Who Watches the...meh...

"Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen it's true face. The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout, "Save us." ...and I'll look down and whisper "No."
- Rorschach's opening monologue from the comic, 'Watchmen'


"If you approach comics as a poor relation to film, you are left with a movie that does not move, has no soundtrack and lacks the benefit of having a recognizable movie star in the lead role."
-Alan Moore, writer of the comic, 'Watchmen'

For my own part, I'm gonna see the movie version of 'Watchmen' when it comes out next March. (Presuming that Fox and Warner Brothers resolve their legal differences over the movie by then...) However, I don't expect it to be anything more than a 'not funny' version of The Incredibles. (or 'The Tick', or 'Venture Brothers' or 'Dr. Horrible's Sing-along Blog' or...) One indicator that a studio doesn't have a lot of faith in a movie like this is the casting of relative no-name actors. (Billy Crudup as Dr. Manhattan is the only actor on the roster I'm really familiar with. There's also Carla Gugino, from 'Spy Kids' and Malin Akerman, who's highest profile parts so far are as a hillbilly's over-sexed wife in "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle" and the Farrelly brother's execrable remake of Neil Simon's "The Heartbreak Kid", where she plays Ben Stiller's shrewish bride. Not a good sign.)

As an unabashed comic nerd, you'd think, that on the surface, I'd want to see a movie based on an entertaining comic book. Wouldn't the fact that a mainstream medium was acknowledging my sophomoric interests by validating my previously sad-ham-with-failure-gravy of an existence? You'd think I'd want to see, say, Daniel Day-Lewis degrade himself by emoting lines like, "You'll pay for killing those orphans, Dr. Despair!" And ninety minutes of CGI explosions, giant metal robots, and lady pirate Amazon ninjas. With big, bouncy boobies?

Hold on.

To paraphrase Laurie Anderson, making a movie based on a comic is a little like dancing about architecture. That is, while in a comic the reader can go back to a previous page if they so wish, a movie can only go foreward in time, and has a limited space to tell its story. (Could, say, Chris Ware's comics be translated to film?) Like Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, the transfer of a specific medium-comics- to another specific medium- film- changes the nature of the thing being transfered. I'm getting a little pretentious here, so let me pull back a bit.

Film, in the commercial sense, is a medium that takes from other mediums and doesn't give back to them. Put it this way: If you've seen the 'Godfather' trilogy, you're not likely to seek out original author Mario Puzo's other works, like 'The Sicillian', for instance. And in the mainstream comics world, the X-men franchise hasn't seen an appreciable increase in sales owing to the recent movies. And why would they? If you are so inclined to seek out the X-men comics, you'll find yourself wandering into a narrative morass that only hours of reading on Wikipedia will enable you to unravel.

And in the case of Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen, the level of reference is so convoluted in terms of a narrative, it demands you go back and read it again and again to discover more meaning in the comic. For instance, we notice early on that a random nutcase on the streets of New York is, in fact, the sociopathic vigilante called Rorschach. Little details like airships floating in the background, and the egg-like design of cars, as well as the cigarettes some characters smoke add to bigger details like Dr. Manhattan's influence on American society in this time, as well as the integration of Vietnam as the 51st state. Trying to shoehorn these details into a movie will make the movie's narrative clumsy and full of odd expositional dialogue.

I can only imagine Warner Brothers is hoping they'll cover the movie's costs with its theatrical release, and make money on DVD sales. (Director Zack Snyder talks about the cornucopia of extras that'll be on the DVD.) The whole experience is an attempt to wring as much money out of that particular sponge.

The line of thinking seems to be, "If Warner Brothers make a movie of 'Watchmen', movie-goers will be inspired to seek out the original graphic novel, and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons will get more exposure as artists, and this will inspire them to create more and better works in the comic genre."

No, it won't. For one thing, DC comics is owned by Warner Brothers, and Moore and Gibbons were treated rather shabbily by DC when they signed the deal to do 'Watchmen'. (One of the main points of their contract was that the rights would reverse to Moore and Gibbons once Watchmen went out of print for a few years. Well, twenty-two years later, we see how useful that clause was to Moore and Gibbons. It's like they're being punished for doing superlative work...) As a result, Alan Moore refuses to work for DC anymore. What's going to happen is that the movie comes out, thousands of internet nerds bitch and argue how disappointing it is, and maybe DC pushes a couple of thousand copies extra of Watchmen over the time period. Not that either Moore or Gibbons would materially benefit from any of it, mind you.

So in an odd way, this legal battle between Fox and Warner Brothers is a good thing. Consider this: The movie's been made, and everyone who's worked on it has been paid for their work, presumably. (The only downer is that people like Snyder and the producers won't see any extra money on it if it never gets released.) If it never sees the light of day, the beetle-browed denizens of the internet who are bitching about it, like,er, me, get their wish of never having a solid work degraded to another, more popular medium. The internet nerds who want to see it get to speculate endlessly about what kind of movie it could be, and argue with each other about who'd be a better casting decision in what particular role. Everybody wins.

Well, not Alan Moore. If he put his name on the movie, he'd be decried as a sell-out who abandoned his principles for a few dollars. And if the movie tanks, he'd be the one taking the blame. ("Alan Moore's seminal 'Watchmen' flops at the box office...") And if it makes bank, Warner Brothers is going to jump to the head of the parade float, taking all the credit. ('Zack Snyder's adaptation of the ground-breaking comic, 'Watchmen' creeps up on last year's 'The Dark Knight' in terms of ticket sales...")

I'm rolling a d20 of hate...

...for the entire Sword and Sorcery genre- I should probably point out that beating on this genre, intrinsically, is like slapping around a eight year old girl with one hand tied behind her back. Nonetheless, I feel it is my duty to piss and moan about it, since that is why these 'blog' things were invented, innit? Here goes...

In the beginning, there was Lord of the Rings, an enjoyable bildungsroman romp by a linguistics professor at Oxford that highlighted his love of Celtic and Nordic culture. Over on this side of the Atlantic, you had Robert E. Howard cranking out pulp entertainment in the pages of 'Amazing Stories'.

In this day and age, however, the whole genre hasn't progressed much beyond that. As a genre it's generally related to the craposphere, and not without good reason. There is little or nothing you can take from it and apply to your own life. It is a vacation from life. Its primary consumers are adolescents indulging in power fantasies and blue collar types envisioning a primal world where might makes right. Also, note if you will the constant harping about the decadence of civilization. This brings me to the sword & sorcery genre as it stands now. I'd like to bounce the bitch ball off the heads of these particular offenders:

Dungeons & Dragons:The Role-playing game: What started as a side line for tabletop medieval war gamers in the sixties turned into a phenomenon in the eighties. The game allows you to role-play a character in a medieval/fantasy setting where you can pretend to be a thief, wizard, barbarian, whatever. The style of play is open-ended, in that if you wish to rob travellers on a pilgrimage, set up your own church, storm a wizard's castle, gallivant through a dungeon, or plot and scheme, Black adder-like, in a nobleman's courtroom, you are perfectly free to do so. Ideally, this is in a relaxed social environment with like-minded friends with the same atmosphere of a good poker game.

The trouble is, in order to play this game, you are obliged to understand and be proficient at the underlying rules, which take up literally hundreds of pages. Creative accounting, as it were. The type of people who gravitate towards RP G's tend to be obsessive, introverted types (NEEERRRRRDDDDSSS!!!) who enjoy that type of anal-retentive detailing. That tends to drain all the fun out of it. This leads me to:

MMORPGs: World of Warcraft and it's predecessor, Everquest. If D&D is a gateway drug, than MMORPGs are crystal meth. Watching a MMORPG player, I'm reminded of a lab rat with a diode wired into the pleasure part of its brain. If the rat presses a switch, its brain is flooded with endorphins. The rat will literally starve to death pressing the switch above all its other biological concerns. (How do you kill that which has no life?)

The Lord of The Rings movies: Y'know, I tried watching the DVD of the first one of Peter Jackson's series a while back and I had to turn it off after fifteen minutes. When these came out in theaters, I felt more obliged to see them as opposed to wanting to see them. Well, I saw the first one in a theater; the other two I felt I could wait for a DVD release. It's one of those things you experience, like a six-hour German opera or a performance by a Japanese noise band. (as opposed to something you enjoy.) The point is, this is as good a movie as you're ever going to see of the whole genre. Peter Jackson, is at worst, a competent journeyman filmmaker. In watching it, you realize (well, I did...) that the genre has a ceiling to its level of entertaining an audience. As for how low it can go...

Dungeons and Dragons: the movie- In the press releases for this little cinematic turd, I was informed that the director/producer, one Courtney Solomon, spent TEN YEARS of his life getting this to the big screen. Just think about that...

"Hey, Courtney, wanna shoot some hoops?" "Naw, man, I gotta get ready for a budget meeting with some producers for my DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS movie!"

"Hey, Courtney, you goin' for that promotion at work?" "Naw, man. I quit my job to bring DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS to the big screen!!"

"Courtney, my darling. Let us make love.." "Naw, baby. DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS is my one true love!" Follow that dream, buddy. Follow that dream.

Eragon: Keeping with the spiteful and vindictive tone of this blog, I've considerately decided to pass my snidest judgement on Eragon, a movie I haven't seen and a book I haven't read. Why? It's a Sword and Sorcery trope, dur. From what I understand, it shamelessly cribs from both Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. This makes it a photocopy of a photocopy. It's a twenty-first century knock-off of those Golan-Globus direct-to-video filmed-in-Spain-where-the-actors-speak-their-lines-phonetically crapfests that came out all the time in the eighties. But why such animosity, you ask? The book was 'written' by a sixteen year old kid home-schooled by his rich parents. His publishing deal came about when his self-published novel (well, his parents published it.) fell into Carl Hiakseen's stepson's lap, who sent it to a publisher. The rest, is history.

So. Given the to-do this Chris Paolini's gotten over the success of his 'Eragon' novel, how many more Paolini wanna-bes do you think will be crawling out of the woodwork? Hundreds, if not thousands, of self-published 'novels' about noble heroes and epic quests and ferocious dragons with good hearts and dwarf comic reliefs who fall down a lot on their butts and evil wizards with long fingernails who say things like, "Now, my plan is complete!" and "Fools! You let them get away!" and "This isn't the end, Seth Trueheart!" (cause the kid who wrote the storys' first name is Seth) and fair maidens who are like, totally hot, like Trish Corscaden in like, my Math 20 class, but she's not a stuck-up bitch like Trish, and the fair maiden,(who's named Trisha) is like, a cross between Buffy on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Princess Leia and at the climax of my novel, Seth totally swings across the Cavern of Lava to rescue Trisha, and she's all like, "Oh, Seth, I love you so much I'm totally willing to overlook your acne!" and when they swing back across the Cavern Seth kinda cops a feel of Trisha's boob, but she's cool with that cuz he rescued her, and who should be facing Seth but the Inner Guard of the Lich Warlord, these five guys who totally look like the defensive line of the high school football team, and the head Inner Guard is like, Todd Ames, who pushed me into a locker last week, so he's goin' down. Then Seth totally goes Jet Li Sickhouse on their asses, and the dwarf comes in to help, and Seth's all like, "No! These ones are mine!" and then the dwarf falls on his butt, and after the side of the Cavern of Lava Seth swung back on looks like a cross between Jackson Pollock and a meat grinder, the dragon shows up and says,"Young prince, you had the power in you all along!" (cuz', you see, Seth was a lost prince of the realm all along, so he like, totally gets his own castle where he gets servants to take out the garbage and mow the lawn so his parents can fuck off) and gives Seth the fabled Bong of Eurpideis the Wise, winks knowingly, and flys off into the sunset, and Trisha totally sticks her tongue down Seth's throat, and then the credits roll,and like, Evanessence is on the soundtrack, and like, I figure, as an 'Easter egg' for dudes who stick around until after the credits are over, like, we give 'em a bonus scene, where the dwarf falls on his butt.

Fuck off, Paolini. Fuck off and die, you spoiled little shitbag.

Stuff I hate that everyone else likes...

A few weeks ago the Onion's A.V. Club (the only bit on the site I'm inclined to read nowadays) had a short bit entitled, "Classic Movies it's Okay to Hate". A poster on the site pointed out that this is the type of 'controversial' piece usually saved for Entertainment Weekly or Us magazine. They list Network, The Shawshank Redemption, Star Wars, A Clockwork Orange, The Exorcist, Fantasia, Caddyshack, Roger and Me, Carrie, and The Big Lebowski as talking points in their theme. Fair enough, but it kinda got me thinking. I'm sure everyone has their "Pfft. You gotta be kidding!" moments when it comes to popular movies (and t.v. shows), so I thought I'd just beak off on mine...

Network- I'm totally on board with their assessment of this one. Paddy Chaefsky's script is smug, self-righteous, and condesending. Coming out when it did, in the 70's, beating on televison would be like beating on a cripple in a wheelchair with one hand tied behind his back. Every character is shrill and didactic. It's Chaefsky's passive-aggressive revenge on an industry that didn't kiss his fat ass enough in the thirty-odd years he wrote for it. Of particular contempt: Max Schumacher's (William Holden) wife's speech to him after he informs her of his affair with Diana Christensen(Faye Dunaway). Up to this point, she's been essentially a non-entity in the film. After Max confronts her over his infidelity, we get this bit of histronics...

"Get out, go anywhere you want, go to a hotel, go live with her, and don't come back. Because, after 25 years of building a home and raising a family and all the senseless pain that we have inflicted on each other, I'm damned if I'm going to stand here and have you tell me you're in love with somebody else. Because this isn't a convention weekend with your secretary, is it? Or - or some broad that you picked up after three belts of booze. This is your great winter romance, isn't it? Your last roar of passion before you settle into your emeritus years. Is that what's left for me? Is that my share? She gets the winter passion, and I get the dotage? What am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to sit at home knitting and purling while you slink back like some penitent drunk? I'm your wife, damn it. And, if you can't work up a winter passion for me, the least I require is respect and allegiance. I hurt. Don't you understand that? I hurt badly."

Boo-fuckin'-hoo. Then she drops off the face of the movie. The actress, Beatrice Straight, won a best supporting actress Oscar.I envision Chaefsky sitting in front of his typewriter, cackling to himself about how he'd love to see the faces of every network executive when they screen his little magnum opus. What was his reaction, I wonder, when Network got all those Oscars in '77? It's too bitter and heavy-handed to work as satire. In an interview at the time, he disingenously claimed that, "he wasn't writing satire; all t.v. execs aspire to be Diana." Bullshit.

I'd argue the Onion's other choices are just attacking mainstream entertainment for doing its job. I mean, come on, no one is going to compare The Shawshank Redemption to, say, Renoir's Grand Illusion. And their take on 'The Big Lebowski' is wrong. Just. Plain. Wrong.

So here's some of my other personal picks for Movies (and T.V.) that everyone likes but I think suck:

Napoleon Dynamite- I am told that this is a comedy. I am told that the title character is a loveable outsider with a eccentric family. I've been told it is a coming of age tale that takes a loving look at growing up in small-town Idaho. I had to turn this movie off about two-thirds of the way through. The main character comes across as a victim of Asperger's syndrome in such a chronic manner that he could replace Dustin Hoffman's Rainman character. When another student crushes his cache of tater tots in his cargo pants, I felt a small twinge of pleasure at Dynamite's abuse. Because the character is closed off from everyone else in the film, you can't empathize with him. In the South Park t.v. show, one comedic bit is to have a character say or do something incredibly absurd, then cut to a reaction shot of other characters giving that character a blank stare of hostile incomprehension. The whole movie of Napoleon Dyanamite's humour is essentially relying on the audience staring blankly in hostile incomprehension at the goings on in the movie. There's another bit where Dynamite is part of an extracuricular school club called 'singing hands', where he and some blank-faced girls wave their hands about to sappy new-age music. There's a cut to their audience, some other blank-faced students. (If we had got a shot of a student snickering at this display of absurdity, followed by being cut short from a faculty member's disapproving stare, THAT would've been funny.) I felt exactly like those kids after watching this.

Sex and the City- It's been mentioned that if a man truly wants to understand women, he will watch this show. In theory, it has a lot on its side; modern single women seeking sexual gratification for its own sake, and not suffering any backlash or societal disapproval for their actions. It's not hard to figure out why it was so popular during its run. The main characters have vibrant, successful lives, and the conflicts that they face in the course of the show are the type of problems that their audience would give their eye teeth to have.

The problem for me, after I bit the bullet and actually watched a few episodes, is that it's like some odd disease swept through Lower Manhattan and removed any trace of empathy or selflessness or altruism from every single human being in that region. While some of the dialogue is clever, I'm reminded of a point the television writer, Maria Semple, made. If anyone ever said to her even one of the things that the people on sitcoms routinely say to each other she would probably burst into tears and go running out of the room. When the four main characters get together to 'dish' about their love lives, I got the impression that they hung out together not because they had formed a sisterhood of like-minded mutually suportive libertines, but that the unspoken agreement amoungst them was, "I'll endure listening to all your petty whinging, but in return, you all have to listen to my epic life story, because I am such a fascinating and unique person, and no one in history has ever faced the dillemas and struggles of me." It would've been more interesting a series if it was revealed that the four main characters in fact, hated each other, and sought to undermine the others at every opportunity. In reality, I've endured self-obsessed 'tards like this many a time in my life, and the only reason they aren't dead, or beaten within an inch of their lives, is because it's illegal for me to inflict damage on them...

As an example, one of the episodes I saw had as it's plot the dilemma Carrie Bradshaw faced when her apartment went condo, leaving her facing the inconvience of apartment-hunting in Manhattan. In steps her boyfriend of three months, offering her to move in with him. Just as she is about to accept, her friend Meredith reveals that Carrie's boyfriend went shopping with her for an engagement ring for Carrie. (Why Meredith didn't try and give Bonehead the "aren't you moving kinda fast?" speech isn't explained.) I missed the rest of the story, but let me guess-Carrie finds her own place, refuses boyfriend's offer of marriage, Samantha makes some comment about her cooze you'd expect to come from a crazy homeless woman of sixty, The End.

I hate to get all preachy on you, but if this show, is in fact, how all women everywhere aspire to be, then I must chop my genitals off and fling 'em into the ocean. It's based on a series of columns by a woman named Candace Bushnell, written, no doubt, in the same smug,devil-may-care-hurray for sexuality tone of the series. I can't help thinking, however, about some single mother in the midwest stuck making under twenty four grand a year at her shitty, dead-end job with no real free time for a social life watching this show and being made to feel like she's not only missing the party, but that she's not welcome in the first place.