District 9: Political allegory, man’s inhumanity, banality of evil, and FRICKIN’ RAY GUN FIGHTS & BATTLE SUITS. Oscar right now.

Currently available on DVD and On-Demand. [Editorial disclosure: District 9 is an advertiser, but that's really really really not why Will feels it deserves an Oscar.]

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Whatever the structure of a long-term relationship, in terms of gender breakdown or number of people involved, I believe that long-term relationships are good for the larger society. People with loving families have something to lose; they are invested in their lives and being good citizens.

Why does it occur to me to mention polyamory and gay marriage today in particular? It is February 14, Valentines Day, and the number two most searched term on Google is polyamorous. Valentines Day, the date for celebration of traditional romance, seems like a peculiar day for searches to be volcanic for polyamorous. Are people thinking that they don’t feel obligated to buy enough special dinners, lingeries, flowers, and candy today? What would make today the day to suddenly wonder about what it means to be polyamorous?

Now, head on over to Gothic.net and ask for a standard definition of what it means to be gothic. Okay, don’t do that because you probably already know that you will hear quite varied explanations. Polyamory is much the same. Some people feel that being poly is about connecting sexually with a larger-than-average number of partners, but only people you connect with emotionally as well. Some people feel that poly means having one primary partner and then other lovers in relationships of varied terms. Some people practice polyamory the same as any dyad two person marriage, but with …

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Every Halloween, one or another group of my friends and acquaintances will invite me to go re-watch Nightmare Before Christmas. And obviously, I have photographed a lot of hot women who have Tim Burton-inspired tattoos. So I feel like it is appropriately newsworthy to point out that there is a new Tim Burton movie coming out. That goes double, counting the casting of Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter. (My apologies if I can’t stop thinking of Fight Club quotes whenever she is on screen; I’ll control my Tourette’s and not repeat them now with commentary on how appropriate they are in light of Lewis Carroll’s reported tastes.)

Although I found Nightmare Before Christmas visually lovely, I was discomfited by the the message. Jack Skellington doesn’t get to have a Merry Xmas because he is too weird and spooky? WTF? I believe strongly that you are entitled to the rewards of the larger society, if you earn them. Whether or not you have giant poofy red hair or a head like a jack o’ lantern pumpkin skull.

But that’s just me. And, if the structure of the costuming in Alice in Wonderland seems a bit cynically designed to make it easy for fandom costumers to duplicate, so be it. I think it is cool that Hollywood is pushing the envelope on 3D and, when that kind of dough is at stake, it does help to mitigate risk wherever possible. When it comes to creating entertainment, the line …

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Check out this featurette from Universal Pictures on the making of The Wolfman.

I’m excited to check out the new movie The Wolfman, which opened tonight.

I enjoy the classics when it comes to monster movies and this film is particularly interesting for having big deal actors like Benicio del Toro and Anthony Hopkins. These are people who are big deal actors known for their actual acting chops and not who they are having sex with or partying with this week. How often do you have multiple Oscar winners and multiple Golden Globe winners in a werewolf monster movie?

Some people say horror is on the wane as a genre, but maybe it is just going more high end. Who better than Universal to raise the bar on classic horror.

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Alexander McQueen was such an extremely talented and out-of-the-box designer that even punks who hate the whole concept of fashion could appreciate his work. In keeping with this, Alexander McQueen said that he once used a pen to scrawl the word CUNT into the lining of a coat he worked on for Prince Charles. David Bowie’s coat on the cover of the Earthling CD was by Alexander McQueen. Hopefully, there were no bonus notes in David Bowie’s clothing lining.

As vampires have become more mainstream-acceptable, pockets of the gothic subculture have been inclined to reject the whole vampire thing. Okay, I wrote my thesis on vampire stuff, so maybe this is no surprise, but the whole immortality aspect always got a thumbs-up from me. My family is packed with humans who tend to be both long-lived and kinda dicks about funerals. The way that Alexander McQueen pushed the envelope in life will give him a certain kind of immortality.

I have never met Alexander McQueen, but my own life had a lil too many deaths in it this past year. In case Blue Blood is the only site you’ve looked at in the past day, Alexander McQueen was supposed to attend his mother’s funeral today, but he was reportedly found hanged in his home yesterday. He leaves a remarkable fashion …

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Sega is coming out with an Aliens vs. Predator game and they sent us over a neat little trailer for it. Would you rather be hunted by Aliens or Predators? Personally, I would prefer Predator because you can just choose not to participate with that guy and Predator will respect your choice of non-violence. Alien has all those pregnancy hormones in the system and there is just no rational getting out of a fight.

