So last night I finally saw Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York.
I’m a big fan of Kaufman’s other films. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Adaptation, and Being John Malkovich are all brilliant works. Adaptation in particular spoke to me as a writer on multiple levels, and I think it’s one of those films all artists should see.
Thar be spoilers ahead, if you care.
Crazy! I’m still trying to catch up. Sometimes it seems like a vacation just means doing twice as much work and being twice as stressed the week after you get back.
Star Trek rocked. I had the pleasure of seeing it in the Arclight Dome in Hollywood, surely one of the best theaters on the planet. I thought it was a pretty pretty movie full of pretty pretty people, and a blast to experience. Then I saw it again a few days later on my birthday and enjoyed it even more. I could go on about it, but I feel like all the discussion probably happened while I was away. Suffice to say I loved it.
(Oh, yes, I aged a year in a mere day on the 14th. Talk about time dilation. Birthdays ceased to have much meaning for me after they allowed me to start drinking legally, so I don’t really think about it anymore.)
My chosen traveling reading material was solid. Torso was quite good (though my copy kind of fell apart while I was reading it, which is irritating). Loyola Chin and the San Pelligran Order was also quite enjoyable, though I liked American Born Chinese more. Strangers in Paradise I only got through some of, and I’m still on the fence about. If I have any recommendations there, it’s to skip the first volume (the first three issues). They’re a little more, I dunno, cartoony than I was expecting, and not really to my taste. But between those initial issues and the next volume, Moore really refined his style and the mood of the book. I’m digging it so far. We’ll see if it interests me enough to continue past the third trade.
One of the highlights of my trip was visiting the Echo Park Time Travel Mart in LA. The Time Travel Mart is part of a network of children’s writing centers. I nabbed one of the little chapbooks full of stories written by the kids there about how much they hate writing. It seemed appropriate.
There are various other such themed stores around the country, if there’s one nearby you should check it out (I’m aching to swing by the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co. next time I’m in New York). If I’d known about the one in San Francisco I would have gone there and gotten some pirate booty while we were in town.
I almost missed it, since it went up over the weekend, but Frank has an excellent new story up over at Every Day Fiction – check it out.
X-Men Origins: Wolverine was about as disappointing as expected. They crammed a lot of unnecassary characters in, and to do so they condensed and butchered the portions of Logan’s origin story that are actually interesting.
Part of the problem is the taming of Wolverine for a mass audience, which is strange because the untamed Wolverine has about as mass an audience (in comic book terms) as you can get. The film completely passes over the years he spent feral and savage in the Yukon, living with wolves. His time with the Weapon X program is chopped down to like one mission. They don’t cover any of his time in Japan (though there is a hint at it after the credits). I’m not being fanboyish here – I certainly don’t expect the film to be slavishly devoted to the source material. It’s just frustrating when they ignore so much great material in favor of some 30-second fan wank appearance of Emma Frost or Gambit or other characters who have nothing to do with Wolverine’s origins.
Oddly enough, Wolverine is kind of a Mary Sue. For a character that has had tragedy after tragedy heaped upon his comic book incarnation, nothing bad really happens to him here. He has help at every turn. When he needs more power, someone comes along and gives it to him. When it looks like he meets someone who can defeat him, people who hated his guts five minutes before show up to save the day. This is motherfrakkin’ Wolverine, people. If anyone is custom made to have horror after horror perpetrated on him, just so that he can stand back up on his own and slice the shit out of whoever did it, it’s him.
There are other things to not recommend the movie as well – the last third of the film is fairly predictable and chock full of cliche. The filmmakers also underestimate the audience and feel like they have to explain things that are obvious.
It’s not all bad. There are some fun action scenes. There are some great performances from most of the cast (though I can’t imagine who thought it was a good idea to put Will.I.Am in there). If you want to completely shut off your brain and enjoy a fun action flick, you’ll find something there to enjoy.
According to the May Table of Contents, “The Squeeze” will be going up over at Every Day Fiction on the 11th. It’ll be a funny little story to start your week. Unfortunately that’s right in the middle of my vacation, so I won’t be around to really see the response. I’ll do my best to check in, though.
Yes, I’ll be going on vacation next week, starting on Wednesday. The wife and I are California bound. We’ll meet up with friends in LA and drive up to San Francisco. As per local law, I will be wearing flowers in my hair.
This weekend will be crammed with chores and preparation for the vacation, but I will find some time to go see the Wolverine film. I believe we have some free passes around here somewhere, and this seems a good time to use them.
