movies

“Masked musclemen and their melon-breasted mamas”?

I can usually accept Lucius T. Shepard’s opinions, because I think they’re often considered and well thought out, but I don’t think there’s any possibility that I could ever agree with him on anything. From his pretty negative take on Watchmen:

Despite the insistence made by some that pop culture be taken seriously as high art, =Watchmen= remains a superhero comic (if it were something else, it would not serve its author’s purpose), and as such its vision of history and its take on human relationships are adolescent and simplistic, and its profundities are merely quasi-profound; its themes, variously interpreted as everything from political satire to the death of the hero, are essentially a juvenile nihilism embroidered with masked musclemen and their melon-breasted mamas. It seems the work of an precocious sophomore whose reading of philosophy ended with Nietzsche and whose literary obsessions (Jack Kirby, Raymond Chandler, and so on) have produced an absurdly pretentious style of noir, a style that has since proliferated and that I’ve come to call the It’s-Always-Raining-Where-I’m-Drinking (high) school of creativity, usually defined by rundown urban settings rife with graffiti and rainy streets awash with obsessed loners and women in tight and/or revealing clothing. Labeling it one of the great novels of our era doesn’t change the fact that you could probably make a list of a hundred better novels written by authors whose surnames start with the letter Z. It’s a seminal work in the comic book field, a genre-expanding work, but the genre it expands, superhero comics, targets a demographic composed mainly of adolescents and adults clinging to their adolescence (I make no implicit judgment here—I’m clinging like all get-out to mine), a vast percentage of whom are prevented by an R rating from seeing the movie.

Which is just so arrogantly dismissive that it pisses me off. It doesn’t matter if you think Watchmen was a great or terrible movie; Shepard is saying that it can’t be great, because it’s based on a comic, and those things — as anybody with two brain cells to rub together could tell you — are by their nature shallow and immature.

It’s not that Shepard levels these charges against Zach Snyder’s movie, or against Alan Moore’s book. Nobody says that he, or anybody else, has to like either of them, or that they should escape all criticism. It’s that he comes in with all sorts of assumptions and prejudices and applies them across the board.

I’m reminded again why, although I can accept Shepard’s opinions, I tend to avoid reading them. And why, although I don’t always agree with her opinions, I think Abigail Nussbaum was completely right about the man.

Hurm.

Everything you’ve heard about Watchmen, the movie, is right.

Everything you’ve heard about Watchmen, the movie, is wrong.

Honestly, I think you should just see it and make up your own mind. I finally had a chance to see it for myself this afternoon, and I quite enjoyed it. Maybe I had less invested in it than some comic book fans; the original book absolutely deserves its reputation — it’s arguably Alan Moore’s finest work — but it’s been years since I first read it, and it’s not a book I return to time and again. I discovered Watchmen in college, when I started getting serious about reading comics again, but it’s less a personal touchstone for me than, say, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman or the late-’80s X-Men books (from the last time I’d been serious about reading comics).

Reaction to the film has certainly been mixed — to the point where you almost wonder if everyone’s seeing the same movie.

Roger Ebert calls it “charged from within by its power as a fable,” while A.O. Scott found it “grim and grisly” and “interminable.” Certainly there’s room for differences of opinion, but Watchmen seems to have critics and fans split pretty evenly down the middle.

I avoided most online discussion of the movie all weekend — easy to do with only a couple hours of an iffy hotel internet connection every night — but now that I’m digging through some of it, I think my sensibilities lie most with Tasha Robinson, in her comparison of the movie and original graphic novel:

And so forth and so on. There are a bunch more little changes I could harp on, but frankly, in spite of all this—mostly attributable to the film coming from a different emotional place and a different creator, one who really loves the slow motion and the shock moment—I enjoyed the hell out of the film both times, simply because Snyder’s visual aesthetic is so close to the book: He really wants those characters onscreen just as they appear in the book, whether that means Rorschach’s shifting face or Dr. Manhattan’s eerie blue glow. And he wants it all to be as exciting and vivid and intense as possible; I can’t blame him for that, nor be too cross that his bar for intensity is higher than mine. And frankly, while many of these changes lost me little moments I was looking forward to, apart from the superheroing-up of the cast, they mostly strike me as cosmetic, the cost of a huge-budget action film. After decades of being positive Watchmen would never make it to the screen—or that it’d be completely rewritten, as a Terry Gilliam dark comedy or a 9/11 commentary film or who knows what else—I was delighted to get something this accurate to the broad storyline, and this reverential to Moore’s work. (Even if Moore himself doesn’t think so.)

So the movie is not the book, and it probably is the lesser of the two when all is said and done, but I think they’re both perfectly valid, perfectly entertaining ways of telling the same story.

And you know, even if the movie was — as Gerry Canavan and others have suggested — a creative failure, I’d still have great respect for director Zach Synder for making this kind of failure. For having a distinct creative vision (or at least a vision borrowed from Dave Gibbons) and for swinging for the fences. I don’t agree with everything Patton Oswalt says here, but I do agree with him on that.

I will say this, though: My Chemical Romance are no Bob Dylan.

“In a world where the dead are returning to life, the word ‘trouble’ loses much of its meaning.”

“It’s easy to recognize our own reflection, even when it has blood in its teeth.” – Keith Phipps

Last night, I watched George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead, and, y’know, I kind of liked it. I don’t think there’s any danger of it supplanting either Dawn or Day of the Dead as my favorites so far, but it has some really interesting things to say, some really decent actors to say it with, and it feels like a natural progression from those earlier films.

If I have any complaint, it’s maybe that the movie feels a little rushed near the end, sacrificing some of the interesting world-building that Romero does before that, as it marches towards its natural, flesh-eating conclusion.

Still, I’d definitely recommend it.

Saturday various

  • “Who Pacs the Pacmen?” I’m not sure, but I think I want one of these t-shirts.
  • Superusless Superpowers [via]

  • John Sclazi offers some perfectly plausible reasons why George Lucas plans to re-release the Star Wars films in 3D. I still wish Lucas wouldn’t, though.

  • Typelizer seems to think I’m an ESTP personality type, at least based on my weblog, suggesting that I am “[t]he active and playful type….especially attuned to people and things around [me] and often full of energy, talking, joking and engaging in physical out-door activities.” [via]

    Several years ago, however, when I took the Meyers-Briggs test, I was pegged as INFJ, which is the direct opposite. So either I’ve radically changed in the seven years since, Typealyzer doesn’t really work, or one is not one’s weblog.

  • YourFonts. While on the one hand, a free personalized font creator sounds really cool, the idea of turning your signature into a font opens up all kinds of fears of forgery and identity theft. [via]
  • “Tumbarumba is an add-on for Firefox web browsers. It quietly sits in the background, occasionally inserts a fragment of a story into a webpage that is being viewed. The result is an absurd sentence that is reminiscent of the surrealist exquisite corpse game.” [via]

    Which, I’ll admit, sounds and looks really interesting. There’s a pretty decent list of authors. But I wonder about plugins like this… What would happen if you installed this on someone else’s computer and didn’t tell them?