All Aboard

If you happen to have read GQ sometime in the last decade, then you know that close to the start of each issue is a segment called "GQ Endorses..." Just for fun, I have decided to endorse certain things on this here blog. It probably won't be Italian "sneakers" or male bronzing creams, though.

Anyone who knows me fairly well probably already knows that I sort of have an addictive personality. If I like something, then I really like it and want to learn all about it and then buy tons of it (where possible). That's why I proclaim to have sweet teeth instead of just the one and never jumped on the liquor/nicotine train. I would, however, like to conduct the method train and invite you all to join me.



method (intentionally lower case) is a brand of eco-friendly home products, and I simply love them all. The brand has a focus on gentleness to the planet while being impossibly stylish and fun. I have bought all kinds of their products, including soaps, mops, candles, and their book, and I fully support and endorse method. I even gave a new mom the method baby line for her little bundle of joy (and sensitive skin), and it was a big hit.

Isn't the packaging ridiculously cool? Their ads are also witty and sometimes risque. Oh my. You can find most of their products at your local Target, which is where I buy mine, and rest assured that they're reasonably priced. Check them out at http://www.methodhome.com/.

2009 is Halfway Over? Wha?!

It is crazy to me to think that this year is at its halfway point. As my pal Holly said a few days ago, it's only 6 more months until Christmas (!). I feel like we just put the tree away. Ok, so we don't put up a tree at my house--but at work.

At any rate, I thought it might be fun to make some lists for July. Here's part of my to-do list:

1. Celebrate America. Despite some of the junk that goes on, it's a wonderful place to live. No place is perfect--not even Nova Scotia. (I realize it's a province and not a country.)

2. Exercise more. Believe me, where I live, this is easier said than done right now. The temperature often breaks triple digits, with the humidity level not far behind. I just have to get a later start if hoofing it out-of-doors.

3. Try to boost my own mood. Without using narcotics, hired cheerleaders, or excessive sugar intakes, I need to remember to put on more smiles than frowns. This generally refers to my work face. I'm hoping that the summertime teller obligations will end with this month.

Oh. And here's what not-to-do this month...or any month.

1. Forget to wear SPF outside. I rarely head out in the daylight (very Twilight of me, no?), but sometimes I catch myself in the rays without proper protection. Tisk, tisk.

2. Let clutter accumulate. Whether it's e-mail, envelopes containing the credit card offer of my life, or books from Goodwill, heaps of most things are rarely good. (Noted exceptions: money and SunChips.)

3. Floss in public. Yes, a lady did that today at the drive thru window. I almost gagged a little in the microphone.

(That cool calendar was a gift from my friend Ashley. It's recycled paper and has a little wooden holder. Fun times.)

Specs in a Small City

Hi! And welcome to Specs Appeal, my spankin' new blog! As this journey begins (and continues), I plan to share with you snippets from my life, even though it can be a bit mundane at times.

Right now it seems like I'm in somewhat of a transition period. In December I graduated with my MBA, but for some reason, the bank where I've worked for seven years has decided to move me from my customer service desk back to the teller window...at the drive thru. I hate even typing thru. It's like when people write good nite. I was sort of on the HR/marketing/management track, so this was a definite setback. Right now I'm being treated as summer help.

Anywho, I have been trying to find the positives in this situation. For one thing, I still have a job, and that's nothing to sneeze at in this economy. For another, I do get to listen to music back there by myself. (It's a small bank. And I can hit the back button on my custom mixes as many times as I want.) And if I happen to get on Gmail for a few minutes or 7.5 hours each day, ehhh....

Here's my viewpoint from the drive thru...

I hope you have enjoyed my first post and will check back often. As I experiment and learn more about blogging, I plan to modify the layout and design. Also, I welcome your comments. Thanks for visiting!

...And Bill Keane is S. Clay Wilson...

