Academy Award®-winning filmmaker Peter Jackson will host a live first look at The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, the second film in The Hobbit Trilogy, on Sunday, March 24 at 3:00 p.m. Eastern/12pm Pacific at www.hobbit.com/sneak.    The live event will now include a Q&A with Jackson and fans! Video questions can be submitted beginning March 12 through March 19 on “The Hobbit” Facebook page, or through the Vine mobile app using the hashtag #askPeterJackson. Fans can also Tweet links to video questions using the hashtag #askPeterJackson.  The live event will be limited to holders of an UltraViolet™ code, available by purchasing The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, which arrives on Blu-ray Combo Pack, Blu-ray 3D Combo Pack and 2-disc DVD Special Edition on March 19.  Visit thehobbit.com/sneak for more information.

Yesterday morning I received an e-mail from my pal/ComicMix partner/Secret Santa Glenn Hauman with a link to a three-month old piece in The Atlantic  and the comment “You simply must write this up!”

Must? Glenn never says must. He knows I’ll twist and turn any demand challenge into the pretzel from hell – you know, it’s a living – so he usually makes polite suggestions.

I was thinking about writing in detail about exactly how to fix the comic book industry and how easy it is and how it won’t take any additional money to pull it off, but evidently Glenn thinks this is more important. So be it.

I believe the brilliant political satire The President’s Analyst (James Coburn, Godfrey Cambridge, and Wasteland contributor Severn Darden) to be even more relevant today than it was when it was released in 1967. I don’t want to do any spoilers but if you haven’t seen this movie, do so. Yeah, it’s got some hippie stuff. You can deal with that. But the ending of the movie, where the happy Doctor Doom of the piece, Pat Harrington Jr., explains his evil scheme is far more believable today.

For the past 46 years I have been proselytizing this nefarious scheme shall come to pass, and now, according to The Atlantic, it has. That’s because they know what magnetic resonance imaging neurofeedback is. I didn’t, and now that I’ve read up on it my brain hurts real bad. The funny thing is, if this magnetic resonance imaging neurofeedback thing works you might not have to do the heavy reading.

“Simply” put, magnetic resonance imaging neurofeedback allows you to learn how to do visual stuff by having the information zapped directly into your brain. Boston University in Boston and ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Japan figured it out. I won’t explain the process – I can’t explain the process, at least not until I undergo it and I doubt it’s covered in my über-lame health insurance plan.

I find myself in metaphor hell. I don’t know whether to allude to The Matrix or to The Manchurian Candidate. Both, probably.

Here’s the scary part. This procedure has most effective when applied to subjects who don’t know in advance what they’re supposed to be learning. Think about that for a minute. If somebody wanted you to, say, murder somebody and they chose you because of your access to that person, if you actually knew about this in advance your moral predilections might get in the way. Well, they might.

Of course, all of this is still in the experimental phase.

At least, that’s what they want you to think.

ComicMix Editor-In-Chief Mike Gold also writes a weekly, much more political yet somehow still whimsical column each week at www.michaeldavisworld.com, where Martha Thomases, Marc Alan Fishman and Michael Davis also try to annoy the masses.

THURSDAY: Dennis O’Neil

FRIDAY: Martha Thomases

NBC has given us more episodes of GRIMM, with changes galore including big ones for Bitsi Tulloch and Sasha Ruiz plus newcomer, Claire Coffee. They give us all the latest – plus more with Walton Goggins (yes he IS coming back to SONS OF ANARCHY) and the cast of X-MEN DAYS OF FUTURE PAST grows again.

Take us ANYWHERE! The Point Radio App is now in the iTunes App store – and it’s FREE! Just search under “pop culture The Point”. The Point Radio  – 24 hours a day of pop culture fun for FREE. GO HERE and LISTEN FREE on any computer or on any other  mobile device with the Tune In Radio app – and follow us on Twitter @ThePointRadio.

The great innovators and popular entertainers of previous generations often fade from sight from they retire or die. A new generation discovers them afresh, either on their own, or someone has done some digging. In the case of the famed director Alfred Hitchcock, he has spawned a cottage industry with recent biographies and films. Hitchcock, with Anthony Hopkins nearly unrecognizable under the latex, is based on Stephen Rebello’s Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, and portrays a particular point of view about the Englishman.

Psycho is currently his best known work, especially with this week’s debut of Bates Motel on cable but critics tend to pick his other, earlier works as among his best. Sure, this thriller is terrifying and exciting and surprising thanks to the Robert Bloch story, direction, and performances. And the making of the film is worthy of exploration. Director Sacha Gervasi has a rich source of material and some fascinating players to explore but the end result is surprisingly slight. Rebello shone a much-needed spotlight on Hitch’s wife Alma (Helen Mirren), the secret engine behind his successes and Gervasi tries to milk tension out of the largely fictitious tension between spouses. When Universal refused to allow access to the source material, Gervasi needed something to hang the film on but clearly chose poorly.

The story picks up in 1959, with Hitch riding the success of North by Northwest and his popular television anthology series that made his silhouette the most recognizable in the country. Seeking his next project, he assigned the research to Peggy Robertson (Toni Colette), his assistant. She came up with Bloch’s novel, loosely based on the famed Ed Gein murders. It had just the right amount of lurid tension that would let him explore something different, something he did throughout his storied career.

