Let's start with Electropolis, the new Dark Horse collection of Dean Motter's Retrofuture Deco Noir story (Preview here). Filled with robot detectives, femme fatales and the power of electricity, it's just one of many off-beat genre books appearing at comic book stores this week.

And if Electropolis' pulp fiction is your thing, then maybe the Batman/Doc Savage Special (Dark Knight Detective versus Man of Bronze!) will also float your boat, after all. Or maybe Sky Doll: Doll Factory, a collection of unseen material from the awesome European strip Sky Doll, will provide your reading material for the next few days.

But if you prefer your heroines a little less suggestible than Sky Doll, the first issue of Tank Girl: Skidmarks is probably more your speed. Unsurprisingly, we'd also point you in the direction of the debut of Locke & Key: Crown of Shadows, but we're biased.

Maybe you're looking for something you've already seen in major motion pictures? That's okay; not only is there a preview issue of the new series of Wall-E, but there's also Star Wars Purge: Seconds To Die, which follows a young Darth Vader killing off as many Jedi as possible, post Revenge of The Sith. And that's not all! There's also a paperback collection of DC/Wildstorm's recent The X-Files series.

For those who can't get enough of those superheroes, then I'd recommend the first issue of Warren Ellis' Supergod, his latest "What if superheroes were bastards?" series. Or, on the opposite end of the superhero spectrum, the Absolute Justice hardcover, collecting Alex Ross' expansive love letter to the Super Friends (No, really).

In between those two extremes, there's Dynamite's Project Superpowers: The Black Terror Vol. 1 collection, DC's Green Lantern: Agent Orange collection, which leads into the current Blackest Night storyline, Supergirl: Who Is Superwoman? (in which Sterling Gates and Jamil Igle manage to undo years of abuse and make Supergirl a likable, working character again - good job, people) and the Authority: The Lost Year Reader (reprinting Grant Morrison and Gene Ha's two completed issues of their abandoned run, ahead of Keith Giffen and other artists aiming to complete the story in their absence).

There's also Marvel's PunisherMax (Yes, one word. It's the new "mature readers" title for the character, and maybe Marvel thinks pushing words together is more adult?), Green Hulk/Red Hulk collection (Heroes' writer Jeph Loeb writes a couple of gamma-irradiated monsters in a couple of adventures), the first issue of Strange (Mark Waid's reboot of the former Doctor Strange, Sorcerer Supreme). And also, there's all manner of X-Men books: the Dark Avengers/X-Men: Utopia collection, as well as collections of Wolverine: Tales of Weapon X, Wolverine Weapon X: Adamantium Men and Wolverine/Gambit. All your Wolverine needs should definitely be met this week, let's face it.

If there are any other needs looking unserviced, I'd recommend checking out the complete list of books shipping from Diamond Distributors this week, and then remembering that your local comic book store can be found here. If this week seems overly expensive, don't worry; there's an entire skip week at the end of the year to get some of that money back. Look at it as a loan. Or something.

V's success last week must feel confusing for the alphabet network; on the one hand, it was the second-highest rated series premiere of the season, and the most-watched 8pm premiere for ABC since Lost, but on the other, they'd already put the show on production hiatus and retooled things behind the scenes in a way that not only means they're unlikely to be able to bring the show back before the announced March 2010 return - thereby potentially losing whatever momentum the show will have at the end of this four episode mini-season - but also means that they've replaced many of the folk responsible for the show's success in the first place (Then again, who knows how many people liked what they saw last week and will return tomorrow?). Ever eager to help television networks out of a jam, we've come up with some possible ways to keep the V-mentum going while viewers wait for more Visitors:

Re-Edit Other, Little-Seen, Shows To Tie In With V
Got any police procedurals lying around? Just add an extra scene at the end where the perp turns out to get a cut on his hand and WTF HE'S A LIZARD MAN. Then you can cut to Elizabeth Mitchell getting a phone call and saying "Another one? Oh my God, they're everywhere." Cue dramatic music and cut to black. Pretend that it's an effort to show just how widespread the alien invasion actually is.

Re-Edit Episodes Of The Original V
Start each episode with Morena Baccarin talking to some minion Visitor and saying "You know, this reminds me of that time we invaded an Earth in a parallel dimension, and I had that long hair and 1980s evil bitch mask" before cutting to the original episode. Then, at the end, cap each episode off with Baccarin laughing and saying "Now, that was a sticky situation!"

Run Trailers For Lost Promising That It'll End With The Visitors Arriving On Earth
It's not like we have any better idea how Lost is going to end, let's face it. And, let's face it; like you can't already imagine the serious voiceover going "It started with a planecrash... But once they've solved the riddle of the island... They'll have to face the visitors." And then use Party of Five footage of Matthew Fox and Scott Wolf and pretend it's a flashback. Alternately...

Run Trailers Reminding People That They Could Just Watch Lost Instead
Again, cue the serious voiceover: "Waiting to find out what happens in V? Why? Lost is back on and it's much, much better. We promise that we'll throw Alan Tudyk in if it'll make a difference. Come on! It's the last season!"

Just Rename FlashForward
Am I the only person who thinks that FlashForward and V are long-lost brother shows? Both of them have worldwide events that shock humanity that are linked to terrorism and some believe prove the existence of God, both have FBI agents as central characters working to uncover the truth about said events, and both feature attractive people from as many different demographics as possible drawn into the web of slowly uncovering storylines. Considering that FlashForward's ratings are slipping, why not just edit in a new subplot that explains that the FlashForwards are really the result of Visitor experiments, show Dominic Monaghan peeling off his face to show that he's a lizard, and just call the show V from December onwards? Would anyone really care that much?

Here's the book's caption for the above image and our other images of that concept art:

The parallel reality of conceptual design - visions of the exotic bazaar a wandering Kirk might have stumbled upon in the film. In its final design, the desert planet becomes a threatening world of snow and ice.

So instead of seeing Kirk chased through the snow by the Cloverfield monster's cousin, we could have seen him encountering a slew of weird alien traders and smugglers on a desert world? I guess Abrams' film was already enough like Star Wars without this sequence.

Star Trek: The Art Of The Film, on sale next week, is Titan Books' latest coffee-table art book tying in with a major science fiction movie, and it's one of the best so far. You get insights into stuff you might not have thought about, like the many different head tattoos the film's scurvy-addled Romulan dogs sported in the film — there's a two-page spread showing all the different tattoos, just in case you and all your friends want to get done up as Nero's crew for a convention. It turns out that the U.S.S. Kelvin was originally designed to look like a Soviet submarine (there are some early renderings) and Nero's ship, the Narada, was supposed to be like a hundred scary knives. The Cloverfield monster in the film was origianlly hairier and more like Aggedor from Doctor Who.

We've already seen some gorgeous concept art from the film, but there's still some great stuff in the book I hadn't seen before — including some early paintings of Vulcan, and a huge section on the reimagining of the U.S.S. Enterprise.

Images from Star Trek: The Art of the Film. Out November 17th from Titan Books.

People often lump Tierney together with George Will, as global-warming doubters at major newspapers who use somewhat specious arguments to downplay the scientific consensus that we're slow-cooking our planet. But Tierney's position as the Times' science columnist gives him more authority than Will's as a random TV pundit. But also, the thing I find fascinating about Tierney is that even as he goes to great lengths to paint the evidence about global warming as mere hype, he's also eager to buy into the hype whenever there's a claim that new technology will deliver us to a beautiful future, without having to make any hard choices. It's hard not to believe the two things are related.

Reading Tierney's columns and blog posts on global warming, a few things become clear. He's a global warming skeptic, rather than an out-and-out denier. (In one blog post, he says he believes there's "some risk" that global warming will be a danger.) But he's given tons of exposure and legitimacy to outright deniers, including some groups with ties to the oil industry. And he's done a lot to paint the scientific consensus on global warming as pure hype and conformism.

In Tierney's world, the reason the majority of scientists agree that global warming is a worsening crisis is dick-measuring. In a column on Obama's science advisor, John Holdren, Tierney spends most of the column quoting Roger Pielke, a climate researcher who's been one of the most vocal critics of the idea that the polar ice caps are melting. According to Pielke, scientists present conclusions about global warming as definitive not because the data supports them, but just to boost their own "authority in the political debate" and tarnish their opponents.

And Tierney implies that scientists sign on with the global-warming orthodoxy because that's where the money is. (One blog post is provocatively titled, "Global Warming Payola?".) And the idea that we're cooking the planet is sold to the public by taking advantage of natural disasters and tragic images of sad polar bears:

Two studies by NASA and university scientists last year concluded that much of the recent melting of Arctic sea ice was related to a cyclical change in ocean currents and winds, but those studies got relatively little attention - and were certainly no match for the images of struggling polar bears so popular with availability entrepreneurs.

Recently, Tierney has also been pounding on the common conservative meme that the same scientists who now warn about global warming were warning, in the 1970s, that we faced a new human-made ice age. Since they were so wrong back then, and have changed their tune so drastically, the implication is, why should we believe them now? (The meme is massively overplayed, but even if it were true, so what? Smart people adjust their views when they receive new information. And when the data becomes overwhelming, only idiots and tools stay agnostic.)