The Doug Wright Collection (C-)

This is one of those times where I feel like the kid in the story, 'The Emperor's New Clothes'. You know, the one who tactfully points out that the king, is in fact, naked. In this case, the naked king is the hardcover, 240 page collection of the work of Doug Wright, Canada's Master Cartoonist. I've read all this praise and over-heated tributes to the guy, and well... I just don't see it.Yeah, he's a good draughtsman, but I get the impression that for Doug Wright, cartooning involved being an artist first... and telling, you know, gags was like, well, not on the top five things one does in one's pursuit of a career as a cartoonist. The gags, such as they are, are so pedestrian that if you look through the entire run of his career doing 'Nipper' and 'Doug Wright's Family', one single motif pops up through the whole 31 year run of the strip: 1) Doug's kids engage in typical kid behavior. (playing hockey, roughhousing, exploring the neighbourhood.) 2) Being kids, their activities lead them into getting their clothes dirty or torn, getting scrapes on their knees or elbows, or mildly damaging property. and 3) receiving a glower of embarrassment from their mom, or a glower of rage from Dad. And that's it! That's thirty-one years of Doug Wright's career as a cartoonist in three sentences. The level of humour on display here is on par with 'Reader's Digest', 'Family Circus', and 'Fred Basset'. (Oh, who am I kidding. I like to imagine Doug Wright looking at Family Circus and snarling, red-faced, 'THAT'S CRAZY!! WHERE DOES THAT BILL KEANE SONOFABITCH GET OFF? I MEAN, THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS INVISIBLE GHOSTS NAMED, 'NOTME'! THAT'S NUTS! IS HE TRYING TO WRITE A SCIENCE FICTION STRIP? AND THAT FRED BASSET! EVERYONE KNOWS DOGS DON'T SPEAK ENGLISH!! ARE THEY HIPPIES SMOKING REEFER? HAS THE WORLD GONE MAD?! BOYS, COME HERE AND LET ME YELL AT YOU SOME MORE!! GNAAAARRRGH!) Face it, Bill Keane is S. Clay Wilson next to Doug Wright.

I realize I'm being hard on poor Doug Wright here, so let me backpedal a bit. His drawing is top-notch, and it's nice to see such a body of work collected about a uniquely Canadian cartoonist. (The kids play a lot of hockey, instead of, you know, baseball, and there's references to particularly Canadian institutions, like Imperial Oil, fr' instance.) My animosity in this case is leveled more at the marketing geniuses at Drawn and Quarterly, the book's publisher. The byline reads, 'Canada's Master Cartoonist.', and my first thought is, 'Since when?' I'd put Aislin, Lynn Johnston, Chester Brown, John Byrne, Hal Foster, Kate Beaton, Seth (one of the editors of this tome, by the way), and even Dave Sim among a lot of others way up ahead of poor old Wright.

In trying to inflate a journeyman cartoonist up to legendary proportions, Seth and Brad MacKay don't do him any favours in the long run. In the highly likely event sales for this book don't merit a second volume, I really hope Seth doesn't go into some kind of public funk over 'Canadians apathy over a criminally overlooked national treasure." once that happens.

2009 Summer Blockbusters!

So this summer, I plan on seeing all the big blockbuster films and judging them accordingly. And by judging accordingly, I don't mean I'll be reviewing them like a real film, I mean I'll be assigning them a rating based on the following criteria: 1) Is there a scene where two people face against each other in dead earnest, scowling and glaring at each other so close, they can smell each other's bad breath? 2) Will there be big explosions that either vehicles or people walk nonchalantly away from to emphasize their bad-assedness? 3) Will there be little ethnic children in the movie to emphasize the fundamental humanity of the protagonists? 4) Is there lots o' lens flare in the cinematography? 5) Is there innovative camera work that really adds nothing to the story, but it looks cool? 6) Is the cast populated with robots or humourless robot-like automatons? 7) Is time travel a plot point? 8) Is the film part of a 'franchise', that is, is it banking on the audience's goodwill towards earlier versions of the characters and settings to pull in the dosh? 9) Does the story fall to pieces if you spend more than five minutes thinking about it? (See: point #7) 10) Is the soundtrack so loud and bombastic that it kills your sperm cells?




Star Trek (B-) It is in fact, SULU, who fires the torpedoes. That comes from a bit from comedian Patton Oswalt, who tells us of his time in a liberal arts college when he had to take an elementary physics class, taught by the head of the physics department. At the semester's end, the professor, in a probably misguided attempt to reach out to the little art-fag wood nymphs, drizzled some pop culture dust atop the questions in the finals test. One of the questions was phrased as such: The U.S.S. Enterprise, moving at a specific speed, fires its torpedoes at a Klingon warbird at a certain speed. The Klingon ship is moving at another defined speed. The student is then, given the variables, asked at what time Chekov's torpedoes hit the cruiser. It's a speed vs. velocity question dressed up to appeal to the students. Upon reading the question, Oswalt gets up from his desk, and according to a friend in the class, says something 'VERY specific and VERY angrily to the professor, then storms out of the class in a huff.' The professor hangs his head, then addresses the class:

"I have just been informed, that it is Sulu, and not Chekov who fires the weapons in Star Trek. If this makes the question impossible to solve for you, please turn the test book into my T.A. , and I will head home to drink a full bottle of gin, then slip into a hot bath and open my veins. Fuck all of you, I do not want to live on this planet with you anymore..."

