cyrus.mortazavi

The younger counterpart to Mark Hamil's original, Devon Graye will terrorize Central City later this spring on CW's hit.

Disney announced dates for the live-action remakes of "Ghost in the Shell" and "Pete’s Dragon," while delaying the release of "The Jungle Book."

Lucas had intended to direct the first installment of the new trilogy and release it in May 2015, and then sell Lucasfilm -- but Disney had other plans.

The former "Battlestar Galactica" admiral joins the Marvel Universe as Robert Gonzalez.

Greg Capullo, artist for the current Endgame story arc going on in Batman (#35-40) along with writer Scott Snyder and Inker Danny Miki, decided to share some of his original concept drawing for the story on his twitter feed yesterday. You can see him getting a feel for drawing the one-handed caped crusader as well as a head shot of Wonder Woman and a creature that I’m not sure of but who looks very cool.

Greg Capullo’s Concept Sketches For Batman: Endgame

Scott Timberg, an arts reporter for the LA Times who was laid off in 2008, has now written a book, Culture Crash, investigating “the killing of the creative class.” He names anti-intellectualism, celebrity culture, and the decline of print as culprits:

Probably the boldest claim that Timberg advances is his indictment of postmodernism as a destructive attack on culture with broadly deleterious consequences. This attack has emanated from the academy, not our profession—most journalists wouldn’t know postmodernism from a doorpost—but Timberg argues that we are all its victims. He offers a whirlwind tour of various critical schools—structuralism, “deconstruction,” feminist criticism, cultural studies—and says that they have leached the joy out of reading and other cultural pursuits.

Even the avowedly populist Pauline Kael comes in for some bashing, for allegedly “championing the kind of work that did not really need a critic’s advocacy or interpretation.” In fact, Timberg’s crankiness is reminiscent of the reaction by earlier critics of modernism, who also lamented that the cultural world as they knew it was coming to an end. Thanks largely to postmodernism, Timberg writes, we are graduating fewer (novel-reading, theatergoing) humanities majors. One could argue, of course, that practical considerations—including a spate of recessions and the sexiness of high-paying Wall Street, consulting, and tech jobs—have been more decisive in this decline.

Evan Kindley finds that “there is, ultimately, an unnerving sense of entitlement to Culture Crash, well-intentioned as it is, and that entitlement is largely generational”:

The real sting in the tail of Timberg’s polemic is not, as he would have us believe, that things are worse for creative people than they’ve ever been before. It’s that things are considerably worse than they were 20 years ago.

Throughout Culture Crash, the 1990s function as a go-to belle époque: “the peak years of journalistic employment, especially for newspapers,” the height of architectural innovation, the heyday of indie rock. His choice of interview subjects (David Lowery, Dean Wareham, David Byrne) betrays an obvious bias toward aging Gen X icons. Timberg makes clear that he’s “not particularly interested in James Cameron … or Kanye West: Celebrity and corporate entertainment—good and bad—hardly needs defenders.” Yet he’s not very interested in the genuinely marginal, obscure, or underprivileged, either—or in anyone under 40: Timberg’s interviews are all with white men who did extraordinarily well in the 1990s (or occasionally the 1980s or early 2000s), and are doing worse (but still reasonably OK) now.

One can hardly blame folks like Lowery or Byrne for complaining about the relative decline of their industries: They have firsthand experience of an age d’or to share and probably (even correctly) view themselves as spokesmen for the many suffering artists who don’t have a comparable platform. But Timberg certainly could have tried harder to talk to a wider swath of the creative class beyond his personal social circle and those he comes into contact with on his promotional rounds.

Mooney watched as oil dipped below $50 per barrel yesterday:

So when does the oil price decline actually stop? Brian Youngberg, a senior analyst at Edward Jones who focuses on the energy sector, says he’s expecting an oil price bottom in the first half of 2015 — but more downside pressures are definitely possible in the interim. The reason is simple: supply, supply, supply.

“Russia is producing at the highest levels since the Soviet Era, and Iraq is producing at its highest levels since the 80s,” says Youngberg. “There’s just plenty of oil to go around right now, and not enough places to put it.”

Plumer says much the same:

Whenever new data shows an unexpected boost in oil production or an unexpected drop in oil demand, prices go down. For oil prices to go up, we’d need to see either an unexpected drop in supply — say, new fighting flares up in Iraq, or US shale projects start going offline faster than expected, or Saudi Arabia switches its stance and decides to cut back on output to prop up prices. Or we’d need to see a surprising rise in demand — say, China starts growing faster than expected or the euro zone somehow fixes its economic woes.

Drum imagines how this will impact the fight over Keystone XL:

Prices have plunged, OPEC is engaged in a production war, and gasoline is selling for two bucks a gallon. Does the American public really care very much right now about a pipeline that makes it easier for Canadians to ship their oil to Japan via the Gulf of Mexico?