The formula for superhero films is always that the more characters you add, the worse it gets. I don’t get why the studios still haven’t learned this. Wolverine seems to be adding as many unnecessary characters as possible to an already complex origin story, virtually guaranteeing disaster. Wolverine is one of those characters who can be fun even in a bad story, so I think it should still be at least moderately entertaining.
On kind of a Chandler adaptation kick lately, I watched The Big Sleep last night (just a week or two ago it was The Long Goodbye – if you want a really good time, watch both of these followed by The Big Lebowski). Despite the extraordinarily convoluted plot, it’s a good time. You could tell the writers knew how hard the plot was to follow - there are several points in the film where everything just sort of stops so the characters can sum up what the hell has been going on. You almost don’t even notice the “who killed the chauffeur” plot hole. Mostly you just watch to see Bogey flirt with beautiful women.
Which is what brings me to the inspiration for this post. One of my problems (as I hinted in my last post) with Dollhouse is how the dolls are treated. They’re sex slaves, and it doesn’t seem to bother any of the employees. The show itself doesn’t seem to give the issue a second thought. There are certainly ways that it could be used to discuss a deep moral quandary, but it mostly seems like the show just uses it as an excuse to have Eliza walk around without pants.
The Big Sleep definitely features women as sex objects. Every female in the movie throws herself at Marlowe. (In fact, I thought the scene with him and the girl in the bookstore – played by stunning Dorothy Malone – was 
way sexier than any of the euphemism-laden flirting he engaged in with Bacall.) And Bogey has a blast with it; he’s far from being the best looking guy in Hollywood, but he plays the role with a slick flair that makes the viewer totally buy it.
So we’ve got two different scenarios here. A ’40s detective film in which the women are props designed to make the protagonist look good; and a contemporary action thriller in which women (and men, just to be fair) are programmable dream dates.
But The Big Sleep doesn’t bother me. Marlowe seems to actually respect the women. He treats them as equals even as he admires their physical traits. At a couple points in the film he relies on Vivian to help him out in physical confrontations with the bad guys. He values an intelligent woman as much as a lovely one. It’s pretty remarkable for a film of its time. They’re using sex to sell, sure, but they’re doing it in a classy way.
In Dollhouse, on the other hand, the dolls are mostly treated as pets, and there’s been little evidence that anyone in the Dollhouse ‘verse even cares. Ballard, the FBI agent trying to bust the Dollhouse, has become so obsessed
that we’re not sure whether he’s doing it because of human rights issues or just to prove himself more stubborn than the next guy. And he’ll probably punch out the next guy anyway. Langton, Echo’s handler, was set up in the first episode as someone who could perhaps be the ethical voice, but he seems to have bought into the Dollhouse line pretty quickly.
I could be totally wrong. It’s a series, so the next couple of episodes may see a complete reversal of this. Someone will be revealed as the traitor and they’ll have some impassioned plea about equality and what not. But 10+ hours in is a little late for for me.
Edit: having read some of the other reactions and critiques of the show that are floating around, and the loads of discussion concerning Dollhouse, I will concede that the show is smarter than I was originally gleaning. I get it. But I’m still not entertained by it or care about anyone in the show. So it’s a wash for me.
So on Saturday a few of us went to see Watchmen. I went in cautiously optimistic, realizing that the project Snyder was attempting was nigh-impossible to pull off, but at the same time falling for the marketing campaign just a little. It’s hard not to.
If you’re not familiar with Watchmen, you should head down to your local library and check it out. It’s an astounding work of graphic storytelling. The story begins with what seems to be a simple murder, but events quickly spiral out of control, and soon a massive conspiracy reveals itself. Along the way, writer Alan Moore dissects the superhero – the effect of heroes on society, the psychological issues, and so on. It’s a book so layered you can read it multiple times and catch something new every time. And you’d probably still be missing things. If you’re not someone intimately familiar with the genre and its history, you’ll likely miss a lot of the subtext, but I wouldn’t consider that a big problem. The story works regardless.
There’s a huge cast. Watchmen covers not just the modern batch of heroes, but their predecessors as well, weaving a story that spans decades. I could keep gushing, but there are plenty of people who’ve already done that better than I could. You get the idea, though – it’s a big, complex, layered story with numerous subtleties. Hollywood has none too good a record with any of those attributes.
I’m still digesting the film, but here are my initial thoughts. I’ll avoid spoilers.
The film has a lot of really cool stuff going for it – the cast is, for the most part, fantastic. Billy Crudup nails the increasingly disconnected, creepy Dr. Manhattan. Jeffrey Dean Morgan is appropriately jackassian as the borderline psychotic Comedian. Patrick Wilson is solid as the geeky, soft-hearted Nite Owl. The real stand-out is Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach, who transformed into the disturbed detective in a performance that blew me away. I don’t think I can stress enough how awesome he was.
