Writing

I've fallen a little behind on watching TED talks recently, but I took a look at this one today while I waited for Mad Men episodes to download and thought it was particularly interesting.

Alternately titled: "In Which C. Fisher Provides an Unbiased Review of Watchmen Nonetheless from a Nerd's Point of View"


I have not read the Watchmen comic. Most of you know of this, and of my insistence not to read it before seeing the movie. I wanted to experience the film without bias or expectation, except those that I came by via word of mouth and conversation.

I know people have strong feelings about Watchmen, so I am going to do my best to COMPLETELY DISREGARD them and give my honest opinion.

Watchmen was a visually beautiful film ruined by clunky dialogue, an incoherent (by which I mean "un-cohesive," not "difficult to understand") plot, and a distracting overuse of popular music.

I'll start with the positive. Many of the shots, effects, and images of the film were truly beautiful and mesmerizing, especially near the beginning. Trying to parse meaning from the ever-shifting shapes on Rorschach's mask was one of the more mentally engaging parts of the film. Unlike a lot of people, apparently, I didn't find the opening credits particularly amazing, but the fight scene resulting in the Comedian's death was fantastic. As the film progressed, I will admit that I started to get bored of gore splatter, slow/fast punches, and bone-breaking. I did not get bored of looking at Patrick Wilson, but that is beside the point.

The plot was the weakest part of the film. I'm sorry, Alan Moore fans, but as I ranted and raved about in my V for Vendetta review a few years ago, his plots just can't be transferred directly into the film medium, they NEED to be reworked. I had some investment in the characters, some moreso than others, but no investment at all in the story. Someone killed the Comedian. Okay. He seemed kind of like a terrible person. There is going to be nuclear war? Hm. Okay. I guess for me, there were really no stakes. If you want to make an audience worried about a nuclear war, show some shots of normal people panicking, praying, weeping, building bunkers and holding their children close, not talk show hosts talking matter-of-factly about how the Doomsday Clock is at four minutes to midnight.

There wasn't much build-up to Dr. Manhattan's realization that he still had feelings. There wasn't much build-up to Nixon deciding to go to DEFCON 1. There wasn't much of a build-up to the climax at Ozymandias' secret South Pole fortress of solitude, either. These were prime opportunities for the film to get us invested, to make us excited, but it just kind of blandly laid events out. Choosing any one of these as THE BIG CLIMAX and working around them would have automatically made the film more engaging.

I think the strongest parts of the plot were the little backstory vignettes that composed the first half of the film. Each was its own little mini-movie and they were fairly effective. But all these great, complex characters were all set up only to essentially go through the superhero motions at the end. DISAPPOINTING.

I'm sure a lot of people have talked about the music, so I won't spend a lot of time on it, but I found it REALLY distracting. Did we really need that Simon & Garfunkle song at the funeral? Did we need "99 Luftballons" in the restaurant? Sometimes gaps without dialogue can stand on their own! I feel like the insertion of the songs there represented a huge lack of faith in the power of the visual narrative.

All in all, for a film that was supposed to run dark and deep, there were a lot of silly giggles in the theater when I saw it. Some at the almost comedically explicit violence, some at the sort of cliched lead-ins to the Silk Specter/Nite Owl sex scenes, some just at awkward dialogue. I think a lot of the laughter could have been avoided if (sorry Zack Snyder) it had been put in the hands of a more skillful director. Snyder is great with action scenes, but he cannot do drama for the life of him.

Any drama the film had was salvaged by the fantastic Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach. I've only ever seen him (that I remember) in Little Children, but he was fantastic in that as well, obviously in a very different way. In Watchmen, a film where most other actors were kind of sadly smiling and shrugging their way through, he was absolutey in the zone.

In closing, I'm sure that this film works excellently as a supplement to the comic book, but it absolutely does not hold up as a standalone film.

Guy Maddin is attempting to leave Winnipeg, the city in which he was raised. In order to so, though, he must consciously relive his youth there and try to find new meaning in his memories. He recruits his mother, hires actors to play his siblings, exhumes his father's corpse, and they move back to his childhood home. They reenact events as Maddin traces the history of the city and his relationship with it.

The posters for this film read "Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg," which might be a more accurate title. Winnipeg is an intensely personal, extremely subjective look at the city of Winnipeg as the director, Maddin, knew it. The movie is like diving into Maddin's psyche, overtly Freudian but realistic at the same time. Its sometimes excessive surrealism weaves back and forth between solemn, wryly funny, and downright mystifying.

One has the impression throughout the entire thing that it is wrought with complex metaphors whose meaning we can only scratch the surface of, metaphors that Maddin understands completely. Its constantly bleary, sleepy focus and rhythmic editing put the viewer in the mindset of the sleepwalkers who pervade the city's streets. My Winnipeg is mesmerizing and alienating at the same time, filled to the brim with layered meaning and poignant images that create a believable composite of human memory.

