Author Archives: Tom Crippen

Just Saw Watchmen Again

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I’m doing a column about it for TCJ, so two viewings were necessary. (Here for my first viewing. Here for Noah’s thoughts on Laurie.) This time I brought a pad and kept notes, mainly of sound effects and camera movements that annoyed me. They’re constant. I’ll put it this way: right before the WOMP!! when Rorshach kicks in a door, you get the two-second sheee-ooom of his foot traveling. Every action in the film gets a sting. Close the kitchen door: Wuhmm! Drop a matchbook on the table: Wunnk! The film cannot communicate a moment in any other way. Pretty soon, if you’re sensitive, you start to feel a bit teary; the nervous system never gets a moment to reknit. At least this time I knew what was coming and could roll with it.
Another example of how everything in the film gets treated the same way: little Rorshach punching the neighborhood kid who was picking on him. Not only does the punch get the same big-sound sting as an adult superhero’s punch, little Rorshach delivers his punch like one of the adults, with the same straight-line trajectory. The punch is treated like a devastator, but the kid is too small to be dangerous in that way. The book’s little Rorshach confined himself to the desperate-clawing-away side of the enterprise, which is far more plausible. The movie includes the clawing away but feels that the clawing most be accompanied by a thunder fist. Any fight, in the movie’s terms, is an encounter involving thunder blows. 
Worst casting: I’ll say it again, Matthew Goode as Ozymandias. He doesn’t have the chin or the shoulders, any other considerations aside. Every time he shows up, there’s a hole in the screen.
Nice surprise: Ms. Akerman does a decent job in the dinner scene between Laurie and Dan.
Nicer surprise: Jeffrey Dean Morgan is really quite good as the Comedian. He really swings his Keene riot scene (“The American dream came true”) and his bedside scene with Moloch.
I saw the film at an 8:15 showing on Friday and the place was nearly full up. Counted walkouts by about a dozen people, including a clump of little kids who’d been in the front row and had enough around when Ozymandias was explaining his scheme. The guy sitting next to me really hated the film and made some asides to his companions about “this bullshit.” Once the credits started rolling, people had their coats on and broke for the gates.
Box Office Mojo says that after three weeks Watchmen’s world box office is $161,172,305. Budget was $150 million, so okay. The movie still had a huge second-week dropoff, and it’s not at all a good movie, but I’d rather Watchmen’s film version be sort of a success and not a flop.

What a Bitch!

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It’s a meeting of titans, Prince Philip and Simon Cowell. They’re both pissy, slender men with a lot of money and little patience. But one of them is royalty and the other feels he’s been disrespected. In fact he reports that the prince called him a “sponger.” Buckingham Palace responds that the prince categorically denies it: “He has said he does not know enough about Mr. Cowell to make any sort of comment.”

Conservatives Are Funny

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They really are. The right, or large portions of it, has a great sense of humor. But it’s a humor that’s directed outward. They don’t laugh at themselves, they laugh at others, and very well they do it.

Now big names on the right are trying to show they can laugh at themselves. But the only way they can think of doing this is to put on a silly garment and get photographed. Without the garment, one assumes, they would figure there was nothing at all silly about them.
The left is different. They’re supposed to be humorless, and it’s true they often get pissy about the things the rest of us get up to. But in my experience they tend to laugh themselves. The first time I heard the term “p.c.” it was in college, as in “Yep, tonight we’re eating real p.c.” when the rice and lentils were being served. I was reminded of this when reading Bechdel’s big new Dykes collection. So many of the strips make fun of the lesbians just for being left-wing lesbians with left-wing lesbian attitudes, eating habits, etc.
I’ve read my share of right-wing prose and I’ve known a few conservatives in my time (some fine people, some not), but I can’t remember ever hearing a conservative make fun of himself/herself for being a conservative. They might say there’s nothing funny about conservative beliefs because (in their view) conservative beliefs make so much sense. But left-wingers take their beliefs seriously too. I would guess it’s the matchup between the person and the belief that strikes left-wingers as funny. All these sweeping principles about the earth in balance and the global revolution of the poor, and what they come down to is serving lentils. Whereas conservatives, at least our modern-day variety, tend to feel that they and their principles make a fine match. Turning the course of history from collectivism to freedom — why, sure, that’s right up my alley (my theoretical conservative says) and it does me credit that I take on the job.
When I was in Florence, I was struck by all the people who wanted pictures of themselves standing next to Michelangelo’s David.  Without them, they figured, the photo would be incomplete. Reminds me of conservatives. 