Visually, the film was extremely faithful to the book, from the dingy alleys and floating airships to Ozymandias’s massive Antarctic fortress of solitude and Nite Owl’s basement hideout. Snyder follows the book almost panel for panel in many scenes, which is kind of a shame. Comics and movies aren’t the same thing. Blocking your widescreen film into 9-panel pages of close-ups is a bit of a waste of potential. But the sets and effects are quite good. It was with bitterness that I noted the screen I saw it on lacked a digital projector.
Likewise, the dialogue is almost line-by-line the same. Some of the dated elements (such as insults) have been updated for the better. Unfortunately, there are some spots where the filmmakers had to plug in their own dialogue, and those patches stuck out painfully in one or two scenes.
Otherwise, the screenplay was pretty amazing. They managed to squeeze in everything they needed to, and the numerous flashbacks worked well. A lot of world-building background material was worked into a very well done opening credit sequence, allowing them to spend more time on the main plot. Major kudos for managing to fit such a complicated plot into a three-hour time frame. At the same time, most of the main characters are well developed. Dr. Manhattan, Nite Owl, Silk Spectre, and Rorschach are all explored almost exactly as they were in the book, with perfectly reasonable cuts for time. Sadly, though, Ozymandias, one of the most important characters in the story, gets severely short-changed on the development side. Other than a few monologues (at least one or two of which were not just badly-written add-ons by the filmmakers, but also contradicted some of the facts of the character and smacked of attempts to make the story “relevent” to modern political topics), Veidt is badly neglected.
Perhaps what bothers me the most about the film is the violence. The book has plenty of action and violence, sure, and plenty of blood. But the stylistic choices Snyder made for the action scenes is highly questionable. The gore factor was turned up quite a bit, for no other reason than shock value. One case in point – when Dan and Laurie are jumped by a gang of thugs, we see them gleefully handing out compound fractures, using men as human shields to protect against gun fire, and even stabbing them with their own knives. Not only does the extra gore not add anything to the story, it contradicts both of their personalities – Dan was always the one who wasn’t comfortable with excess brutality, and Laurie never cared for the life to begin with. In addition, it means some of Rorschach’s actions, which should be shocking, just don’t hit as hard as they should.
And on top of all that, Snyder apparently forgot that these people don’t have superpowers. They’re normal people. Yet in the film they have no trouble punching through walls, breaking bones, and tossing people across alleys. I assume it’s all in the name of “kewl” but it just doesn’t work for Watchmen.
All in all, it’s not terrible film. It has some big flaws, but I was entertained the whole way through. I look forward to seeing a longer cut later. If you haven’t read the book, you’ll probably have a lot more fun with it.
I’m still mulling over a pretty significant rewrite of the ending. I do think the slavish adherence to the comic’s framing robbed the film of some of the ending’s power.
Now if this same cast and crew (minus the ridiculous action scenes) had been tapped for a 12-hour HBO miniseries, it would have been solid gold. But as is, the filmmakers failed to convince me that this film should needed to be made.
I look forward to hearing other thoughts on the movie, so feel free to chime in. I’ve avoided official reviews up to this point, but I may peruse some to see what some of the pros though.
So the 2008 Academy Award nominations were released today.
Looking over the movies that came out this past year, it’s actually kind of a weird year.
There is some stuff I absolutely loved – Iron Man, Dark Knight, In Bruges, Wall-E, Tropic Thunder.
Some I thought were pretty good – Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Cloverfield, Run, Fatboy, Run, Speed Racer, The Incredible Hulk, Gran Torino, Frost/Nixon.
There are a few I wanted to see, but didn’t get around to – Zack and Miri Make a Porno, Synecdoche, New York, Burn After Reading.
There are probably some I just can’t think of at the moment that were decent but I may or may not ever see again.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull definitely marks the biggest disappointment of the year.
The one foreign film I managed to see this year, and probably the film that affected me most deeply, was 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days – which didn’t even get nominated for Best Foreign Film.
That’s the general trend, actually. Very few of the films I saw this year and thought were good were nominated for much of anything. Speed Racer didn’t get any technical nominations, which seems completely mad to me.
It just seems like a weak year to me. I certainly wouldn’t mind seeing Doubt, or Slumdog Millionaire, they look like perfectly fine movies. But I’m not getting a “holy crap these are going to blow me away” vibe from them or any of the other nominees. I dunno. The big daddy of them all, Benjamin Button, just doesn’t interest me. I get the concept and all, but the trailers just aren’t sucking me in.
Three really solid comic book movies (balanced out, sadly, by several not-so-solid comic book movies, but really who expected Punisher War Zone to be any good?) give me great hopes for the future of that genre, but other than that, 2008 didn’t really wow me for film. Then again, now that I’m looking over the 2007 list, it’s looking pretty good. It just seems like the diamonds that came out in 2007 were better than the diamonds of 2008.
And I still think the “Best Animated Feature” category is a joke. There’s no reason Wall-E, for example, can’t stand shoulder-to-shoulder with, say, Frost/Nixon. And Persepolis totally got robbed last year.
Ah well. Oscar rants there will be aplenty in the coming weeks, so I’ll end mine here.
So I finally got to see Hellboy II: The Golden Army yesterday.
It was…okay.
It’s a fun movie with some fantastic visuals. They brought in Johann Kraus, a great character from the comics and translated him pretty well. The general idea for the story is great and very appropriate for a Hellboy story. It’s more fantasy-inspired than the typical Lovecraftian fare we usually get for Hellboy, but it worked. There’s definitely a big fairy tale feel to the whole event. Abe even gets a fight scene that’s a lot of fun to watch, though it makes me wish they’d been a little more true to the character from the beginning. Praise be Odin that they finally let Doug Jones voice himself. There are some great character moments, like Hellboy getting Abe drunk, and some great banter between Johann and the other agents.
Unfortunately, there are a couple of huge problems that prevent me from being all that enthusiastic about the movie. First, there are some plot holes big enough to guide a Cthulhu through. Secondly, there is a major cheese factor going on here. del Toro and crew turned the corny factor up to eleven, and everything from the dialogue to the music suffers for it. Several cartoony slapstick scenes are quite groan-worthy. It doesn’t just make you roll your eyes there, though, it makes it hard to take the action scenes seriously. You rarely feel like anyone is really in danger (other than the predictably expendable human BPRD agents, of course). You feel like you’re watching Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck argue about who can get momentarily inconvenienced by a face full of buckshot from Elmer Fudd. There’s no gravity to anything that’s happening.
I don’t know. The more I think about the film version of one of my favorite characters, the more I feel like they strayed too far from the page.
Fresh new rejection letter! Quick one, too. Yay!
Saw Wall·E. It’s quite good, though I think Monsters, Inc and The Incredibles are still the best of the Pixar bunch. Wall·E seemed almost too short. I could have stood to watch the little guy roaming around on the dead Earth for a little while longer. I felt disappointed when it turned out there were still humans alive. I wanted to see robots still carrying out the programs of a civilization long dead, but gradually learning to overcome that and create a society of their own. There’s potent metaphor there.
Or maybe I’m just weird.
(I always misspell weird and villain. For some reason it bugs the hell out of me that the i comes second. Perhaps I use the words weird and villain too much.)
Hellboy is out! And Dark Knight this weekend! Gah! Too much going on!
Moving on…I have joined the ranks of Twitter. It’s sort of a strange (ha! eat that, weird!) combination of message board and chat room. I have added a feed over there to the right. What’s really cool is that there are a number of writers and artists whose work I admire on Twitter, and you can chat with them a little, as we are all simultaneously bored at work. But it’s a lot more relaxed and casual than a chat room. It’s interesting.
If anyone out there uses it, feel free to follow me, and I’ll make sure to follow back.
Writing-wise, I am feeling the tug of several directions at once. I’d like to write a western, but I’d also like to explore my superheroes some more, which is really what I should be doing. I also have a couple of other stories smoldering as well. It’s hard to choose just one when so many are calling. It would help if I actually got back to work. I’ve also got a number of pending critiques due to the writing group.
I had somewhere I wanted to submit my robot librarian story, but it appears they’ve closed to open submissions. Oh, well. It was pretty much going to be a shot for the moon anyway. My second choice appears to be in the process of switching over to a flash market, so that’s out; the story is about 500 words too long for flash. I have one more spot I’ve got bookmarked at home that I’ll try tonight.
If you haven’t had a chance yet, you should head over to A Thousand Faces and read the current issue, which contains several excellent stories. It’ll only be up for a couple more weeks before the next edition. After that you’ll have to order it.
This weekend, Hellboy II! I’m a huge fan of the Hellboy comics, and the films have done a pretty decent job of adapting them. There are some pretty big differences, but the core of the character is largely intact.
(One thing about the movies that bugs me is the whole “secret” aspect of Hellboy and the BPRD. In the comics there’s no secret; HB was featured on the cover of TIME shortly after he was found, and the rest is history. Pretty much everyone knows him, and no one bats an eyelash when this big red demon shows up to help them out. It’s great. But I digress, as usual.)
I am a bad person because I haven’t had a chance to see Wall·E yet.