I’m not sure, but I suspect Republicans may be choosing the wrong moment to take a stand on Keystone XL. Democrats can probably hold it up in the Senate without paying any real price, and even if they can’t, Obama can veto it without paying any real price. It’s lost its salience for the time being.

Max Ehrenfreund examines a new study on the impact of cable news:

A new working paper argues that former President George W. Bush’s popular vote total would have been 1.6 percentage points lower in his race against former Vice President Al Gore if Fox had not launched four years earlier. The paper provides new evidence that Fox and MSNBC have a real influence on how their audiences are likely to vote.

Cass Sunstein declares that the study authors’ “evidence is the most compelling to date that cable news has a major influence on viewers”:

The researchers estimate that in 2004 and 2008, if there had been no Fox News on cable television, the Republican vote share (as measured by voters’ expressed intentions) would have been 4 percentage points lower. And if MSNBC had had CNN’s more moderate ideology, the Republican share of the 2008 presidential vote intention would have been about 3 percentage points higher. (In general, Fox has more success in converting viewers than MSNBC does; it also has a much larger audience.)

Drum wonders why Fox is better than MSNBC at persuading viewers:

I’ve always believed that conservatives in general, and Fox in particular, are better persuaders than liberals, and this study seems to confirm that. But why? Is Fox’s conservatism simply more consistent throughout the day, thus making it more effective? Is there something about the particular way Fox pushes hot buttons that makes it more effective at persuading folks near the center? Or is Fox just average, and MSNBC is unusually poor at persuading people? I can easily believe, for example, that Rachel Maddow’s snark-based approach persuades very few conservative leaners to switch sides.

Video Game history is something that I worry isn’t preserved or studied enough. While it is much younger, few really know extended pieces of Video Game history in the same way they do about film. A lot of people know who the Lumiere Brothers, Georges Méliès and Thomas Edison are and why they are important to the birth of motion pictures. Contrast that to video games and even many enthusiasts would struggle to name a handful of pre-1970 forefathers.

That’s why I’m pleased when the community gets excited about the medium’s history. At some point though, you do have to wonder how far is too far? In a mind-boggling Ebay auction, a copy of Stadium Events is currently going for $100,000. The game was first produced in 1987, but was recalled before it got a rebrand, making Sports Events one of the rarest video games ever produced.

In a brief interview with GameSpot, the seller claims that they used to work at Nintendo and that the game fell into his position at the end of its life-cycle. A still sealed copy sold for $44,000 in 2010, but obviously this copy has far surpassed that. If the bids maintain their legitimacy, this might well be the most expensive single copy of a game ever bought.

So, if you want to own a little bit of video game history, you’ll have to dig real deep into your pockets.

Rare Nintendo Game Is Currently Going For $100,000 On Ebay

Whatever you want to call the universe of characters building up on the CW, the Arrowverse is expanding once again and this time its gaining Vixen. The animated series Vixen will take place in the Arrow and Flash universe with both costumed heroes making an appearance. The show will run on CW Seed, the network’s on-line presence and debut this fall. The series will be headed up by Arrow producer Marc Guggenheim. This was announced at the Television Critic’s Association press tour this morning.

New Animated Vixen Series As Part Of The CW’s Arrowverse

According to Marvel.com, when Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD returns this March it will be with veteran actor Edward James Olmos as a guest star. Olmos will play Robert Gonzales and will have massive repercussions for Director Coulson (Clark Gregg) and his team.

Olmos has starred in many popular series like Miami Vice and Battlestar Galactica as well as film like Blade Runner and Stand And Deliver for which he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Lead Actor.

Agents of SHIELD returns March 3rd.

Edward James Olmos Joins Marvel’s Agents Of SHIELD

Look, people. A bit of life advice. If a mutual friend invites an A-list actor or actress over to your apartment for a date, playing video games probably isn’t the answer to having a great time. I know in just about all other cases, playing video games is the answer, but this is one of those few exceptions when it isn’t.

Let Jimmy Fallon be your example. It turns out that once Nicole Kidman came over to his apartment for a brief date, totally unbeknownst to Fallon. His response to having one of the hottest stars at the time in his apartment? It was to fire up a game. As you might guess, that didn’t impress Kidman too much.

The interview from the Tonight Show is a car wreck, but in the best kind of way. Kidman, who was on the show promoting Paddington, said she went over because she was single at the time and was in town. It’s a great bit of late night television. Take a look below.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Jimmy Fallon Missed His Chance With Nicole Kidman Because He Played Video Games On A ‘Date’

The dubiously elite continental currency club admitted a new member over the holidays:

On Thursday, Lithuania became the 19th country to join the euro zone. The move made it the last Baltic nation to adopt the currency, and the timing was inauspicious—the euro looks more and more like an economic death sentence as depressions spread across the continent. Proving skeptics right, less than 24 hours later, the currency’s value dropped to a four-year low after European Central Bank President Mario Draghi seemed to suggest that the bank might start printing money to combat what he called “excessively low” inflation. The Financial Times noted that with the latest dip, the euro’s value “has fallen by 12 percent against the dollar in the past six months.”

