Chris Mautner has posted a thoroughly vicious and entertaining review of the Wonder Woman animated movie.
I actually got the movie from netflix just today. I’ll watch it shortly and see if I agree with Chris’s assessment….
Category Archives: Blog
Saturday Morning Watchmen
There are a few versions by now. Classic or “Matrix On-line” (the images work nicely) or classic with messed-up editing (stutter effect, imposed bits of speeded-up music).
Via Sullivan, the Schulz-as-Miller parody that’s going around.
Alan Moore’s Simpsons appearance; go to 6:24. Some joker taped the episode off his tv screen; the wobbly effect is actually kind of pleasant, but the sound suffers.
Watchmen Sucks, Redux
My long review of the long-awaited, highly polished turd called “Watchmen” is now online. Here’s an excerpt:
One of the most telling characters is Rorschach. In the comic he’s repulsive and ludicrous—a tiny man with lifts in his shoes, he suffers from major sexual problems, and his disguise is a street person whose placard reads “The end is nigh.” The backstory makes him both more likable and less admirable; the moment in the comic when he threatens his landlady is uncomfortable, but the next panel, where he spares her because of her child, who reminds him of himself as a boy, is extremely poignant. Snyder alludes to some of this—we glimpse Rorschach in civvies, wandering around with his sign—but it never coheres. Viewers new to the story might not even realize this nutty doomsayer is the vigilante’s alter ego. All we’re left with is another cool-as-shit dark hero, kicking ass in glossy martial-arts sequences, doing the dirty work of justice.
I must say, for all its shittiness, Watchmen has generated some pretty entertaining reviews. I think my favorite is Tom’s — it’s not often you see a three paragraph review reference both parade floats and cartoon dogs. Still, Nina Stone’s review would be a close second. I’ve already explained that I feel poor Malin Ackerman has been criticized unduly…but that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate good snark:
That woman has the depth of a teaspoon. I swear to God, it wasn’t only painful to watch her, it actually made me angry. Sure she looks good. So do a lot of other actresses who deserve to have that role. Actresses who can actually act. I mean, it started with her scenes with Dr Manhattan. Her heartbreak and confusion and distress all read like a bratty, petulant 13 year old. All her lines felt like monotone script readings. There was no sense of history to her, no sense that the actor owned the feelings of her character. I couldn’t take it. “Vapid” is almost too nice a word to describe her. (And vapid is a pretty mean word!)
I agree with all of that except for the part about “other actresses who deserve to have that role.” I think Ackerman was perfectly suited for that crappy role. Inflicting it on an actress who could act would just be cruel.
Anyway, as I said in comments, the great thing about the movie is how it brings us all together. Whether you know the comic well, like Tom and me, or whether you’ve never read it, like Nina, we can all still join hands and despise it together.
Update: Bill hasn’t seen it, but thinks it literally looks terrible.
Future Shocks
I knew that Alan Moore had done some work early in his career for 2000 AD, but I’d never seen most of it (unless you count Halo Jones, which I think was serialized in 2000 AD first?) So I was excited to read through “Future Shocks,” compiling his work from the magazine.
In the event, the book was a little disappointing. Certainly, if you didn’t know the author, you’d be hard-pressed to guess that he was destined for future greatness. The stories are mostly three to six pagers, and they’re fairly rote, smug twist-ending sci-fi tales. A ravening race of conquerors heads off across the universe, destroying everything in their path…but space is curved, and they end up despoiling their own home world! A woman clubs an older lady and steals her car…but the car time-travels, and eventually it turns out that the women the younger lady clubbed was herself as an old woman! There’s even one that pulls the hoary old gambit of having the captions natter on about an invasion of disgusting aliens…and then at the end, you learn that the disgusting aliens they’re talking about are humans.
Not that the book is bad. The art — by folks like Ian Gibson, Dave Gibbons, and Alan Davis — is uniformly professional and enjoyable. And there are hints, here and there, of Moore’s future. You can see his facility in a couple of rhymed nursery morality tales, more reminiscent of Hillaire Belloc than of standard sci-fi fare. And in one or two places you can see his unusual (for pulp comics creators) ability to write non-stereotypical female characters. In “Going Native” for example time-traveler from the distant future goes back to study neanderthals. He becomes friends with one of the neanderthal woman, Murr. Like the other neanderthals, Murr’s appearance is apelike and animalistic. Nonetheless, over the course of the four page story, as the narrative mostly speaks of other things, we see her humor, her intelligence, and her strength. At the end of the story, the time-traveler falls in love with her, not despite her appearance, but because he has come to see her as beautiful…as, at least to some extent, has the reader. The story is both bizarre and touching, prefiguring the Swamp Thing/Abby, monster/human love story in some ways…though with the gender of the monster (and the human, for that matter) reversed.