You should definitely read Andrew Leonard's takedown (at Salon.com) of one of Tierney's columns, in which he basically claims that the more energy we use, the faster we'll solve any environmental problems — because we'll all get richer, and rich people demand clean air. (Shorter version: CO2 is odorless and colorless, so relying on wealthy people's distaste for smog won't do much good.)

I'm not just picking on Tierney because he's the science columnist at one of our biggest newspapers — I'm fascinated with him because while he paints global-warming concerns as pure hype, he's also one of the biggest boosters of the hype around the Singularity, as simplified by Ray Kurzweil and others. Reading Tierney's writing makes me wonder if the two things (skepticism on pressing, real problems, and wide-eyed enthusiasm for fictional, easy solutions) go hand in hand.

In fact, Tierney has explicitly pushed the idea of a technological Singularity, happening by 2030, as the alternative to neo-Malthusian warnings that overpopulation will result in starvation and environmental disasters. In one blog post, "Malthus Vs. The Singularity," Tierney cites a paper by Robin Hanson in the IEEE Spectrum saying that the Singularity could speed up our economic growth so much, our economy would double within a month. (Or even a week.) Says Tierney, this provides an alternative to that downer Malthusian view:

Now, you could argue that his projections of artificial intelligence are as speculative and unprecedented as the Malthusian visions of resource depletion. But I'd bet on him over the Malthusians. Unlike Malthus, we can look around and see that we already have the energy and technology to feed a larger population than exists on Earth today. And we can look at Ray Kurzweil's graphs showing exponential growth in computing power for more than a century, with no apparent end in sight.

Here's a smaller version of the Ray Kurzweil graph he's talking about:

Kurzweil, author of The Singularity Is Near, was a frequent touchstone in Tierney's column and blog posts in the summer of 2008, although not so much since then. And the idea that you can extrapolate from existing trends in computing power into the next century is a cornerstone of Kurzweil's prediction that machines smarter than humans are coming in the next few decades. (Actually, the graph maps "calculations per second per $1,000," which seems a tad arbitrary — and how do you measure how many human brains $1,000 will buy you?)

Tierney eagerly seizes on Kurzweil's predictions that rapidly accelerating technological advances will solve all of our problems — he's devoted a column and at least one blog post to Kurzweil's Law Of Accelerating Returns, which says that progress has been speeding up since the beginning of life on Earth. (There are more charts, which show the timeline between multi-cellular organisms and the development of mammals, versus between the Industrial Revolution and the development of the personal computer. Guess which took longer?) According to Kurzweil, the time between Paradigm Shifts has been halving with each decade, and soon our paradigms will be shifting constantly.

Among other things, that means we'll have unlimited clean energy soon, life expectancy will start shooting up every year "faster than you're aging," and all of our problems will be solved. In another blog post, Tierney addresses his commenters who doubt Kurzweil's Law. (Don't they realize it's a Law?):

In response to my Findings column about [Kurzweil] and a post about his graphs, some readers were skeptical. Francis and others insisted it's naive to assume exponential progress can go on - that, just as bacteria proliferating in a petri dish will eventually exhaust the resources, we too will hit a limit.

I think these skeptics are missing the lessons of history, but before explaining why I like Mr. Kurzweil's theory more than theirs, let me grant them a couple of points. First, there is no guarantee that exponential increases in computer power will continue, or that the exponential growth in computer science will be matched in other fields. One of the most common mistakes of technoprophets is to assume that the the technology du jour will shape the future. When radio was invented, futurists envisioned locomotives powered by radio waves; when atomic power was discovered, there were predictions of nuclear-powered car in every garage.

Also, futurists tend to underestimate the social and political obstacles to progress, so they're often too optimistic about how soon people's lives will be transformed. Just because new tools exist doesn't mean they'll be used widely. Donald Norman, a technology expert profiled in my Findings column in December, says the chief problems to overcome in introducing new technologies involve people, not machines.

That said, after watching the impact of computers on so many fields, I share Mr. Kurzweil's belief that these tools are especially transformative and that change is just going to accelerate. Yes, there are physical limits to what can done with computer chips. But for a century now, each time computer engineers ran into previous physical limits - with the original electro-mechanical machines, with vacuum tubes, with transistors - they jumped to a new technology, and they're already working on successors to today's chips. It may seem naive to expect continuing leaps forward, but I think it's naive to ignore the trend of the past century - or the past 10,000 years.

The Cassandras have been warning of limits and resource depletion and population crashes for thousands of years, but as Julian Simon explained, we've kept exceeding limits and finding new resources and extending our life expectancy. The new problems lead to new solutions that leave us better off in the long run. Today's Cassandras are focused on climate change, which could bring real problems, but to think these problems are insurmountable seems to me as short-sighted as the prophecies of the 1960s ("overpopulation" leading to worldwide famines) and 1970s (the exhaustion of energy supplies).

If anything, climate change seems much more manageable than previous "crises" because the chief consequences are so far in the future. We have decades to figure out ways to deal with it: to find carbon-free sources of energy, to develop techniques for removing carbon from the atmosphere or geoengineering the climate, or simply to adapt. These are all formidable challenges, but our tools for dealing with them are going to be improving exponentially, as Mr. Kurzweil argues.

So once again, you see the connection — even as Tierney says that we have decades to figure out what to do about climate change, he's also tremendously excited about a Singularity in which all our troubles will melt away and magic robots will carry us into the cyber-heaven on their shoulders. Rather than viewing the Singularity as a huge disruption, one which we can't possibly understand in advance, as many science fiction writers have done, Tierney buys into the hype that the Singularity will give us unlimited rice pudding.

You'll notice the mention of "geoengineering" in that last paragraph — it's another one of Tierney's favorite pie-in-the-sky themes. If it really does turn out that CO2 in the atmosphere is causing some problems, there's a potential fix that doesn't involve making any sacrifices:

Originally called geoengineering, this approach used to be dismissed as science fiction fantasies: cooling the planet with sun-blocking particles or shades; tinkering with clouds to make them more reflective; removing vast quantities of carbon from the atmosphere.

Today this approach goes by the slightly less grandiose name of climate engineering, and it is looking more practical. Several recent reviews of these ideas conclude that cooling the planet would be technically feasible and economically affordable.

Possible ideas include lofting aerosol particles into the ionosphere to reflect shortwave radiation back into space, spraying seawater mist into low-lying clouds, to brighten them and reflect sunlight away from the Earth, and removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Scientists have pooh-poohed the idea of geoengineering because — wait for it! — they don't want to lose the prestige and money they've gotten from warning about carbon emissions. But there are real reasons to think that geo-engineering without reduction in carbon emissions would be worse than doing nothing — and that's if it even succeeds. Futurist Jamais Cascio, author of Hacking The Earth, writes in the Wall Street Journal recently:

To be clear, geoengineering won't solve global warming. It's not a "techno-fix." It would be enormously risky and almost certainly lead to troubling unforeseen consequences. And without a doubt, the deployment of geoengineering would lead to international tension. Who decides what the ideal temperature would be? Russia? India? The U.S.? Who's to blame if Country A's geoengineering efforts cause a drought in Country B?

Also let's be clear about one other thing: We will still have to radically reduce carbon emissions, and do so quickly. We will still have to eliminate the use of fossil fuels, and adopt substantially more sustainable agricultural methods. We will still have to deal with the effects of ecosystems damaged by carbon overload...

[Geoengineering] would simply hold temperatures down temporarily, doing nothing about the causes of climate change, let alone ocean acidification and other symptoms of a carbon overdose. We can't let ourselves slip back into business-as-usual complacency, because we'd simply be setting ourselves up for a far greater disaster down the road.

Cascio explains further here:

I'm an optimistic person — but my optimism comes from a faith that we, as human beings, will figure out a way to change what we're doing before it's too late. I don't believe there are magical "get out of eco-hell free" cards lying around, or that the Singularity is going to solve all of our problems. The Singularity has given us some fantastic science-fiction novels by people like Vernor Vinge, Rudy Rucker and Charles Stross — but it's not going to come true, any more than the novels 1984 or 2001 were accurate descriptions of those years in real life. But even if computers did become smarter than humans in 100 years' time — for some values of "smarter" — I'm not sure that would save us from the results of our own fecklessness. For one thing, who's to say those super-smart computers would care whether the Earth was habitable for humans?

You can certainly look at our history, as a species, and see an unbroken line of progress. But you can also see many eras where we've driven ourselves into a technological hole (the Dark Ages come to mind) or engineered ourselves into mass starvation (China's Great Leap Forward was a purely human-made catastrophe.) There's certainly no guarantee that we get to have an unbroken upward progression going on for ever and ever.

We'll get a beautiful future — but only if we work for it. The idea that a wonderful, shining future will be handed to us, or that the awful dilemmas we're facing as a species will just go away, feels worse than foolish. It feels like sabotaging the future, for the sake of a bit more comfort and a false sense of security today.