Stan’s Babe-o-Dome, b (FCR addendum)

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I was writing about Stan Lee’s hot-chick covers of the 1940s and mentioned P. G. Wodehouse. I see some resemblances between the two fellows. They’re cheery and upbeat and they see their job as entertainment, pure and simple. In person Wodehouse was very shy; no one could call Stan shy, but he is fairly private. The Raphael-Spurgeon bio tells how, back in the 70s, Stan decided he would take the guys at Marvel out for drinks; once at the bar, Stan realized he had nothing to say to them and slipped away. The reason he took them out drinking was that he heard that Carmine Infantino would take the fellows at DC out to dinner once a week. I don’t think anyone would call Infantino especially charming, and Stan is especially charming. But Infantino liked being with the gang and Stan, from appearances, would much rather be with his wife and daughter and, these days, his grandkids.

Stan and Wodehouse also showed a certain difficulty in coming to grips with unpleasant facts. Mike Ploog tells a story of his Marvel days when he asked Stan for a raise and a regretful Stan explained how in the current economic climate, etc., and then Stan began showing pictures of his latest fancy sports car. Ploog made the obvious point that there was a degree of unfairness here, and an abashed Stan immediately saw he was right. I would guess that, for the brief moments that he looks back, Stan really wishes he had stuck up for Kirby about the art and that he hadn’t been so quick to bill himself as “creator” of all his Marvel co-creations. Wodehouse certainly wished he hadn’t made those broadcasts on Nazi radio, and my only excuse for bringing Nazis into this is that Wodehouse actually did make such broadcasts and they were as harmless as broadcasts on Nazi radio can be. But as actions go it was beyond dumb. It was unthinking, and the same (in a very different arena) for Stan’s complacency about how well he was making out when others at Marvel were not being treated nearly so well. 

Turning out happy, happy entertainment, entertainment as happy and carefree as a Wodehouse book or one of those babe covers, may require a certain temperament: not just good cheer but a sharp disconnect from reality. A decent tv sitcom is grittier than Wodehouse or Stan at his most Stan-ish. The problems get wrapped up, but at least they’re there. (Which isn’t to say Wodehouse is somehow inferior to How I Met Your Mother. Wodehouse is great. At what he does he is inferior to no one, and what he does is worthwhile. But it’s a very specialized stock in trade. Stan’s babe covers aren’t really so great, but whatever.)
This disconnect from reality, when I consider it, feels to me as if it were connected to the unsocialized aspect of Wodehouse’s and Stan’s personalities. That’s why I used the phrase “Babe-o-Dome” in the head, emphasis on “Dome.” The larkiness in their works makes you (or me, anyway) think of isolation just because it’s so air weight, so free of anything at all that might run counter to larkiness. Stan’s babes capture the one moment of joy you feel at the sight of a pretty girl. What a bright moment that is, and what a small moment it is compared to everything that comes after.  

Bad Back-Cover Copy

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A small-time publisher puts out a book that’s about Beverly Hills from 1930 to 2005. The publisher already put out a book about Beverly Hills’ founding and first few decades. So:

Nowhere on Earth are sequels and the success that fosters them more apparent than in Hollywood’s bejeweled bedroom, Beverly Hills. This continuation of the history begun in Arcadia Publishing’s …

Yes, Beverly Hills is evidence of sequels. You look about and say to yourself, “Sequels have been here.” 
All right, the success that fosters sequels is evident. I’ll grant that. But what an odd way of dragging success into the conversation. A hit film can have a sequel. Therefore, the copy treats “sequel” as a synonym for movie success. But it isn’t, so the writer then has to think of a way to mention “success” directly (“the success that fosters them”). And the whole time the writer knows he/she is being clever because the book is a sequel and “sequel” is a movie term.

Shinbone!

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I make a lot of noise about that damn Ted Hughes and that sillyass Sylvia Plath, and then in comments Aaron White coolly deflates me:


Tom, this is like the third or forth time I’ve noticed you expressing a desire to hit someone for the crime of annoying you. Just pointing it out…


Yeah, well … okay. Yeah, I do that. And there’ll be more to come. A guy’s got to do something and I don’t want any situations where I might get hurt. So there’ll be more imaginary violence.

In my defense I can point to a man far more clever than me who also wanted to smash. Mark Twain once said he could never properly criticize Jane Austen. Why not? Because he kept being distracted:

Everytime I read ‘Pride and Prejudice’ I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.


Yes. I’ve known so many smart people who love books and love Jane Austen, and so many decent writers who look up to her, and she is so dreadful, such a ninny-prinny, self-serving, shallow travesty of what a decent social observer should be. She has the greatest subject on earth, that of people talking to each other, and all she can do is remind herself over and over of how silly they are. That’s some sense of humor! Well, Jane Austen, you’re silly, okay?