Not everyone agreed with the choice with agent (Michael Stuhlbarg), Paramount president Barney Balaban (Richard Portnow), and Alma all thinking it beneath the director, who insisted he wanted the change of pace. When Paramount balked, he moved the film to Universal Studios which welcomed him with open arms. Hitch cast  Anthony Perkins (James D’Arcy) as Norman, Janet Leigh (Scarlett Johansson) as Marion Crane and Vera Miles (Jessica Biel) as sister Lila. There’s plenty of behind the scenes intrigue, saving only the original film’s most famous moments for on camera action where we discover the tyrannical Hitchcock is as prurient as Norman himself.  He later bullies Hays Office censor Geoffrey Shurlock (Kurtwood Smith) into approving the shower scene since more is implied than ever shown.

The movie’s more interesting dynamic is between husband and wife and here the film should sing but lacks spark which is odd considering how strong the performers are so the fault clearly lies in the script. There are other missteps along the way including Gein’s ghost, but by then, the film has lost its audience rather than gripped them.

The digital film is well-transferred to Blu-ray and sounds just fine. The combo edition comes complete with Audio Commentary from Gervasi and Rebello, and I wish the film was as interesting as their conversation. There is also a single Deleted Scene (1:41); Becoming the Master: From Hopkins to Hitchcock (12:28) all about Hopkins’ makeup and performance; Obsessed with Hitchcock (29:09), the usual making of documentary; Sacha Gervasi’s Behind-the-Scenes Cell Phone Footage (13:31) which is far more entertaining and informative than you imagine and gets credit for being a unique bonus; Hitchcock Cell Phone PSA (:41); The Story  (3:54); The Cast (4:25) which features with interviews with the director, Mirren, Hopkins, and others; Danny Elfman Maestro (2:16) which is an all-too-brief piece on the evocative score;  Hitch and Alma (3:15), which honestly needed to be more expansive and in-depth; Remembering Hitchcock (4:44): Hitchcock’s former cast and crew members trip down memory lane; Theatrical Trailer (2:33); and, Sneak Peek (14:31).

Overall, the extras bolster a weak production and makes it worth a look. Or, you might be better off reading the bios and watching the actual films from the great master. Hitchcock was terrific at building suspense, adjusting to new technologies and exploring the human psyche in ways his peers at the time avoided, giving him freedom to explore and entertain.

Please refer to last week for part one.

When last we met…

Off to Gertz we went! Gertz was the department store back in the day. When we got there my mother walked right to the toy department and brought me Captain Action and the Batman and Superman costume changes.

At that point I had to wonder, who was this woman and what had she done with my mother.

This was entirely way to good to be true.

As I would find out soon it certainly was.

I found out later that, what was a great Saturday turned crappy, why my mother was so quick to buy me Captain Action, which I just knew, was the last thing I would ever want or need.

My stepdad (who at the time I thought was my real dad; long sad story) told my mother earlier in the day he would not be picking me up to spend the night with him. Those times with my father were all I lived for.

If I had to choose between having Christmas every day and spending one day with my dad, Santa would have lost out.

My mom didn’t tell me that on the bus ride back. Nor did she broach the subject when we got home. She missed the opportunity while I was introducing the good Captain to my GI Joes. Introduction may not be the best word for the Joe exchange.

It was more like an eviction.

I evicted a platoon of Joes from a few of my GI Joe footlockers. The good Captain and his costume changes could not be made to spend his down time in a ghetto toy box. The toy box was where the poor toys lived.

The toys box were the projects in the ghetto. The footlockers were the nice homes, you know, the white neighborhood. Hey, I was a child living in a world where all Black people lived in the projects and all white people lived in nice homes in safe neighborhoods. That’s what the TV told me and TV was everything to a child.

Anywho, my mom never did tell me that my father wasn’t coming over – which was most likely her plan. The toys were a distraction. A distraction that was working until my sister asked me if Robert (That’s what we called my father, not dad or daddy. It’s a black thing you wouldn’t understand) brought me the toys.

Just like that I remembered that I was supposed to spend the night with Robert and realized that he had not picked me up yet.

My mother was then forced to tell me that he was not coming and I started crying like baby.

Then something magical happened, my mortal enemy, my sister Sharon picked up my Captain Action and started taking to me about it. After a few minutes I was proudly explaining what my new toy was showing her the costume changes and schooling her on all the reasons Captain Action was just the greatest thing that ever happened to the world. I’m not sure when I stopped crying or when I forgot Robert was not coming over.

Then, I was an adult.

That what happens in life one moment you are a five-year old with the greatest toy you have ever had the next you are a grown man trying to recapture those moments by becoming a collector of the things from your childhood that brought you that wonder. My Captain Action collection features the Ideal Toy Company original. The Prying Mantis 90’s redo and the current Captain Action Enterprise’s new line.

DC Comics did Captain Action comics back in the day and the good Captain has been returned to the industry those books are in stores now and I hear big plans are planed for comics in the future.

Yes, this article and part one is my love letter to an old friend who has always been in my life. It’s sappy, I’m sappy and I know that.

That’s OK.

Sappy is the new black.

WEDNESDAY: Mike Gold

THURSDAY: Dennis O’Neil