News-Record.com

Well, the shoot for the film version of the classic graphic novel Watchmen has officially wrapped. The film is slated for release one year from today, March 6 2009.

Director Zack Snyder (300) has posted some cast photos which include costumed versions of The Comedian, Rorschach, Nite Owl, Ozymandias and the Silk Spectre.

I think Rorschach (the psychopathic character based on The Question) looks properly ominous.

This one of The Comedian seems a little Joel Schumacher-directing-Batman to me.

And this one of Ozymandias just totally jumps the shark.

I know I shouldn't expect subtlety and nuance from the guy who gave us 300 -- but Alan Moore is not exactly Frank Miller. Different writer, different stuff, different tone and sensibility needed.

Looks like Dave Gibbons, the artist who co-create the universe with Moore, is pleased with the production, though. I should really reserve judgment until I've seen the finished product.

For those coming in late: Watchmen, Alan Moore's epic deconstruction of the Superhero genre, has been stumbling its way to the screen for 20 years. The comic is consistently hailed as one of the best graphic stories ever told and helped give birth to a darker, more serious tone in superhero comics (which Moore later tried to dismantle with the "pop comics" of his America's Best Comics line). It also made Time magazine's list of All-Time Top 100 Novels alongside Catch-22 and To Kill a Mockingbird. Not too shabby.

Moore is famously critical of films of his work (and who could blame him the way it's been screwed up -- "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" and "From Hell"). He was happy to essentially stay quiet about the film version of V For Vendetta until the producers began telling people he approved of and liked it. He's gone back and forth for years between not really caring if they made films out of his stories and actively opposing it.

Too soon to tell if this one will tick him off.

Over at the Bargain Blog, Mike Fuchs points to an article in Slate by a writer who bought an HD-DVD player...only to see the format go the way of the Dodo a few months later.

Josh Levine writes:

"If there's any consolation for us HD-DVD-buying losers, it's that disc-shaped physical media won't be around much longer. Once high-definition digital downloads, like those available through Apple TV, hit the mainstream, Blu-ray will be as dead as HD-DVD. Take that, Sony!"

He's right, of course -- and early adopters of all sorts get screwed. I've been through three MP3 players since getting my first one in 2005. The one I have now actually appeals to me because of its simplicity -- and it's actually about the size of my first one and smaller than my second. It takes us a while to wade through the tech that's being constantly spewed at us these days and figure out what we like, what we need and what will serve us best.

I didn't buy an HD-DVD player -- and I don't have a Blu-Ray player either. Hell, I've still got tons of VHS tapes. And I'm going to keep playing them until they go completely fritzy-wobbly on me and I can't make sense of them. My DVDs, too.

Any of you get on that train a little early and end up kicking yourself?

The San Francisco Chronicle has a great piece about a woman selling a Mastodon skeleton on eBay.

The woman, Nancy Fiddler, said she's had no bids so far -- which could have something to do with the $115,000 starting price.

My favorite bit from the article:

Mastodon experts say that six figures for a mastodon is several figures too many, and that fossils belong in museums instead of wine bars and garages.

"That's an incredibly inflated price," said UC Berkeley paleontologist Mark Goodwin. "Mastodons are not uncommon. And the commercialization of fossils is a huge problem. It's undermining the science. This is our fossil heritage, and it shouldn't be for sale."

I just love the idea that the paleontologist is upset because she thinks that whoever buys this skeleton is getting hosed. What's the Blue Book value on an extinct animal's fossilized remains?

Blender magazine has an excellent feature on the 20 Biggest Record Company Screw-Ups of All Time.

Some of my favorites:

Thomas Edison having his record company diss Jazz in favor of foxtrots and waltzes.

Berry Gordy selling Motown for $60 million in 1988. Five years later the new owners sold it off for $325 million.

Warner refusing to release Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, then having a subsidiary buy the best-seller back after giving them the masters with their walking papers.

A Decca executive passing on the Beatles because he was annoyed that the line of kids was so long outside the Cavern Club in Liverpool, where he had come to see them. Hundreds of kids were gathered outside the club in the rain, pushing at each other to get in, and he decided it wasn't worth the trouble because "Groups with guitars are on their way out."

Check out the trailer for the new Incredible Hulk movie, starring Ed Norton as Bruce Banner.

For those keeping count -- yes, this is the second Hulk movie in the last five years. I enjoyed 2003's Hulk, but I did think it was a little psycho-babbly and am looking forward to this reboot.

If you've seen Primal Fear, you know Ed Norton's perfect for this. And while the effects still look a little weird to me, it looks like the script's taking its cue from some of the Hulk comics of the last few years, which have seen the character return to his roots as a loner hunted by the government and unable to get close to anyone for fear of the monster that lives inside him.

Also, for the comic geek fanboys out there -- the other monster toward the end of the clip looks like it could be The Abomination, a fan favorite Hulk villain.

ABBA drummer Ola Brunkert was found dead in his home at Spain after an apparent accident with a glass partition.

According to ABBA's website: "Together with bass player Rutger Gunnarsson, Ola is probably the only musician to appear on all ABBA albums -- he was one of the most frequently used Swedish session musicians during the 1970s."

Originally a Catholic Feast Day celebrating the life of a Saint who probably did not drive any snakes out of anywhere, it's now down to drinking, wearing green and spotlighting any Irish heritage you can claim, however remote or tangential.

And why not?

Talk about a strange week in rock news -- and it's only Tuesday.

- ABBA's drummer died in a freak garden/broken glass accident in Spain.

- The Raconteurs are rushing the release of their new album, Consolers of the Lonely, to next week.

Stores, fans and the press will all get the album at the same time and it will be available for download from their website.

- Trent Reznor is seeking Nine Inch Nails fans to make the group's next videos.

Radiohead is doing something similar.

- When and if Led Zeppelin hit the tour circuit again their opening act could be...VELVET REVOLVER?!?!

- Apparently the call girl in New York Gov. Elliot Spitzer's recent sex scandal has made upwards of $200,000 in downloads of her songs "What We Want" and "Move Your Body."

And you thought $4,000 a week for sex with the governor was good dough. If she gets a record deal she's going to have to thank the morbidly curious in her liner notes. Also, Larry Flynt's offered her $1 million to pose in Hustler. Who says it's only Julia Roberts who gets a hooker Cinderella story?

Arthur C. Clarke, author of 100 books including the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, died in Sri Lanka yesterday at age 90.

Some good obits out there -- though the NYT headline looks as though it was written by Yoda.

This one highlights Clarke's qualified skepticism and deeply held atheism. From the piece:

Clarke certainly believed in extraterrestrial, intelligent life. "They might land tomorrow on the White House lawn," he told McAleer. But he did not believe in UFOs, which he said could be reasonably explained.

Nor did he believe in God. He was an unapologetic atheist with no patience for organized religion, which he blamed for many of society's ills. "The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion," he wrote in a 1999 essay.

Wired magazine writes that Clarke told them what he wanted as his epitaph in a 1993 interview:

"I've often quoted it," he said."'He never grew up; but he never stopped growing.'"

File under "Revivals...sorta"...

- Queen is releasing their first album of new material in more than a decade -- and this time they're doing it with ex-Bad Company frontman Paul Rodgers, with whom they've been touring with a sort of "Tribute to Freddie Mercury" show.

Hardcore Mercury fans are losing their minds and saying they shouldn't call this new iteration of the band Queen. Which you had to sort of see coming. Their last album, 1995's Made in Heaven, was made with leftover Mercury vocals.

- Variety reports that director Sam Raimi (Spider-Man, A Simple Plan) is looking to revive Tom Clancy's superspy Jack Ryan, who has been played on screen by Alec Baldwin (The Hunt for Red October), Harrison Ford (Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger) and Ben Affleck (Sum of All Fears).

Jack Ryan movies have, to date, raked in nearly $800 million at the box office -- so I guess you can see why they'd want to bring him back yet again. My dad's a Tom Clancy fan and these guys (and they're almost all guys) are rabid. Freddie Mercury fans may scream and cry if Queen replaces him with someone they don't like -- but Tom Clancy fans might shoot the poor guy who becomes the next Jack Ryan if he lets them down. I nominate Vin Diesel for this very reason.

- Yes (the band) are hitting the road for a 40th anniversary tour.

No, no you're right -- they did just do a 35th anniversary tour. Think that's a little too much Yes? Keyboardist Rick Wakeman agrees with you -- so he's sitting this one out. This is the fourth time he's quit the band. His son Oliver's going to be handling his duties while dad takes a principled stand over giving Yes fans more of what they inexplicably continue to want.

- It looks like Bob Odinkirk and David Cross of the late, brilliant Mr. Show are coming back to HBO for a new series. It won't be a Mr. Show revival, but I'm still looking forward to it.

- And last but by no means least, Elvis Costello is releasing his new album, Momofuku in only two formats -- digital and vinyl.

If you buy the vinyl album (which I will) you get a voucher for a digital download. Hardcore audiophiles continue to (probably rightly) extoll the virtues of vinyl and (certainly rightly) condemn the comparatively terrible sound of the MP3 format. Like Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails, Costello has built an audience that's loyal enough to roll with him and remain curious as he experiments with how to continue to deliver music to us in the way he likes.

Wired has a great piece about counter terrorists looking to the online game World of Warcraft for ideas on how to stop real-world terrorism.

From the piece:

"Warcraft has a history of in-game terrorist activity. Early on, players found a curse in a high-level dungeon that would turn them into living bombs. They would then teleport to major cities and detonate themselves, killing nearby players. These suicide bombers gradually began to target areas where large number of players gathered, usually at auction houses or banks. Eventually, attacks occurred with enough frequency that some players simply avoided dangerous cities."

Chris Evans, the guy who played The Human Torch in the two god-awful Fantastic Four movies, is telling MTV news that he doesn't think there will be another -- and that he's ready to be done with it.

I think we're all ready to be done with it.

I love The Fantastic Four. And I think they could, as Spider-Man proved in the first and second films, translate to the screen in a way that would thrill both adults and children. A solid concept always can. But they've screwed the pooch twice on this one and if there are going to be any others they need to do what Batman (and now The Hulk) are doing and just pull a full on reboot, as though the first two never happened.

Which is essentially what Evans is saying when he admits to MTV that, "I think that if [FF2] does okay and people respond with the appreciation of a more serious tone, hopefully [with] the third one we can inch closer to a legitimate cast and a legitimate film."

Saying that your first two movies failed to have a legitimate cast that made up a legitimate film does sound like straight shooting -- and has Clooney proved with his Batman film, sometimes you just have to admit something sucked to get past it and do better work. But it also sounds like a guy who knows this train ain't going back there.

LONDON, England (AP) -- British writer and self-styled dandy Sebastian Horsley was denied entry to the United States after arriving to promote his memoir of sex, drugs and flamboyant fashion.
Horsley

Sebastian Horsley was deemed "not admissible" by U.S. customs agents.

Horsley said he was questioned for eight hours Tuesday by border officials at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey before being denied entry on grounds of "moral turpitude."

The 45-year-old author was traveling to New York for the U.S. launch of "Dandy in the Underworld," his account of a life dedicated to sex, drugs and finely tailored clothes.

"I was dressed flamboyantly -- top hat, long velvet coat, gloves," Horsley said. "My one concession to American sensibilities was to remove my nail polish. I thought that would get me through."

Full story here.

----

You've got to scratch your head at a country that treats The Rolling Stones like royalty and lets them tour coast to coast but deports this weird little twist, whose only drug conviction (discharged) happened 25 years ago, because he writes about drugs and hilariously expensive clothes.

Not having to actually tour the U.S. AND getting a ton of free press over this sort of thing? I'm sure Horsley is laughing all the way to the bank.

Also -- I love that this guy's Wikipedia entry begins thusly:

"Sebastian Horsley (born 1962) is a London writer and artist best known for wearing a stovepipe hat."

REM's new album, Accelerate, is in stores (and online) April 1.

And they feel fine.

Before its release, however, frontman Michael Stipe has an important announcement.

When I was a kid, there were few things cooler than G.I. Joe.

It took the massive cultural tsunami that was the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to unseat Duke, Snake Eyes, Scarlett and Sgt. Slaughter as the coolest good guys (with the coolest bad guys).

Unfortunately, the cartoon doesn't hold up very well when adult fans revisit it.

But, like Transformers before them, the Joes are getting the big screen, live action treatment. And here's a shot of Snake Eyes, the silent-but-deadly ninja every guy my age wanted to be when he was barely old enough to hold anything as sharp as a steak knife.

I've been really enjoying HBO's mini-series event, John Adams.

Which sort of surprises me.

I'm not much for period pieces. I find that most films that take place during dramatic, world-changing events in human history are so scrubbed down and overblown that there's no way you could be fooled into thinking it might have happened even sort of this way.

But the John Adams mini-series...it's like seeing Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven after a steady diet of John Ford or Howard Hawkes westerns. There's something about seeing our founding fathers sweaty, smelly, dirty, petty and egotistical that seems so much more authentic.

At one point in the second installment a group of representatives sits around a table patting themselves on the back over the first continental congress -- which has to this point accomplished nothing. Adams -- whose directness we admire even if it does sometimes make him an insufferable prick -- says that all they've proved is that every man there thinks he's a great man and has to go out of his way letting everyone else know it.

Which is the kind of thing you never read in your grammar school history class.

Any of you enjoying it as much as I am?

Reader Jim Vanner sent me a link to this Q&A with historian David McCullough from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

McCullough is the author of some of my favorite historical biographies, and in this Q&A he talks about the John Adams miniseries HBO has created around his bestselling biography.

McCullough has had really good experiences with HBO so far -- they produced the excellent Truman, based on his Pultizer-prize winning biography of Harry S. Truman. He has high praise for what they've done with John Adams as well.

The author says of the min-series' gritty realism:

"It's going to be the 18th century -- and particularly, of course, the 18th century in this country -- as Americans have never seen it before. It's not a costume pageant; it's the way life was. You are going to see people with bad teeth and dirt under their fingernails. You are going to see a man tarred and feathered and it's going to be hard to watch, it's so awful. It wasn't just a sort of high school prank. Tar-and-feathering was torture. People died from it. You are going to experience the horror of smallpox and of someone having a leg amputated without anesthetics. It's very real and entirely in keeping with the way it was."

When punk came to California, photographer Jenny Lens was ready for it -- and she caught all of its luminaries, losers and laugh-riots when punk exploded there in the late 70s.

Rolling Stone has a great preview of her first book, Punk Pioneers: When Punk Was Fun, which is out next month. Some of my favorite shots:

Debbie Harry of Blondie at the Whisky in LA, 1977.

Rick Nielson of Cheap Trick mugs for the camera while bassist Tom Petersson smooches a young (and adorable) Joan Jett backstage in Santa Monica in 1977.

Lorna Doom of The Germs at a photo shoot in 1977.

Joey Ramone wants the airwaves (and the robots) in Little Tokyo in 1977.

Holy Chocolate Salty Balls!

South Park Studios is now live -- a South Park internet hub from which you can legally stream every episode from all 12 seasons of the show, right up to last Sunday's installment, all for free.

The site also has clips, games, news, an episode guide (when DID Kenny come back, and when DID we find out who Cartman's father was?) -- as well as this really weird avatar maker.

R.E.M.'s new album, Accelerate, isn't in stores until April 1 -- but you can listen to the whole thing now if you like, over at iLike.

You can also check out this NPR interview with the band, which links to a stream of their full show from South by Southwest this year.

The Queen of Soul turns 66 today...

...and Sir Elton Hercules John turns 61.

Oooooooooh...

The new Black Keys album, Attack and Release, is out next week.

But you can listen to it here right now.

Have heard the first three tracks and oh, do I like it.

Producer Danger Mouse (of Gnarls Barkley and Grey Album fame) apparently asked the Black Keys boys to write a set of songs for Ike Turner last year. When Turner died, they morphed it into this strange and wonderful record.

It's a slow drink of whiskey of a record -- some southern fried electric blues, some British blues revival psychedlia, a little soul and R&B for good measure.

Go and listen. It won't cost you anything and you'll feel sexier all day.

Here are the boys rocking "Your Touch" live:

Now this is one strange story:

"This could make for one odd family reunion: Barack Obama is a distant cousin of actor Brad Pitt, and Hillary Rodham Clinton is related to Pitt's girlfriend, Angelina Jolie.

Researchers at the New England Historic Genealogical Society found some remarkable family connections for the three presidential candidates -- Democratic rivals Obama and Clinton, and Republican John McCain."

It was a story some time ago that Obama and George W. Bush are 10th cousins. But the researchers have also found that Obama is distantly related to Harry S. Truman, James Madison, Dick Cheney, Gerald Ford, Lyndon Johnson and General Robert E. Lee.

Clinton has a few notable distant relatives herself -- many of them French Canadians. But Jack Kerouac is canceled out by Camilla Parker-Bowles. A connection to Alanis Morissette is less impressive when we learn she's also related to Celine Dion. A connection to Madonna is, at this point in our cultural history, sort of neutral.

Dr. Pepper is taking up the cause of every true Guns n' Roses fan by promising everyone in America a free Dr. Pepper if Axl Rose will release the band's Chinese Democracy, for which fans have been waiting 17 years.

From the press release:

"It took a little patience to perfect Dr Pepper's special mix of 23 ingredients, which our fans have come to know and love," said Jaxie Alt, director of marketing for Dr Pepper. "So we completely understand and empathize with Axl's quest for perfection — for something more than the average album."

Herb Peterson, inventor of McDonald's Egg McMuffin, has died at 89.

I know that most good southerners are partial to biscuits as the base of a good breakfast sandwich, but I've always thought the English muffin was brilliant -- maybe even better than the croissant that is the base of Burger King's croissanwich.

Here's to Herb -- I had a McMuffin in his honor today.

The Rolling Stones are playing Blackpool, England for the first time in 44 years after the town lifted a ban imposed after a 1964 concert caused riots.

A lot of things that seemed dangerous in 1964 now seem almost quaint -- heck, Holiday Inn even lifted their ban on The Who now that the biggest problem the band causes them is Pete Townsend waking up to got the bathroom every twenty minutes.

Right now I'm listening to the soundtrack to Scorsese's new Stones documentary, Shine a Light, streaming free here.

There's a version of "Loving Cup" with Jack White. Nice.

Maya Angelou is 80 years old.

Good story about her life (with pictures) here.

Here she is with Dave Chapelle on the Sundance Channel's Iconoclasts: