote above attests, Dark Knight director Chris Nolan recently checked in briefly with the L.A. Times about his two main villains: “Don’t expect a lot laughs in this summer’s return to the cave. ‘It’s a dark and complex story,’ Nolan said, ‘and the villains are dark and complex as well.’” Meanwhile, on the Spielberg side of things, we have this new still from Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls. (Note Ray Winstone lurking in the corner.)