This addresses the inherent problem in adapting a much-loved franchise like the Star Trek one for an audience. Because there's been, what, almost forty years of back-story and continuity to the Star Trek saga, any new stories are inevitably going to antagonize any Trekkie-nit picker. (I, for one, was chuffed that Finnigan did not make an appearance during Kirk's time in Star Fleet...) So J.J Abrams and the writers did the only thing they could. That is, reboot the series.

When doing this type of movie, the rule is thus: Give the audience what they need, not what they want. (If you give an audience what they want, you get the last three movies of the Star Wars series. Serves you right, Star Wars nerds.) While a hardcore audience would like to see every shout-out and in-joke from the last forty years crammed into their movie, it would make for a tedious, five-hour yawn fest, and Paramount would go broke. So they go with a reboot, where Kirk and Spock's destiny is changed thanks to some pissed off Romulan miners travelling back through time. This results in Old Spock and New Spock living in the same timeline, as well as changing the dynamics between the main characters. It winds up being a pulp sci-fi adventure straight out of Doc Smith.

And that's okay. While I think time-travel plots in sci-fi movies tend to be really fucking stupid, (Even the Back to the Future franchise took a good idea and beat it into the ground to the point where they basically wanted to do a western-oh, sorry...) and Star Trek is no better in that regard... In this case, I'm gonna go with it because otherwise the lack of continuity and my dwelling on all of it will lead me to kill myself in shame...

2009 Summer Blockbuster checklist: Lens Flare? Lots and lots. Characters scowling and facing off? Check! Nonchalant retreats from an explosion? Yup. Cute little ethnics? Well, Scotty gets an Ewok covered in snot as a sidekick, so close enough! Cool camera work? Um, in this case, the camera work actually has a sense of proportion, except for the lens flare, so...No. Humorless automatons? You'd think Spock would do the job, but he actually shows some emotion in this, so no on that count, also. Time travel? Check. Franchise? It's 'Star Trek', doye. Flimsy script? Eeyeah, but they couldn't not write themselves into a corner, put it that way... Loud soundtrack? Oh, my, yes. Final tally: 8/10





Terminator: Salvation: The End of the Franchise: (C-)

If you gave Skynet a hundred million dollars to make a Terminator movie, this is what it would come up with. There is no indication that human beings worked on the script at all. So what you get is boring slog from action sequence to action sequence until the end credits. If it were a demo reel for a special effects company, I'd give it a 'A', for what that's worth. And let's face it, the plot of the first movie was, 'Run from a robot.' The second movie's plot was 'Run from a different robot.' The third movie's plot was... well, you see what I mean, right. And they screwed it up?

Instead of hashing over the movie, I'd like to explain why the movie stunk on ice, and there's two main reasons: Spinelessness on the director's part, and studio politics. Taking the last point first, it's a case of Christian Bale demanding (and getting) a bigger part as John Connor, thus forcing the writers- the guys who wrote 'Catwoman', 'The Net', and 'The last Terminator movie starring the current governor of the fifth largest economy in the world and that chick who wound up in a couple of Uwe Boll flicks, so she should be on an infomercial hawking shoddy weight-loss crap pretty soon.' - to write him a bigger part. And the movie suffers. Suffers more, I should say. On the plus side, it looks like Bale won't be in any position to make any more creative demands on that magnitude.

Then there's 'McG'. Oh, Mcg! He makes Michael Bay look like Robert Bresson! Well, he can put an action sequence together okay. But you can tell that's all he's interested in. You can see him twiddle his thumbs and yawn whenever there's story exposition or character development on screen. Also, I get the impression he's just too nice to direct actors over a long shoot. Case for the prosecution? Bale's infamous tirade to the schmucky lighting director who 'blew his concentration.' Bale goes on a near-psychotic four and a half minute rant to the guy, in front of a conspicuously silent McG. McG should've just shut Bale down after half a minute, sent the lighting guy away, and taken the extra time to cool things down on the set. That's part of his fucking job, after all.

