Ugh. Lost is a repeat tonight . Wasn’t the whole point of these 24-style super runs in bunches that there would be a signifigant lack of repeats? Guess not (supposedly there’ll be another break week after episode 12). But now I can’t wait for next week’s episode, entitled “Namaste,” not so much for the reunion of Sawyer and Kate, but for the continuation of the 1970′s Geronimo Jackson dance party!
“Like most novelists, I like to do exactly the opposite of what I’m told.”
-Haruki Murakami, defying protests to accept the Jerusalem Prize.
“People don’t turn to self-help books to be reminded of the complexity of life or human relationships, they want an Oprah-esque ‘a-ha!’ moment that allows them to take charge and move on with their lives. (See: Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus.) So, I get it. The only thing I don’t get about HJNTIY is why, after a guy promises he’ll call and then doesn’t, plans a date and then ditches, the response should be ‘he’s just not that into me’ instead of ‘he’s an inconsiderate asshole, and I shouldn’t be that into him’?”
Reviewing the film version of Watchmen is inevitable but I’m going to give you two reviews. The first is the shorter one, the one for the more spoiler conscious, and the simplest and easiest to understand: The joke here is on us.
The second review… is about the same. The joke is still on us, not just as fans of the comic, but as people who enjoy good stories, decent acting, and quality filmmaking. Director Zack Snyder comes from the same slow motion then quick speed up school of snooze action as Peter Jackson, but not just that, he also has Jackson’s knack for diving head first into works that are far too big for him and then adapting them as if they were a piece of shit that just needed a flashlight and a camera pointed at them.
I’d love talk to you about the original comic, the graphic novel, and how in comparison to it’s greatness, the film is so horrible. And I will, but don’t worry, I am fully aware that I’ll be screaming at the top of my lungs in a room filled with deaf people.
As for the original graphic novel, by Alan Moore (whose name smartly, or perhaps sadly, doesn’t appear anywhere on the adaptation) and Dave Gibbons, I could talk forever. I’d love to, in fact. We could talk about the original Charlton characters that got switched over into the story’s characters (Blue Beetle becoming the Nite Owl and the Question becoming Rorschach), and we could talk about why there is no letters column in the back of each issue (Alan Moore opted to go with the text backups to offer more depth into the huge world he was creating and because he didn’t want to print fan’s letters; he didn’t want to give them the idea their feelings mattered and rightfully so). We could talk forever about the fractal nature of the episodes within the larger story and we could talk about the two tools of a writer that Moore always uses perfectly: resonance and juxtaposition. We could talk about all of this and more, but it comes down to something simple with the original story in that no matter how much you like the story, if you think it’s just good, or if you think it’s great, or even brilliant, you have to agree on something very simple: It works. It just does.
Tonight I went to a screening of this film – called ” the most anticipated film of the new century,” or so I overheard a barista say in a Starbucks the other day and the very idea of that sends chills up and down my spine – with my associates Benjamin Light and Occam Razor. “Now Watchmen fans know how I felt after viewing Peter Jackson’s Lord Of The Rings trilogy,” Benjamin Light says, and I agree with him perfectly. I feel his pain here.
On the way home, we discussed how a lot of the reasons why some of the idiots out there will love this film is evocative of what’s wrong with a good deal of the filmgoing public these days: They love cool shit. They love cool scenes. On it’s own, that’s not a problem. There’s a lot of films that I hate, but they have great moments in them. But there’s no longer an understanding of what a film is anymore, that it’s more than just a collection of “cool scenes” thrown against a wall of projected light with the significant hope that maybe, just maybe, it’ll work. We also discussed how, despite it being a cliche of it’s own (and cliches are not something this movie is a stranger to), this film could not be more soulless. More so than The Matrix even, and that is quite the feat.
To save us all a lot of time, I’ll list off just a few things that are wrong about this movie:
The direction.
The writing.
The casting.
The frequent willingness to dive into pointless montages just about always.
The constant and bizarre violence that wasn’t needed – if it’s there for shock value, it’s a laughable shock, I promise you – and the weird gore that came with it.
The oddly graphic sex scene set to “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen (I will attach kudos to using the original song and not the Jeff Buckley cover) that was… a bit too much i.e. weird thrusting. Zach Snyder, you are a weird little kid.
