Wexistence

Chillin’ with Darth Maul
as the 8th Philippine Toys, Hobbies and Collectibles Convention
June 13, 2009, SM Mega Mall Megatrade Hall 2

Pictures from yesterday’s foray into the sea of nerds here. (I say “nerd” with no trace of condescension. We’re nerds, so it’s okay for us to make fun of other nerds. If we were jocks then that would just be plain mean.)

We were supposed to just look at not buy, but Ry and I went home with one toy each: a Soundwave MP3 player (that actually transforms!) for me, and a Revoltech Rodimus Prime for him. It seems like there was less cool merch this year compared to last year, but it was still interesting to poke around.

The cosplay parade was fun as usual. Lots of really awesome intricately-made costumes. I could’ve done with less of the anime dorks and gothic lolitas though.

Take Watchmen off your shelf, watch the pages as you rapidly flip through them with your thumb, and it will almost be like watching the movie: images rushing at you without conveying the full weight of their significance. There are just too many subplots and too many layers of nuance to properly tell the story in a two and half hour movie. I guess Zack Snyder did the best he could given the limitations of the medium, but it was more like a movie based on the Wikipedia entry on Watchmen than a movie based on the actual graphic novel.

We all know that movie adaptations of our favorite books never live up to our expectations. I can accept this particular adaptation for what it is. If you liked the Watchmen movie taken in and of itself, that’s fine. But if you liked it because you thought it was “just like the comics,” you need to stay the hell away from me.

The characters:

• Matthew Goode as Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias – 5/5. I didn’t think he could pull it off. In my mind he was still the cute secret service agent who was chasing Mandy Moore around Europe. He should’ve looked a little bit older but all in all it was a convincing performance.
• Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Edward Blake/The Comedian – 5/5. The Comedian is an amoral, sadistic, cigar-chomping womanizer yet Morgan still managed to portray him as a somewhat sympathetic character. Good job, dead guy from Grey’s Anatomy.
• Jackie Earle Haley as Walter Kovacs/Rorschach – 5/5. Haley got an Oscar nomination for his performance as the town pedophile in Little Children so we knew he had the creepy psycho thing going for him. He did not disappoint. I especially loved the scene where he trashed the shrink’s office and growled, “WHERE’S MY FACE?!?” The only Rorschach moment I didn’t like was the part where he killed the little girl’s kidnapper instead of leaving the knife beside him and setting the house on fire. I don’t see why they felt the need to change that detail. It wasn’t a minor detail – it changes our understanding of Rorschach’s sense of justice.
• Patrick Wilson as Dan Dreiberg/Nite Owl and Malin Akerman as Laurie Juspeczyk/Silk Spectre – 4/5. They look like their respective characters, except they’re both too young and too hot. Dan’s a dumpy middle-aged man. When he’s walking around naked you’re not supposed to want to check him out. Laurie’s in her forties and going through mid-life crisis. They’re both shadows of their former selves. Malin Akerman’s most notable role to date is the wife of the redneck freakshow in Harold and Kumar so we weren’t really expecting much from her, but wow. She’s a terrible actress. At no point does she show that she’s capable of any depth and her emotional breakdown on Mars just seemed contrived.
• Billy Crudup as Jon Osterman/Dr. Manhattan – 3.5/5. Dr. Manhattan experiences time in a non-linear fashion. His perception of the world is radically different from that of ordinary people. Human concerns seem pointless, the morality of human actions escapes him. Over time his emotional capacities decrease. He becomes more and more detached from the world, with Laurie as his only link, until he eventually loses her too. Crudup’s portrayal wasn’t able to demonstrate this great divide between Dr. Manhattan and the rest of humanity. His Dr. Manhattan just seemed kind of clueless. Also, couldn’t they have done something about his voice? Put it through a filter or something. It’s hard to be in awe of someone who sounds like geeky Jake Gyllenhaal. Plats thinks the only reason Crudup was chosen for the role was “because he was the only one willing to expose his peeper.”

