Two Things I Thought I Knew

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I’ve been reading about Watchmen, the book and the movie. In the comic, I always thought the Gordian Knot Company was a bit of a stretch as names go. Yes, the Gordian knot was impossible to untie, but you don’t really think of untying locks,  just opening them; to my mind, rope and metal are too different for one to easily suggest the other. Additionally, the legend of the Gordian knot is known but not widely known, at least not in the U.S. Not a likely name for a small-time consumer service company.

I figured Moore wedged the name in there simply to further his Veidt-Alexander parallels. But no. He said in 1988 that he just thought the name would be funny and that it was only as the book went on that he realized how it dovetailed with Veidt’s monumental self-esteem.
Next, the movie gives us Dr. Manhattan always surrounded by an eye-repelling blue-white glow. I thought the glow was one further effect of the film’s deadly CGI blight. Again no.  Peter Aperlo’s Watchmen: The Movie Companion tells us the glow comes from the little bulbs on Billy Crudup’s motion-capture suit. It was, what do you call, actual-source light or something. Only the big blue muscles were CGI.

Mysteries of Young Women

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I live in the section of Montreal near McGill University. There are lots of college kids around. Right now it’s finals and the 2nd Cup is jammed full of kids studying. I’m parked at my little table in a row of other little tables, all of them full except for the one to my left. It has a textbook placed on its far edge and a slim sheaf of papers placed atop the textbook. During the past hour four different people have tried to park themselves at the table. Each time the girl sitting one table over has told them no, “somebody’s sitting there.” But there isn’t. Her friend, who had been there, took off to print something at home and so far has not returned. As mentioned, the coffee shop is jammed and, like the missing girl, the people who want to sit down are students frantic to get ready for big tests.

It amazes me how young women feel entitled to pull stunts like this. I’ve seen them try it at the gym too: “I’ll just wrap my sweater around the handles of this elliptical machine and come back in 20 minutes, and meanwhile Monica will tell all comers ‘somebody’s using the machine.'” My theory is that men don’t go in for such wanton abuses of “saving” because they’re afraid someone will hit them. 
UPDATE:  A fifth character just got turned away. Agitated, I leaned over to the friend and said, “I’ve got to say, this is getting to be a bit unfair.”
The friend: “I know, I know. I agree. I’ll call her.” She gets out her cell phone. So maybe western civilization is safe after all.
UPDATE:  The girl is back. To her friend: “Sorrryyy. Oh, sorrryyyy.” She has one of those lockjaw drawls.

The Week That Was

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I think this has been our biggest week os blogging here at HU. In case you missed it in the flurry, we had a roundtable on Kyoko Okazaki’s Helter Skelter, a few more posts about Wonder Woman (one by Tom, even), the second installment of Gluey Tart: Adventures in Manporn by Kinukitty, this one about self-referential German pretty boys. Also Spider Man 2 and probably other things I’ve forgotten.

Also, if you’d like in comments, let us know if there’s something you’d like us to address or talk about. I’m going to do a post on Alan Moore’s Glory next week more or less by request; Tom did a post specially for a commenter last week; we are all about shameless pandering here at HU.

Nobody Much Is Watching the Watchmen

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Thanks to patford at TCJ’s message board, we have a link to this box office status report by Simon Brew at the site loudly named Den of Geek! The news is mediocre:

Seven weeks after its release, however, and Watchmen‘s legs have all but buckled. For the weekend just gone, its seventh on release, the film brought home $199,114. More worryingly, that makes for a total take of $106,848,750 in America. It’s the 358th most successful film of all time in the US off the back of those numbers, and in 357th is Batman & Robin.

Oy!

The current international take for the film, and this has been petering out too[,] … currently sits at $74,207,581, for a total worldwide gross of $181,103,123. For the sake of comparison, Batman & Robin drew over $130m overseas, for a total of $238m.

Out of Watchmen‘s receipts has to come the exhibitors’ revenues, marketing costs, distribution expenses and such like. And then there’s the film’s budget, with the most conservative suggesting that it cost $120m to bring the film to the screen in the first place. Off the back of box office returns such as Watchmen‘s, it’s perhaps unsurprising that we’re not going to be seeing a mass market R-rated comic book movie for a long time to come.

…
Fortunately, for Watchmen its real money spinner is yet to come. … it’s a film that’s going to have legs for many years on the home market, and Warner Bros will no doubt keenly exploit it with special and collectors’ editions en masse over the coming decade or so. Watchmen will not, when the final numbers are totted up, be a business failure for the studio.
…
However, tomorrow – Friday April 24th – marks the film’s 50th day on release, and it’s just a shame that it won’t be playing for that much longer …
Well, no, there I cannot agree. Watchmen is not a good movie, especially when viewed in a  theater with a big sound system. There is much pain and tedium built into the Watchmen-viewing experience. Yet I do believe the predictions of a long home-theater afterlife are correct. I know I want a copy, as long as I don’t have to pay retail. The Watchmen movie is bizarre and unique, and I still love the credits sequence.
Oh yeah, this link will start you on a magical mystery tour thru the posts Noah and I did about the film’s many shortcomings and isolated virtues.

Sex and Fury

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Japanese yakuza sexploitation; supposed to be a major influence on Tarantino’s Kill Bill. It was kind of disappointing; the swordfights are not especially well-choreographed, and Christina Lundbergh is pretty much a dud as a lovelorn American spy speaking painfully stilted English. The plot is more complicated than it needs to be, the revolutionary good guy is incredibly lame with a lameness matched only by the police who keep letting him escape after his botched assassination attempts (that’s pretty funny, actually). As you’d expect, there are a bunch of largely unmotivated sex scenes and a heaping helping of gratuitous violence, but none of it goes anywhere in particular, and the perversion and viciousness is all pretty rote (women on women whipping in front of a picture of Jesus while organ-music plays and a bunch of nuns look on…eh, okay.)

Still, it earns its reputation to some extent on the strength of the performance of the star, Reiko Ike as Ocho. The scene where she leaps out of the bathtub nude and cuts a swath of death through a passel of treacherous gamblers is probably the movie’s high point…though the climactic scene, where, again mostly nude, she again chops away at a phalanx of baddies, is also great. She never actually looks like she’s a master swordsman, necessarily, but she’s very charismatic and intense; she’s got the fluid stalking thing down, not to mention the deadly glare. There’s a sequel which I’m going to watch shortly, so obviously there was some appeal.

Manga Screening

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Footnote to our roundtable and especially Tom’s fine dissection of Helter Skelter‘s art.

I noted the lack of patterning in the book compared to other manga for women. I meant not the hand-drawn composition of Okazaki’s pages so much as large, flat areas of design. Like the pattern on the dress and tights in this image from Nana:

(Image nicked from Let’s Fall Asleep, a manga & comics blog for librarians.)

The patterns are typically screentones (though I imagine more studios are doing this with computers). Either way, they’re applied, not drawn. (Though at least one artist, Shizuka Nakano, draws with screentone specifically. ActuaBD has a couple of small samples.)

And you can get screentones for just about everything:

Limpid pool and doily patterns:
Clouds and trees:
City at night and magical feathers:

From the Beginners’ Pack at IC, Inc. Pollocky splotches, your family’s tartan, celestial fuzz of the kind that clouds your judgment when you see a really hot girl with bad morals? They’ve got it all.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

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In a much talked-about essay, Peggy Orenstein has speculated that Facebook denies to young people “an opportunity for insight, for growth through loneliness”; it makes it harder for them “to establish distance from their former selves, to clear space for introspection and transformation.” Maybe it also eases — or hides from us — our displacements, and creates, etc., etc., etc.,

 


Oh, shut up.

Via Sullivan.