Category Archives: Blog

Can’t Watch the Watchmen

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I won’t see the Watchmen movie, though I value the book and don’t mind when the film factory injects a treasured classic with silicon[e]. I even think it’s a plus when I’ve never heard of a single actor in it, save Billy Crudup, who’s replaced early by a computer chip.

Mostly, it’s that I can’t endure the coloring.

In the comic, John Higgins’ colors seemed nasty, lurid, like touching them would infect you with a superbug they’ve only got two antibiotics for and one doesn’t work. My enduring image of it is whole pages of flat magenta or yellow with minor shifts in value. It matched the rotten story and the paper stock. If newsprint seemed to smear color, even absorb it, Baxter(?) paper made it brighter. It’s surely one of the great works of coloring in mainstream comics.

If nothing else, it put me off baked beans for years.

Yet in the movie (trailers), everything’s slick and cool. Its visual sheen has been honed in recent cycle of superhero movies; I guess X-Men was the first, where costumes gave way to hard plastic muscles on bodysuits. Regardless of what they do for the body, they catch the light just so, like a luxury sedan.

Much of the blame should go to the colorist. Even critics who talk about cinematography and lighting, and the rare ones who know the gaffer’s dark art, never talk about coloring (or color grading, as it’s known). The job’s like making a print in a darkroom with expensive hardware.

Stu Maschwitz, a sharp technical mind who until recently ran the VFX house The Orphanage, has a couple of posts on his blog about how color grading can affect a film:

  • Color Makes the Movie, with raw and graded frame grabs from Transporter 2
  • Save Our Skins, about the recent trend in movies to maintain an even flesh color through all kinds of light

So, just from what I’ve seen in trailers & clips, the cold sheen of the images could have been avoided. The recent superhero movies Maschwitz have done, like The Spirit, at least have arresting visuals. Watchmen looks like Turtle Wax.

Nana #15

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Just read through the 15th volume of Ai Yazawa’s Nana, and yes, I am still in love with the series. A few more or less random thoughts…some of which I may have said before, but what the hell:

1. One of the things I like most about the series is the way that it manages to be a soap opera and use lots of soap opera cliches — and yet, the way the series uses them is never, or rarely cliched. For example, volume 14 ended with Nana being confronted by a picture of Ren, her finacé hugging another woman (Reira). We know that nothing happened between Ren and Reira, but Nana doens’t..so, totally predictable set-up, right? Nana should go ballistic and be horribly upset and betrayed and there should be all this drama because of miscommunication. Except that isn’t what happens at all; Nana immediately realizes that the picture isn’t all that incriminating and that Ren wouldn’t cheat on her. She is upset, and there is some drama with Ren, but it’s more about the fissures that already exist in their relationship than it is with the photograph per se…and, in any case, their reconciliation occurs fairly quickly.

Basically, the point is that Yazawa seems to trust her characters to be interesting on their own terms. She certainly provides plenty of drama, but she never sacrifices her protagonists to the exigencies of plot. Nana doesn’t become stupid just because the story would be more conventionally exciting if she did. It’s pretty much the opposite of the way that Brian K. Vaughn proceeded in Y; The Last Man, in which the integrity of the characters is gleefully chucked over every available cliff-hanger.

2. I love the way that Yazawa let’s the focus of the story drift from character to character over the course of the story. Nana and Hachi are always more or less the most important characters. But as their lives alter and evolve, the most important supporting characters change a lot. In this volume, I was just noticing how central Takumi (Hachi’s fiance) has become, while Nobu (her former flame) has been pushed off to the sidelines. Meanwhile, Jun, Hachi’s friend, and a central character early on, has a walk-on appearance, and though it’s a very brief scene, you can feel the weight of their past — there’s a close-up where you can see Jun realize that Hachi has become a much stronger and more mature person — and seeing it through Jun’s eyes allows the reader (for whom the transformation has been more gradual) to recognize it too.

Again, the point here is Yazawa’s faith in her work and in her readers. She trusts that even if she drops characters or adds characters, the reader will stay with her. And, perhaps more importantly, she trusts that the story can change gradually and organically, without exclamation points. It’s just incredibly mature and confident story-telling.

3. On another note: this isn’t exactly a criticism, but…today I was talking to a friend who has toured with an act which started small, and then got quite big. And one of the big problems he encountered was with money. That is, when you start out small, nobody thinks much about how you’re going to split the dough, because there is none. But when you suddenly get big, the money becomes a huge issue — one that can sew a lot of bitterness, wreck friendships, and just generally create a lot of drama.

Nana is, of course, about two bands that make it big. And it’s a soap opera, so it thrives on drama. But…there’s virtually never any drama about money. The characters don’t argue about money. There’s no discussion of how they’ll split their takes. There’s an acknowledgment that they are earning money, certainly, but there’s never fighting about it. It’s weird.

A while back I talked about the odd way Nana deals with the band’s drug use and publicity. Most of that strangeness had to do with cultural differences, I think; Japanese bands have to be a lot more careful of their public image, especially around issues like drug use. It seems unlikely that cultural difference explains the problem here, though; I mean, I doubt that Japanese rock stars never quibble over money. Probably Yazawa just doesn’t think that money troubles are romantic or interesting — and possibly she thinks such mundane concerns are beneath her characters, who are all fairly self-consciously presented as artists. I don’t know…anyone out there have any insights? It doesn’t really bother me per se…it just seems odd.

Really Bad Sentence

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From Lesbian Images by Jane Rule, published 1975. The book says that Jill Johnston, a loudmouth flibbertigibbet with the Village Voice, refuses to quit being a loudmouth flibbertigibbet:

Instead she seems to collects insults and labels to wear them around her neck like all the other decorations she wears over her comically aggressive costume and then stick that neck out once again, not only to contradict other people’s visions of reality, but her own vision of six months or two years ago.

Yeah, stick that neck out and … Oh well. The sentence is a spasm of klunk, a rare combination of two flaws normally found apart: clod-hopping heaviness and disoriented dizziness.
Wikipedia says Jane Rule, author of Lesbian Images, was inducted into the Order of Canada two years ago. Incredibly, I saw a movie based on one of her novels, saw it way back in 1986. Today I find out that the movie, called Desert Hearts, was based on a book by a woman who became a Canadian knight (or dame) and wrote at least one sentence that sounds a lot like somebody on cough syrup trying to turn an epigram after falling a long way down the stairs.
Bonus facts: Jane Rule was born in New Jersey, and her novel, published in 1964, is entitled Desert of the Heart.

And here’ s the Jill Johnston Wikipedia entry.

Nietzsche-Keane

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This is a bit collegiate, but … The Nietzsche Family Circus. A random Nietzsche quote is made the caption of a random Bil Keane cartoon; just hit refresh and you get a new one. Didn’t really make me laugh, but one appreciates the thought. 


UPDATE:  And then this one did make me laugh.


 

For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity to exist, 
a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.

That kid in the background with the hat. Mom’s going to buy them a fifth and they can get trashed and do amateur theatrics in the backyard.

And this one. It seems too good to be true:




If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

And finally:


A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.


Impulsive Prediction

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UPDATE: The AFL-CIO had already confirmed the offer.
UPDATE 2:  Bad news for my prediction, though not good news for the GOP.
***

Political Animal links to a Greg Sargent bit. Supposedly, the AFL-CIO has told Arlen Specter they’ll back him in his next election if he votes for the Employee Free Choice Act. The idea is that he may jump parties and become a Democrat. My reflex judgment is, yes, he’ll change parties. I saw Bill O’Reilly on the Daily Show in November, and he was saying that basically his outlook was anarchist. These days you can go on national tv and say you’re an anarchist, and that’s better than saying you’re a Republican. And Specter has always struck me as somebody who jumps as survival dictates.

Here’s a clever piece of distancing, by Tom Wolfe in early 2006 (if I remember). He was asked about being a conservative. Wolfe said people know him for what he’s against, they don’t look on him as being in favor of anyone in particular. As I translated it: he wanted to say that, yes, he was still against limousine liberals, but he was not necessarily in favor of Republicans or conservatives. If that was the idea, I think it was a dodge but clever.  “Being against” really is a big part of Wolfe’s outlook, especially being against flossy, pretentious, trend-following would-be elite fops — damn liberals. On the other hand, come on, his beliefs are conservative and so are his loyalties; that’s why his latest book is on sale at Human Events Book Service, along with Ann Coulter and Bernard Goldberg.