The poor special effects. I know the marketing budget for this film was astronomically ridiculous, but where did the rest of the money go?
The cut corners in just about everything. Or, as you could probably call it, the watering down.
The score. It worked so much better on Beverly Hills 90210, I promise you.
The bizarre “cameos” by real life people like Pat Buchanan and Lee Iacocca.
The lack of the giant fucking Cthulhu-esque squid at the end. You know what I’m talking about. It would’ve been so big and so weird and so perfect. It could’ve been the opening starship pan from A New Hope. It could’ve… well, giant fucking squids just make everything better, right?
The way that the filmmakers took one of Time magazine’s top 100 novels of the last century and turned into a parody of anything good. The all too willingness to take a piece of quality material and do it anything but right. The idea that if Darren Aronofsky and Terry Gilliam or even an overrated schlub like Paul Greengrass tried and were unable to do this film justice that someone like Zack Snyder could. Seriously. The guy who directed 300? Come on.
Now, as for something that the film did incredibly right… Let me get back to you, okay?
Shockingly, Roger Ebert gave this film four stars, but if you read his review, he’ll tell you that even he doesn’t know why, or even what’s going on here. He gets one thing completely right though: This is a film complete without nuance and it’s hand delivered to an audience who doesn’t think complex thoughts.
One last pet peeve about the film before I pour myself a drink and try to put this all out of my head: In the theater for an after 9 o’clock showing tonight there was more than a few kids. In this R rated film with lots of violence (which I know, I know, I know that no one really cares about protecting our kids from) and some sex. There wasn’t just a few kids there, there were a lot of kids. I still get carded at times going into certain films or bars, so this shocks me. Why weren’t they kids given some long island iced teas so they might actually enjoy the movie while they were there? And more importantly, why weren’t they enjoying them at home instead with a marathon of Heroes episodes?
Eh, I’d love to say more here, or end this on a funny note, but what do you expect? The Comedian is dead.
This is my weird but wonderful celebrity sighting from over the past weekend:
Most of my associates here at your semi-friendly neighborhood Counterforce have gone back to work, whatever their day jobs are, or back to school. They’ve gone back to the grind. But not yours truly. Marco Sparks is still on vacation, grinding away here in the golden state and chilling in Benjamin Light’s apartment while he’s off making a little paper.
Anyone care to know the contents of Light’s porn folder?
The nice thing, let me tell you here, about starting a blog with a bunch of people is that when you go on vacation, it gives you places to stay. So, you know, thanks to both Peanut and Lollipop for putting me up for a while. Occam, understandably, is a cheap bastard who wouldn’t put any of us up, but he has been hosting the official Counterforce Lost parties the last two weeks, and that’s pretty stand up of him.
Speaking of official Counterforce anything, over the weekend, all of the assorted weirdos from this blog were gathered together in one room, and in the same hotel room for a while, in San Francisco. There were some lurid stories, some large quantities of consumed alcohol, and some down and dirty drama: The ingredients of any good party, yes?
In SF, pretty much all of us attended a nerd convention, and Lollipop took home the best spoils: a picture autographed by Mitch Hurwitz, Will Arnett, Henry Winkler, and Kenan Thompson (Kel was busy manning the Coolburger). Oh, and the guy who did the voice of Spongebob was in there somewhere too. A very cool grab.
But me? Other than the pleasure of everyone’s company, which would’ve been more than enough for me (more than I deserved, certainly), I got the photo you see up at the top of the page of a certain flame-headed singer of a 90s “alternative” band (who now sadly stars on that Sarah Connor show in the middle of the Friday night graveyard of programing on Fox)(Right before Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse which, sadly, I’m expecting to get cancelled any second now).
The story of the picture is simply that I was out to lunch with August Bravo (who smells like straight up mayonnaise, no joke) and my friend Anthony at some Chinese place. “the best dim sum in the city,” the sign outside told us. I was broke, Anthony was buying, so that meant I would’ve followed him into hell. Or a dim sum place when the sketchy looking tempura house he originally wanted was closed (damn you, SoMa!).