2009 SBC: Face-off? It's practically the center piece of the movie! Lens flare? Nope. Looks like they filmed it through a cheesecloth, actually. Nonchalant bad-assery walking away from booms? Can't really remember, but there must've been. Remember, it's Terminator! Innovative camera work? It's McG! Robots? Terminator! Cute little kids? One! (Well, two if you count the teenager playing Kyle Reese.) She even squeezes the 'good' robot's hand near the end to emphasize humanity's connection! Aww! Time Travel? Terminator! Flimsy script? Like it was written on a spider's web! Franchise? Terminator! Loud-ass soundtrack? Terminator! Final tally: 10/10. Terminator! Terminator? FUCKING TERMINATOR!!

Bang! Pow! Zoom! Comics aren't just for... Oh, hell...

Watchmen (C+) "So, you people who are into comic books who aren't kids have been going on for the what, past twenty three years- about this 'Watchmen' comic, right?"

"Well, ah-hum, firstly, they're called 'graphic novels'-"

"Yeah, whatever, fancy. So I saw the movie that 'watchmen' comic was based on last night-"

"Well, you should know that the writer, Alan Moore, disavowed any connection with the movie adaptation of his 'graphic novel"-

"You mean, 'comic book'. Anyways, Poindexter, the movie I saw last night was a clumsy, disjointed mess. It was basically 'Mystery Men' without, you know, any of the laughs. And a lot more pointless violence. Like a lot of directors who cut their teeth on doing commercials, Zack Snyder pushes the visuals over the actual narrative. As a result, what you get isn't a movie in the regular sense, but a Cliff Notes version of the comic book."

"It's a 'graphic-"

"If you call a comic book a 'graphic novel' one more time, I will punch you in the face!"

Ok, enough with the Socratic dialogue. It's actually not bad, for being an action movie. And as an adaptation of an all but unadaptable comic book, it's about as good as that type of thing as you're going to see.

The point I was struggling with earlier is that it highlights the main problem of adapting comic books to the movies. That is, the movie's ability to get the audience to suspend its disbelief in order to enjoy the movie. (An aside: I enjoyed Iron Man a little more than The Dark Knight because Iron Man's more effective in getting an audience-well, me, at least,-on board more than Dark Knight was. Call it the Dumbo Effect. If we can't accept a flying elephant in the first place, we aren't going to enjoy the movie, 'Dumbo'. And if we can't accept the premise that people are capable of superhuman feats of agility and strength (while in high heels and capes, no less) while retaining universal human traits we can relate to...Well, you get what I'm saying.)

So it gives us a world where superheros really exist, and sets it in a time where the threat of nuclear annihilation was literally hanging over our heads. The plot involves some retired superheroes trying to find out why one of their number was killed, which leads to a global conspiracy involving another one of their type. This conspiracy involves framing another superhero for killing millions of people which will, presumably, lead to a sort of peace between the United States and Russia, as they will have to combine their forces to keep this rogue superhero at bay.

If that plotline doesn't bother you, you will probably enjoy this movie. As for myself, well, yeah, it's pretty dumb, but I guess it makes sense in the context of the movie. And let's face it, Zack Snyder managed to pull off what better directors like Paul Greengrass and Terry Gilliam couldn't do, with a lot of visual flair, so there's that. Patrick Wilson as Nite Owl, Jeffery Dean Morgan as the Comedian and Jackie Haley as Rorschach do a bang up job as actual people put into the unreal context of a superhero narrative.

My ultimate point though, is that if 'Watchmen' is a high point for comics as a respectable medium, then comics still have a long way to go. (The plot of the comic involved a giant space squid. Yup.) Snyder's direction does kind of bring up the shortcomings of the original comic.
I'm not sure what the point was to make Nixon out to use Dr. Manhattan to extend Nixon's time in office. Sure, he was a bastard, but unlike Bush the Usurper, Nixon knew his limits. (The actor in the movie does such a bad Nixon impersonation, I honestly thought for a moment that Nixon might be directly involved with the plot. He's just window dressing, though.) And some of the musical references, taken from the comic, are a little too spot on. (It's a bit like Forrest Gump without Robert Zemeckis' sense of humor)

And in a movie like this where all the details are so meticulous and so thought out, (Warner Brothers is probably counting on DVD sales to make bank.) when some details don't work, they really don't work. Casting thirty-seven year old Carla Gugino as sixty-seven year old Sally Jupiter doesn't work when you look at her bad makeup job. And Malin Akerman as Sally's daughter, Laurie, really doesn't pull off the character. (Off the top of my head, I'dve gone with Juliette Lewis, maybe?) While I'm here, the sex scene between Laurie and Dan, the Nite Owl gets my vote as Second Most Unerotic Love Scene in Movie History, The First One, of Course, Being That Scene In the Second Matrix Movie.

And the violence. I suppose you could argue that the over-the-top fight scene between Laurie, Dan, and the knot-tops was meant to emphasize the hypocrisy of a society condemning a vigilante like Rorschach while endorsing 'nicer' heroes like Silk Spectre and Nite Owl, who are equally as brutal. But I suspect it's done more out of Zack Snyder's love of meticulous gore and graphic brutality, like his earlier '300'. It's just a turn-on for him.

Overall, it's ok, just not the masterpiece it wants to be. (And not the high watermark comic fans want to validate themselves.) Like Peter Jackson's 'Lord of the Rings' movies, it shoehorns a broad, complex story into a limited time frame. It may have been better as a two-parter, but that's all academic. The only way I'd personally get bent out of shape would be if every single copy of the comic disappeared in a puff of paper dust the day the movie opened.

Don't Like...

Apocalypse Nerd (C-) It's Peter Bagge's six issue 'post-Armageddon' tale about what would happen if a computer nerd and his jock best friend had to fend for themselves in the face of nuclear anarchy. That whole 'last man on earth' fantasy is a pretty standard trope in science fiction, and is never more prevalent in times of socio-economic crisis. (During the '80s, I recall a hell of a lot of 'post-apocalypse' fiction coming out in movies and T.V. From 'Mad Max' to 'Threads', it was a sub-genre with a lot of legs to it.)

The problem is, Peter Bagge as a storyteller just doesn't know how to end a story. He had the same problem in his popular series, 'Hate' about the life and loves of Buddy Bradley, the slacker-est slacker in the Pacific Northwest. (That series ended on a lame 'in-joke'.) 'Hate' ended because Buddy had reached a compromise with his life, and the most interesting part of his life was over, and thusly, there were no more tales to tell. (Interesting aside: Version 2.0 of Love and Rockets operates on the premise that the Hernandez' brothers characters are natural celebrities, and takes for granted that there's an audience for the most boring details of their lives.)

Dollhouse (tentative C) Put it this way: if Joss Whedon's name wasn't on it, I'd have given it a pass. Unlike 'Firefly', the premise is kind of convoluted, and let's face it, Eliza Deshku is fine eye-candy, but kind of limited as an actress for this type of thing.

So the premise is thus: A company develops a technology where they can 'wipe' the memories and personalities of young, attractive people and implant different personalities and skills in them for a price. Naturally, the assumption is that there are enough rich people out there who are in the position to hire this service-who's default service is 'escort who genuinely loves you'. In watching the first two episodes of this series, a whole load of 'But-but...there's no explosions in space!' type of questions arise.

First off, given the amount of cost is setting up and maintaining this type of operation, the costs to any clients would be astronomical. To the point where your average rich guy would figure it would be less money and hassle to fly to Vegas and get a couple of high-end escorts who were Penthouse Pets, instead. (Or hiring an actual, experienced hostage negotiator or back-up singer...) Any remaining richie riches wanting to use this service wouldn't provide enough of an income to support this type of company, unless the company's premise was just a front for a broader scheme that the viewer isn't aware of. (Which I presume is a sub-plot of the series.) It's like trying to invent a battery-powered battery installer.

Secondly, the dramatic arc of the series involves Eliza's character, 'Echo' various personalities starting to bleed into each other, creating the show's major conflict. In practical terms, this means the organization is at a terrible legal, financial, and practical liability. (Another subplot involves an earlier blank slate's personalities blending into a murdering psychopath and escaping.) As a viewer, this means that in order to maintain an interest in the show, you have to identify with the main character. Since there's no 'there, there' in this case, your interest is going to be limited. About as limited as Eliza Deshku's acting abilities. (Put it this way: How do you get the batteries into the above-mentioned battery installer?)

I'll give it a few more episodes, but unlike Firefly, I won't be too bummed when it gets canceled.