iainjclark's Mysterious World

We've been watching the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes series from the start. We've just made it to 'The Final Problem', featuring Holmes's apparent death and the final appearance of Watson #1, whom I think I marginally prefer to Watson #2 for his eagerness and fantastically deadpan bemusement. I'm not sure what more I can say about Brett's merits as Holmes except that rewatching these episodes has reminded me just how very good he was in the role, particularly early on. Athletic, eccentric, rude, bursting with nervous energy, and the very image of what you want Holmes to be.

There's also a realism that this Granada series derives from having been shot on location that puts it streets ahead of any amount of over-dressed ye olde england sets, plush smoking jackets and fake pea-souper fogs. When you've seen Matt Frewer as Holmes (and generally speaking I have nothing against Matt Frewer) you realise just how badly wrong Holmes can go when treated like a Disneyland attraction. Brett's Holmes and the world he inhabits are perfectly real -- despite being inhabited by a parade of Victorian grotesques.

Despite all this I remain inexplicably positive about the ludicrous Guy Ritchie romp starring Robert Downey Jr. I put this down to an ability to compartmentalise.

On a related note I'm not sure how I missed this news that Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss are making a modern day version of Holmes starring the improbably named Benedict Cumberbatch. If it weren't for the writers I'd dismiss this out of hand. With these writers, well, I'll give it a chance.

Plus they've just found the Giant Rat of (Somewhere Near) Sumatra.

Nothing new to report on the Bump front, so here's some nice eye candy that distracted me last night.

Here's a really impressive trailer for a film that was completely off my radar, Daybreakers. Stars Ethan Hawke and Willem Dafoe, and set in a world in which Vampires are the majority and humans the hunted underclass. Pushes all my buttons, really.

The surprisingly good, even mature looking (I know, I know), trailer for Torchwood's Children of Earth mini-series (running in five parts Mon to Fri in a single week.)

I'm intrigued by the Johnny Depp / Christian Bale / Michael Mann gangster flick Public Enemies, even if the trailer is just an abridged version of the entire film as far as I can tell. Although he can be quirky and mannered as an actor, Depp is such a chameleon sometimes.

And BIG 'SPLODY THINGS. Roland Emmerich destroying the world again in 2012. Unlike Transformers, the astonishing spectacle of this one may actually lure me to the cinema against my better judgement.

Finally, and on a slight tangent, I'm a complete nerd sometimes but this CGI image from a forthcoming Trek calendar is just stunningly beautiful. In a nerdy way. (From the blog of Doug Drexler, an FX guy from Trek / BSG.)

Unexpectedly, the latest trailers (Trailer 3 in both cases) for Star Trek and Terminator: Salvation are not just good but *so* good they've more or less sold me on the films. I wasn't sure either of them would amount to more than superfluous cash-ins on their respective franchises, but the Star Trek one in particular reached me on a gut level in a way that previous promos for the film missed by a mile. Maybe it's just been so long since Trek had some genuine spectacle, drama and energy on its side.

If streaming video doesn't float your boat, both trailers can be downloaded directly here

Films 1 to 5 of 2009 (Defiance, Persepolis, Frost/Nixon, Valkyrie, Underworld: Rise of the Lycans) are reviewed here.

Bookwise I've completed His Dark Materials but that's it so far. Reviews to follow.

Not had time to post much recently what with working late, going to hospital appointments, shopping, attempting to decorate, going to leaving dos and trying to at least pretend to have a social life.

So far this week I've been impressed by President Obama, specifically his inauguration speech and immediate action to overturn any number of idiotic, bigoted or downright fascist Bush policies. Kudos to that man. I do remain suitably sceptical that this huge rush of political euphoria can last; no doubt there's a New Labour style post-election crash due soon (although I'm by no means as cynical as Tom McRae on the subject). There are a few nay-sayers in our office who think he's all cliches and speeches and, to quote Luke Skywalker, it's all such a long way from here. Nonetheless, I can't help but feel that this is an important moment in world politics. Obama is the right man at the right time telling the right story - and it is a story even if not in a pejorative sense - about regrouping, rebuilding and reaffirming fundamental values.

TV-wise, CSI: original flavour is back on C5 and as good as ever. I've been mildly spoiled for future cast changes, but otherwise it's nice to watch a consistently high quality series do its stuff and not have a clue what's coming next. We're still catching up on various US imports including House (still great), Sarah Connor (mostly great) and Galactica (I just need closure). We also have the Dexter S1 box set to watch, and we found the entire Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes going cheap in HMV so we've started that too. Incredibly I don't think I'd ever seen the first episode before (A Scandal in Bohemia).

We're also trying to get back in the swing of going to the cinema. Today we saw Frost/Nixon which is both a predictable underdog story and an extremely solid, occasionally outstanding character study of two men. Both lead performances are exemplary, and the film settles out as a surprisingly melancholy portrait of Nixon in a way that reminded me very much of George Reeves in Hollywoodland.

We finally went to see Quantum of Solace at the weekend. ( Spoilers... )

The moment I started my holidays last Saturday I started coming down with the lurgy. Funny how often that happens. So even though I'm on holiday this week I'm also bunged up and feeling like the back of my throat has been sandpapered (or, occasionally, chiselled). Since I'm not up to much therefore, here are a few things that, in my delirium, I mentally logged as worth telling someone. You be the judge.

The saga of Tom McRae's website continues. It's now in Australia. No really.

This story about the MMR vaccine scare on Bad Science is actually an excerpt from Ben Goldacre's new book. It's also a fantastically rational account of how irrational the media can be in their quest to sensationalise a story.

Frost/Nixon is a movie that wasn't on my radar. What were the chances that anyone, let alone Ron Howard, would make a Hollywood movie out of David Frost interviewing Richard Nixon? It's hard to know what to make of it. The trailer paints the film as a mixture of political drama and David vs Goliath feel-good story, in the general neighbourhood of Charlie Wilson's War. Michael Sheen looks great as Frost, and Frank Langella seems okayish as Nixon. Other eclectic cast members include Oliver Platt (White House Counsel Oliver Babish on The West Wing) and Matthew "Tom from Spooks" McFadyen. (Plus it has Kevin Bacon in it, so given how ubiquitous Michael Sheen is this should blow the Kevin Bacon game wide open.)

No Heroics is a new sitcom centred around off-duty UK Superheroes. The trailer looks surprisingly okay, albeit sex-obsessed, particularly given that this is airing on that great sitcom purgatory, ITV.

Lastly, what is up with those camera zooms that punctuate Evan Davis's every sentence at the start of Dragon's Den? It's like the camera operator just ate an entire keg of Smarties and can't calm down.

The Wire star hits out at Emmys. Sergeant Ellis Carver thinks the Emmys are ignoring his show, and rightly so. I still can't believe that The Wire has never won an Emmy. It does at least have a single nomination this year: Outstanding Writing in a Drama Series for its final episode. Maybe that means it'll get the 'lifetime achievement' sympathy vote.

Fresh from last month's Ben Folds gig, we now have tickets to see Counting Crows supported by Ben Folds in December. This is good. Counting Crows' latest has some strong return-to-form stuff on it but has left me a bit cold overall. Nonetheless the combination of Crows and Folds is pretty much a slam-dunk. Folds has a new album Way to Normal out on 30th September which sounds a good deal more up tempo than anything he's done since the first couple of Ben Folds Five albums.

Hot on the heels of The Dark Knight (spoilery review here) there are preview screenings of Hellboy 2: The Golden Army on 5th August, so we have tickets to see that too. This is double plus good. My Cineworld Unlimited membership is a process by which I willingly allow Cineworld cinemas to scam £12 from me every month in return for me not going to the cinema. To add insult to injury, even though I only found out about the screenings through their Unlimited newsletter, my membership doesn't let me book advance tickets. So I've paid for the tickets. I really should cancel that membership...

The trailers for Hellboy 2 look a bit mediocre but I sense there's a good film hiding behind the crappy marketing. Plus I like the comics and really enjoyed the first flick and Janet is a sucker for dark mythological faerie types, so really the film is pandering to us shamelessly.

Not entirely sure about this poster as a design, but how perfect is Zachary Quinto as Spock?



That's Eric Bana with the tatoos, although it's pretty hard to tell. Plus Chris Pine as Kirk and Zoe Saldana as Uhura. TrekMovie.com has more details.

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In unrelated news, today City Link delivered a parcel, to our door, while we were in. They knocked and rang the bell. I believe this means the apocalypse is nigh.