Matt O’Brien calls Vilnius’s gambit “another reminder that the euro, which isn’t so much a currency as a doomsday device for turning recessions into depressions, has always been much more about politics than economics”:

In Lithuania’s case, those politics come down to four words: breaking free of Russia.

That, after all, sums up their last 100 years of history. … Indeed, it’s no coincidence that Lithuania’s support for joining the euro has gone from 41 percent in 2013 to 63 percent today in the wake of Russia’s incursion into Ukraine. Freedom, in other words, is worth a euro-induced depression. It’d better be, because that’s what Lithuania has gotten. It pegged its currency to the euro back in 2002, you see, so it’s been importing the euro-zone’s monetary policy for over 12 years now. And, like the other Baltics, that’s ended quite poorly for them. Lithuania went on a borrowing binge — its current account deficit reached a staggering 14 percent of GDP in 2007 — as rates that were too low for its still-catching up economy pushed housing prices if not into the stratosphere, at least into the lower level clouds.

At the same time, Mike Bird notes, the chances the Greece will take the heretofore unthinkable step of exiting the euro have increased:

That’s because Syriza, the radical leftist coalition that wants to tear up the country’s bailout rules, looks likely to win [the general election on Jan. 25]. That means a game of chicken with the EU institutions and International Monetary Fund. If either side refuses to back down, there could be market chaos, bank runs, and a forced exit from the euro. … It’s not Syriza’s official policy to leave the euro, but a solid portion of the group are happy that route, and others may join them — if pushed.

The Greeks’ disillusionment with the currency stems largely from the European Central Bank’s unwillingness to take steps to boost employment in peripheral countries at the risk of increasing inflation, which Germany (the eurozone hegemon) fears. However, David R. Kotok thinks that’s about to change:

The economies of Europe are on a very flat growth path. They have high unemployment, large structural impediments, no apparent inflation, and either extraordinarily low growth or actual shrinkage, depending on which country we examine. The tool of European fiscal policy is hampered by huge deficits and lots of unfunded social liabilities.

Monetary expansion is the only game in town. Interest rates have already fallen to levels below zero in some shorter-term instruments and near zero in others. We expect a large monetary stimulus to originate from the European Central Bank as early as the end of this month. Markets are building this expectation, which will mean a huge market disappointment if the ECB does nothing.

(Chart via xe.com)

In a podcast chat with James Viscardi’s Let’s Talk Comics, Rob Liefeld talked about a time when Marvel were planning to give Jim Lee control of Marvel Comics. Viscardi’s ComicBook.com seems to have interpreted that as Jim Lee buying Marvel but that’s not what Liefeld said. Twelve minutes in, Rob says “They almost gave all of Marvel to Jim Lee… Marvel relocated to San Diego, and run everything out of Wildstorm.”

Firstly, Lee didn’t have the funds to do such a thing, even then. But in 1996, as Lee’s Heroes Reborn titles were launched at Marvel, initially Fantastic Four and Iron Man, then gaining Captain America and Avengers, Ron Perelman visited Lee’s Wildstorm offices in La Jolla, as Liefeld mentions. Let’s step back a bit.

Vulture capitalist and Marvel owner since 1989, Perelman saddled the publisher with the debt he had used to buy it. Increasing prices and amounts of comic book published, he floated the company at the height of the boom and made a very large profit. But promises of increasing sales to investors faltered. Marvel’s major comic creators left to start Image Comics. As the comics boom stopped booming, distribution was blamed, leading Marvel to buy Heroes World and, disastrously, began to self-distribute. As stores began to fold under pressure, Marvel started buying the likes of Toy Biz, Fleer, SkyBox, Panini, Simpsons publisher Welsh Publishing and Malibu Comics. Later in 1996, Perelman would put Marvel into bankruptcy protection, and Toy Biz’ Isaac Permutter would seize control of Marvel where Perelman and venture competitor Carl Icahn failed.

But back in La Jolla in 1996. Marvel had rehired Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld from Image Comics to recreate a number of their less-well selling, but still high profile comics. But Ron Perelman had bigger plans for this.

The plan was to make Jim Lee the EIC of Marvel, place him as as head of all operations and move that operation to Lee’s Wilstorm Studios in La Jolla, California.

Which would have been a dramatic shift in many ways. Discussions took place including Rob Liefeld, Jeph Loeb, Scott Lobdell and Larry Marder.

However, according to Rob on the pocast the deal was killed at the last minute by… Marvel publisher Bill Jemas and Dan Buckley. Buckley is now publisher of Marvel. The then Marvel publisher, Jemas now works for game publisher Take Two’s comic book line Double Take.