If Tierney only used his bully pulpit at the Times to raise doubts about global warming, he'd just be one of many obstacles to saving our planet. But the fact that he's simultaneously guzzling the Kool Aid on things like Ray Kurzweil's Panglossian Law of Perfect Awesomeness and the mad-science easy fix for global warming makes him something much worse. His cheery outlook is actually helping to ruin our future.

Monday

What better way to start off the week than with a Syfy marathon of Stargate SG-1 running right now, from 8am all the way through to 3pm? Sure, there's that whole "work" thing, but come on. It's Stargate!

Otherwise, your television thrills are limited to an 8pm conflict between new episodes of House on Fox (A teenage girl can't distinguish between fact and fiction "after a wild night out." Am I the only one who feels like this could be either awesome or hideously embarrassing for all involved?) and Heroes on NBC, where Sylar is still trying to take control of Matt's body and Claire has to face off with her father's Sorority Girl Army. And, yes, I did accidentally make that sound more interesting than the actual show. Sorry, everyone.

Tuesday

For those calling in sick, I'd recommend skipping Syfy's Tru Calling marathon (8am through 3pm for those whose love of Dushku overpowers their bad-show gag reflex) and tuning into AMC, which goes dragon crazy with a 12:45 airing of Dragonheart (Dennis Quaid and a dragon voiced by Sean Connery!) followed by a 3pm re-run of Reign of Fire (You could stay tuned for a 5pm Batman Begins and 8pm Terminator 2: Judgment Day as well, if you were feeling particularly lazy).

If you'd rather get a delayed British take on the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, then James May On The Moon (BBC America at 8pm) takes Top Gear's Captain Slow and puts him in the driver's seat for an hour long look back at those heady days where men were men and the Moon seemed an obtainable destination.

Otherwise, click over to ABC for the second episode of V and see whether it still feels like FlashForward meets... Well, the old V, really (The official PR for the episode says "A seeker among the Visitors tracks Erica and Father Jack. Chad seeks redemption by investigating the aliens ahead of his next newscast while law enforcers press Erica for information concerning Dale M…").

Wednesday

Thank God for Mythbusters on the Discovery Channel at 9pm. Without their investigation into whether cars will automatically burst into flames after crashing (Surely we have empirical proof that the answer is no already?), I'd have to find some way to pretend that Glee (Fox at 9) was a scifi show just to have something to write about for today. I figured I could always claim that it was set in an alternate reality where people aren't creeped out by Will Schuester trying to rap.

Thursday
If it's Thursday, then it's time for all the shows to run up against each other again. Sure, you could pretend that the networks aren't showing anything and watch a double bill of Demolition Man and End of Days on AMC (Sly and Arnold! In two of their most underrated - for a reason - movies! It starts at 8pm, if you're tempted), after spending the day watching Syfy's Star Trek: Enterprise marathon (8am through 3pm, as ever), but come on. I know that you can't resist the big shows people are talking about.

On FlashForward (ABC, 8pm), Aaron discovers the truth about his daughter's death, Janis returns to work and Mark and Olivia's martial troubles bring everyone down yet again, man. Things are much more fun over in Mystic Falls where Vampire Diaries (the CW at 8pm) brings a mysterious new teacher, arguments over medallions and, according to the CW, "Damon finally reveals to Stefan the stunning reason he has returned to Mystic Falls." If I watched the show and/or cared, I couldn't wait!

9pm brings the real reason to wrestle over the remote; Fringe on Fox gives Olivia, Broyles and Peter a new reason to be suspicious of Massive Dynamic when the impossibly shady corporation turn out to be involved in a kidnapping case, but Supernatural (The CW) looks much more fun than even Walter Bishop could provide:

Super fan Becky uses Chuck's phone to trick Sam and Dean into attending a Supernatural fan convention, complete with fans dressed up as Sam and Dean. One of the activities is a live action role-playing game, but things quickly turn sour after a real ghost appears on the scene.

Seriously. How could anyone resist that?

Friday

Jericho fans! You have the Syfy marathon of the day (8am through 3pm, which I'm sure you already know by now) to keep you happy during the daylight hours; the rest of us will be watching the original The War Of The Worlds movie on AMC at 10:15am (And avoiding the following Star Trek: Nemesis at 12:15pm, a movie which can best be described by blogger Kevin Church here), instead.

Still, Friday evening starts the weekend off right with the double bill of Batman: The Brave and The Bold ("The Fate of Equinox!" Yes, the exclamation point is part of the title) and Star Wars: The Clone Wars (following last week's surprisingly brutal, "Are Jedi really advocating using flame throwers against living beings what the hell?" episode) on Cartoon Network, starting at 7:30pm (Clone Wars is at 8pm, if you have an aversion of Batman. And if you do, then I'm very, very sorry.)

If you're in the mood for MOR dramas teasing the supernatural, then CBS is the place to be tonight, with new episodes of both Ghost Whisperer (8pm, with Jennifer Love Hewitt "pulled into a murder mystery by a real estate power couple" - Yes, this is what people want to watch, apparently) and Medium (9pm, which at least includes a potentially amusing-for-the-wrong-reasons subplot about posting videos of someone on the internet and "getting into trouble") on offer.

The rest of us, we'll be considering Smallville on the CW at 8pm (It features the Wonder Twins! You know you want to), Stargate Universe on Syfy at 9pm (The crew of the Destiny get a message from their future selves from the past. Or something) and Sanctuary on the same channel at 10pm.

Saturday

If you're not looking forward to Syfy's Ice Twisters at 9pm ("A sci-fi novelist is summoned to help scientists after an experiment in weather manipulation goes awry and produces deadly tornadoes made of ice," apparently), then we'd suggest that AMC's double bill of trilogies is the best way to spend your day. Start with the Mad Max trilogy (Movies starting 1:30, 3:30 and 5:30pm) before a night of The Matrix trilogy (The three movies begin at 8pm, 11pm and 1am on Sunday, respectively). Otherwise, the only thing left is Discovery's Surviving 2012... which is about all the prophecies, and not, sadly, advice on making it through Roland Emmerich's latest.

Sunday

It's the best night of television this week! Who knew, right? Start things off right with Syfy's latest screening of Serenity at 6:30 before switching over midway through - Hopefully missing Alan Tudyk's least favorite scene ever in the process - to catch the premiere of AMC's brand new take on The Prisoner at 8pm. If Ian McKellan and Jim Caviezel can't bring Patrick McGoohan's classic paranoiafest back to life, I'm going to be very depressed.

Of course, the best way to finish the evening off is coming at midnight, with the latest episode of The Venture Bros on Cartoon Network. Can we all just admit that it's the smartest and funniest show on television already?

If you are a process junkie, then the boxset is made for you; along with a lovely booklet full of production sketches, each episode has an additional mini-documentary with interviews from the crew involved, as well as seven episodes with new material added for "Director's Cut" editions (Spoiler: Han doesn't shoot first in any of them). More to the point, just rewatching the series shows how the show has evolved as everyone learns what they can, and can't, get away with; I watched the first few episodes in the set after watching "Landing At Point Rain," the most recent episode of the second season, and the difference is amazing - and, for a second, somewhat damning to the first season in comparison ("Point Rain" featured not just some wonderfully choreographed battle sequences that offered a fluidity and grace that the earlier animation lacked, it was also surprisingly brutal in tone - The clones and Jedi used flamethrowers on their alien opponents and you saw them burning to death, which really leaves the earliest episodes of the show, uncertain about the tone just yet, looking anemic). But to concentrate on how far the show's come is to miss the point, and the fun, of the first season.

Clone Wars season one was full of trial and error, yes, but even when things didn't work, they're still worth watching - even moreso on DVD, when the bad taste of the Jar-Jar-centric "Bombad Jedi" is quickly washed away by the double bill of "Cloak of Darkness" and "Lair of Grievous," both of which move more towards the self-assured tone of the movies. The show's mini-arcs make more sense when viewed together, as well (And episodes like "Storm Over Ryloth," "Innocents of Ryloth" and "Liberty on Ryloth" work better than the feature that introduced the series in the first place). But as much as the writing shifts and grows in quality and confidence throughout the series - Just compare the Ryloth episodes to "Ambush" to see what I mean - so, in a much more subtle way, do the visuals.

Never less than impressive, even from the get-go (Just look at some of the textures used! Or the lighting! Man, it's good stuff), the animators nonetheless manage to tighten things all the way throughout the season by, ironically, loosening up: The "acting" by the characters - especially the facial movements - gets more natural as the show goes on, making it easier to empathize with the characters despite (because of) their impressive and intentional cartoony quality (Again, this is something that's all the more obvious looking at newer episodes like "Point Rain," where Anakin has some great subtle smirking going on, adding to his "Yeah, you're a hero now but you're going to end up Darth Vader because of that assholishness, buddy" thing).

But even outside of the "Watch the show improve" aspect that made the boxset for me - I couldn't help it, I'd seen the shows before - there's a lot to like about The Complete Season One; yes, some of the episodes (Ahem, "Bombad Jedi") are clunkers, but the good outweigh the bad, and there's something to like in all of them. The bonus features, as I've said before, are worth watching (Especially the "Jedi Temple" extras, which I think are BluRay only?), and the format makes the multi-episode arcs much stronger than they were when first broadcast, even without the addition of the extra footage.

