One thing singles tell me a lot is that they enjoy singlehood, they really do — and that they would enjoy it even more if they knew, for super-sure guarantee, that it also had an end date. Well, one new movie — starring BG imaginary BFF Emma Caulfield as a gal named Oona — uses machine-as-metaphor to make that fantasy real. It’s TiMER, in which women and men may choose to be implanted with a device that counts down the days, minutes, and seconds until they meet The One. But Oona’s timer is blank. So what will she do? Like the rest of us in the real world, will she have to just “just know”?

From the trailer, TiMER looks like a sweet sci-fi wrapped in a chick-flick tied with a careful-what-you-wish-for bow. And since what we’ve been wishing for is the return of Emma Caulfield, we’re not gonna be careful at all. (Now if we could just know for sure when — or if — it’ll go into wide release.)

Forget the Al Bundy-esque battle over the remote control. According to the New York Times, the latest pop-culture conflict heating up among couples is: The Netflix Wars.

For many couples, the queue — the computer list of which films will arrive next in the mail, after those at home are returned — is as important as everything else that spouses and other varieties of significant others share, from pet names to closet space to the bathroom. For some, this is fine. For others, the queue is the new toilet seat that somebody left up.

Yikes! Looks like someone just rented “Awkward Metaphor.” Anyway: from changing the account password to sneakily bumping up one’s own selections, “policing the queue” has apparently become “a delicate matter” that can cause turmoil under a shared roof.

True? What about you? Have you ever had a Bridget Jones v. James Bond scuffle over movie choices with your partner?

BG’s pretend boyfriend Nick Andropolis Jason Segel speaks to NPR about real-life geekdom, bromance, respecting your ex, and the real-life Naked Breakup.

If superheroes were real, they could have ended the Vietnam war. Such is the case in Alan Moore & David Gibbons’ Watchmen, which takes a serious look at costumed crimefighters (including their sex lives). Moore’s alternate reality is being brought to the screen in March with equal parts faithfulness and abbreviation by Zac Snyder. The filmmakers have really gone the extra mile to capture the alternate history of the Watchmen world with this unbelievably cool “archival” footage:

More alternate-reality artifacts can be found at The New Frontiersman website.

I suffered my own personal heartbreak on the day after Christmas: I saw “Frank Miller’s The Spirit” — a movie that defies logic, taste, the basics of filmmaking, and, most importantly, the source material, Will Eisner’s The Spirit.

Eisner literally wrote the book on graphic storytelling, and his influence on comic book creators — both writers and artists — is so ginormous that the industry’s awards are called The Eisners. His work on The Spirit — in particular the postwar period — is an unparalleled achievement in artistry, combining the mainstream charm of a newspaper strip with groundbreaking film-style visuals all in service to a smart, taut, O. Henry-style short story. To see his soulful, whimsical masterpiece translated to film as a dreary, awkward catalog of Frank Miller’s personal fetishes is a cringe-inducing experience that diminishes two comics legends. People reading comics have known this for some time, but now we have box-office returns to prove that Miller, who wrote some influential comics 20 years ago, is now a mannered, self-aggrandizing hack.

Our Breakup Girl comics are heavily influenced by Will Eisner’s The Spirit. When we first set about trying to tell a rich story in only six (later five) pages, I couldn’t help but study the old Spirits which were just seven pages, but pack a punch greater than most of today’s 32-page comics. Plus, Eisner, always stretching the form, found himself creating stories that were more fable than adventure, not afraid to have the hero take a backseat, and that has always been our goal with BG. Looking back I can also see how his characterizations have also played into my writing. Like The Spirit, Breakup Girl is not a wealthy playboy but a “middle-class superhero,” very much an approachable character in her glitz-free New York neighborhood, who’s costume verges on plain-clothes and who’s workaday approach to crime-fighting is full-bodied, practical and plucky.

Now imagine walking into a Breakup Girl movie and seeing Barb Wire instead. Feel my pain.

for BG’s Biggest GirlCrush: The Movie.

Something about New York Magazine’s “Vulture” blog’s plug for the film “Mardi Gras: Made in China,” caught my eye. Perhaps it was the post’s title, which contained the phrase “Ritual Breast-Baring”? Reading on, I learned that the film profiles four of the Chinese teenage factory girls who make those infamous love beads, making the point that the Western women who — in that infamous Bourbon Street courtship rite — don the beads… well, they enjoy quite a different set of human liberties. “The documentary earns an intimate, easy confidence with the girls,” says the post, “who blush and scream when they see how their product will eventually be used.”

Check out the trailer here, in versions both S and NSFW.

While we’re on the subject, what do you think? Is Are women at Mardi Gras (and while we’re at it, women on Spring Break vying for a free Girls Gone Wild t-shirt) reveling in their freedom of sexual expression and celebration of their bodies, or are they merely cheapening themselves and keeping their global counterparts from ever advancing and earning equality and respect in their own countries? Is American bad-girl behavior (if you classify this as such) what the rest of the world has to look forward to in terms of cultural advancement? Weigh in your thoughts in the comments below!

FOBG Rebecca Traister’s ode to Scully is more than worth a day pass to Salon.com’s premium offerings. After all, you’ll need something to last you till tomorrow.

Highlights:

Dana Scully was not standard television beautiful, but a diminutive pre-Raphaelite, pale of skin and red of hair, who could give equal amounts of soul to lines like “Nothing happens in contradiction to nature, just in contradiction to what we know of it” and “Well, seeing as how it’s Friday, I was thinking I could get some work done on that monograph I’m writing for the penology review: ‘Diminished Acetylcholine Production in Recidivist Offenders.'” A woman who, when asked by her pestering partner to examine a cadaver’s head just one more time for a set of horns, can snap on her gloves and mutter “Whatever” like she really means it.

And, about TV romance — or at least spooky chemistry:

The pairing, based mostly on the dynamic between actors Anderson and Duchovny, crackled, and the show had at its core a professional relationship that was not just sexually, but romantically, electric. Of course, back then, when we all walked a mile to school and programs started the season in September and finished them in May, slow-burn television relationships burned really slowly, especially in comparison with today’s short-attention-span theater, when an unrequited prime-time couple can maybe make it to sweeps before kicking off their panties. Not only did the sparks between Mulder and Scully fly fast and far, but the drawing out of their relationship allowed their audience to fall for them too, despite the irritating imperfections of both character and plot.

See you at the movies!

According to Scientific American, yes, kind of, sort of, but it’d take a lot more than a celebrity trainer. Read the whole geek-jock Q&A — with the author of Becoming Batman: The Possibility of a Superhero — here.

(Update: more here.)

Okay, so I have watched maybe 0.75 episodes, ever, of Sex and the City. Yes, I have been living somewhere down near the earth’s core since 1998. What can I say? It just never wound up on my super-radar.

But this did!