So, for all the moaning about DC Comics moving west, Marvel almost made the move themselves twenty years ago…

When Marvel Tried To Make Jim Lee EIC And Move To San Diego…

ABC’s new comedy-action-musical debuted last night in the time slot normally occupied by Once Upon A Time and did very good numbers. The new series/event played half-hour episodes back-to-back to fill the slot with the first one taking a 2.1 rating and the second a 1.9 among the 18-49 demographic. It brought in 7.88 million viewers with 6.8 million sticking around for the second episode. This is one of the best debuts of a Sunday series or Comedy this year and unlike Black-ish and Marry Me (the higher debuting comedies), Galavant did not have a strong lead in.

As for the show itself, I watched it and enjoyed it and hated ABC. The show is silly and funny in a Mel Brooks kind of way. And you would do well to listen to the song lyrics as they contain some of the best humor that includes the King singing of all the things he wants to do to Galavant like shoot him with a crossbow or stab him in the eye. There is also a nice love ballad at the end of the second episode that contains the message “you’re not the worst person ever”. And there is a nice Game of Thrones easter egg to boot. Plus, as my girlfriend put it, the best joust ever.

The only negative I have is that the main song for the show was used a bit too much in the first episode and then it was made worse… and this is why I hated ABC last night… when the network decided to use the music and sing all of the promos for their other shows that aired during the episodes. I really could have done without musical bits for The Middle, The Bachelor and Revenge.

Galavant is eight half-hour episodes that will run two each Sunday for four weeks. So if you missed last nights, watch them on-demand or ABC.com so you can pick up on it this Sunday. And you have to applaud ABC for trying something completely different.

Galavant Debuts Well In Sunday Night Slot

Marvel may not have a Black Widow movie in the works, but after the success of Lucy, Dreamworks is ready to give Scarlett Johansson the lead in their upcoming adaptation of Ghost In The Shell… and the latest word from Variety is she has accepted. The film is based on Shirow Masamune’s cyberpunk manga of the same name.

Johansson would play a covert ops member of a Japanese National Public Safety Commission unit that specializes in fighting technology-related crime. Rupert Sanders will be directing based on a script by Bill Wheeler.

The film has not been officially greenlighted but Steven Spielberg (A principal at Dreamworks) has wanted to make this film for a long time and a commitment from Johansson would push it closer to happening. Her film Lucy made $394 Million and she has Avengers: Age Of Ultron coming up in May.

[Source: Variety]

Scarlett Johansson To Lead Ghost In The Shell Adaptation

In his profile of Bernie Sanders, Mark Jacobson asks the senator from Vermont what his administration might look like:

“This is how it is going to be,” Bernie says, as if he were still in his $200 car, back in the Liberty Union days [in the 1970s]. “Suppose you want to raise the minimum wage to a fair level and know that change is not going to come from inside Washington. Not in this climate. So, as president, I’d invite millions of low-income workers to come to the capitol. Like a bonus march. I’d do the same thing about making college affordable. Put out the call, invite a million students. Make sure they’re all registered to vote. Then when these congressmen come by the White House and they’re beholden to the Koch brothers, the super-PACs, or the oil companies, I will say, ‘Do what you want, but first do one thing for me: Look out the window.’ ”

“Look out the window,” Bernie repeats, liking the sound of it, the call to arms, just the sort of phrase that might get the attention of a downtrodden, detached electorate and prompt them to raise a fist in the air. “Look out the window. Because all those people are out there. They’re demanding their fair share and they’re not leaving until they get it.”

Back in October, Andrew Prokop also considered how a hypothetical Sanders presidential campaign might affect 2016:

Essentially, Sanders is calling for the Democratic Party to wage a rhetorical war on the billionaire class, to better mobilize the general public against them, and break their power. He believes the power of the rich is the defining issue of our politics, and wants to elevate it accordingly.

The specifics of how this mobilization happens, and what the public does once it’s mobilized (beyond voting out Republicans), are less clear. Sanders’ generic suggestion tends to be for a march on Washington. “You wanna lower the cost of college? Then you’re gonna have to show up in Washington with a few million of your friends!” he told an audience member in Waterloo. …

But Hillary Clinton is extremely unlikely to take up the banner of class warfare in her presidential campaign. According to a report by Amy Chozick of the New York Times, she is currently exploring, through discussions with donors and friends in business, how her campaign can address inequality “without alienating businesses or castigating the wealthy.” Beyond Clinton’s desire to raise campaign cash, there’s a long-held belief among many Democratic political consultants that messaging critical of the rich simply isn’t effective in US politics. Instead, they argue, much of the American public actually rather admires successful businessmen, and aspires to be like them. And lack of trust in government is a real and consistent force in American politics and public opinion.

Image Expo in five days time will be full of announcements. Expect Marvel scalps, expect people new to Image and, it seems, new projects from the very familiar. Such as the second person to ever have a book out from the publisher.

On Facebook, Todd McFarlane has announced,

You guys have heard me talk a lot about Spawn issue #250 because it’s my single BIGGEST issue we’ve done since the existence of the Spawn title so I’ll be giving more details about that at the Image Expo. But I will also be introducing another NEW COMIC title that will be arriving on book shelves in a few short months! I will give all the details later this week.

It’s an idea that I’ve had for a while… and it’s finally coming to fruition. Plus all the issues of this initial 8 -issue mini-series are COMPLETELY done. That’s right…over 180 pages of the story are finished.

Below is a teaser of the signing poster that I’ll be using at the Image Expo. After the show, I’ll make sure I save a few of these and run a giveaway of some signed posters for you good people here on FACEBOOK…. but in the meantime… if you’re in the San Francisco/ Bay Area January 8, stop by and see me!

I’ll be doing a quick signing on Jan. 8th from 4-5PM, so I hope to see some of you there. More details about the Image Expo (and to get tickets) here: http://bit.ly/1JY8gaO

Be good.

TODD

We will Todd! Could your announcement be.. monstrous?

Todd McFarlane To Announce New Comic This Week

Marvel TV head Jeph Loeb says series profiles "rise of the hero and the rise of the villain".

Sometimes you see something that feels like it was pulled straight from your imagination. It can almost feel invasive — like someone has aggregated all the things that interest you, that haunt you, that titillate you, that you celebrate or loathe about yourself and others, and put it onscreen. That was True Detective, for me. It had Camel Lights, drugs, and Lone Star; it had Wu-Tang Clan, Lucinda Williams, and Grinderman; it had undercover police work, criminal conspiracies, and the occult; it took place at the intersection of the real world and some kind of purgatory that resembled it. It was about the construction of alternative personal histories; it was about truth, fabrication, and self-delusion; and it asked: What is the right way to live, and would you live that way if you thought there was no punishment in this life, or reward in the next? These are all things that interest me.

And it had the shot.

 

There’s a scene toward the end of Visions of Light: The Art of Cinematography in which Michael Chapman talks about the work he did with Martin Scorsese on Raging Bull. He mentions Scorsese’s understanding of what “the storytelling of a shot is really going to be … all you need is this one shot, and it’s so good, and so evocative, and so powerful, emotionally, that it will get you from A to B without any coverage, without any worry.” Chapman is referring to this moment in Raging Bull:

After watching Visions when I was a teenager, I became acutely aware of how the visual aspects of a film impacted me. I was fascinated with lighting, framing, and camera movement — especially tracking shots; searching takes, from directors like Scorsese, Orson Welles, Max Ophüls, and Brian De Palma; Steadicam shots and crane shots. Whether filming the mundane or the action-packed frame, it didn’t matter.

Over the last 20 years, I have always found my eyes gravitating toward the lower corner of a screen when watching a movie. That’s where I first notice the camera moving. A tracking shot just feels so wonderfully cinematic, a unique element of the medium. If film is a hybrid of theater and photography, a tracking shot is something neither of those two art forms can replicate. Deployed judiciously, tracking shots can make you feel like you are experiencing some kind of heightened version of moving life. I like a lot of directors, but the ones I love tend to be able to move their cameras.

What We Saw

In 2014, we saw things we've never seen before — things we were never intended to see, things we didn't want to see, things we delighted in, and things we will never forget. The past 12 months were defined by these images. Considering a year this difficult, this beautiful, and this complex requires looking at these images closely — whether we want to or not — and considering why they stubbornly refuse to fade.

By the time the fourth episode of True Detective aired in mid-February, the series had built up momentum. It wasn’t just because of Rust Cohle’s ruminations on locked rooms, the art brut drawings on burned-out church walls, references to a yellow king, or Charlie Lange’s jailhouse rants about a place called Carcosa and the rich men who sacrificed women and children there. And people weren’t just tuning in for Woody Harrelson, Matthew McConaughey, or Michelle Monaghan. They were watching for Cary Joji Fukunaga.

I had liked Fukunaga’s previous efforts, Sin Nombre and Jane Eyre, and had even enjoyed his “Go Forth” campaign for Levi’s.⁴³

He was obviously a talented filmmaker, but it didn’t seem like he was getting funded to do projects that had the scope to match his talent. That project was True Detective. Over the course of eight episodes, Fukunaga essentially rewrote the visual language of a televised cop show. Gone were the traditional establishing exterior shot of a police department, leading to an establishing shot of an office, a two-shot of the players, and a series of reaction shots between them as a conversation takes place. Here we had a director who seemed to take every frame, every movement, every bit of shadow, and every movement of the camera as seriously as the story. Take the first interrogation of Lange, by Cohle and Hart.

You have the basic framing of this two-shot of the detectives, with the cheap wooden wall in the background, that just-slightly inordinate amount of space above the pair’s heads, and a weird trick where Cohle seems farther back in the frame than Hart, even though they are sitting next to each other. Something is just a bit … off. And it should be. Notice how the camera pulls back, just a little bit, at the last second. Lange is about to tell them about his ex, Dora, the first victim we see on the show, and how she called him one night, babbling, high out of her mind, telling him that she had “met a king.”

No shot was “just a shot” for Fukunaga. His considered, flair-filled style was perfect for the material. Nic Pizzolatto’s writing has been criticized for its portrayal of women, its jerkoff philosophizing, and the fact that he at least heavily borrowed from Thomas Ligotti. But I still greatly admire it. True Detective reminded me of the poetry of Richard Hugo and the fiction of James Crumley, Larry Brown, Daniel Woodrell, late-period Cormac McCarthy, and early Richard Ford. It is, first and foremost, a story about storytelling. Characters are constantly talking about “characters.” (“This world is a veil. And the face you wear is not your own,” says the preacher, Joel Theriot, at a tent revival.) The investigation into the identity of Dora and Marie Fontenot’s murderer becomes an investigation into how we tell ourselves stories in order to live. One of the first things Marty says to Rust is “You attach an assumption to a piece of evidence, you start to bend the narrative to support it, prejudice yourself.”

All of this takes place in a kind of dreamworld version of the Louisiana and East Texas Gulf region. It’s as if True Detective happens in a diorama. Walking out of a coroner’s office, Cohle tells Hart, “This place is like somebody’s memory of a town. And the memory’s fading.”

Staring at this diorama like a blinking god, watching these men at a crossroads, watching their cars coursing across gray highways is Fukunaga’s camera. With the wonderful cinematographer Adam Arkapaw (Animal Kingdom, Top of the Lake), he captures the two protagonists as they are pulled toward their inevitable reckoning.

In the early episodes, this perspective has a unique power. It’s like Cohle and Hart are the only two people on earth. True Detective’s pacing mirrors Cohle’s drug use. In the first three episodes, it’s moody and ponderous, as Cohle pounds cough syrup and swallows ’ludes. But as Cohle hooks back into the “Crash” persona and meets up with his old Iron Crusaders cohort, switching to speed and coke, Fukunaga tightens the vise — the cutting gets quicker, the scenes play faster, and the camera movement goes from languid to frenetic.

The tracking shot is the most intense moment of the series. The most fascinating thing about the shot isn’t just that it’s long (it is), or that the shootout feels so convincingly unstaged (it does) — it’s the way Fukunaga’s camera functions as a kind of character in the house. It’s Cohle’s perspective, just heightened. The camera pauses to gaze, to wander, to linger on characters.

When this episode ended, the floodgates opened. I don’t think I’ve exchanged that many text messages about a single piece of television since the penultimate episode of Season 3 of The Wire. My friends and I were shooting each other YouTube clips from Touch of Evil …

And Hard Boiled …

Usually this kind of conversation would happen after a “We have to go back” or “I am the one who knocks” moment — a bit of dialogue or a twist in a story. That night, it was because of a shot.

“One of my priorities as director was to defend craft despite the constraints on my time and budget,” Fukunaga told The Guardian in March. “In every episode I wanted to at least try to find specific moments in which you could treat the visual side of the medium with the same importance as we were treating the dialogue.”

It has become pretty common to call television the new home of serious storytelling. As films increasingly become the dominion of caped crusaders, we go to the movies to learn what it takes to be superhuman. We go to television to learn what it is to be human.

Great. But what about the filmmakers? At least in the public’s understanding, television was a writer’s medium that became a showrunner’s kingdom. From about 2000 on, we began ascribing the same kind of auteurist powers we once gave filmmakers to the likes of David Chase, David Milch, David Simon, Matthew Weiner, Vince Gilligan, Amy Sherman-Palladino, and Jason Katims.

If the Golden Age of Television was defined by the rise of the writer, whatever comes next will be defined by the arrival of the directors. Over the last few decades, filmmakers had dipped their toes in the small-screen water, for sure — Barry Levinson on Homicide: Life on the Street, Quentin Tarantino on E.R., Nicole Holofcener on Six Feet Under, Peter Berg on Friday Night Lights. But since 2010, things have been changing. Episode orders have gotten smaller (less time commitment), budgets have gotten bigger (a more attractive working environment). Scorsese directing the Boardwalk Empire pilot was the prologue. Then David Fincher, Jane Campion, Jody Hill, and David Gordon Green followed suit. In 2014, we saw more and more major filmmakers move to television — Steven Soderbergh, Jill Soloway — and in the coming years, we will only see a larger spike.⁴⁴

If we’re starting a new chapter in the history of television — one in which the director’s chair becomes as important as the writers’ room — then this six-minute tracking shot from “Who Goes There” could be the turning of the page. Fukunaga, for his part, is going back to features — he is finishing the West African war film Beasts of No Nation and preparing an adaptation of Stephen King’s It. Crazy as it sounds, he might have said all he has to say as a director of television. After guiding a camera through that six-minute maze of tension, desperation, booby-trapped safes, helicopters, double-crosses, and getaway cars, it’s hard to imagine what else he could do to top his small-screen work. To be fair, it’s hard to imagine anyone could. 