I’ll spare you the nitty gritty of our conversation there, but Anthony’s training for a job in which he’ll have a gun. Sigh. What starts out there was cop talk slowly devolves into cock talk and something tells me to look over my shoulder. Perhaps alternarock nostalgia. Either way, there’s Shirley Manson, radiant and glowing, like 5 to 6 feet away from me, having lunch with some wanker. I quietly mutter to my associates in a hushed, stealth tone, “HOLY WTF OMG JESUS CHRIST, THAT’S SHIRLEY MANSON OVER MY LEFT GODDAMNED SHOULDER FUCK!” Luckily, August is on the ball (he was already sexting away on his iphone, so it was cool) and snaps the photo. We decide not to be the kind of pricks who interrupts a celebrity’s life or meal, even if it is with some wanker, to ask for an autograph or ask them to marry us or seek out any kind of validation for our own weird existence. Instead we took a much more subtle and despicable route of just casually glancing back at her like constantly. I suggest to Mr. Bravo that he should get another picture of the lovely Ms. Manson, this time with me leaning into the frame (cause I’m an asshole like that)(and cause the one above has Anthony in it staring off into nowhere or perhaps our waiter’s ass cleavage). He tries to, but it’s too late, the jig is up, and they’re onto us.
The wanker proceeds to look back at us constantly now and we feel shame. Not too much, mind you, a little. Anthony orders more duck and we bullshit our story for in case the wanker decides to say something to us, you know, to stick it too us. Anthony orders some shrimp porridge, rattles off all the police codes for various nefarious sexual acts one can visit upon a minor, and we bullshit that we’re celebrities too. No, not as bloggeurs, but that we’re actually an avante garde folktronica groupe called Infinity Sign. The story we come up with to back that up holds no water and of course, Shirley Manson isn’t going to lower herself to talk to us, and that’s understandable, and I do feel bad about taking the picture. By the way, our first single, “Put My Thing In Your Thing Where All The Other Wild Things Are” will be available on itunes soon.
This picture is absolutely for Peanut, who loves Gwen Stefani so much.
Eventually Shirley Manson and the wanker – whom we try to hypothesize could be her young lover that she takes whenever in the city or her bodyguard or both – leave. And let me tell you here: Some women leave a room and some women leave a room angry. And some do it in the sexiest way imaginable. That’s Shirley Manson. And most likely that dopey guy enjoying the meal with her was probably just the executive producer of her show, but whatever, he’s still the executive producer of that show. Wanker-ish.
Several days later, Commander Light and I took in a showing of the new Clive Owen picture, The International. What a bizarre, wonderful film. Total 70s paranoia thriller fetish porn and all the major action sequences take place in post modern art museums. There’s a wonderful collection of weird European hair happening this film (this weapons manufacturer character who’s running for Italian PM in the film would appear to have a sleeping falcon resting on his head at one point, but, no, it’s just his mega hair). Naomi Watts is barely in it (because, I assume, Jennifer Connelly was busy) and Clive Owen has clawed his way into being my favorite living movie star. Why? Because he’s not a star. He’s not even a man. He’s an animal in a suit and it works.
That, of course, leads me to the Clive Own interview in the latest Esquire. An excerpt:
It just didn’t occur to him to feel the part in advance of doing it. British actors are utterly different animals. You talk to a British actor and he’ll tell you about the night before very matter-of-factly: ‘I fucked her three times.’ They don’t care about your reaction. And you’ll say, ‘Hmm. You fucked her three times. How did it feel?’ and they’ll be blank. ‘Feel? Feel? What’s feeling got to do with it?’ They don’t cart around their emotions about the job. They have lives.
As for Lost, since we do tend to ramble on about that show a bit here, I have to express some love for this past week’s episode, “LaFleur.” It was packed with little tidbits for the fan, and quite frankly, you know that any episode that’s “previously on Lost” clips package starts with a character getting slapped is going to be. Plus, there was this:
On this week’s The Bachelor (that’s a television show ), Jason, the bachelor, dumped the girl he originally chose, Melissa and picked his second best, Molly (Mollies get everything). In six weeks, he will have moved on to the next girl he eliminated, Jillian (never mind, she has just been cast as the Bacholerette) until he works his way through all the eliminated fame-mongers and the camera crew. His true love is Dolores, the Craft Services lady. She unwraps the Hostess plastic donuts and lays them out just the way he likes it, in a semi-circl, not a straight line. He’ll move into her apartment in the Valley, and become a stay at home dad to her 3 cats and pet lizard. She’ll bring him home leftovers from the craft services table: “Here’s some spinach and artichoke dip in a bread bowl from the set SisterHood Of The Traveling Pants 5. That Alexis Beidel is wasting away! She won’t eat anything but carrots and Orbit gum!” And he’ll smile, feed her a bit of the dip off his finger, before throwing the bread bowl to the floor and ravishing her underneath her vintage All About Eve poster that hangs above her bed while the cats feast on the white and green delicacy below.