In the end, then, there's something in The Complete Season One for almost everyone: Complete nerds like me get to geek out over the evolution of the show and peeks behind the scenes, casual fans who liked the series on television can enjoy the Director's Cut episodes and watching the arcs in one sitting, and newcomers... Well, they just get a pretty good cartoon that's, for the most part, more enjoyable than the prequel trilogy. Me, I'm already waiting for the Complete Season Two boxset to hear how they managed to get away with torching their enemies on Cartoon Network prime time.

Spock
Died: Sacrificing himself by bringing the warp engines back online at the end of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, leading to his dying from exposure to radiation.
Undied: His body was resurrected in Star Trek III: The Search For Spock thanks to the Deus Ex Machina powers of the Genesis Planet, and it turned out that his soul had lived on all along thanks to mind melding with Bones.
Cause of Undeath: Mind-meld and blatant plot ridiculousness in order to keep the fans happy. Admittedly, it was all set up in Star Trek II, but still.
Does It Count As Death?: Well, his soul was alive the entire time in Bones, but his body had enough time to go through a funeral and being shot off into space, so... 50/50? But not really, let's face it.

Ellen Tigh
Died: Poisoned by her husband after (in his eyes) betraying humanity in "Exodus, Part II" at the start of Battlestar Galactica's third season.
Undied: Instantly downloaded into a new body as part of the Fifth Cylon retcon, as revealed in the fourth season's "Sometimes A Great Notion."
Cause of Undeath: Traditional cylon download/rebirth.
Does It Count As Death?: Well, she was instantly reborn, which suggests that she was never actually dead as such, but the whole Fifth Cylon thing muddies the waters... especially when she was reborn as someone who wasn't exactly the Ellen she was when she died. We're going with "Kinda, but not really."

Boba Fett
Died: Falling into the Sarlacc's mouth in Return Of The Jedi.
Undied: Climbing back out of the Sarlacc's mouth in comic sequel Star Wars: Dark Empire.
Cause of Undeath: He was swallowed by apparently never chewed or digested and climbed his way out, apparently.
Does It Count As Death?: If you believe Dark Empire, not in the slightest. George Lucas apparently disagrees, however; it's said that he edited Fett's last appearance in the special edition of Return Of The Jedi to make it clearer that it's meant to be the end of the character.

John Sheridan
Died: Avoiding certain death by nuclear explosion at the end of Babylon 5's third season finale, "Z'ha'dum," by jumping into a pit so deep that it was impossible to survive. Oh, and then there was that nuclear explosion, which presumably would've destroyed the pit and everything within it anyway.
Undied: At the start of the show's fourth season, Sheridan was revealed to be in a limbo between life and death because of his love for Delenn. With the help of - and 20 years worth of lifeforce from - helpful fellow limbo-ite Lorien, he comes back to the land of the living.
Cause of Undeath: As Ewan McGregor in Trainspotting would say, choosing life. Who knew it was that simple?
Does It Count As Death?: Nope. Think of it as getting as far as death's foyer, before deciding to turn back because you'd changed your mind.

Tasha Yar
Died: Wanting out of her Starfleet contract early, Denise Crosby got her character killed at the hands of a gloopy, ooky oil monster in the first season episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation "Skin of Evil."
Undied: Thanks to time travel shenanigans, turns out never to have died in the alternate timeline of third season episode "Yesterday's Enterprise," and then manages to return to the past of the original timeline at the end of the episode in a way that still doesn't make a lot of sense.
Cause of Undeath: Alternate timelines having prevented her from dying in the first place.
Does It Count As Death?: Well, a Tasha Yar definitely died. In fact, as we learn upon the appearance of the second Yar's daughter Sela, the other Tasha was killed unsuccessfully trying to escape from the Romulans, so it looks as if any and all Tashas would end up dead one way or another.

Superman
Died: At the hands of the apparently unstoppable Doomsday in 1993's The Death of Superman storyline.
Undied: Midway through the follow-on The Return of Superman storyline, when it's been revealed that none of the four characters who've taken up the mantle are the real thing.
Cause of Undeath: He woke up. No, really; the audience is pretty much told that he'd never died in the first place, he'd just gone into superhibernation in order to heal from the fight.
Does It Count As Death?: Not at all, but it definitely counted as a moneyspinner for DC Comics, who went on to kill Green Arrow and Green Lantern within the next couple of years, as well as teasing deaths for the Flash and breaking Batman's back.

Bucky
Died: Trapped on a bomb that mentor and Nazi-fighting partner Captain America had managed to jump off of before it exploded, as explained way back in 1963's Avengers series.
Undied: In 2005's "Winter Soldier" storyline of Captain America, where he got reintroduced and prepped to become the new Captain America in 2007.
Cause of Undeath: Turns out that Bucky was, in fact, blown to bits by the exploding bomb... It's just that they were pretty large bits. Large enough to rebuild him into a brainwashed no-good commie assassin who gets put on ice between missions, until he meets Cap, goes rogue, remembers who he is, and then uses his mighty Russian technology for the good of American mankind.
Does It Count As Death?: What's brainwashed Russian assassin for no?

The Flash
Died: Which one? Barry Allen died in 1985's Crisis On Infinite Earths. Wally West disappeared and was, at various times, presumed dead/missing/no-one could make up their mind in 2004's Infinite Crisis, and Bart Allen kicked the bucket in 2007's The Flash: The Fastest Man Alive #13.
Undied: Wally came back in 2007's Justice League of America #10, Barry in 2008's Final Crisis #1 and Bart in 2009's Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds #4.
Cause of Undeath: Both Barry and Wally had, it turns out, never died. Barry had been swallowed into the Speed Force, which is the cosmic... thing... that gives all super-speed characters their powers in the DC Universe, while Wally's fate was ultimately (after a couple of failed attempts that were quickly contradicted) decided upon a variation of "He took his family on vacation to an alien planet and didn't tell anyone." Don't ask. Bart, meanwhile, did die, kind of... but his teenage self was trapped in a futuristic lightning rod and then magically released in the 31st century to fight Superboy Prime. Again, it's probably better if you didn't ask.
Does It Count As Death?: No question for either Barry or Wally (No), but Bart... I have no idea. I've read Legion of Three Worlds multiple times, and still don't understand the explanation that's given there; let's just never mention it again and pretend it didn't happen.

Jason Todd
Died: As the result of a real-life phone vote to see if Todd, the second Robin (as in Batman and), should be killed at the hands of the Joker. Seriously, 1988's comic industry, what the hell were you thinking?
Undied: 2004's Batman revealed that Todd was not only not dead, but had magically aged more than most other characters in the DC Universe in his off-panel absence.
Cause of Undeath: Superboy was punching the walls of reality, and things went a bit weird. You know how it is with these superheroes and their punching the walls of reality; history gets rewritten all over the place. Just be glad that Batman didn't end up as Batdinosaur. Although, now that we think about it, that'd be awesome.
Does It Count As Death?: Magically contradicting Schrodinger and his cat, Jason Todd both did and didn't die. His official history has it that he died, and then just came back to life thanks to the punching of reality, meaning that he was still alive. So, while it ultimately doesn't count as permanent death, there was a death in there somewhere.

Jean Grey
Died: In 1980's famous Uncanny X-Men #137, where she sacrifices herself for the good of the universe to stop herself from becoming overwhelmed by the godlike power she possessed that might lead her to eat a couple of planets if she got peckish.
Undied: It's revealed in 1986's Fantastic Four #286 that the Jean Grey who killed herself was never actually Jean Grey at all, but the Phoenix force, who's been cosmically imprinted with Jean's personality. Don't worry; the Phoenix force was already back by that point anyway.
Cause of Undeath: Jean hadn't died (at that point), and the resurrection of the Phoenix force was somewhat implied by the name - The official explanation was that the Phoenix force hadn't actually died either, just lain dormant until someone else (Jean's daughter from an alternate timeline. If you don't already know, don't ask) claimed it.
Does It Count As Death?: Before the retcon and ruined Chris Claremont's X-Men once and for all you bastards, it did. Now? No-one died until years later, when Jean really got the Phoenix power and then ended up dying anyway. Guess there's something unlucky about the name or something.

Both Fringe and FlashForward are seeing ratings in a worrying freefall right now; Meredith has already reported that Fringe was being considered a show in "trouble," but that was before the audience dropped a worrying 23% for this Thursday's episode (In its defense, many people may have been unaware that it was even on; a lot of schedules didn't list the episode, instead telling viewers that it was the seventh game of the World Series). Seeing a less dramatic drop, but still something that's started rumors of a lack of second season renewal, FlashForward slumped even further this week and, as TV By The Numbers showed, continued a speedy decline in the number of viewers each week towards the point of no return.

We already know that Thursday is a packed night of television, but is it so packed that it's going to kill shows we love (or, in the case of FlashForward, like enough to keep watching and hoping for the best)? Or will the success of the V premiere remind networks that Tuesday night is always an option?