Will Ferrell and Sacha Baron Cohen are making a spoof Sherlock Holmes movie (as Watson and Holmes, respectively). This is almost certainly a bad idea, but as usual they failed to run it past me before greenlighting the project.

Meanwhile Guy Ritchie is making a not-spoof Sherlock Holmes movie. Or not intentionally spoof, anyway, since this is the previously reported "sexed up" version emphasising Holmes's bare-knuckle boxing skills. Insert "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Jackets" joke here. On the other hand Robert Downey Jr. is playing Holmes, which makes me all intrigued. And afraid. And intrigued. And afraid.

Meanwhile David Simon will be following the incomparable The Wire and the upcoming Generation Kill miniseries with Treme, an HBO pilot for a series set in post-Katrina New Orleans; details of which can be found in this excellent and detailed article about Simon in the New Yorker (which contains some spoilers for the fifth season of The Wire).

Joss Whedon has an online webisode supervillain-musical thing called "Dr Horrible's Sing-along Blog" starring Neil Patrick Harris, Nathan Fillion and Felicia Day. Trailer, article and review. It looks strangely awesome.

What the-- Steve Martin has apparently made The Pink Panther 2. Sometimes the world is far a more surreal place than I generally allow myself to believe.

Anyway, the actual point of this post was not to watch Steve Martin's career circling the drain but to drool shamelessly over my shiny new PC.

I bought a gorgeous LCD monitor last week, replacing my 19" Samsung with a 22" widescreen Samsung. It's the same height, but wider. Soooo much wider. I have no actual need for a widescreen monitor, but it does help with spreadsheets and 16:9 video looks significantly bigger. But really: pure self-indulgence of the highest order. Mmmmm....

Then, while browsing the interwebs looking for upgrades to my creaky victorian motherboard, I belatedly realised that the best chip it could possibly take is now only available second-hand on Ebay. This started me thinking a) OMG I've been in a coma for ten years and no-one told me, b) I have lots of money saved up because I am crap at shopping, and c) these days you can buy a whole PC pretty cost-effectively compared to the good old days when computer fairs were the way to go and everyone still thought The X Files was a pretty neat idea. So I ordered a nice new PC off Dell, and it's a pleasure to use. No more 10 minute startup times. No more waiting five minutes after my desktop appears before I'm actually able to do anything. No more HD movie trailers that look like slideshows. Yes, I've been catapulted into what SF authors call "teh present".



For record, it cost a mere £384 (excluding the £220 monitor *cough*) which frankly is only about twice what my crappy upgrades would have cost. The specs are excellent, though not out of this world:

AMD® Athlon™ 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5000+ (2.6 GHz)
4GB 667MHz Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM
256MB ATI® Radeon™ HD 2600 XT graphics card
500GB (7200rpm) SATA Hard Drive
19-in-1 Media Card Reader
Windows Vista Home Premium
DVD+- RW / CD RW Drive
Integrated 7.1 Audio

I'm not entirely sold on the bloatware that is Windows Vista but having switched off most of the annoying visual effects I've more or less got to grips with it. Thanks to the miracle of home networking I've also transferred all my old documents, emails, pictures, settings, videos and mp3s. It's all feeling comfortingly familiar, and yet still cool and new.

This has been pointless gadget porn. We now return you to your scheduled programming.

My review of Iron Man is up at Strange Horizons today. Should you care to take a look.

Guillermo Del Toro will be filming not one but two Hobbit movies. The first to be based on a book by J.R.R.Tolkien called "The Hobbit". The second... less so. He states:

‘The Hobbit’, the book, is really one self-contained film, so for the second movie we sat down and worked it out. When we did this we got really excited because this second film is not a ‘tag on’, it’s not ‘filler’, it’s an integral part of telling the story of those 50 years of history lost in the narrative. There will be certain things that we will see from the first movie but from a different point of view, but it will feel like a volume, in the 5 volumes of the entire story. It will not feel like a bridge, I’ve been hearing it called ‘a bridge film’, it’s not, it’s an integral chapter of the story, and I think we’re all on the same page.

Which brings up the burning question: what will the second film be called? And burning questions call for polls. snowking has already suggested a few additional names which I've shamelessly tacked on the end.

[Poll #1180320]

This has the added advantage that if they use any of our titles we'll clearly be paid off with a fat settlement.

A quite nice X Files 2 poster. Apparently they're still haggling with the studio over what the film will be called. I don't mind "The X Files 2" personally. It's been so long since the first one they don't really need a subtitle, and anything is better than "Fight the Future".

The director of the fourth Terminator film, which is having title troubles of its own, seems to imply that they'll be trying to keep its timeline straight with that of the very decent TV show The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Nice idea, although frankly since that series may or may not run for several years who knows where it might end up and how it may end up contradicting things? Despite the continuing absence of James Cameron (which arguably hamstrung T3), Christian Bale is on board for the film and there's talk of making a Batman-style fresh start, which bodes well.

Incidentally the Sarah Connor series has some kind of tangential viral marketing site, EniTech labs, that seems to have little to do with the actual show but ties in strongly with the Teminator franchise as a whole. Frankly I couldn't be bothered to plough through all the dodgily acted videos/webisodes but the last one does feature some cool Killer Robot Action.

Ronald D. Moore reckons they've taken the opportunity afforded by the writer's strike hiatus to retool the second half of Galactica season 4 (spoilers in the link for those who haven't seen the S3 finale). This either means that we'll feel the benefit of forward planning that blessed the first half of Season 2 or, more likely on the evidence of recent storylines, that important threads will fizzle into nothing while major events and character arcs will suddenly erupt out of nowhere.

Battlestar Galactica's Helo is one of the stars of famed misogynist (just kidding) Joss Whedon's Dollhouse.

Meanwhile Moore and fellow Galactica producer David "Not the one who thinks the Queen is a lizard" Eick have been given the greenlight on their strangely dull-sounding Galactica prequel Caprica. I wish I could summon up any interest in this but I can't.

Eick is also writing the pilot of a TV show based on Children of Men. Sounds like a terrible idea given how good the film was, but from the brief comments he makes it seems it will be based more on the book and the social aspects of having no future for mankind. So it may not suck.

And finally... J Michael Straczynski In Good Script Shock. Specifically his movie script for World War Z, apparently.

Official images of characters from the Watchmen movie.  Most of these look pretty good, particularly Rorschach whose ink-blot mask translates surprisingly well from the printed page (he's also seen in this recent shot using what seems to be a flaming aerosol can).

For those not familiar with the comic (and it's a good long while since I read it myself) it's set in a parallel 1985 in which Richard Nixon is still President, airships rule the skies, and the Cold War is close to exploding.  The point of divergence for this alternate history is the existence of superheroes (comics are saturated by Pirates instead), who amongst other things turned the tide of the Vietnam War.  The story makes a genuine attempt to extrapolate the influence of such figures, both good and bad, on the real world.  The realism extends to its characters: washed up overweight superheroes, media celebrities or murderous vigilantes.  Typically Alan Moore invests the whole thing with quite astonishingly meticulous detail (it sticks in my mind that one chapter, 'Fearful Symmetry', features panel layouts that are perfectly mirrored down the centre page).  It's the kind of work where you only realise quite how complex and rigorous it is when you read annotations.   According to wikipedia Moore set out to make something akin to a comic-book Moby Dick, and that gives a good impression of its ambition.  I'm very rusty on it now, and flicking back through it the art and in particular the colouring seem dated and off-putting, but I still remember the impact it made on me when I first read it.

Of course a lot of what made it great back in the 1980s, as with Citizen Kane, are things that are now commonplace and therefore invisible to a modern reader.  For example the absence of thought balloons, now standard, the gritty treatment of superheroes, now hackneyed, and the use of storytelling techniques drawn from cinema.  The metafictional commentary in the pirate story excerpts that run through the tale (every bit as interminable as the whaling excerpts in Moby Dick...)  All that will be invisible in a film version.  Is the basic story strong enough when you strip away those elements?  Particularly given that Heroes nicked portions of it wholesale.  We'll just have to see.  I'm at least encouraged by the images I've seen so far.  It may not be the groundbreaking, layered work that the comic was, but it may at least turn out okay.

After all, V for Vendetta (my preferred Alan Moore opus) turned out to be a surprisingly decent film.

The Coen brothers are to film Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union. It's a novel I haven't read (although I plan to) but this strikes me a A Good Thing.

Val Kilmer is to be the voice of KITT in the new Knight Rider pilot movie, replacing Will Arnett who had to pull out. Val, Val, Val. Where is your career going? I want you to think seriously about this.

Thanks to white_hart asking and example22 telling, this incredibly nifty bit of freeware lets you rearrange the programs on your Windows taskbar. How anal awesome is that? Best gizmo ever. Now everything can be in the right order. Yes, there is a right order.

The American Film Institute is to honour the ten best films in ten genres: Animated, Fantasy, Gangster, Sci-Fi, Western, Sports, Mystery, Romantic Comedy, Courtroom Drama and Epic. Interesting set of genres for a start. You have to register (for free) on their website to see the fifty nominees in each genre, but I'm nice so here's the pdf. They won't release the results until a US TV special, presumably hosted by Jimmy Carr with a fake american accent.

"AFI defines “science fiction” as a genre that marries a scientific or technological premise with imaginative speculation" they say, before including Independence Day in their nominations. There's a good mix of eras, though, and any list that includes The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, A Clockwork Orange, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind has to be considered eclectic at the very least. It all means nothing, but it's interesting.

I've already posted the outcome of one of last year's resolutions, which was to Read More Books! Nine whole books. Kinda pitiful, ain't it? You can say it.

Movie-wise I managed a more respectable 31 films seen for the first time last year. Only 15 of these were at the cinema, which is not quite enough to justify paying Cineworld £10.99 a month for the privilege of sitting at home feeling too knackered to go out.

( Films I saw )

The list of films-we-meant-to-see-but-didn't is far more significant than the list of films we saw. This calls for a poll, therefore! So, which of the following should we try to catch up on?

[Poll #1117250]

I'm interested in the Writer's Guild of America strike, not least because a high proportion of the filmed entertainment I enjoy comes out of the U.S.

On a personal level it's likely that a good chunk of my entertainment is going to dry up soon as a result of the strike, particularly TV which has a much shorter lead time than film, and where the stockpile of existing scripts is diminishing on a weekly basis. I could therefore take the view that this is more than a little bit annoying. As a consumer, I'd be forgiven for feeling irritated that these whiny writers who do already get paid for writing in the first place also want to get paid for each copy of their work that gets sold.

On the other hand, since I do enjoy these things, and since (unlike the U.S. entertainment industry) I think that the person who, y'know, wrote a creative work is *at least*¹ as fundamental to the finished product as the people who directed, produced or starred in it, I do see the writers' point. The way that writers are rewarded in other fields, the world over, is not just a one off payment for e.g. the sale of a book, but also a percentage of the sales. TV and movie companies profit from their product not just once but every time it is sold. All the writers want is a tiny percentage of that profit. And I do mean tiny--next to nothing in relation to the overall profit made by the company or the money that goes to other people involved in the production.

There's a very sensible article on the rationale behind the situation here. It's hard to argue with anything in it.

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¹ And to be honest, probably more fundamental. No writer, no script. No script, nothing to direct or act or produce.

We have now become the last people in the western hemisphere to own a Wii. This is thanks to my wife's considerable perseverance and the power of Ebay, which is a little like the power of Greyskull but less melodramatic. Haven't played much so far but the sheer novelty of the Wii remote infuses even the most mundane game with a mixture of fun and frustration. At some point this will seem natural, but right now it's like gaming with my feet. In a good way.

Interfering with our Wii-ing has been a flurry of cinemagoing this weekend.

( Ratatouille )

( Stardust )

These classic Doctor Who aliens will be in Season 4. That's good.

No more Deadwood. That's bad.

David Tennant is likely to stay on for a fifth season of Doctor Who following the "gap year" of three TV movies. That's good.

They're remaking Near Dark, a film only released in 1987. The Horror remake bandwagon careens, driverless, through yet more innocent pedestrians. (That's bad, by the way.)

Several coolish movie things:

Hot on the heels of the probably-very-good casting of Zachary 'Sylar' Quinto as the young Spock comes this simple but pleasingly retro poster for the new Trek prequel film.

A slightly naff yet iconic poster for the new Indiana Jones film. But more interesting still is the news that Karen Allen will be reprising her role as Marian Ravenwood from Raiders of the Lost Ark.