You've heard all the conspiracy theories--U.S. Presidents are controlled by the Freemasons; they are concealing the reality of alien visits from the public; they have a mysterious secret phone line that can call the future; and they only wear underwear in months that contain the letter R. All of these are true, of course, but what of their personal secrets? Each of our presidents, believe it or not, was a distinct and unique person (except, of course, for John Quincy Adams, who was really just John Adams with sideburns [see above image]). Here are just a few things you didn't know about the presidents you know (or knew in eighth grade) and love (or feel complete disinterest towards).

The Italian Renaissance has long been known as a time of enormous innovation in the realms of art, mathematics, and philosophy. But in his new book, Medici to the Moon: The First Space Race, famed historian Dr. Giacomo Marenzio suggests we add "rocket science" to that list as well.

The book is based upon a collection of blueprints, letters, and essays discovered last winter in the basement of Tutti Frutti, a Florentine gelateria.

"Soon after getting my hands on the Frutti Papers, it became clear to me that this was big--really big," Marenzio explained in a prepared statement. "I knew right away that they were the biggest historical find of the century."

The Darjeeling Limited, auteur Wes Anderson's newest work, is the story of three estranged American brothers (the recently suicidal Owen Wilson; Francis Ford Coppola's tiniest nephew, Jason Schwartzman; and Adrien Brody, who makes most of his income selling bottles of his sweat labeled as "Talent Juice") who go on a journey through India in an attempt to reconnect with each other and grow spiritually.

I had the opportunity to sit down with director/co-writer Wes Anderson and star/co-writer Jason Schwartzman before the screening, and--

Well, I sat down across the room from director/co-writer Wes Anderson and star/co-writer Jason Schwartzman with some other very serious journalists and--

John Kowalski woke up early on the day he ruined his life, early enough to watch the sun, red and swollen, pull itself over the horizon and transform the idyllic suburbia outside his window into a maze of stark contrasts and long, ominous shadows.

This was a noteworthy occurrence, as he had never been a morning person. He usually saw the alarm clock as a mocking adversary that could never be defeated. Since he would spend the next night and countless more after it sleepless and miserable in an unforgiving prison cell, it was meaningful somehow that on his last morning as a free man, he had experienced something new.

At least, that's what Mr. Kowalski thought later, leaning numbly against a concrete wall, clad in what he had heard a guard call the Anti-Suicide Apparel, an ugly, sleeveless suit made of some kind of unrippable fabric.

It seemed that now he would have nothing but time to think, and think he did. When he grew tired of thinking about all the things he had done and shouldn't have done, he thought about water.

When I first met Melinda and Marcus, the famous sister and brother bounty-hunting duo, I did not want to kill my wife, I was just hungry.

I was standing in line for the chili dog stand two blocks from the office. It was a chokingly humid August afternoon and the line was long, longer than usual. As a lone drop of sweat slowly rolled down the back of my neck, I weighed how much I wanted a chili dog against how much I wanted to be back inside the sharp air-conditioned cool of the cubicle that was my prison forty hours a week. I craned my neck to see up to the front of the line. An overweight Mexican was arguing with the chili dog vendor in broken Inglés. I looked at my watch, which seemed to have melted onto the skin of my wrist. 12:59. Almost, almost 1:00. I'd promised myself that at 1:00 I would finish working on my latest project, an instruction manual for a do-it-yourself swing set. Slide Peg C into Slot B, that kind of thing.

As I was about to turn around and head back, three things happened in very quick succession, one might say, well, simultaneously. First, a thick, angry gray line of storm clouds swallowed up the sun, casting the unsuspecting sidewalk in sudden, ominous darkness. Second, a loud crash of thunder boomed, momentarily shocking and disorienting me. Thirdly, a heavy hand landed on my shoulder.

O wiper of windows and wringer of mops,
wheeler of carts and emptier of trash,
you invisible fixer and cleaner--
    Our vomit crusts the sinks!

O proud wearer of the jumpsuit,
with sweat-grayed undershirt beneath,
unabashed shuffler of all-black sneakers--
    Our stale ramen remnants line trash bags!

O bleacher of porcelain and plastic,
scrubber of innumerable surfaces,
king of the industrial cleaning product--
    Our traffic gums the floor with grime!

O unintelligible grumbler of complaints,
hooded downcast eyes brim-full
with righteous resentment--
    Our shower-hair clumps like soggy tumbleweed!

O disconcerting bearer of mystery,
face gouged deep with lines
and folds forged from joy and woe--
    Our young ears remain clogged
        against the wisdom of countless years
            and dirty toilets.