You have seven days to go back and re-watch old episodes to get caught up in time for the season premiere next Tuesday night (fittingly on Groundhog Day).

The Helper Monkey has been watching selected shows from all five seasons as a refresher course and has a few observations.

– The show is so much better without Charlie and Claire.

– Season Two Ben Linus/Henry Gale was just a tease of things to come. Michael Emerson = Show MVP.

– Jacob may not have “touched” Juliet in the Season Five flashbacks, but, according to Ben, he did cure her sister’s cancer.

– What DEADWOOD alums will appear in the final season? Surely there’s a role for Ian McShane as Daniel Faraday’s father or Charles Widmore’s brother.

Start your countdown clock….

[Posted by Mark Coale]

Film director Eric Rohmer, part of the French New Wave in the 1960s, passed away Monday in Paris at the age of 89.

He might be best known in the US for MA NUIT CHEZ MAUD (MY NIGHT WITH MAUD) which was nominated for a Best Screenplay Academy Award in 1971 or his more recent films CONTE D’HIVER (A WINTER’S TALE) (1993) and CONTE D’AUTOMNE (AUTUMN TALE) (1998). His last picture was 2007’s LES AMOURS D’ASTREE ET DE CELADON (ROMANCE OF ASTREE AND CELADON).

Rohmer was also editor-in-chief of CAHIERS DU CINEMA from 1956 to 1963. He also co-wrote, with Claude Chabrol, the book “Hitchcock, the First Forty-Four Films.”

Rohmer’s pseudonym (his real name was either Maurice Henri Josepher Scherer or Jean-Marie Maurice Scherer) came from an amalgam of director Erich von Stroheim and author Sax Rohmer.

posted by mark coale

[Warning: no comic book content in this post.]


TWILIGHT Candy Hearts for Valentine’s Day?

posted by mark coale

Yes, Mythbusters will try and build Captain James T. Kirk’s cannon, with which he took on the deadly Gorn.

Can the world handle this clash of geekery?

[posted by mark coale]

MST3K ON HULU

Joel AND Mike episodes.

Only 5 so far, but hey, one of them is the great GIANT GILA MONSTER.

Posted by Mark Coale

In case you missed the just-concluded World Cup Draw, the US and England ended up in the same group and will play each other on June 12th in South Africa. Will there be a second Civil War in the Beat household?

By the way, whatever happened to that David Beckham and Posh comic book Stan Lee was talking about last year?

Posted by mark coale

It’s Black Friday, people. Remember to be kind to the harried and overstressed retail employees.

(pretend for the time being there are shirtless pictures of Gerard Butler and Clive [used to be cool before finding out he was a Liverpool fan] Owen here)

We’re sure that FMB will give the Beat a wonderful birthday, let’s hope that AMC also delivers a present of a good adaptation of The Prisoner tonight.

I’m sure The Beat will have more on this later in the week but don’t forget that the new version of The Prisoner starts on Sunday. And, as a tie-in, the Thomas Disch novel is back in print too.

By Mark Coale

There was plenty of talk last week about what kind of success WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE would have this weekend at the box office.

Well, it caused quite the rumpus, taking in almost $33 million and easily winning the week.

From the point-of-view of someone without children who didn’t go through a childhood divorce, it was very well made but melancholy. Certainly worth your time. No more details for fear of the comments section being flooded with whining of anti-spoiler zealots.

Longtime wrestling manager Captain Lou Albano passed away today at the age of 76. In the 1970s, Albano was one of the big three managers in the WWWF, along with the already-deceased Classie Freddie Blassie and The Grand Wizard.

In the 1980s, Albano became a crossover celebrity after appearing in Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” video and parlayed that into things like the Super Mario Brothers Super Show television show.

By Mark Coale

Sure, we published our first issue in [cough] years and it was great to see old friends and discuss not being able to watch either the England or US matches with FMB, but can anything really top finding this book in a 50-cent bin?

So great for all the wrong reasons.

While everyone marveled at PLANETARY 27 finally being published, a much less important book will also debut this week.

The often-delayed issue four of ODESSA STEPS MAGAZINE makes its first appearance at the Baltimore Comic Con this weekend (see earlier post for more details).

