(NOTE: If the blog looks a bit weird right now, it's a "known issue" and I hope somebody will be able to fix it quickly.)

I've been hearing from some disgruntled comic-book and superhero fans that they think critics have a prejudice against the genre. Or genres. I think there's a distinction to be made between comic-book, graphic novel and superhero movies (though, obviously, certain pictures overlap categories). So, I thought I'd do a little (and I mean a little) research to see if I could discern a trend. I did, and it was a pretty clear one.

So I sampled a few titles at RottenTomatoes and MetaCritic. Not that these sites should be considered the ultimate authorities on such matters, but they do give some indication of a movie's critical reception. Here's what I found:

... what? Not "Star Wars"? Not even "The Dark Knight"? (Wait -- that's the 21st.)

See? Cinephiles and music collectors aren't the only ones who feel the compulsive need to make lists. Though, usually, we flaunt the subjectivity of the exercise (and try not to figure box-office popularity into the equation). But not this University of Chicago economist profiled in Monday's New York Times:

Ask David Galenson to name the single greatest work of art from the 20th century, and he unhesitatingly answers "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," a 1907 painting by Picasso.

He can then tell you with certainty Nos. 2, 3, 4, 5 and so on, as well. [...]

Now, for the penultimate time! Ten years in the development vault! Dripping wet from the subcutaneous epidural labs! Writer-Producer-Director-Hyphenate Andre Perkowski and Terminal Pictures Presents the previously unclaimed, unfulfilled trailer for Edward D. Wood Jr.'s "The Devil Girls"!!! You'll thrill to their prevailing sex urges for lust, dementia and forbidden entertainment!

The excerpt below is from a piece I wrote at MSN Movies about what films of the past can teach us about the politics of the present. It's called Lights, Camera, Election! Political lessons we learned from the movies:

Events are more carefully staged and scripted than ever, and the mainstream media cover the photo ops, "press conferences" and "debates" as if they were actually news. Even Baghdad can be just another studio back lot: McCain claimed to "walk freely" in a market there and complained Americans weren't getting the full picture of U.S. successes in Iraq -- neglecting to mention his escort of 100 soldiers, three Blackhawk helicopters and two Apache gunships, conveniently off-camera.

If, like me, you were spellbound by each season's opening credits for "The Wire," you must see the short film analyses of them by critics Andrew Dignan, Kevin B. Lee and Matt Zoller Seitz at Moving Image Source (published by the Museum of the Moving Image). Using the actual footage, along with still frames and zooms (aka "the Ken Burns effect"), these short films examine the credits in critical detail, treating them as short movies unto themselves. Which is exactly what they are. Each season of "The Wire" introduced a new opening montage (cut to various recordings of Tom Waits' "Way Down in the Hole") to set the scene. (Also see the Opening Shot essay for "The Wire.")

If you were at Comic-Con in San Diego, you could ride the unicorn from "Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay." You could learn about upcoming projects, most of them sequels and remakes. (They're making "Tron 2." Really.) You could listen to the creators of some of these things talk about what they've been working on and what they worked on and promoted at Comic-Con before.

Comic-Con is the new Sundance, the marketing event for people who want to be the first to know about things that other people will envy them for knowing because they knew about them first. (See my earlier ruminations on "Be the first on your block...") It's tempting to imagine the attendees as various mutations of the stereotype embodied by Jeff Albertson, aka Comic Book Guy, from "The Simpsons." As MSN TV Editor K.O. Pemberton writes from this year's event:

We told our cabbie on the way over that we would be the best smelling group he would have all day and that none of us live in our mother's basement. His deadpan comment back to us was, "Everyone is 300lbs plus. What the hell? What do they do all day?"

Hey, remember the year they released "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull"? Where were you when the movie of "Sex and the City" came out? Remember when Entertainment Weekly did a 63-page spread about the former HBO show the week before the feature film came out? Oh, and what about the big "Chronicles of Narnia" sequel? It was such a hot property they made everybody go through security -- with metal detectors and everything. What if someone had made a shaky-cam bootleg of it 36 hours before it opened to the masses? Whoa!

Then, just a couple weeks ago, people lined up for days to catch the first midnight showings of "The Dark Knight." Oh, maybe that was last week. Once upon a time these things seemed like kind of a big deal, and now they all seem so three months ago.

I regret that I haven't seen Guillermo Del Toro's "Hellboy" (2004) or "Hellboy II: The Golden Army" (2008), though De. Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth" was my top movie of 2006. Andrew Tracy at Reverse Shot evidently isn't impressed with the Hellboys, and I say "evidently" because I'm putting off reading the whole of his review of the new one until I've seen it.

