Vegetarian diet ended around 2am this morning, officially, with a celebratory chicken sammich. Yes, I know that’s technically one day BEFORE it would’ve been the end of October, but I’m not eating rabbit food all Halloween weekend (the food vendors in Salem are NOT serving tofurkey) especially when one of the big events involves a big wedding.

Finally tally: three weeks, five pounds – the exact same amount I generally lose on Slimfast for the same amount of time. Yeah… definitely not worth the effort; other than having learned a few new ways to prepare salad.

I’m off to Five Guys now, to reintroduce red meat in style. When the weekend is over, I’m planning on trying November (save, obviously, for Thanksgiving) piscatarian – which apparently means no meat but fish, which sounds more sane.

Say one thing for Warners/DC: They are really good at keeping production material from failed/abandoned projects from winding up online. Makes sense, given that they were the first “big” outfit to publically blame a movie’s failure on Internet leaks (“Batman & Robin” – the “novelty” of blaming web-gossip pretty much made AICN, publicity-wise.) I mean… people realize that George Miller actually cast, scripted, boarded and costumed the Justice League movie and we’ve never seen a shred of it, right?

Anyway… the most notorious of the failed Warners Bros. blockbusters is Tim Burton’s “Superman Returns,” who’s allegedly-horrifying costumes have been the stuff of legend. In the film (infamously scripted by Kevin Smith) Superman would die and be ressurected by The Eradicator (look it up) who’d then “merge” with him; creating a “new-for-the-90s” dark/edgy look for the costume in the third act. Well, now thanks to an awesome collection of costume test images from FX maestro Steve Johnson’s Facebook page, now we know what it would’ve looked like.

Uh… yikes! Funny thing, though…

You can’t see it in that “natural light” snap, but it’s actually pretty damn elaborate – especially for a practical effect: The muscle-suit is actually overlayed with clear plastic plates and levels of lights to make it look vaugely bioluminescent. One “portion” of this lighting looked awfully familiar to me…

Look familiar to anyone? Perhaps, very similar to another Warner Bros. DC character redesign…

Coincidence? …yeah, probably – but it strikes me kinda “funny” that “glowy sinews” is a kind of running-theme in WB superhero reboots.

Check Johnsons’ page for the full set.

http://cdn2.themis-media.com/media/global/movies/player/flowplayer.commercial-3.2.5.swf

Intermissiom: “Halloween.”

Yes, fan posters suck, and this is probably a good indicator of why I’m not a graphic-designer. Still, if I was working in Marvel Studios’ marketing department and they said “we need teaser posters for Captain America NOW!,” this is probably what I’d be handing in.

(mostly built off the one pic from the EW set that I earlier thought “could be a poster on its own”)

Your “Impressiveness Of Entertainment Weekly Cover Debut” Scorecard, thus far:
Avengers: 1 Green Lantern Corps: 0

That’ll do just fine, thanks.

iFanboy.com was johnny on-the-spot with scans, check them out. Good shot of Hugo as a not-yet-monsterfaced (or are they doing the mask thing?) Red Skull, but the big “squee!” will be for a strikingly-iconic-looking (it could be a poster on it’s own) rear shot featuring the Mark I “triangle shield.”

This is really happening.

EDIT

One more thing: I swear to any gods who’ll hear me that if the fucking Teabaggers start tainting this by dressing up as Cap at their douchebag rallies… it’s ON.

By now everybody knows the Big News, straight from Christopher Nolan: The Riddler is NOT in the next (and presumably final) Batman movie, and the title is now “The Dark Knight Rises.”

Awful, awful, awful fucking title. It sounds like its it’s own fan film. Not that it matters, everyone is just gonna call it “the third Batman” anyway.

As for Riddler… yeah, probably would’ve been kinda redundant to do another master-planner criminal, and everything that makes Riddler not just a more conservatively-dressed Joker was likely to have been tossed in Nolan’s stringently down-to-earth universe. Either way, the bad-guy speculation now goes back to square one; with the possible extra detail that the film is casting around for “a female lead.” So… Catwoman? Talia al Ghul? Poison Ivy? Harley Quinn (a way of having Joker again without having Joker again)? Batgirl (no one says there can’t be a decade or so in between in “movie-time” for Barbara Gordon to grow up)?

Serious question, now: Am I the only one getting the strong feeling that no matter how good this is it’s going to be recieved as a kind of dissapointment?

“Dark Knight” being a cultural-phenomenon was lightning in a bottle, a one-time-only confluence of “wow, Joker!” and “wow, tragic actor death!” That’s not going to happen again. So if this “fails” to outdraw the original (to say nothing of Avatar), the headline is pretty-much already written, yes? “Batman Can’t Beat 3rd-Movie-Curse,” “A Step Back After Inception,” etc?

Independent filmmaker Eddie Lebron, whom you may remember from the pretty-solid feature length “Mega Man” Fan-Film last year, has formally announced his production of a “Sonic the Hedgehog” Fan-Film.

The best parts of “Mega Man” were Lebron’s grasp of action, scene composition, not-bad-at-all use of visual effects and clever narrative compromises toward realizing the game in live-action (and on a budget) so the notion of him tackling a feature built around a main character (and presumably several others) realized wholly through CGI is encouraging as far as I’m concerned. The BIG news, of course, is who he’s landed to provide Sonic’s voice…

http://v.giantrealm.com/saf/272828ab50091da6eb1ae85133def12ae9a44eb4

Way. Past. Cool.

(warning: political stuff after the jump, don’t wanna see/read such things, don’t click it)

You’ve all seen the footage of the guy stomping on the lady’s head at the Rand Paul rally, right?

Well, here it is:

Charming.

The media’s inability (or, more likely, unwillingness) to “figure out” the mindset of the so-called “Tea Party” is, I’ve come to believe, mostly an inability to admit that more than one thing can be “true” of a person – or “movement” of persons, for that matter.

Someone who dislikes the “Tea Party” will tell you: “They’re ignorant, reactionary, small-minded jerks.”

Someone who LIKES them will respond: “No! They represent the voice and face of ordinary, average people.”

Who’s right? They both are.

One of the worst things that ever happened to human civilization was the moment that being “average,” “ordinary” or “typical” were goals… things to be strived for, instead of escaped from. What I see in that video, and this election cycle, is just the latest manifestation of this.

Just my opinion.

Question: Has anyone seen (or “got?”) a still image of the little pool-cleaning robot from “Paranormal Activity 2?” Or, perhaps, know what “brand” or model it is?

Everyone seems to be gaga over that thing, and I can certainly sign on for the idea that it’s the best “character” in the film, but there doesn’t seem to be a picture of it anyplace…

This is a few months old, but have people read this Aaron Diaz article about Batman?

The basic argument is that Batman has actually become the LEAST realistic/believable hero in comics by virtue of the insane amounts of skills attributed to him and the cognitive dissonance of  spending more money than most national defense budgets in order to combat street-crime in the least efficient manner humanly possible. It’s a clever read.

For people who mainly know the movies or TV shows: In order to make his “usefulness” when sharing a world with Superman etc. make sense, the comic Batman is generally written as the World’s Greatest Human – a master of all martial-arts, a human-computer level intellect, possessed of essentially-unlimited cash resources and the ability to spend them on entire space-stations without attracting attention.