In this issue, you can find such diverse things as an interview with Jamie S. Rich talking comics and Criterion DVDs, sportswriter Dan LeBatard, an academic article about STARMAN and lots of wrestling wackiness both north and south of the border.

And only three bucks. Surely a bargain.

You can find it at the Odessa Steps Magazine booth (#138) in Artist’s Alley. There’s also a good chance you can find THE BEAT HERSELF at the booth, likely haranguing the helper monkey on why it took so long for this to be published.

This is THE BEAT breaking in here and congratulating Mark on getting out another issue of ODESSA STEPS! The last time it came out people read fanzines. Perhaps after seeing this, they will again. Please stop by and say hi and get a copy, and once again, THANK YOU MARK COALE.

By Matt Maxwell

So this wasn’t the first comic show in Long Beach. Not so long ago, Wizard used to have their LA-based show in Long Beach. And back then, it was pretty good. Decently-sized, good crowds, some programming, a collection of bars and restaurants nearby that you could sneak out to instead of paying eight dollars for a slice of pizza. Had great conversations with both Grant Morrison and Darwyn Cooke at those shows, and had a good time (since it was only a little over an hour away from where I lived at the time and was pretty cheap as these things went.)

Then Wizard moved their show to the LA Convention Center and it promptly became a ghost town. LA-based people no longer treated it as a vacation (Long Beach is about a half hour south of downtown and a pleasant enough destination), but as work. That and, though it’s being rebuilt and gentrified aggressively, downtown LA by the convention center isn’t that great a place to hang out (though leaps and bounds better than it used to be in the nineties). Marvel sent a delegation and DC stopped sending theirs. The LA show never really recovered. I exhibited there once and attended once, neither time was all that interesting (but the light crowds made for a good set of convention training wheels as it were.)

I was pretty interested to see that the same crew was bringing the show back, no longer under the aegis of Wizard (how often do you see that phrase typed out?) and with a very comics-centric focus (though Nintendo easily had the largest booth there). Sure, sign me up. If nothing else, it gives me a good chance to see my friends in Orange County. Maybe sell some books. Granted, it’s no longer a trivial task to get down there, but it’s not all that much of a trip either. As Sean T. Collins writes, “I’ll eat that.”

(more…)

According to an article in the Sunday New York Times, The Twilight Zone turned 50 years old last Friday.

It’s easy to mention “To Serve Man” or “Time Enough at Last” as your favorite episodes, but what are your favorite “hidden gems?”

Here are a few of mine:

- “Long Live Walter Jameson” – Just how old is Kevin McCarthy’s history professor?

- “Back There” – A time traveler (Russell Johnson aka the professor from Gilligan’s Island) tries to save Lincoln.

- “Will the real Martian Please Stand Up?” – Which diner patron is part of an alien invasion?

- “The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank” – A rural man (James Best aka Roscoe P. Coltrane) shows up at his own funeral.

- “Steel” – Lee Marvin takes place of his robot boxer in a fight likely to kill him.

Tip of the hat to Peter Sanderson for pointing out the article on his Facebook.

It might not be new (since the Star Trek movie reboot has been out for a few months now) but there was no way after seeing these in the grocery store tonight that there was not going to be a post on THE BEAT about them.

I mean. Seriously. Star Trek Eggos.

Last night on Jimmy Kimmel Live, while plugging his new movie, THE INVENTION OF LYING, Ricky Gervais showed a drawing of the character designs for his upcoming HBO animated series (based on the podcasts he did with partner Stephen Merchant and bald Manc Karl Pilkington).

Ricky looks remarkably like Fred Flintstone.

Steve is tall.

And Karl still has a head that looks like a [censored] orange.

The show will apparently begin in the US in January.

The woman that inspired the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” passed away at the age of 46 from Lupus.

From the WaPo obit:
…

Mrs. Vodden’s connection to the Beatles dates to her childhood friendship with schoolmate Julian Lennon, John Lennon’s son.

Julian Lennon, then 4 years old, came home from school one day with a drawing, showed it to his father and said it was “Lucy in the sky with diamonds.”