But that hasn't stopped me from relishing the first two paragraphs! Because Tracy is articulating thoughts I've often entertained but too rarely raised in public. He begins:

Talking faux-seriously about juvenilia has become a marvelous way to avoid talking seriously about the serious. The slew of hyperbolic, overheated critical rhetoric that follows in the wake -- hell, in advance of -- the latest high concept blockbuster is enough to make one gag. In these cases, critical investigation has by and large become a matter of repeating verbatim the films' stridently announced surface-level themes with some linguistic curlicues and intellectual tumbling tossed in.

Do you recognize this Barranca Airways plane? I hope so. Because it's from one of my top-five favorite movies (and most personally influential of all time -- and one of the great classics of American cinema.

A friend sent me this picture, from an "Antiques Roadshow" episode. The seller was asking $250 and didn't even know he had...

This is my condensed version of David Fincher's 1999 comedy masterpiece, "Fight Club," to accompany and expand on my personal/critical essay below. Notice that only one punch is thrown. The violence is psychological, inner-directed and apocalyptic. That's the idea. See for yourself. (Speaking of condensation: Did you know that you can make explosives from soap and condensed orange juice? Tyler Durden says so. But don't talk about it.)

PLAY THIS MOVIE LOUD.

Spoilers abound.

"...There is nothing either good or
bad, but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison."
-- "Hamlet" Act 2, scene 2

If you've ever suffered from clinical depression, you know the experience is impossible to convey to someone who hasn't also gone through it. It doesn't make sense. It's like trying to describe why you love somebody. How do you explain a lack of feeling, or interest, or pleasure, that is both numbing and excruciatingly painful? How do you account for a disconnection with the past and any conception of a future? It's not "living in the moment" -- it's being stuck in a moment from which you can't imagine any escape -- not just the feeling that this asphyxiating near-deadness will go on forever, but that you can't imagine ever having felt any other way (even though, logically, you know that is not possible). You can remember feeling pleasure -- no, make that "having felt pleasure" -- but you have no memory of what it actually felt like.

One of the (many) reasons I probably connect so strongly with David Fincher's "Fight Club" (1999) is that, by capturing clinical depression more accurately than any other movie I've ever seen (though Laurent Cantet's "Time Out" and Eric Steel's "The Bridge" delve mighty deep into that abyss), it helped shake me out of the grips of a depression that was sucking me down at the time. I was the only person in the theater convulsed with laughter from beginning to end, because it was liberating, exhilarating, to see the truth of my own inner experience reflected back at me in its funhouse mirror. I recognized myself in the movie, relished the psychological acuteness of what I was seeing, felt its black absurdity resonate in my poor, chemically imbalanced noggin. From the very first images deep inside the human brain, I felt it could not be about anything else, even though I didn't know where it was going to go from there.

(Spoilers? Oh, yes.)

Attention font fan(atic)s: Many thanks to Larry Adylette of Welcome to L.A. for passing along this video, Font Conference. I guess Helvetica is not represented because Ariel was created in order to avoid paying royalties for Helvetica. Microsoft Windows started using it in 1992, and Apple adopted it for Mac OS X in 2001. (Microsoft commissioned Verdana in 1996.)

No, it did not mean that anyone disagreed with what you wrote.

Moments later: Now comments submitted say "Text is wrong." Whatever that means.

I don't hear NPR's movie critic Bob Mondello all that often anymore ('cause I'm not in my car as much as I used to be), but I've never heard him more excited than when he reviewed "Journey to the Center of the Earth" last week. Not the new Brendan Fraser 3D one, but the 1959 version with James Mason, Pat Boone, Arlene Dahl and Diane Baker.

Although Mondello's greatest enthusiasm by far is for the 1959 film, his best lines describe the 2008 production: "It's considerably more "real"-looking -- in a differently fakey way.... It'll just show you what Hollywood used to do, and do well, done well." Well put. As I was saying about movie blood, what we accept as "realistic" isn't necessarily realistic at all. It's as much a convention of the times we live in as anything else. Much of the groundbreaking CGI of today isn't much better than it was ten years ago, and a lot of the old CGI -- which seemed so convincing at the time -- now looks... well, better than the rubber octopus in "Ed Wood," but dated nevertheless. Even some of the great special effects movies like "Jurassic Park" (1993) don't look much more sophisticated than "King Kong" (1930) these days.

Meanwhile "Wall-E" (and "Finding Nemo") writer-director Andrew Stanton sounds like a really savvy filmmaker. He told Terry Gross on Fresh Air about a lot of the brainstorming that went into "Wall-E," and I had another one of those NPR "driveway moments" during this part of the interview: