...which title I pick not just because the song's been stuck in my head since Saturday's Prom Night, but because the first issue of Grant Morrison's 'Superman Beyond 3D' is the comic I was hoping and expecting Final Crisis would be. Only in one spread does the 3D effect have quite the same mind-twisting force as it did in the Blazing World scenes of Alan Moore's Black Dossier, but even if for the rest of the issue it's just a gimmick then hey, 3D is a pretty cool gimmick. And this...this is what I want from a Grant Morrison Event. Dead worlds! Limbo! Dr Manhattan with the serial numbers filed off! Cross-time lunacy and alternate heroes and giant crashing spaceships and only Superman left to save the day. It's as if Levitzseid has got Grant enchained at the heart of his monstrous engine of destruction, perverting his mighty Morrison powers in the furtherance of DC's Anti-Fun Equation...but Grant's too good to go down without a fight, and so by some ludicrous contrivance freed an aspect of himself to write a good Final Crisis comic.
The second best comic of last week, incidentally, was the conclusion to Book One of Warren Ellis' Doktor Sleepless. Just when I was worried we were getting a Planetary-style loss of focus, it turns out that the mysticism and the techno-evangelism have a perfectly sensible reason for being in the same book. I think we were perhaps meant to come away from the book with the idea that Doktor Sleepless is not the hero after all; personally, I'm backing him all the way.

Speaking of mad science: never mind the cure for cancer - isn't unlocking telomere structure the first step on the road to immortality in the Fall Revolution books?

Finally got round to watching Brokeback Mountain on Sunday - yes, I know, I fail at gay. I was a bit puzzled at first; I was expecting it to be one of those manly American buddy movies where you're thinking guys, just bone already - except then they do. But whether this was intended or not, I really didn't feel any chemistry off them until it happened. Which worked, I think. As did the scenery, obviously; I'm sure if that hadn't been so beautifully, expansively shot then the film would never have been able to cross over to the extent that it did. I wasn't convinced by the flashbacks - I thought they upset a flow which was otherwise brilliantly established - but otherwise, it's just such a well-judged film. Details which don't sit right at first (are the women being deliberately established as deadening forces, in the manner beloved of misogynist homosexuals?) come clear in time: it's not that the women are dead hands, it's that society is. A homophobic rural society especially, but not exclusively; even if Jack and Ennis had settled down somewhere nice and friendly just outside San Francisco, the mere fact of domesticity would mean what they had couldn't stay as pure as it was when it was born up on Brokeback Mountain.
(For another consideration of how uneasily passion sits in a mundane world, consider My Zinc Bed, which features excellent performances from Jonathan Pryce and Paddy Considine, and a rather strange accent from Uma Thurman. Of course, neither of these made me cry a fraction as much as Kiki's Delivery Service; I already know how malformed this world is, it's seeing the contrast of what a decent one would be like which breaks me down)

I'd never really considered the state of Japan in the forties, but David Peace's Tokyo Year Zero makes a plausible case for it not being very much fun. The characters are more damaged than those in Peace's The Damned Utd; the police system in which they operate makes The Wire look decadently overfunded and The Shield feel like a community relations masterclass. Unusually for a politically-engaged historical work these days, no contemporary resonance seems intended - perhaps because to do so would imply support for the Iraq war, although the relentless, incantatory squalor of it all reminds us all how much is sacrificed in the short term during even the most justified regime change. The one thing that has briefly managed to throw me out of the moment depicted is the presence of characters named Miyazaki and Nakamura. Common family names they may be in Japan, for all I know - but to me they have very specific holders.

Being intrigued by the glimpsed red-top headline "MUM OF 5 IS FIRST LESBIAN BIGAMIST" (and frankly, who wouldn't be), I felt obliged to investigate the story, which turned out to be rather desperate. But one of the participants being called Beddoes reminded me of the poet of the same name - "'Twas in those days
That never were, nor ever shall be, reader, but on this paper; golden, glorious days" - (himself less than entirely straight), whose aunt turns out to have been Maria Edgeworth. Of whom one contemporary divine said "I should class her books as among the most irreligious I have ever read ... she does not attack religion, nor inveigh against it, but makes it appear unnecessary by exhibiting perfect virtue without it ... No works ever produced so bad an effect on my mind as hers". Which even within the inglorious field of believing religion to be key to morality, must take some kind of biscuit. And to bring us back from there to the modern news - more fun with islamic dress. Which reminds me, can we maybe make Salman Rushdie a Lord? Or a secular saint? Please?

The Cat Returns is the first non-Miyazaki Ghibli film I've seen (well, as far as I recall - it's quite possible some of the strange anime I half-remember from childhood afternoons was theirs). And this means that for most of the film I'm thinking, well, that was pretty good, but Miyazaki would have done it so much better. The way they move, the faces, nothing is quite in that perfect pitch he almost always manages. The lead has, I suppose, a certain similarity to the girl in his one mis-step, Spirited Away, in that she's far too much the whiny victim compared to Miyazaki's normal protagonists. And the plot...it feels too much like a dream, or an old fable, and these are subtly different forms to film, where the same structures will not suffice.
But by the end, these objections fall away - in part because the film seems to be getting the hang of itself more, but also because its charms are taking effect, and I realise that if it's not Miyazaki, it's still better than almost anyone else.

When I'm objecting to censorship demands made by scum, representatives of the Lost Left like to ask "Ah*, but what if there were a work of art which went against *your* values like that?" And I always say to them, well, there are plenty, none of which I want banned, and some of which are even really good. There are beautiful passages in the King James Bible, for instance (always helps to have Shakespeare on the translation team), and Hero may be a propaganda film for a vile state, but it's also a stunning piece of cinema. The film's message is that China's unity is paramount - there is a subtlety in how characters come to realise this, true, but its nonetheless made explicit that this excuses all manner of deaths and oppressions for the supposed Greater Good. And yet - the point may be vile, but it is never made artlessly. Within the film, it works. That may be a bubble world, a thought experiment which doesn't map on to the real world, but considered as art, it doesn't matter. The Chinese government and military approved of this film enough that it has 18,000 soldiers as extras - but considered as art, the main thing is that given they're playing soldiers (albeit of a much earlier era), this makes for some absolutely stunning massed scenes. And the smaller fights...you know how everyone got excited about Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon even though the fight scenes had some really ropy effects? These are the fights those fights dream about being. They're jaw-dropping, they express character perfectly, and above all they are things of utter beauty.
So yes, it's poison. But art can be poison sometimes and still be wonderful.

Hoorah! Grant Morrison's Batman run has resumed! Boo! It's illustrated prose, and illustrated at that by some obviously computer-generated-in-a-really-nineties-way McKean wannabe. There are some great ideas in this tale of how the Joker's periodic self-reinventions work (and they have something to say about the world beyond the Batman and the Joker, which is where Alan Moore always says 'The Killing Joke' failed). But they would all have been much better expressed as, you know, a *comic*. And I've not seen Batman look less threatening since he was being played by George Clooney (who I still think, tragically, could now make a great Batman but will never get a second chance).

*Yes, delivered in the tones of Stewart Lee's Jesus. How did you guess?