i want a tv embrace
One other obsession I’ve maintained while lounging about in my sickbed was the TMZ website and their hours of cheaply shot paparazzi videos of celebrities. The real gold is their nightly television show which airs at around 11:30, the typical hour most office workers are just about to doze off after the Daily Show. The television show is just the web clips aired with some very cheesy voice overs interspersed with scenes from the TMZ news room, with head Harvey Levin, usually seen clutching a tumbler full of coffee with a straw hanging out the top, to protect his delicate mouth from the scalding hot tempature of the beverage. The staff bounce stories off of him, which usually involve saying they saw a celebrity at a store buying something. We’re supposed to believe this is like a real newsroom, but of course, the joke is, if the story has made it to the show, there’s no need to run it by Harvey. Just read your lines and think about all that work you spent getting your MA in J-school has lead you to: working at TMZ.
my life ain't no holiday
TMZ is like landing on soft core porn, making it past the one sex scene and staying up to find out who killed Shannon Tweed’s husband. The tastelessness at which they handle everything is both horrifying and enormously entertaining in a way that makes you want to puke: they juxtapoz a water skiing Chris Brown with photos of his beat up girlfriend Rihanna to Katrina and The Waves’ “Walking On Sunshine.” TMZ just broke a real news story, inexplicably someone fed them a tip that Northern Trust Bank had used unsolicited bail out money to fund a three day party in Los Angeles for its clients, which forced the bank to return the money to the government. Harvey Levin is proud of his staff, but not as proud of the hours of footage of a confused Britney Spears, hounded by dozens of paparazzi, needing their help to drive her car out of the Hollywood Hills. He added a little Bailey’s to his coffee that day and changed the straw to a My Little Pony one in celebration.
it must feel good to stand above me, while i make you so proud of me
Andre Tchaikowsky, a concert pianist and composer, never achieved his dream of becoming an actor, so he bequeathed his skull to the Royal Shakespeare Company.
It has sat in a box in the props department, untouched, for 25 years. Now, it has made its stage debut at a Hamlet production in Shakespeare’s former town of Stratford-upon-Avon, starring TV’s Doctor Who David Tennant.
“It was sort of a shock tactic, though of course to some extent that wears off and it’s just Andre in his box,” production director Greg Doran said.
The pianist, who died at 46 of cancer, left the rest of his body to science.
His skull was almost set to star as that of “poor Yorick” in an earlier production in 1989, but after a month of rehearsals the lead actor declared he was uncomfortable handling “real human remains”.
I thought of the above story, amongst several other things, because of this dream I had a while back. The same dream that I seemed to have in a slightly updated from a few nights ago. In both of these dreams, each delerious on magical oneiric energy, I was an actor who had been cast in a high school production of Hamlet. I wasn’t younger or back in high school in this dream. I was me, just as I am now, almost ten years removed from the hustle and the bustle of the high school game. I had been cast as the Prince of Denmark in a high school play in which all of the other cast members were high school students. It was wild, but naturally a little weird as well.
At whatever point in the dream that was “now,” it was a few hours before the curtain rose and there was a rally going on at school, one of those “school spirit” boosters in the auditorium (that all of us cool kids would skip), so the masses were at that, and the more theatre-ish crowd (and you remember how weird all the drama kids were at your high school)(no offense if you were a drama kid back in high school, but let’s no bullshit, you know what I’m talking about better than anyone)(and what I’m talking about is at my high school[s], the drama kids were the ones prone to orgies, boring orgies in which they spoke lines from Hamlet and screamed and argued over which era of the Beatles’ albums their friendship was currently at, but that’s a story for another time, obviously) were all hanging out around the back stage area and it’s peripherals. Some of the kids were assembled in neat little cluters, either talking about which set of tights made their package look nicer or worried about a zit here and there or whether or not whatshername from their Science class would go with them to the prom, or at least give them a handjob in exchange for weed. A classy bunch, to be sure.
