Always remember, never forget.

Most people seem surprised by Kris Allen’s win over Adam Lambert last night on the Idol finale. I’d argue that the result wasn’t as unexpected as you might think.

My household voted for Kris (almost entirely on the strength of his cover of “Heartless,” which was the best performance of the season), but I submit that Adam was, at nearly ever turn, the superior candidate. His final night performance was better, his body of work over the course of the season was better, and he’s a more saleable commodity as a recording artist in the future. By nearly every metric, he should have won.

Except that there were some indications that Adam had somewhat polarized the voters. Late in the show he finished in the bottom three. And when the show went down to three contestants two weeks ago, it was Adam and two other, virtually indistinguishable, guys. At that moment, it appeared most clearly that there might be a substantial “Not Adam” vote that had been split in the later stages of the competition, but was slowly congealing. From there, it hardly mattered whether it Kris or Danny in the final. One of them would get the other one’s vote as the “Not Adam” vote finally consolidated.

So why not Adam? Drudge was teasing this as a Red State-Blue State showdown, but I think that’s not quite right. Adam is personally pretty appealing, but his two wheelhouses–glam rock and showtunes–are violently at odds with the musical norms of the series. And worse, when he let them mix, became something weirdly unsettling: American culture has, thankfully, closed the book on the rock opera.

Ultimately, I think that’s what did Adam in.

Mind you, I suspect he’ll ultimately have the more productive career. But these things are hard to project. I don’t know that you could have predicted that Carrie Underwood would have, by far, the best post-Idol career. Or that Jennifer Hudson would win an Oscar.

And anyway, I still find David Cook the most interesting performer to come out of the show. It would be nice to see him break big.

For Inglorious Bastards:

“[I]t is Tarantino’s most sophisticated film since part one of Kill Bill.”

Since Kill Bill Part 1, Tarantino has directed one and a half movies.

Fascinating stuff about Netflix’s Watch Now streaming from the company’s CFO. The most interesting bit is this:

“The big question around Apple and Amazon is not what are they going to do in the pay-per-view space, it is what are they going to do when they realize they are not being very successful,” McCarthy said. “And [theirs is] all new-release content. Something else is going on.”

Important, if true.

Can’t tell if it this is Wild, Wild West or The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Or worse.

I’d love to hear the rationalizations for this. The video is pretty amazing.

But the real scandal seems to be that the Birmingham police department had the video, and knew about the officers’ actions, for months. And did nothing about it. It wasn’t until someone in the DA’s office saw it and took made a beef that the officers were fired.

There’s a trailer out for DC’s new animated feature, Superman/Batman: Public Enemies. It doesn’t look like anything particularly special.

Which is a shame, because the original book, by Jeph Loeb and Ed McGuinness, contains what I take to be the single best distillation of the DC universe’s bedrock characters. And it’s all done in a spare, two-page prologue.

The prologue begins with a young Clark Kent playing baseball in a field in Smallville. Clark hits a ball way out over a fence by the road. He goes to retrieve it and sees a fancy car parked on the side of the road with a flat tire. A tall, thin gentleman–Alfred Pennyworth, as it turns out–is changing the flat. And sitting sullenly in the back of the car is young Bruce Wayne.

Bruce and Clark eye one another for a moment before going their separate ways. Clark head back to baseball; Bruce turns back to his plotting. In thought bubbles, Clark says, “I still wonder if we should’ve asked him to play. If it would’ve made a difference.”

And Bruce’s thought in reply is, “Sometimes, I wish they had asked me to play. But, by then, my life had changed. I had no time for games.”

This is a masterpiece in 8 panels–8 panels!–and it lays out everything you ever need know about Superman and Batman. From here, it’s a straight line to Book IV of Dark Knight Returns. It’s comics writing at its very, very best, though I’m not sure it’ll translate particularly well to film, even animation.

The side question in all of this is why DC has committed itself to direct-to-video animation for its properties. I realize they’ve had mostly bad experiences with live action, but this strikes me as a failure of management, not material. There’s no foundational reason why DC can’t build its own film universe the way Marvel has. And I suspect there’s more than enough room at the multiplex for both.

I’ve been getting stoked for surf season the last few weeks, thinking about the 4′ monsters I’m gonna shred down at the encee. Looking at videos like this is only filling me with more stoke.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2vkwy2vdP4&hl=en&fs=1]

It doesn’t look so big until the helicopter starts pulling back. At which point you might be thinking, “No . . . oh no . . . dear God, no . . .”

Watch it all the way to the end, because a couple times you think he’s dead and somehow he outraces the thing. Unbelievable.