The artist walks readers through how he and his art team create Gotham Academy's lush visual landscape.

This week's WONDER WOMAN has a surprise for old school DC Universe fans. But you have to click to get your SPOILERS.

by Dish Staff

Karen Tumulty tweeted yesterday that, “with exception of 2012, you’d have to be 38 or older to have lived thru an election with no Bush or Clinton running for prez.” Aaron Blake discovers that it’s even worse than that:

[G]oing back a full half-century – i.e. to 1964 – there have been only three elections (midterm or presidential) in which a Bush or a Clinton hasn’t been on the ballot somewhere for something.

Stretching back to George H.W. Bush’s first bid for U.S. Senate in 1964 (he lost), that’s 23 out of 26 elections. The only exceptions are 1972, 2010 and 2012. That most recent two-election drought was broken when George P. Bush – Jeb Bush’s son – ran for Texas land commissioner this year (he won).

Greenwald believes that a Clinton-Bush match-up would illustrate “the virtually complete merger between political and economic power, of the fundamentally oligarchical framework that drives American political life”:

If this happens, the 2016 election would vividly underscore how the American political class functions: by dynasty, plutocracy, fundamental alignment of interests masquerading as deep ideological divisions, and political power translating into vast private wealth and back again. The educative value would be undeniable: somewhat like how the torture report did, it would rub everyone’s noses in exactly those truths they are most eager to avoid acknowledging.

Even Douthat, who isn’t against political dynasties in principle, has misgivings about a Clinton-Bush race:

[T]here really would be something historically unusual about having the same two families alternate in the American presidency for, potentially, twenty-eight out of thirty-six years. The closest analogue would be the Roosevelts, Teddy and Franklin, who served for about twenty out of the 20th century’s first forty-five years, and they were related in a much looser way, rather than being part of the same marriage or nuclear family. In the main, the American presidency has resisted dynastic control, and the dynasts have tended to be among the less-enduring of chief executives: The Adamses were both one-termers, likewise the Harrisons (a one-monther, in William Henry’s case!), and for all their fame the Kennedys only occupied the Oval Office for the three short years of J.F.K.’s not-entirely-brilliant presidency. And they have also tended to be well-spaced: Twenty-five years from Adams to Adams, more than fifty years between the Harrisons, twenty-four between T.R. and F.D.R.

So it’s hard not to look at Bush-Clinton dominance, however shaped by randomness, as distinctive to our era, and therefore probably somehow connected to stratification and elite consolidation and other non-ideal patterns in American life generally. At the very least, it’s striking how many non-pedigreed men — Truman, Ike, Nixon, Carter, Reagan — won the White House during the golden years of the American middle class, compared to the mix of family ties and Ivy League resumes (dynasty woven into meritocracy, as it inevitably is) that has defined the office’s leading aspirants in recent decades.

Update from a reader:

Oh, please. Conflating the Clintons and the Bushes is ignorant and offensive. The Bushes are on their fourth generation of power and their third presidency. The Clintons are a married couple. Hilary did not inherit anything, nor did Bill. A Washington power couple is not a dynasty. Put these two families in the same sentence when Chelsea’s granddaughter is running.

(Photo: Former US President George H.W. Bush greets his former Vice President Dan Quayle as former First Lady Barbara Bush stands by after inaugural ceremonies at the US Capitol on January 20, 2005. Also pictured are Florida Governor Jeb Bush his wife Columba and former President Bill Clinton and his wife Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY. By Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images)

Why did you decide to pursue getting CM Punk to write a comic but not pursued George RR Martin.

George RR Martin’s Conditions For Writing For Marvel Comics “Seemed Unworkable” (UPDATE)

By Spencer Ellsworth

The female robots in IDW Transformers comics have been a source of controversy for years, as Bleeding Cool has previously reported. Rachel Stevens gives a wonderfully thorough overview of the recent storylines and controversies in Women Write About Comics; go read it.

In sum, IDW has recently introduced three “naturally occurring” female Transformers. The Windblade miniseries established Windblade, Nautica and Chromia as part of a generation of Transformers that grew to identify as female.

Transformers have never canonically reproduced sexually (though it only takes a cursory Google search to find plenty of fan-penned accounts, all roaring pistons and spinning sprockets). (I don’t have to tell you that, do I?)

Windblade leaves it unclear whether there is a built-in gender component for the TFs or whether they simply identify as male or female. James Roberts, writer of the critically acclaimed More Than Meets The Eye series, recently listed, in issue #31, his female character Nautica as being “spark-type: Estriol-positive.” Sparks double as Transformer CPUs and Transformer souls, powering transformation cogs, brain modules, and presumably all the pistons and sprockets.

Roberts asked for the Estriol reference to be removed from the MTMTE trade paperback, claiming it is “unnecessary and potentially (if unintentionally) offensive.”

Canonically, this means there is no fundamental difference between his and hers—Transformers only identify as such.

This will put an end to any hopes of robot sex in future Transformers comics. If that news disappoints you, I’m sure a quick Google search will put you right.

Spencer Ellsworth has written about comics for Bleeding Cool since 2013, and all over the Internet since 2007. He has also published short fiction in many venues, including the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and maintains a blog and bibliography at spencerellsworth.com and twitters @spencimus

No Little ‘Bots? James Roberts Retcons ‘Estriol’ In Female Transformers

Manu Bennett has quite the list of genre credits: 30 Days of Night, Spartacus, Arrow, The Hobbit… and now he can add another. He has just been cast as the last druid Allanon in MTV’s adaptation of Terry Brook’s Shannara.

The first season of Shannara will be 10 episodes long and focus on The Elfstones of Shanarra, the second book in the original trilogy. The decision to skip the Sword of Shanarra, the first book, was Brook’s idea as he felt Elfstones was a better starting place for a television series.

Allanon is described as a wise, perceptive and serious man who knows something incredibly important has begun when the wise tree Ellcrys starts dying. He enlists Wil Ohmsford (Austin Butler) to fulfill his destiny and save the four lands.

Shanarra will air on MTV in 2015.

[Source: THR]

Manu Bennett Joins MTV’s Shanarra Adaptation

When it came time to cast Lisa Snart, younger sister of Leonard Snart (Wentworth Miller) the rouge known as Captain Cold, the casting office of The Flash must have pulled out the same tapes they used to find Ronnie Raymond / Robbie Amell as his former fellow member of the Tomorrow People, Peyton List, got the job.

List’s character in the comics is also known as Golden Glider. She is far more wild and sadistic than her more cold and calculating brother. She uses her sexuality to get what she wants and in the 16th episode of the season, Rogue Time, she is going after Cisco Ramon (Carlos Valdes).

Besides her stint on the Tomorrow People, List also spent five seasons on the hit series Mad Men.

We also know that Cisco will have some family issues that episode as his handsome and charming older brother Dante will be involved. The character is a gifted pianist who never quite reached his potential and is resentful of his brother. Dante will be played by Sleepy Hollow’s Nicholas Gonzalez.

The Flash returns on January 20th.

[Source: Access Hollywood and TVLine]

Peyton List Joins The Flash As Golden Glider

43-year old Jon Hamm, star of the hit series Mad Men, thinks he is “old and irrelevant”. Not my words, his given to the RadioTimes.com. The actor thinks that in the current media lanscape you need to be either young or have worn a pair of superhero tights to get any attention.

“It doesn’t compute to the generation that most of Hollywood cares about, If your last name’s not Hemsworth or you are not in One Direction or you don’t wear a cape and tights for a living, you literally have a hard time making an impression.”

Having not worn a cape has been Hamm’s own choice and one he does not regret.

“The deals that they make you do are so draconian. And, of course, you are signed on for not only the movie that you are signed on for… but at least two more that you haven’t read and you have no idea what they are going to be and all the crossover ones you are going to have to do.

“For me to sign on now to do a superhero movie would mean I would be working until I am fifty as that particular superhero.

“It’s a lot of work at one thing which is not necessarily the reason I got into the business which is to do many things. If you want to spend all day pressing the same key that… seems an odd choice.”

Hamm’s name has come up quite a few times for roles like Superman and Doctor Strange and he admits he has been in contention for some but he is happy having turned them down.

[Source: Radio Times]

Jon Hamm Thinks He’s Old And Irrelevant At 43

Maybe they should change the show’s title to Arsenal… at least for a few episodes. It seems while Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell) is “away”, Roy Harper (Colton Haynes) will have to step up and fill the role as resident archer. Arrow executive producer Marc Guggenheim told Entertainment Weekly:

“One of the things I was very straight with Colton [Haynes] about is I don’t think we serviced his character quite as much as we would have liked in the first half of the season,” executive producer Marc Guggenheim says. “I’ll say the stuff that he’s got in episodes 10, 11, and 12, it’s pretty danggangbusters.There’s one scene in episode 11 between him and John Barrowman that I think is some of his finest work on the show.”

So fans of Arsenal and Malcolm Merlyn should be very happy when the show returns on January 21st.

[Source: EW]

Next Man Up – Colton Haynes Steps Up When Arrow Returns

Tycho: So he didn’t get it done.  It was me; it was just me. There are two places you can have your junk turned into Venetian blinds that have very similar names, and I always went to the wrong URL whenever I was trying to “bone up” on what I needed to know.  One of these two offers Valium to those in its care, and one does not.  So I was nervous, but under the misconception that a fear obliterating chemical was en route, which kept things at a low boil. There was a portion at the beginning where a woman came in to ask me all of the questions I had answered on the…