[Alexis Rockman via {feuilleton}]

Disney World I
Disney World II
Capitol Hill
Church and White
East 82nd St.
Gateway Arch
Hollywood
Hollywood at Night
Hotelscape
Manifest Destiny
Mount Rushmore
Miami
Vie en Rose
Washington Square

Magical Realism
Air
What It's About: At its heart, Air is a love story between Blythe - a flight attendant who's afraid of flying - and Zayn, who is as much a mystery to himself as everyone else. But Air is much, much weirder, and more interesting, than that: For one thing, Blythe is a natural hyperpraxis pilot, which means that she can travel to places, times and ideas that don't, theoretically, exist... a skill she's honing with the help of Amelia Earhart, who by the way is still alive. For another, there's a war brewing between terrorists over control of the skies, and for a third, certain people may be very interested in that whole "hyperpraxis" thing. A series that's gentle, human, full of wonder and emotion, and at times just beautiful, Air is unlike most comics - and television shows and movies, for that matter - out there.
Where To Start: Two collections are available, Letters From Lost Countries and Flying Machine. Pick both up; the series is great, but the first collection (Letters) stops at a frustratingly bad point, and you need to read the second to fully appreciate what's going on.
Click here for a preview of Air.

Post-Invasion SF
Resurrection
What It's About: We've all seen stories about aliens invading Earth, but what happens after they leave? FlashForward producer and Green Lantern movie scriptwriter Marc Guggenheim's series starts with that idea and spins out a series that's part Y: The Last Man, part Lost and all-over fascinating. Why did the aliens invade? Where did they go? No-one knows yet, but considering they've left behind technology and even one of their own, you can sure that we'll probably find out somewhere down the line... but along the way, you can get sucked into the more down to earth stories of the humans left behind. Even if one of them is former president Bill Clinton, who was revealed to be more alive than everyone thought at the end of the most recent issue.
Where To Start: There's already a collection of the first black and white series out there, but we'd actually recommend waiting until the start of next year, when the 368 page Resurrection Vol 1: Deluxe Edition, featuring the complete first series and the first seven issues of the current series, hits the shelves.
Click here for a preview of Resurrection.

Urban Fantasy
Locke & Key
What It's About: Ignore the punniness of the premise - The Locke family move to the family estate of Keyhouse, wherein there are magic keys that can do various weird and wonderful things, which puts them right in the middle of some bad things that're about to happen - and instead, embrace and enjoy those weird and wonderful things that the keys can do: like open doors that turn people into ghosts or even open their own heads so that you can reach in and take out unpleasant memories. Mixing horror, fantasy, comedy and family drama and featuring moments that are genuinely unsettling, Locke & Key deserves all the praise it's gotten, and a lot more.
Where To Start: There're two collections out already; Welcome To Lovecraft and Head Games. Start at the beginning (Lovecraft), bearing in mind that Head Games is the better, and also the more freaky.
Click here for a preview of Locke & Key.

Nostalgia Done Right
Pluto: Urasawa x Tezuka
What It's About: A reimagining of Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy (with some nods to his other work thrown in), Naoki Urasawa's Pluto is inventive, dramatic and in almost every single way, a lesson in how to take reboot and update an old concept the right way. Instead of retreading the old status quo, the series centers around robot detective Gesicht, who's investigating the murder of various high profile robots around the world... Murders that may have been committed by another robot. Even if you don't get sucked in by the economy and subtlety of the writing, there's no way you could fail to admire Urasawa's amazing artwork.
Where To Start: Unsurprisingly, Vol. 1. The seventh volume of the series is due in January, but that's still too far away; when you finish the first volume, you'll be hooked and get through the other five in days.
(No preview available, due to licensing issues. Sorry.)

Crime/Romance/SF/Everything
King City
What It's About: I've written before about Brandon Graham's stunning future crime book, but now that it's being re-released in an easier-to-find serialization by Image Comics, I'll use the opportunity to gush again; the bastard child of an orgy that included Moebius, Vaughn Bode, Jamie Hewlett and Osamu Tezuka (and maybe a little Alex Toth, come to think of it), King City is the tale of one thief, his broken heart, his cat that can literally do anything if given the right drugs, werewolves with war trauma, stolen organs, sidekicks in wrestling masks and pretty much all that's good in the world, all wrapped in something that takes noir's cliches and gives them a makeover laced with enough absurdity and love that it all seems new again. The whole thing manages to be both laid back and electrifyingly kinetic, and your heart will break for multiple reasons while reading it. Really, really worth tracking down.
Where To Start: The serialized reissue is on #2, so picking up back issues from the start really shouldn't be a problem. The original Tokyopop release may offer more story in one sitting, but the Image re-release comes with bigger pages and brand new material to accompany the serialized reprint.
Click here for a preview of King City.

Surprisingly, the issue was raised with White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs earlier this week, as Mediaite's Tommy Christopher risked lizard attack by asking whether or not the President had a statement on the issue:

Tommy Christopher: Robert, I have one question and one clarification. First, the new TV series on ABC, "V," a lot of people are talking about how this show draws very strong –

Gibbs: I got to tell you - I'm going to start with this: I don't want to give anybody the impression I have time to watch anything other than what most of you all do each night. So I can't even tell you what that is or what it's about. If that makes me fairly un-cool, I tend to watch more "SpongeBob" than "V."

Tommy Christopher:There have been a lot of news stories about this –

Gibbs: Makes me a hit with one six-year-old, and that really is all that counts.

Tommy Christopher: You haven't seen the news stories about how this show compares your administration to the alien invaders? (Laughter.) Seriously, really, you haven't heard about it?

Q: He couldn't admit it if he had. (Laughter.)

Gibbs: Because there's a chip in the back of my head that requires me - (laughter) - I don't mean to - I honestly - I got to tell you, I spend - I watch a little football on Saturday, a little football on Sunday, and a lot of news every other time.

Q: Get a life. (Laughter.)

Q: (Inaudible).

Gibbs: Pardon me?

Tommy Christopher: Fourteen million people watch it, and the show –

Gibbs: And clearly, me not being one of them. Again, I –

[Cross-talk.] (Laughter.)

Gibbs: Hold on. I'm not entirely sure who I'd check on since I don't watch the show.

Tommy Christopher: Well, check with the President, see if he has a reaction –

Gibbs: I will assume that the President watches –

Tommy Christopher:– comparing him to a space alien.

Gibbs: What's the - which would probably, like, be one of the least worst things he's been called today.

The exchange ended with Gibbs being promised a tape of the show to review from ABC's Jake Tapper, which, if nothing else, should give ABC something new to promote the show with next week: "Officially screened at the White House at request of the President!"

Here's hoping that his often-discussed love for sci-fi will get him through the derivative hour without being too distracted by a cast that includes Firefly, Dollhouse, Lost, The 4400 and Smallville refugees.

White House Is Thus Far Unaware Of Comparisons To ABC's Hit Show ‘V' [Mediaite]

The news broke in The Wall Street Journal, of all places, in a story about toy lines being co-opted by movie studios:

J.J. Abrams, who created the TV show "Lost" and directed this summer's "Star Trek" film, is in discussions to produce a movie about Japanese toy line Micronauts, which Hasbro just acquired.

With Abrams producing, that opens the door for some Kurtzman/Orci involvement, if they could be convinced to jump from the Transformers franchise into another toy universe. We're really keeping our fingers crossed for comic artist and Micronaut lover Paul Pope getting involved on the design side, though.

The Cry Goes Out in Hollywood: 'Get Me Mr. Potato Head's Agent!' [Wall Street Journal]

Based on 70s short story by Richard Matheson, who also wrote I Am Legend, the movie's central premise is simple. A strangely-disfigured man named Arlington offers a strange proposition to a young family. If they press the button on a box he leaves with them, somebody they don't know will die and they will receive $1 million in cash. School teacher Norma and her NASA engineer husband Arthur aren't sure what to do when the mysterious Arlington leaves them to make their decision. Is the box a hoax? If not, is it bad to kill somebody they don't know if it means they'll have enough money to continue their comfortable, middle-class existence?

With Arthur's dreams of becoming an astronaut dashed (he failed the psychological test), and Norma unable to continue getting a discount for their son at the fancy private school where she teaches, money has recently become a source of anxiety for the couple. So Norma decides to press the button, though Arthur is immediately upset that she does it.

Once this fundamental plot point fades into the narrative background, cult auteur Kelly is free to do what he does best: Get weird. He slowly builds a portrait of suburban life haunted by a mystical military-industrial complex ruled by aliens and spies. Another NASA employee's wife is brutally murdered while their daughter cowers upstairs, and Arthur suspects it's because of Norma's button pushing. Meanwhile, people with nosebleeds are spying on the couple, as well as speaking in portentious tones about "going into the light."

Arlington continues to keep them under surveillance, and they discover that he's actually with the NSA. He built the box after being struck by lightning and mysteriously brought back from the dead. And it all has something to do with the Mars probe Voyager that Arthur helped design.

The movie is packed with the memorable, strange imagery that is Kelly's trademark. Boxes made of water hover in the air, a perfect recreation of a low-tech 1970s library becomes a haunting maze, and the NASA sets are lovingly rendered, complete with retro computers and lens flare. And the eponymous box itself is designed like some kind of Cold War objet d'art. Balanced atop a 70s-style wood panel box is a big red button that looks like it could launch nukes.

Kelly manages to weave together mystical moral issues with government conspiracies and godlike alien intelligences, but the result is uneven. It's hard to sympathize with a comfortably middle-class couple who are willing to kill somebody just so they can continue to live in a giant house and send their son to private school. And the moral universe Kelly has created in The Box is woefully black-and-white: Either you push the button and you're bad, or you don't push it and you're good. I kept waiting for Donnie Darko to step out from behind a curtain and yell at everybody for trying to reduce all human problems to the bland binary of "fear" vs. "love."

We also discover that the button is always pushed by wives, which suggests that women are the culprits holding humanity back from achieving the level of moral goodness that the aliens require in order to spare us from annihilation.

Despite these problems, there were flashes of goofy brilliance in The Box. Especially in the woefully short segments where we see Arlington's mysterious laboratory, located in a wind tunnel that the NSA has requisitioned from NASA, we get a glimpse of a truly great science fiction story. Arlington and his "employees" are a more deeply strange and stylized version of characters from Fringe, and that's a good thing. There's an especially great moment when one of Arlington's puppets returns to the alien spy installation at a tiny freeway motel, which is packed with other alien-controlled people and partly papered over with tinfoil. There's even a cheesy motel pool that's been improbably converted into an alien portal.

Kelly is at his best when he's making mind-melting science fiction with allegorical underpinnings, but unfortunately The Box is more like a morality play with a few science fiction characters hanging around in the background. Making matters worse is that the moral here seems like easy, unimaginative misanthropy. Unlike Kelly's previous films, which bristle with complicated hopefulness in the face of horror, The Box paints a simplistically dark picture of humanity. Despite the best of intentions, women keep pressing that button again and again - putting their families in danger, and dooming Earth to a harsh judgment from the godlike aliens.

Why are such complicated characters doomed to be inserted into narrative boxes that only clumsily contain them? Unfortunately, The Box doesn't answer that question.

Make It Impossible

The first rule to come from the director was, make it impossible....

The rules are — what I always say but people forget — the pictures have to be super impossible. I'm only interested in doing the impossible image. That's really hard to explain. But one of the first things I saw in my mind, was the ground opening up. And I realized what that means, when the bottom falls out under your feet.

So far that sounds exactly right as just about every single scientist and critc has said that the general ideas behind these disaster movies are, literally, impossible. But come on — who doesn't want to see people running from frost?

Stick To What You Know: You Can Always Blow Up The White House Again

[If you are going to destroy something] It has to be very original, otherwise you don't do it. I remember at one point [during 2012 production] we were discussing what will happen with the White House [in 2012]. I said, "What should happen? I cannot destroy the White House again." And Harald [Kloser, screenwriter] said, "Well you have to, if you don't destroy it people will have the same question. Just come up with something new." ... I thought I could have this object crashing into the White House, because we knew that in one of the first waves we'd have to put objects in it so you could see how big it was and thought maybe tankers or war ships. Then we came up with image of [the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy crashing into the White House, which is like] JFK returns to the White House. I was reading about the Kennedy family a lot at the time and thought that was sort of ironic and interesting in a way.

You gotta respect a man who made a career of blowing up the White House, so much that if he doesn't do it we wonder why not? But honestly, we're running out of cities for this guy to destroy, and yet he still manages to crush them differently each time. One has to wonder if he'll be able to come up with more after this last disaster.

The More Characters The Better

Multi characters help you a lot because you can constantly keep the story moving. And people from all walks of life. Every audience member has different people they like in the movie and will follow them. These movies are so expensive that they have to work for pretty much everybody. For young people, for men and women. old people probably like Danny Glover, and Harry and Tony, the Jazz musicians. Kids get wrapped up in our two kids. Create characters so everyone in the audience has an identification figure.

I guess that means my character in 2012 is Woody Harrelson the conspiracy blogger, cause I like cartoons and pickles too. Look at me, I'm bonding with the story! Still I'd like to meet the people that relate to beautiful Vivca Fox, the heart-of-gold stripper who loves dolphins and has a Fighter Pilot for a boyfriend.

Superheroes Aren't Half As Cool As Earthquakes, Tornadoes And Waves

Who wants character-driven movies about confused anti-heroes in a near futuristic world fighting Oscar-winning villains? Not me. Give me Will Smith punching aliens and Bill Pullman's president speech any day.

Look at it like this. I'm a person who doesn't like superhero movies, just personally. I like some of them but I cannot really relate to a superhero. I have trouble with fantasy stories. And famous books — I write my own stuff, a famous book is really not an option for me. There's very little left in big movie genres. It's science fiction or it's disaster movies. And what is the most successful movie of all time? Titanic. And the best part of a disaster movie is: No sequel.

Cut Other Would-Be Disaster Porn Directors Off At The Knees

You have to be a tyrant about getting your end of the world movies made. This is why Emmerich is the King of the B grade blow em up movies, because he'll make it before you. Who wants to wait until 2012 to make 2012? Not this guy.

"First when we had the idea, I said, I'm not going to do it. I don't want to repeat myself. Then we heard inklings that other people were working on something like this, also with the title 2012. Then Harald [the screenwriter] said, "Someone else is going to do it. Don't you want to be the person to do it? Look at your movies: you are perfect for this. Make it your crowning achievement."

Be G-Rated Political *Winky Wink, Nudge Nudge*

If you've seen the five-minute clip from 2012, you know there is a Arnold-esque Governor in the film reassuring the people of California that everything is a-okay, after a mess of earthquakes rocked the town, to which John Cusack yells he's "just an actor, he's reading a script." Suddenly fake Arnold gets creamed with a few lights. Subtle, no? We asked the director if this was on purpose as in The Day After Tomorrow, when actor Kenneth Welsh was cast to be a Cheney look-alike. If you remember Welsh was a bit of a dick about the whole, "we're all gonna die," situation. Which Emmerich later confirmed was a dig at the Bush administration's environmental policies. Emmerich shrugged off our political questions:

"We kind of felt that not every politician should be on the ark. I don't know where these ideas come from. We have terrible fun with what we do."

Which I'm translating as: We lob softball politics at the audience, just so everyone feels good about themselves, for being in on the obvious political joke. I wonder what Emmerich would say his reasoning behind casting Glover as the president before we knew the results of this election. Or was it simply just another near-future "Neato, a black president!" moment?

For Every Wrinkled-Shirted Scientist, You Need At Least One Crazy Prophet

Dennis Quaid, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Jeffrey Goldblum may have messy hair, messy clothes, big ideas, and know all the facts. But they pale in comparison to their crazy counterparts: the homeless guy with the dog, spouting words of humanity, Woody Harrelson's crazy tree-hugger and the drunken pilot from Independence Day who knew there were aliens all along.

[Woody] came out of the fact that there are a lot of crazy people on the internet that believe a lot of crazy things about 2012, so we thought that we have to have a character like that. And then on the other hand we have to explain what the theories are like Earth Crust Displacement. How do you describe them in scientific terms. And we thought, we can have Woody tell the audience how this all works, with a little you tube.

But Make The Destruction Glamorously Terrible

Say what you will about the exceedingly cheesy work of Roland — you can't deny, when he slaughters millions of tiny CG specks that are supposed to be people, he does it with panache and style. It may be ridiculous, but it's beautiful. Which is why, no matter how cliche or repetitive these movies get, it will make millions opening week, because people want to see the great big wave number two come careening into New York City yet again, but on a big fat splodey screen. When it comes to disaster porn, we're all addicts.

In Men Who Stare At Goats, Ewan McGregor plays Bob Wilton a reporter who's trying to escape from his boring life, so when he gets wind of a secret military program from the 1980s to create "Jedi" soldiers, he follows the story. At first, you think that he's just a very off-beat embedded journalist, following the semi-retired Jedi Lyn Cassady (George Clooney) around, but it becomes clear that Wilton is getting more out of this than just a story: He's becoming Cassady's Padawan and learning to become a Jedi himself.

McGregor, of course, played Obi-Wan Kenobi in the three Star Wars prequels, and the film winks at this fact a few times, when Clooney says McGregor knows nothing about being a Jedi. But actually, in many ways, this is the Star Wars movie I wish McGregor had starred in before — it's about learning the ways of the Jedi, and seeing the contradictions inherent in the phrase "warrior-monk."

In Goats, which is based very loosely on the real-life story of the New Earth Army, we discover that the U.S. Army developed a secret program, following the humiliation of Vietnam, to fight a new way. And this involved developing psychic powers, but also letting in some of the counterculture's spirit of anarchy and playfulness. Drugs, long hair and crazy paintings. Unfortunately, one of the leading Jedi in this organization was secretly aligned with the Dark Side (this is actually explictly said at least once) and he corrupts the organization, tarnishing the other leading Jedis and turning one of them into his henchman of evil. So in the end, McGregor is the movie's Luke Skywalker, learning the Jedi legacy and ultimately helping to restore the light side.