A nice new image of the Joker from Batman Begins sequel The Dark Knight plus a pretty nifty teaser trailer (more audio than video, but good nonetheless).

A stunningly visual trailer for the Neil Gaiman / Roger Avary penned Beowulf film with CGI that you'd be hard pressed to tell apart from real actors for most of its length. I still want to see the characters do some real face acting before I'm convinced.

Lastly some interesting casting for Watchmen.

Oh, and as a bonus I'm throwing this one in just because I can't tell how crap it'll be: a trailer for The Last Legion a film that seems to mix the end of the Roman Empire and the legend of King Arthur with such certainty you'd think it was actually telling real history. Could be just as bad as the recent King Arthur but you never know.

David E. Kelley (Ally McBeal, Boston Legal) is making a US version of Life on Mars, and the pilot episode will be directed by Thomas Schlamme (The West Wing, Studio 60). My instinctive reaction to this idea is to grab a couple of candlesticks and hide behind Peter Cushing, but actually the chances are that a US version of the show would be different enough to be worthwhile. US cop history is more than rich enough to provide a subtly different seam of influences, and the nostalgic imagery would be very different. It depends on whether they're adapting the UK scripts or taking the premise and spinning it into new stories. The latter would be a much better idea.

I've been meaning to mention this for ages, so by now most people have probably seen this really disturbing promo image of Heath Ledger as the Joker from the upcoming Batman Begins sequel The Dark Knight. It's an impressively pared down interpretation and one that bodes well for how gritty and risk-taking the movie version could be compared to the rather camp Jack Nicholson performance. If anything it's almost too far gone, but there's another low quality image here that gives more of an overview of how the character will look, showing that the green hair and purple jacket are intact after a fashion. I like this look for the character overall. My wife is much less convinced. I think she's still hoping that they'll cast Mark Hamill.

My review of Spider-man 3 is up at Strange Horizons. If you don't read it, how will you know I didn't talk about you behind your back?

David Tennant is on board Doctor Who for the entire fourth season (following the upcoming third season)--according to the possibly unreliable Daily Mirror at least (via Outpost Gallifrey). This comes as a mild relief to me if true: as frustratingly variable as Tennant's performance can sometimes be, the last thing the show needs is a succession of very short-lived Doctors. This way it gets the chance to settle down a bit.

I just caught Jonathan Ross on BBC1 praising the first couple of episodes of the new series following a press screening. I've no idea what this actually means about the quality of the episodes.

Meawhile those who want to avoid Doctor Who spoilers should avoid the Sci-Fi Wire website, whose idea of spoiler space appears to be putting "and (spoiler alert!) Darth Vader turns out to be Luke's Dad" in the middle of a sentence. Not so much a spoiler warning as a spoiler sucker punch. (I should know better since they're also one of those genre news sites who regard plot rumours as news).

Interesting snippet from Alfonso Cuaron on the Children of Men DVD in a brief interview over at www.aintitcool.com:

AICN: You had quite a few screenwriters on the movie. Can you talk about how that evolved?

ALFONSO CUARON: ...I don’t want to say anything else about all this amount of writers… whoever has read a book by PD James has a credit as a writer here. This screenplay was written by Tim Sexton and myself. If I would credit another writer, it would be Clive Owen...From the moment that he got involved. Tim and I we worked with Clive a couple of weeks in a hotel room in New York, focusing his character. His instincts were so great that then we asked, “Can we pester you with the rest of the script?” He (worked with us) with that and he was amazing.

There's a nice behind-the-scenes article on Babylon 5: The Lost Tales over at CG Society (Society of Digital Artists) with a lot of new photos and a few story spoilers.

AICN have a test image of Rorschach from the ever-mired-in-Development-Hell Watchmen movie. I'm still ambivalent about the movie, but the high-res image is very well-realised and faithful to the comic. Janet says that it just looks like a man in a cloth mask, but that in Watchmen this is probably part of the point.

A version of the image has been snuck into the middle of a new promo for 300 for some reason, a film which has just exceeded box-office predictions on its first day of release. The movie looks visually gorgeous and is getting very positive reviews, although I suspect it may be just a teensy bit OTT and hyper-macho for my sensitive tastes.

EDIT: For those who don't read Neil Gaiman's blog: Bob Dylan sings Dr. Seuss.