Most of the best moments in the collection, though, come from Moore’s humor. I had always thought that his ABC joke strips, like Jack B. Quick, were a new departure for him, but, as it turns out, they were just a return to his roots. Most of my favorite gags in “Future Shocks” volume come from Moore’s Abelard Snazz stories. Collected at the end of the volume, they read like a more bitter Douglas Adams. In one memorable tale, Snazz (who is a professional genius with (literally) four eyes) — decides to help some down-on-their-luck gods gain new worshippers. So he updates their images; Demeter, for instance, becomes the God of organic foods, while Ares becomes the God of space invaders machines (“Hey!” as one bystander comments, “That’s my kind of omnipotent being!”) To Snazz’s horror, however, the old Gods haven’t shed all their past ways, and, soon enough, gamers are performing human sacrifices atop arcade machines in order to improve their scores. Other Snazz adventures involve spaceships powered by the good thoughts of particularly saintly worms, giant tennis players with the uploaded bio-brains of John McEnroe, and gigantic Rubik’s cubes that take six million years to solve. It’s all quite clever and bracingly mean-spirited; a nice conclusion to an uneven, though overall enjoyable, volume.
Just Saw Watchmen
It’s terrible. I’m just glad the thing ended; for a while there the question seemed touch and go.
I guess the film wins the award for biggest falloff from credits to movie. I loved the credit sequence. The movie itself … to quote a dispassionate observer, the movie is “hollow and disjointed, the actors moving stiffly from one overdetermined tableau to another.” It’s like a well-meaning eccentric decided to tell the story of Watchmen thru parade floats, after which an absolute hack shot and edited together the parade floats using techniques made familiar by low-budget rock videos of the 1980s. The movie helps you appreciate how quiet the comic book is, not to mention understated, deft, elegant. The comic book is pretty much told in medium shot, without sound effects, and at a measured pace. The movie’s approach would be the opposite of all those things.
No big problems with Malin Ackerman or her character. All the cast seemed pretty lame, lightweights chosen for their resemblance to the characters, then stranded amid the dioramas and looped dialogue. The Ozymandias chap was the feeblest all around, but the biggest disappointment was Rorschach’s voice. He sounded like a cartoon dog.
Most regrettable switch from the movie: Rorschach’s business with the handcuffs and file is gone. Instead he just brings an ax down on the child killer’s head.
Stop Hating On Malin Ackerman!
Tucker jumps on the bandwagon
All in all though, if you go with the right people–like the people who can dissociate their desire to masturbate on Malin Ackerman from their desire to watch actors that can actually act in a way that isn’t fundamentally retarded, you can have a pretty good time.
This is fundamentally unfair. Yes, okay, she can’t act. And she did nothing with the role. But let me ask you this…what was she supposed to do? What did the writers and director ask of her? Did they not systematically rob the character of every nuance of characterization? They stopped her cursing; they took away her impatience; they smoothed over her conflict with her mother; they anglicized her last name; they even took away her cigarettes. And why? Because, clearly, they didn’t want silly distractions like personality or a brain to draw attention away from the main thing (or things.)
Ackerman stood there. She wore latex. She looked good. That’s all Zack Snyder wanted from that role. Because he’s a misogynist fanboy shithead.
I guess it’s the old Steppin Fetchit dilemma. Is the actor to blame for playing the part he or she was hired to play? Of course, Ackerman probably couldn’t play any other part. I guess I don’t really want to defend her all that much. Maybe we can just agree to sneer at her and Zack Snyder? Together? In a cuddly friendship circle of hate?
Update: I have a longer post on Laurie from the comic here.
New Wonderful Sentence
This one’s a corker. It’s by Thomas L. Friedman, and it reads like The Onion doing a parody of a dork journalist quoting The Onion:
Sometimes the satirical newspaper The Onion is so right on, I can’t resist quoting from it. Consider this faux article from June 2005 about America’s addiction to Chinese exports …
The rest of the column warns of ecological apocalypse. Well, all right. But I have a Friedman Reflex that’s viciously developed: whatever he says, I want him to shut up.
The Onion article interviews a Chinese factory worker (a “faux” Chinese factory worker, as Friedman might put it) who can’t believe the crap his factory turns out for the American market. Friedman doesn’t get that part of the joke is that the factory worker is saying exactly what western critics of consumption have been saying for years. The Onion does that kind of thing, takes language and ideas that are perfectly commonplace in one setting and transposes them to a different setting. Then Tom Friedman comes along, filters out the odd setting, and focuses on the commonplace sentiments, which he treats as his personal discovery.
I’m not saying Friedman is wrong or right about runaway western consumption and ecological crisis. But if he is right, he is right in exactly the same way as many, many others who have gone before him. And he thinks he’s doing everyone else a favor by getting on his hind legs and making his announcement. It’s official! (Over in Japan, ecological doom predictions are such a mainstay they’ve even generated a new form of pastoral, as Bill tells us.)
Bonus: A classic piece of op-ed Slop Logic. Take two big issues, drop one top of the other, and figure you’re drawing a connection. As in:
What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: “No more.”
I’m not against life in balance. But the US and Europe deregulated banking and let their financial sectors run wild. Canada, for example, didn’t. The US and Europe encountered market disaster; Canada didn’t, it just has to deal with the rest of the world sagging.
The global crisis didn’t happen because ordinary people like to buy stuff. It happened because rich financial professionals were allowed to make themselves richer by running the economy in a cackhanded way that generated profits for them.
Friedman, just do me a favor. Don’t think, okay?
(Footnote: a Friedman Reflex is similar to a Dowd Impulse, which is the urge to seal shut Maureen Dowd’s mouth as soon as she opens it, if not sooner.)