Along the way, Clooney doesn't just teach McGregor how to burst clouds with his mind: he gives McGregor a grounding in the spiritual discipline behind the Jedi way, with a mixture of battiness and sageness that's actually kind of intoxicating.

All of this is played with tongue pretty firmly in cheek, but at the same time, it's made pretty explicit. And the movie is as charming as McGregor, Bridges and Clooney can make it. Bridges, especially, brightens up the screen every time he turns up as Bill Django, the founder of the Jedi organization.

There's a parable, here, of the ways in which America itself has turned away from opportunities to become more peace-loving, more creative, and less exploitative of our natural resources and of each other. And the failure of the "Jedi" program to meld the hippie "peace and love" ethos with the military's buzz-cut culture doesn't just expose the fact that you can't be a soldier and a monk (in our military, anyway.) The culture clash also aims to say something about America, and the ways in which we've betrayed the promise of the 1970s peace movement.

Here's a personal share: I have an alarmingly low tolerance for Baby Boomer nostalgia and, after several years in the Haight Ashbury, my hippie kitsch allergy is at a permanent level of anaphylactic shock. And yet, there is something beautiful and hilarious about the scenes where Bridges transforms his army unit into a group of shaggy-haired, dancing oddballs. And something heartbreaking about seeing the Dark Side destroying the Jedis. Mostly, this is because Jeff Bridges and George Clooney are so much fun to watch, you don't care.

And like I said, Star Wars sits at the center of the movie's themes. At one point, Clooney says that the Jedi program flourished in the 1980s because Ronald Reagan was such a big Star Wars fan. Reagan's Star Wars, of course, was a missile defense program that many scientists claimed was impractical, but Reagan never let go of the idea. Star Wars is so many different things to different people: a glorious war story, a window into one man's personal growth, a parable of controlling your hatred and choosing peace... part of why the original trilogy was so powerful was that it spoke to so many people in so many different ways.

And in a way, Men Who Stare At Goats is as much about the legacy of Star Wars as is it as about the legacy of woo-woo New Age hippie culture. Our culture was so heavily shaped by Star Wars, it opened up different ways of thinking about the way of the warrior, as well as offering some of the most exciting battle scenes ever committed to film. How you view Star Wars says a lot about your outlook on the universe in general.

Goats is often hilarious and sometimes chilling, but it's not a perfect movie. In particular, the pacing is a bit lead-footed at times, and the story loses some of its impact as a result. The movie's mix of absurdity and scary war scenes definitely won't work for everybody — I liked this film quite a bit, but Entertainment Weekly gave it an F. But all in all, I found it an entertaining, thought-provoking ride — of all the oddball films that have come out lately (including The Box and Fourth Kind) I'd say Goats is the most fun, and the most entertaining. Mostly, it's Jeff Bridges and George Clooney obviously having a blast playing another pair of larger-than-life characters, and that's a goat ride I'm always willing to take.

I suppose if Fringe has to do a relatively mythology-free episode, at least it harnesses a little B-movie magic. Last night's episode has shades of The Incredible Melting Man, in which an astronaut returns from space and becomes a monster who needs to consume human flesh to survive. But Fringe took a gory concept and made it creepier with its radiation-sucking cosmonaut turning people to ash. That opening scene was a great little nugget of horror; even though we expect it, it's chilling when the woman comes home and her excitement melts into trepidation, then frightened disbelief as her husband crumbles to ash. When Fringe does monster of the week, it does a solid job.

Scream Queens: I get that this was supposed to evoke classic horror movies, but does it only have to be the women screaming? Men are perfectly capable of emitting a nice, high-pitched wail.

Russian Fringe Science: It makes sense that the Russians would have fringe science (and that it might be even more developed than American fringe science). I hope this isn't just a throwaway mention, and that this somehow comes into play in the coming interdimensional war. And it's interesting that Walter still uses the term "pinko." Is it just because of his 17-year timeout, or does this indicate something about Walter's politics.

Whither Nina Sharp? It's also interesting that, in a Broyles-centric episode, we see neither hide nor cybernetic arm hair of Nina Sharp. Little has been made of Broyles' relationship with Sharp since it was revealed in the season premiere, and now that Broyles is returning to the case that ruined his marriage, he doesn't ask Sharp to use Massive Dynamics' resources. Perhaps he's trying to maintain some illusion that Olivia is the only one in contact with Massive Dynamics', or maybe he only turns to Nina Sharp when he knows she can help with the problem at hand.

Man in Black: As the episode went on, it began to feel less like a standalone episode, and more like we're lining up potential players for the battle ahead. The CIA is less than thrilled that the Fringe Division is poking its nose into the case of the missing cosmonaut. Does the CIA have its own Fringe Science Division? Although, at the end of the episode, a man from the CIA informs Broyles that the cosmonaut was still alive and gave a pointed look at the night sky. I wonder how often the CIA deals with problems by shooting them into space.

Astrid Action: This was a Broyles-heavy episode, so most of our regular cast took a back seat to Lance Reddick. Still, when are we going to see Astrid in the field already?

Walter Moment of the Week: Walter still got to be Walter despite the focus on Broyles. He maligned Russians, played with Tinker Toys, and shared yet another embarrassing memory from Peter's childhood (involving doodles of genitalia no less). But the most truly Walter moment was when we fully realized that Walter thinks of licorice the way some people think of tea cookies and canapes.

Baccarin plays Anna, the leader of the alien Visitors (or Vs) who come to Earth professing peace and friendship and promising healthcare and advanced technology. And of course, it's all too good to be true. Some pundits have been saying her character is meant to be Barack Obama, and Baccarin seemed to be aware of the comparisons. So we asked her if she thinks she's playing our new president, and she says:

I don't think we're saying Anna is President Obama. But she is the leader of her people, and she is coming down to Earth and offering healthcare, and offering cures for diseases, and things that sort of clean out and give people hope, and there are definite parallels to be drawn and our intentions are to create a show that people relate to. And I think this is something that's been on people's minds, even before Obama... finding hope again, and healthcare, and finding a leader, and someone who can save us from the hole we've gotten ourselves into.

Don't expect Baccarin to play to the cheap seats. One thing Baccarin stressed over and over again, in our interview, is that she's going for a subtle portrayal of Anna, and she never plans to become as out-and-out sinister as Diana, the evil alien leader in the original miniseries.

"We're working with Anna being a little more subtle than in the original," says Baccarin. She wants Anna to be "creepy" and "scary" but also have qualities that the audience can relate to. That said, in the next few episodes, we'll get to see Anna "show her true colors a little more."

Baccarin says her goal is to make the audience feel drawn to Anna, even though they know they shouldn't be:

It's really true of all the characters on the show: We walk a fine line. It's way more interesting to question why they feel they want to follow this character. There should be qualities that [the audience] can identify with, that we see them in ourselves. People identify [with Anna] and feel compelled by her, and feel like they want to follow her... and can't understand why they feel drawn to her. [The audience should be saying,] "I don't know, this isn't right that I'm going for it."

This was something the producers had worked out early on, she adds:

We had discussed early on, when I auditioned, [that] she couldn't be robotic or alien. She had to be nurturing and human, to be allowed into people's lives, so that people would trust her... We created this character who's very calm and controlled and nurturing. You don't see her losing her cool, and you don't see what's behind her motivations. It's like having your neighbor turn out not to be who you thought they were.

This subtle approach means that you have to watch Baccarin carefully to catch the little cues she drops in. The way she flutters her eyelashes. The way she lifts one eyebrow, or looks straight at someone, or looks away. Says Baccarin, "Obviously, Anna lives in a very constrained space, in that she is very precise, but there is a lot of freedom of subtlety and nuances."

I asked Baccarin how she felt about playing a villain after playing the more sympathetic Inara on Firefly, and she responded: "It really is fun. I'm not going to call her a villain. I'm going to say that you said that." (She really is good at the slippery politician thing.)

From Anna's perspective, "she is is being the best leader she can be. And if it's at the expense of a couple of humans, so be it."

Baccarin admits she gets asked whether she'll be eating a live hamster — like, pretty much all the time. She says:

We haven't done it in these [first] four episodes, and I'm bracing myself. And so many people ask about it, I think it's imminent. I think we are going to pay homage to those moments, but not maybe do them the same way — so hopefully I won't have to put a hamster down my throat.

Finally, I asked Baccarin how, as an immigrant from Brazil, she feels about taking part in a show that promotes xenophobia and suspicion of visitors. She says you shouldn't read too much into V:

I think we should all be suspicious of aliens. We're not saying be suspicious of people from other cultures, I think we're saying be suspicious of people from outer space. So we're very safe there. There's a lot of ethnic diversity in our world now, and we're not commenting on that all. It's literally about people coming from another world.

V airs on Tuesday nights for the next three weeks, and then goes away until March due to some kind of sporting event.

Our sister site Jalopnik has a stellar collection of movie cars — both official and replicas. These are mostly fan-made, drivable replicas of cars and bikes from science fiction.

Batmobiles

Some of the more ambitious projects are the Batmobiles. You can actually purchase kits to convert various car models into an Adam West-era Batmobile. But some fans prefer to make their Batmobiles the hard way.

It took Leif Garvin of Stockholm 20,000 hours and $1 million to convert a 1973 Lincoln Continental into the Tim Burton Batmobile. It may not be quite as hi-tech as Batman's car, but it does feature a voice recognition system and rear cameras. [via Toxel]

Bob Dullam attracted massive amounts of attention when he showed off his homemade Tumbler from Batman Begins. Dullam made the entire vehicle from scratch, and even made his own Batsuit and props to go with it. [via Superhero Hype]

And frequent builder Grant Hodgson made a Tumbler of his own. [via Jalopnik]

Bob Causey helped Dullam with his Tumbler and decided to create a Batmobile of his own. Causey took on the Batman Forever version, complete with a remote controlled top. [via /Film]

Kaneda's Bike

There are plenty of models of the iconic motorcycle from Akira, but many of those are non-working copies. Neo-Fukuoka, not a fan group but a professional garage, created multiple, working copies of Kaneda's bike, some offered for sale. [via Riding Sun]

But another fan, Matus, is also creating a replica of the bike from scratch, although he hasn't yet progressed to the exterior.

Mad Max Vehichles

Mad Max vehicles are a perennial favorite among vehicle modifiers. There are impressive lists of fan-made Interceptors at Last Interceptor and Mad Max Movies. But one fan stands out above them all. Adrian Bennett didn't just transform a Ford Falcon Coupe into the famous vehicle, he moved himself, his car, and his entire family from England to a tiny Australian town so he could live out his Mad Max fantasies. [via SCI FI Wire]

Other Mad Max vehicles have gotten the fan treatment as well, such as this Yellow Interceptor made by Grant Hodgson (who also did one of the Batman Tumblers):

And Goose's bike by Mike Acebo:

KITT

Knight Rider's KITT is another favorite, and again there are kits you can purchase to give your car KITT's Cylon eye. Of course, the best KITT mods don't just change the outside of the car, but are also incredibly detailed on the inside, such as this converted 1984 Firebird, which speaks in KITT's voice [via Jalopnik:

And this 1992 Firebird:

Frankenstein's Car

The Gator Car from the original Death Race 2000 would have been more fun, but some Russian fans of the Death Race remake took an impressive crack at Frankenstein's car, starting with a Chevy Camaro. [English Russia]

The DeLorean Time Machine

A DeLorean is already a DeLorean with those retrofuturistic gull-wing doors. But add a flux capacitor, a temporal display on the dashboard, and a liberal sprinkling of light-up buttons, and you've got yourself Doc Brown's time machine. [Auto Blog]

Ecto-1

George Barris, who famously designed the original Batmobile among other TV cars, famously made a replica of Ghostbusters' classic car, one that is perpetually for sale. But others have taken on the Ecto-1 challenge as well. Ghostbusters fanatic Joe Kerezman created an Ecto-1 of his very own.

And a fan calling himself "Venkman21" modified his from a Cadillac ambulance.

Luke Skywalker's Landspeeder

They may not hover, but fans can always pretend in their homespun landspeeders. [all via Interbent]

This puppy was made from a 1988 Ford Escort and is actually a licensed, street-legal vehicle.

This pre-distressed model, created by Daniel Deutsch, runs on batteries and can climb to 25 MPH — impressive, though not exactly putting the "speed" in "landspeeder."

Why the teeth and the clown's head on a pole? It's an art car from Burning Man.

And this last one — which is a bit heavier on the wheels — comes from Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and annual Star Wars Day.

In Men Who Stare At Goats, in theaters today, Bridges plays Bill Django, a Vietnam veteran who founds a group of "psychic soldiers," who are warrior-monks steeped in the counterculture. And the film follows him from the 1970s to the present day. Meanwhile, George Clooney is Lyn Cassady, the best of Django's psychic soldiers, who takes a young reporter, played by Ewan McGregor, under his wing.

Both Bridges and Clooney manage to play their characters in the 1970s (in Bridges' case) and the 1980s (for both actors), as well as the present day. It gives you hope that Bridges really will be able to pull off his role as two different Flynns, an aged version and an ageless copy, in Tron Legacy.

So how did they manage to make Bridges and Clooney appear to span a few decades in the movie's flashbacks and present-day sequences? Heslov explains it was a tough decision:

We spent a lot of energy on that, even when I was just starting casting and George [Clooney] and I were talking about him doing the role, I was [wondering], "Do I have a younger guy play George in the past, and then George plays himself in the present? Or do I have George do it all?" And the more I thought about it, the more I hated the idea [of another, younger actor stepping in.] It's always hard to jump back and forth in time. I just felt like, if I had another actor playing George, the audience would be questioning, "Does he look enough like George?"

So once they had decided to use the same actors throughout, "it was just a question of how to back it up," and where to place the actors' current ages in the narrative. And how to use wigs and mustaches, among other things, to make the actors look younger in their flashback sequences.

For the 1970s sequences, they pulled Jeff Bridges' face back, to tighten the skin. "They use this kind of tape," explains Heslov. "They basically pull back under the hairline, and they tape it and pull back a little more, and then they use strings." The make-up people "use all sorts of gadgets" to get rid of Bridges' wrinkles, which sounds a bit painful. "It was fun, but it was time-consuming." Luckily, Bridges is "kind of a perfectionist," who "loves all that character-detail stuff." some actors don't want to be bothered, but Bridges will obsess over every aspect of his characters, including wardrobe, hair and makeup.

Also, for scenes set in the past, Heslov used as much soft light as possible, and in the present, "it was all about as much harsh light as we could use."

Escape From The Valley Of Elah

The majority of Goats' present-day sequences take place in Iraq, where Ewan McGregor's character travels to try and cover the war. So I asked Heslov if he was worried that his film would be lumped together with Iraq movies like Valley Of Elah and Stop Loss, which have bombed at the box office.

But Heslov says that he doesn't think of Goats as an Iraq war movie. "It has very little to do with Iraq, except that that's the backdrop of where the story takes place." The movie does touch on modern-day issues like torture and the military's habit of hiring huge contractors like Halliburton to take care of basic security and other functions, but "it was never my intention to make an Iraq war movie."

Counterculture meets military culture

One of the most striking images in Goats is the way Jeff Bridges' character brings a hot-tubbing, Zen, druggy counterculture influence to bear on the 1980s military. The merging of two opposite cultures in the "warrior monk" program is so loopy and weird, it feels like an alternate history. We asked Heslov if he thought the counterculture and military culture ever could really coexist, or learn from each other like that.

Heslov said he really does believe that the military is always exploring alternative ways of fighting wars. And he definitely does believe that in the wake of its experience in Vietnam and the 1960s and 1970s in general, the military was "beaten down by that experience, and they were searching for ways to change it up." But at the end of the day, Heslov thinks it would probably never have worked out, even if the individuals involved had behaved differently. Plus, if the military really learned to win without killing people, then it wouldn't really be war any more.

A debt to Dr. Strangelove.

Heslov says the weird blend of comedy and horror in his movie owes a lot to influences like Dr. Strangelove, M.A.S.H. and Catch-22. Certain directors, like Altman and Kubrick, have been very influential to him, and he did think about their works as he was creating this film.

Heslov says he tried to keep Goats from falling too far into horror or comedy, by keeping it as grounded as possible. Even at the most absurd points of the story, "I tried to keep it as real as possible, so the absurdness of the actual" situation would come through. Things like George Clooney trying to burst clouds with his mind, or people trying to run through walls, were played straight instead of playing up their silliness. "I hope that by maintaining that real tone, you could slide back and forth" between the absurd and the real.

We talked to Cusack yesterday as part of 2012 interviews:

With comic book films being so huge right now in Hollywood and big-name actors like Robert Downey Jr. starring in films such as Iron Man, would you ever consider doing a comic book adaptation or a superhero film?

I don't know, but yeah, for sure. I think the adult comics are some of the best film ideas out there.

Are there any comics in particular out there that you'd like to make?

Not one that I particularly know that I would like to do, but whenever I've come across one, I've really liked them.

Are there any [comic book movies] you've seen floating around in Hollywood that you'd like to see made?

Yeah, I can, there was one or two that I heard of that sounded really cool. One of them was about, I think... it's a vampire and a killer, and they're on the road, and it's this really strange story. I thought that sounded pretty cool. Also some of the obscure ones, I don't know if there are any more superheroes left.

That sounds a little bit like Preacher?

I think it might have been Preacher.

You should get involved with that!

I'm trying to. I heard about that one, I like that.

Who would you want to play?

I'd say either the vampire or the priest. One of those two guys.

So just the two best characters in the comic?

Why not?

So I'm not 100% sure if Preacher is the script that Cusack saw, but the name definitely struck a chord with Cusack. I can't even imagine Cusack as an murderous Cassidy, but he could make a pretty bad ass Jesse or even Arseface's daddy. John August's screenplay may not even be finished yet, and it's possible Cusack was merely talking about it as an idea he'd heard floating around Hollywood.

Last we heard about the adaptation of Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon's comic series, Sam Mendes was possibly going to direct and the script was half finished in May. But at least Mendes said he was trying to translate it just right so there might be a second or a third.