Monthly Archives: March 2009

Turns out…they’re trying to make the channel sound more “human.”

Er…what? First of all, this is an insult to the intelligence of their viewer: They can’t understand what SciFi means, so we’ll spell it phonetically!

Second of all…SciFi is inhuman? Does this make the people that enjoy it similarly inhuman? This is almost as bad as that stereotype that all geeks are pimply-faced 40 year old unwashed men living in their mother’s basement.

It’s just another blow to a channel that has, more and more, provided nothing but crappy worse-than-B-grade TV movies, wrestling, and…er…more wrestling, often alienating the core audience that the channel was originally conceived for.  The one good thing remaining on it is Battlestar Gallactica and…it’s in its final season. When that’s gone, what reason will any good “SyFy” loving geek have to return to the channel that has nothing for them?

None. It might as well change its name completely and become “Spike 2, even more Stuff For People with IQs of a smashed turnip.” Just as how the music disappeared from MTV, the SciFi is disappearing from…SyFy.

They’re not just losing their core demographic, they’re driving us away. SciFi was created for people who by and large want intelligent content rather than mind-numbing idiocy. We want quality. What’s so bad about being TV for Smart People?

I’m with Wil Wheaton on this. “SyFy? Fyck You.”  I’ll be watching Discovery or, you know, anything that’s been cancelled by Fox.

Image via Wikipedia

When I heard that there would be a movie version of Watchmen, I have to admit that the first thing that popped into my head was “Oh no.”

You see, I have loved this comic for years, studied it academically. This is the first comic that was written with an adult audience in mind, the first one to dare to be politically relevant beyond the usual anti-whatever-we’re-fighting propaganda that was common in earlier superhero comics.

No…Watchmen had a point, a very good point concerning current politics of the world it was written in and it drove that point home in the most brutal and graphic manner it possibly could.

It went like this: The world is full of crap. Even if superheroes did exist, they’d probably just make the world even crappier, or fail to shovel the crap completely. They’d be impotent, or insane, or completely and utterly alienated from the human race, but they would not be the answer to all of our problems and would probably just cause other problems.

Quite frankly, hearing that there would be a movie version worried me because of the intelligence with which Watchmen was written, and the typical makeup of the average action movie audience.  They would have to dumb it down, I thought. It was written in the Cold War, and I worried that they would have to modernize it just to allow modern audiences to understand it – there are some remarkable similarities to the life with the constant bombardment of terrorism news.  Plus, there is a lot of nudity. Male nudity, and everyone knows that old double standard: It’s okay to show naked women all over a Hollywood movie, but naked men are verboten.

There was also the possibility that they might alter it completely to make it fit into a PG-13 rating, to take advantage of the usual superhero movie demographic.

I very nearly didn’t go see it at all because of my admiration for Alan Moore, and I knew of his distaste for the way Hollywood tends to mis-represent or mis-translate graphic novels to the screen, and have never liked the way that comic publishers can remove a writer’s creative rights to how his work is used.

So, it took some time for me to convince myself to actually go see this movie. I expected to be disappointed, and love the comic so much that I didn’t want to go see the movie if it was going to be as bad as…well…it could have been. (Movie spoilers ahead)

Disappointing, this movie was not.  They cut a lot.  They had to.  It was already a 3 hour movie, and if they’d kept everything they cut it would’ve easily made 6 or even 8 hours of film time.  Some of what they cut was some of my favorite parts, some of what makes the novel special, particularly the bits with the “normal people” going about their daily lives.  The newspaper dealer and the kid that sits at his stand reading comics, the homelife of Rorschach’s psychiatrist, etc.

So yes, they cut a great deal. What was not cut, however, was wonderfully well done. The frames of the comic came to life on the screen, the particularly memorable scenes almost perfectly posed to match the artwork. They didn’t dumb it down. They didn’t sugar-coat the violence or turn Dr. Manhattan into a funny-looking blue Ken Doll. The point of the novel remains intact in the film, though I still am not certain that all of the audience will fully understand.

All in all, I was very pleased with the movie.  The acting from some angles was a little wooden at times, but mostly it was very good and very true to the book.  Rorshach was absolutely phenomenal.

So if you’re like me and a great lover of the comic, afraid to go see the movie because you might be disappointed…You won’t be. Go see it, it’s definitely worth it.

One Note, however: This is not a movie to take your kids to, people! Pay attention to that R rating on it and don’t get annoyed when you have to take your 7 year old out of the theatre because of the amount of Dangly Blue Wang the kid might see plastered over the screen.  Yes, it’s a superhero comic movie and advertised as such…but the rating is up there on the poster too. It’s your own fault if you decided not to pay attention.

Most of the time, I was with my grandparents when he came on in the afternoons. Usually, one or the other would be driving me home from school, or I might be riding around with my grandfather as he visited the businesses of the people he did taxes for. I specifically remember sitting in the back seat of my grandmother’s old, enormous wine-red Lincoln, with a Dairy Queen chocolate dipped cone in my hand, listening as he told “The Rest of the Story.” Nanny would always turn the volume up. I might’ve been five or six, but that memory is clear and sharp, something that happened often enough to imprint itself in my mind.

If, instead, I was riding with my grandfather, or if he were in the car, the topic of the broadcast would inevitably spark some sort of discussion. I was always included in the discussion, even when I was really too young to fully understand what was said, but my grandfather always listened to my contributions and even when we disagreed, never treated them as invalid, and always respected my right to voice those opinions.

This morning, when I heard Mr. Harvey’s obituary on NPR, it was those memories that popped fresh to my mind. Memories of my grandmother when her mind was still whole, listening to that mellow voice as if it held all the secrets of the universe; memories of my grandfather when I thought he could never get old, teaching me lessons that I didn’t even know were being taught.

Thank you, Paul Harvey, for your service. Yours was a trusted voice throughout my life.