A 14-minute chunk from the opening of HBO's Game of Thrones? Embedded below; bigger here. Because I'm greedy and have no attention span (and also just kind of dislike excerpts, on principle), I usually have little to no interest in watching the first few minutes of anything if I can't watch the rest of it immediately thereafter—but this is fucking Game of Thrones, man, so bring it on. My excitement for this show, which is already at fairly ridiculous levels, is only stoked by this footage, not to mention early reviews like this one:

Though it demands attention, Thrones never once bogs down. It's the kind of drama where, when the first episode ends, you wish the nine others were immediately available. And that validates HBO's notion that television is the perfect medium for a fantasy series done right. Getting Martin's Thrones, the gold-standard, could end up landing HBO its next franchise.

Also: Those four minutes of Green Lantern footage that were shown at WonderCon this weekend? HD here; embedded below.

More than any other superhero flick I can think of, Green Lantern just looks like a comic: Bright and weird and pulpy, with cartoony aliens and hallucinogenic colors smeared all over. (That's Geoffrey Rush, BTW, voicing that nightmare-inducing bird/fish abomination.) As a comics nerd who loves that sort of old-school sci-fi goofiness, this makes me incredibly happy; as somebody who writes about film for a living, it makes me curious. Like Avatar, Green Lantern's got a shit-ton of outlandish world-building it'll have to deal with; it also feels fantastic and weird in a way that not many mainstream films do (though, again, Avatar comes to mind). I'm curious to see if audiences will buy into this, just as I'm curious to see how Green Lantern fans—who, as far as I can tell, are incredibly obsessive and anal-retentive about this character, even more so than most fanboys—are gonna react to the film. So far, my incredibly accurate polling system* seems to indicate they are "furious" and "disappointed" that Ryan Reynolds does not seem to be giving this role the required "gravitas" and "intensity" that it apparently "requires." I'm gonna hold off on judgment, though I should note that I find Ryan Reynolds to be handsome and charming in just about everything he's in, because he is handsome and charming.

(ALSO, Green Lantern fans: I've tried reading some Green Lantern comics in the past, but never got that into 'em. [Geoff Johns' Rebirth came highly recommended, but then did that thing DC books sometimes do: "Go ahead, try to enjoy this... AS LONG AS YOU REMEMBER EVERY SINGLE SIDE-CHARACTER AND REFERENCE THAT WAS PUBLISHED IN 1974, ALL OF WHICH DIRECTLY AFFECT EVERY SINGLE PLOT THREAD IN THIS BOOK, WRITTEN 30-PLUS YEARS LATER, WITH LITTLE TO NO EXPLANATION."] I still want to give it a shot, though, so: Got any favorite Green Lantern trades you'd recommend to someone who's familiar with the character but not, like, obsessively fanatical about the character?)

*me offhandedly asking several of my obsessive and anal-retentive Green Lantern fanboy pals