Somewhere at this point in the dream, as I was just wandering around and taking note of things as I am wont to do, I had (of course) forgotten all of my lines. For this play that we had rehearsing for several weeks now. The dream “me” had forgotten the lines, I mean. And there I was, about to go into this performance, struggling the to think up all of the lines from Hamlet that I could remember, that actual “me” could remember, that is (which, to be fair, is probably a good deal more than your average person remembers).
And so there I am, sitting there in this dream, trying to think of how I’m going to play all of these scenes that were awaiting me, which choices I wanted to make in the performance (and Hamlet is a role with nothing but choices attached), how big I wanted to take certain parts of it, and trying to think about which moments needed to be quieter, more restrained. Also, there was the question of how overwhelmingly masculine or how little boy-ish the main character to be, rewinding my memory back to Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet and Mel Gibson’s Hamlet, excellent examples of both of those almost in the extreme. Even the Ethan Hawke Hamletmade it’s way through my grey matter, a film that had some decent parts, both as a film by itself and as a retelling of a classic (but all of the stuff in the film that I liked was with my favorite character in this story and not with the title character).
I was even straining to remember Kurosawa’s version of Hamlet, The Bad Sleep Well, and Olivier’s Hamlet (or even The Lion King), both I saw both of them so long ago that it was harder to recall anything. But all of it was in a jumble as I paced back and forth, furiously attempting to remember which choices those actors made in those steps into the roles and ponder which ones I’d like, or duplicate, and which I absolutely abhored and would prefer to go a different route altogether in…
I know, I know. I dream weird dreams. But can you believe that none of my fellow high school “actors” would go over some last minute rehearsals with me? Fuckers. I hope whatshername doesn’t go to prom with them. I hope she goes with the captain of whatever team or one of those assholes from the FBLA. The same goes for the hand job.
Anyways, as bizarre and frustrating as it was, it was an awesome dream, if I can sound like (more of) a nerd for a moment. Very cool stuff. I mean, the dream itself was tense and manic, a lot of running around and panicking while at the same time trying to explore so many options in my head, but… it was exhilarating as well. Incredibly so.
Ah, what dreams may come…
‘Why couldn’t Ophelia Save Hamlet? That’s another of my questions actually.’
‘Because, my dear Julian, pure ignorant young girls cannot save complicated neurotic over-educated older men from disaster, however much they kid themselves that they can.’
‘I know that I’m ignorant, and I can’t deny that I’m young, but I do not identify with Ophelia!’
‘Of course not. You identify yourself with Hamlet. Everyone does.’
As I mentioned above, or as you might have inferred from above, Hamlet is by no means my favorite character in his eponymous tale. It’s Ophelia. Someday I hope to see a version of the story from her point of view. I especially mention this because when I had the dream that I shared with you again just recently, the girl playing Ophelia in the high school play stood out to me as perfect casting. And it was a shame too because if Hamlet hadn’t come around and fucked up her life, Ophelia might’ve been happy.
Ugh. Lost is a repeat tonight . Wasn’t the whole point of these 24-style super runs in bunches that there would be a signifigant lack of repeats? Guess not (supposedly there’ll be another break week after episode 12). But now I can’t wait for next week’s episode, entitled “Namaste,” not so much for the reunion of Sawyer and Kate, but for the continuation of the 1970′s Geronimo Jackson dance party!
Medieval “vampire” skull found.
And then there’s Watchmen director Zack Snyder’s thoughts on Dr. Manhattan’s little blue cgi penis and the suspicious lack of giant fucking squid.
Russia is now the world’s top heroin consumer. I can’t wait for the version of The Wire.
Nano-treatment set to torpedo cancer. Perfect. Robots kill and eat cancer!
This story has just been called “off the charts weird” and “sick, sick, sick and dead wrong.” Do you want to know more?
from here.
“Too shallow to be truly lonely,” Pauline Kael wrote in her review of L’Avventura, “they are people 
“Like most novelists, I like to do exactly the opposite of what I’m told.”
“When so many are lonely… as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.”
from 
“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”
from 