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Today is Groundhog Day and apparently the current famous groundhog Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow. So that means six more weeks of winter. As I’m in Los Angeles, that means that Hollywood will have more 62 degree days. Angelenos will tell you that it is 72 degrees Fahrenheit year round here and that just is not so. We even had a whole bunch of rain (with bonus flooding!) last week. Not that I’m gloating. I like to visit weather sometimes.

I have to leave the house today. I am thinking about saying, “Ned? Ned Ryerson?” to every person I am asked to shake hands with today. I actually often think of that scene, particularly out at clubs or at professional events.

For any of you who may be so culturally impoverished as to have not yet seen Bill Murray’s starring turn in the movie Groundhog Day, please rectify this failing as soon as possible, but I will now give you background. Groundhog Day is a classic comedy, released in 1993, directed by Harold Ramis, and written by Harold Ramis and Danny Rubin. Bill Murray plays Phil Connors, a weatherman with buckets of hubris, who is compelled to relive a particular Groundhog Day over and over and over again, until he gets it right. Which, in his case, includes winning Andie MacDowell’s Rita. Each …

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Time Magazine says, “Call it the Decade from Hell, or the Reckoning, or the Decade of Broken Dreams, or the Lost Decade. Call it whatever you want — just give thanks that it is nearly over.” Time Magazine’s Andy Serwer article, The ’00s: Goodbye (at Last) to the Decade from Hell seems like it should be a New Year’s piece, but sometimes it is hard to wait. Heck, I’d intended to post this on December 31 and here I am posting it early too.

The last decade was certainly one filled with digital snake oil and the rise of wikiality over reality, tonal arguments over logical debate, and the erosion of freedom and privacy in the developed world. Many hipsters love to observe on how zombies are awesome monsters because they are weaker than their prey but make up for their shambling loserdom with numbers. So the past decade also saw the rise of people jumping up and down shouting individualist buzzwords while conforming as fast as humanly possible. And I’m not too thrilled by the economic and work ethic evolution in my circle of acquaintance, where so many people I know have gone from talking about their creative endeavors to bragging about how they are leeching money out of the “system”. But those are my complaints.

Time Magazine has their own top ten reasons …

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Some people like to get inspired for the day watching televangelists at 6am, while they get ready for work. Me, I’d like to have a channel of all shows like Mary Queen of Shops on BBC America.

Mary Queen of Shops comes from the same team which produces Gordon Ramsay’s F Word and Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, both shows about how to improve commercial kitchen work. My problem with the Gordon Ramsay shows is that I can’t watch most food television without getting insanely hungry and desperately craving whatever is being prepared. Basically, I have way too low a threshold for food porn. Mary Queen of Shops has a similar format with none of the insatiable craving for sauteed scallops in some special parsley butter sauce following viewing.

Mary Portas is a branding and retail consultant for fashion enterprises. Each episode of this show, she takes a small floundering independent boutique and helps it improve the way it does business. She is a strong advocate of fabulous service and careful market segment focus. It doesn’t even matter if one always agrees with everything she says because part of the show’s appeal is that it puts one in a business frame of mind. It makes you think about what you would do in whatever situation is being presented. Mary Portas comes across as …

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I’ve been in a bit of a morbid headspace due to recent events. So, when Twitter lit up with Brittany Murphy RIP tweets, I’m not proud of it, but I popped over to TMZ to see what happened. I made the correct assumption that TMZ would have the most up-to-the-minute info on anything really depressing and dismal involving bad things happening to a celebrity.

TMZ in fact was updating every few minutes with stuff like UPDATE 4:07 PM ET — A rep for Murphy tells TMZ, “In this time of sadness, the family thanks you for your love and support. It is their wish that you respect their privacy.” They followed this up with paparazzi photos of Brittany Murphy’s grieving husband coming back home from the hospital, after his wife had been pronounced dead. Here is where it gets kind of hilarious. If you have a very very very dark sense of humor.

The stated cause of death for Brittany Murphy was cardiac arrest. Because she was a talented actress, it was common assumption, after her star turn in the meth addict movie Spun, that she was a big ol’ druggee. See Robert Downey Jr.’s performance in Less Than Zero for the classic example of this phenomenon. I think that, if I managed actors, I would tell only untalented ones to ever …

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