Deep hurting

So my library has The Loch by noted hack Steve Alten (his last two novels, I recall, featured sea monsters eating people on behalf of Osama bin Laden and a robot submarine which gains sentience after being struck by lightning and then nukes Iraq, to the approval of the hero (GUNNAR WOLFE!)). On the cover is this blurb: "...the best work of fiction since King Kong and The Lost World!" (suck it, Casablanca!) - Loren Coleman, world's leading cryptozoologist (isn't that like being the world's best warlock?).

ETA: Phonetic accents! Phonetic accents everywhere!

Just... superhero movies

I should probably have posted this a while ago, but here's a look at the costumes for the abandoned J.J. Abrams version of Superman Returns. And although the project itself was literally so much of a clusterfuck that internet reaction to a script review killed it (in a rare moment of sanity for all concerned), I gotta say, the costume ideas point to a reasonable update of Supes' costume. At the very least, better than "let's make his cape blood red!" Although I don't know what's with the insistence on giving Superman a... what is that, a bellybutton ring that raped a Texas belt buckle? It's like "we need to distract attention from his crotch, but we can't give him a belt, aliens don't wear belts!"

Speaking of clusterfucks, sometimes I really don't get film projects. Like, I get the reasoning behind a Spider-Man reboot... you've spent hundreds of millions of dollars making good movies, so now it's possible to spend twelve bucks on a movie, call it Spider-Man, and people will spend so long waiting for Tobey Maguire to show up that they won't be able to get a refund on their ticket.

But then the studio does stuff like create a shitty version of the costume and, when people complain, release a picture of the costume with the shitty aspects minimalized. I can't help but think it would be smarter to just change the costume. Or design a good one in the first place. Certainly, it's going to be easier than keeping the clothes that the hero wears whenever he does something cool in the shadows for an entire advertising campaign.

Or if you're doing a reboot. Wouldn't the obvious thinking be to go "we have a fresh new take on the story that you're going to love, meow meow meow Batman Begins", or at least to skip right over the origin and get straight to the fighting and relationship angst people pay to see? I just don't see the point of a reboot where things things are exactly like the old series? I mean, obviously they're making a Spider-Man movie for the cha-ching, but can we at least pretend there's a valid creative process behind any of the decision-making? If not, why not just let Raimi do Spider-Man 4, spend a couple hundred million dollars, make hundreds of millions more dollars, and not kill the goose that laid the golden egg?

Hey thrace_

Here is a picture of Gina Carono in a business suit. Relevant to your interests?