This is a man of taste

Not to be posting so soon again about Mark, but he’s really on the hype-train after the failure of his Netflix projects and the vanishing sales of his recent uninspired comics, and he wants you to know he can say the n-word again, which must be a huge relief to him: www.thetimes.com/uk/scotland/...

As a 20 year resident of LA I am once again embarrassed for my city. This is some bush-league “rioting.” The news is showing a live feed of people slowly walking with a crawl saying “objects thrown onto police cars.” Absolutely pathetic. Philly outdoes this with an average Eagles win. Do better, LA!

Mark Millar spent the last few years beating the drum that publishers need to support brick and mortar comic stores and cheekily implying that maybe he’d do a big event book for one of the Big Two in order to help rejuvenate the sales market and create a bonanza for stores to benefit from…

RIP to Peter David, the greatest (and certainly among the last) of a certain generation of comic book journeymen who wrote absolutely everything. TV episodes. Novelizations. Games. Also maybe the first writer to be significant pundit in the industry, a before-its-time trend. Relentless innovator

We are at the vet and some idiot in the waiting room has Yakety Sax as his ringtone and he is getting a LOT of calls.

If you see this post a #vampire and pass it on

So who’s going to jump in a boat to the McDonald Islands and inspire a Penguin Juneteenth by delivering the news that, unbeknownst to them, they’ve won a trade war against the most powerful economy in the world?

Happy 20th anniversary to Frank and Robert Rodriguez’s SIN CITY, released on this day in 2005. Not a… *good* movie in the commonly understood sense of that word. But such a pure expression of fuck-you renegade filmmaking, from concept to execution, that you can’t not respect it.

What an unbelievable piece of shit this guy is. “Whoops I meant to cure cancer but instead I became a billionaire by stealing from every single artist on the planet and swamping the world in an accelerating tide of inhuman shit. Whomp whomp.” Jesus Christ himself would break this motherfucker’s jaw

My parents are coming to visit in a few days and I’ve been telling my dog how she’s going to get so much more love and snuggles. I don’t think she necessarily grasps the idea of a potential days-off event or even has much of a concept of the future. But how will she ever learn if I don’t explain it?

Me and @ryanbrowne.bsky.social made a Godzilla

Remember when Jonah Hill put out that documentary about how great his therapist was, and then like right after he got busted for forcing his girlfriend to unfollow dudes on Instagram or whatever, and forbidding her from wearing bikinis? That’s when I knew. I knew that civilization had been a mistake

What is this weird new trend of comic book series using excessively wordy sentences as titles? Not trying to call out or shame any particular person, just, what is- what?

Watching Heisei era Godzilla movies. Salarymen reacting cartoonishly to being dragooned into one outlandish high tech Godzilla-response force after another. Bright blue 1980s skies and gleaming modernist skyscrapers. That latter-day Economic Miracle aesthetic that has colonized my imagination

Feeling bad for Crash Bandicoot

Love it when the pilot updates you on the weather at your destination and tells you the direction of the wind. Oh, wind out of the east! Good! None of that south wind shit.

PEAK SEASON is up on Mubi. My favorite from SXSW last year. A magnificent little movie about displaced romance, like a sunnier LOST IN TRANSLATION without the dream-pop ennui. Watching it felt like peeking into an alternate dimension where they still make low-stakes movies with gloss and craft

Paper Moon = a great movie about America

Three of my favorite movies in 2023, AMERICAN FICTION, DREAM SCENARIO, and THE HOLDOVERS., are about academics. Two of the three are put on suspension because of their woke snowflake students. A different two of the three fart explosively. What a year in film.

Rewatching MARS ATTACKS: a wonderful point in film history when a weirdo could make a big budget SFX movie where every character is some loathsome avatar of American shit-headedness and you’re supposed to laugh when they’re cruelly disintegrated by monsters. We live in a fallen world

Trailer for Napoleon playing silently on the TV above this bar. Joaquin Phoenix looks insane in this costume. Like you’d imagine a guy in an institution who has lost his mind would look. Legitimately deranged. Looking forward to it!

For anyone following me on Letterboxd, some context: Any movie in which a character takes a shotgun blast to the head is an automatic three stars. Just calling balls and strikes here.

My first panel as a pro was a Wildstorm thing and I got to sit next to Keith and I told everyone how in awe I was to be on the same panel as him and he insulted me and nothing has ever happened to me since then that’s made me feel more like I’d made it. All time legend.

What the fuck even is a kangaroo

Could happen!

A crime thriller where after Tibetan Independence, the Dalai Lama dies (is assassinated?) and Triads get leverage on one of the lamas searching for the new one, giving the inside track on the Test to one of their own, installing a Dalai Lama of their choosing. Now the Triads run their own country.

In my job I’ve never had occasion to say “this meeting could have been an email.” But I’m constantly thinking “this TV show could have been a movie” so I feel you. I feel you.

Considering watching Anger Management before too many members of the principle cast have died.

Google search: Is Lorenzo Lamas homeless?

I’ve been wondering recently if it would be worth it to re-read all of the Dark Tower books, even though I’m 100% certain it definitely wouldn’t be. What a curious animal is man, to wonder and at the same time to know.

In LA even the earthquakes are petty attention whores.

Cops can carry guns that literally kill people but I can’t set off a fire extinguisher at the bank.

Years of taking my dog to the park, very rarely did I step in poop. These past six months it’s been poop on my shoes several times a week. A WEEK! Something is happening and something must be done! Not only is Bluesky the best place to air this, it’s also coincidentally the only place I have.

I love social media because seeing kinda-bad writers name-check other not-very-good writers like they are geniuses gives me the hate juice. The juice I need to live.

Your Uber is here

At SDCC, and yesterday I see a vintage toy vendor who’s got some original Popples. I’d been on the lookout for something special for someone who couldn’t make it, and that felt like a perfect comicon gift. I come back today to get one and am confronted with disaster and horror.

Watching ALLIGATOR and it’s astounding how much production value and resources an exploitation B movie had access to in the late 70s. This kind of movie today would be lucky to shoot 20 days in a single location. The industry has been going in the wrong direction for a long time. #TheLastDriveIn

Entering into my Doom era

Back in the aughts I was a huge fan of the show “Intervention.” One episode had gambling addict who threw horrible toddler-like tantrums when his parents wouldn’t give him money. He also performed an original song on the show. One day I saw him at Ralph’s and that is my favorite celebrity sighting.

If you want to see how for the first time people in America are doing worse than their parents: this family went from seducing Marylin Monroe to courting Rob Schneider in a single generation.

David Zaslav, pouring flop sweat, knocks on Sony’s door with a briefcase full of 70 year old movie music cues. “I’ve got the love theme from “I Was a Teenage Werewolf” in here! You really don’t want to be without this when the werewolf craze comes back!”

Happy Father’s Day to me, it’s entirely possible.

Wonder how Sandra Bernhard is doing.

Cormac McCarthy lived in a dirt-floor shack with no running water and ate cold beans rather than accepting money for a speaking engagement. I can’t say for sure that’d he’d happily stab every single writer I’m friends with (including myself) but I’m sure he’d think about it. The giants are all gone.

So what do we call these things? A Skype? That doesn’t work. A bloop? What are we doing here?

I wonder if Woody Allen ever did cocaine?

Fair warning: I’m probably not going to do this.