trochee

Justice League, Season 1, Disks 1&2
I just finished watching the second DVD in this series from Netflix. This has been a lot of retro fun for an old comics reader, and I enjoy that it actually captures some of the magic of the old Justice League comics I read as a kid. I'm enjoying noticing the background hat-tips (a giant storm is "Tropical Storm Gardner", which has to be a reference to Guy Gardner's temper), Snapper Carr is a reporter.
I notice that the series has dropped the "of America" from the traditional team name, and this seems like a wise thing, considering that the lineup -- if you know the characters' back stories -- is fairly alien: that makes [by increasing alien-ness] one "normal" (psychotic-deranged) human, one human enhanced by laboratory accident/mystical power force [depending on who you read], one human enhanced by alien police-weapon artifact, a thousand-year-old demigod, and the trifecta of a Martian, a Kryptonian, and a Thanagarian. I mean sheesh, we're lucky these people (if that's the right word) feel loyal to Homo sapiens at all. There is one nod, in the In Blackest Night episodes, in that direction:
Superman, investigating the debris of a destroyed planet, to J'onn J'onnz: "Does this remind you of anything?"
J'onn: "The deaths of millions. Grief. Anger. Echoes of both our pasts."
Yow. Shivers when I realize that the two of them are each last surviving members of their species. I was glad to see a teeny bit of acknowledgement of the real darkness in the motivating stories of some of these characters (though I'm still waiting to see Batman's darkness explored a little).

Starfish, by Peter Watts.
This is a great near-future SF story, that I read by recommendation from yendi. Like The Abyss, with which it shares some thematic similarities, it's an SF exploration of the alien spaces even on our own planet -- and in human minds. Who is the kind of person that might get sent to work on the bottom of the deep-sea trenches to run a (claustrophobic, cramped, disturbing) geothermal power station? The oddest-of-the-odd, the people whose minds are already bent and broken: child molesters, sociopaths, paranoids, and masochists. Yet Watts' writing gives them humanity, and even the possibility of a sort of inside-out redemption, leaving the normals on the surface looking more and more bent and twisted themselves.
Spooky, intense, thought-provoking. Recommended.

Lemming, starring (among others) Charlottes Rampling and Gainsbourg.
Spooky psychological thriller that imtboo picked out because of the Charlotte Gainsbourg factor. Scared me quite a bit, actually, and felt like a David Lynch film. It leaves a lot of questions open -- it's not clear whether it's a ghost story, or how much of the movie is hallucination.
Watch it with someone who will hold your hand -- much more fun that way.