Likes:

• Genuine attempt to be true to the original look and feel of the graphic novel, though they were more successful in some parts of the movie than others. Loved the flashbacks especially, very Golden Age.
• Cohesive story. Smooth transition between scenes. You never feel like you’re missing something or confused about how something came about. Of course that meant sacrificing content, but that’s better than trying to cram too much material into a limited amount of time.
• The soundtrack. Paul Simon and Jimi Hendrix! I loved that scene with All Along the Watchtower. I don’t understand why some people are saying that the music was out of place throughout the whole film.
• The scenes where they fought like old time comic heroes — hook-like punches and all. Nothing artistic or graceful about them, just Bam! Kapow! Zokkkk!
• Confrontation between Nite Owl and Ozymandias. This doesn’t happen in the graphic novel. Nite Owl doesn’t challenge what Ozymandias did; he accepts it. The ends justify the means. But in the movie, it is presented as a moral dilemma.

Dislikes:

• No sense of impending doom. The world is on the brink of nuclear destruction but for some reason you don’t feel the direness and urgency of the Cold War-esque situation.
• No crescendo. There’s no build up and no climax. By the middle of the movie I was already bored, and remained so all the way till the end.
• Laurie and Dr. Manhattan’s conversation on Mars. This is actually one of the best parts of the the graphic novel, but it had nowhere near the same impact in the movie. The scene felt awfully weak, partly because they whittled down the dialogue too much, party because the actors weren’t very good.
• Nite Owl and Laurie’s fight scenes in the alley and the prison corridor. Too smooth and too choreographed. It felt too modern, not at all the way I imagined they would fight. I had in mind something much grittier.
• Awkward talkie scenes. There were several in the movie but the first one that comes to mind is the one between Nite Owl and Rorschach in Nite Owl’s lair after Laurie and Dr. Manhattan teleport to Mars. Rorschach’s being a pain in the ass. Dan goes, “Why do you gotta be like that, man?” Rorschach goes, “You’re a good friend, Dan.” Dan goes, “I’m sorry man.” And this whole time they’re just standing awkwardly in front of each other and the camera angle doesn’t change. Is it because in the graphic novel that conversation takes place in only one frame?
• The ending. Some people argue, who cares about the squid? The same effect is achieved: a threat to humanity unites humanity. But I disagree. I think that the fact that the threat to humanity came from humanity should change the outcome. The squid is neutral; Dr. Manhattan is not. The US created Dr. Manhattan. He was their most powerful weapon and he backfired. This resulted in massive destruction and loss of life around the world. Why should their mistake unify the nations of the world? Why would Russia or anyone else be rushing to embrace the US just because they suffered casualties too? I think human beings need to be confronted with something larger than themselves, something completely removed from them and totally beyond their known universe (e.g. aliens) to enable them to rise above their small-mindedness.

Conclusion: I knew it was going to be a let down but it was still worth watching. 3/5 stars.

I’m currently reading A History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam by Karen Armstrong and while it’s not exactly your typical page-turner I can’t put it down.

My interest in God is far from spiritual. The closest thing I’ve had to a religious experience was the profound sense of peace that descended upon me when, after years of trying to reconcile the Catholicism I was born into with my increasingly secular world view, I finally decided that I was perfectly capable of living a meaningful life outside the purview of the faith. I prefer to discover meaning for myself, rather than have it neatly packaged and handed to me as a ready-made belief system (created, I might add, by an institution that I’m not entirely fond of).

My interest in God is mostly socio-political — how the concept of monotheism has influenced the development of human civilizations (and vice versa). A History of God is a chronicle of how men and women have perceived and experienced God, from the time of Abraham to the present. It traces the intellectual history of monotheism from classical philosophy and medieval mysticism to the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the modern age of skepticism.

The human idea of God has a history, since it has always meant something slightly different to each group of people who have used it at various points of time. The idea of God formed in one generation by one set of human beings could be meaningless in another. Indeed, the statement “I believe in God” has no objective meaning, as such, but like any other statement only means something in context, when proclaimed by a particular community. Consequently these is no one unchanging idea contained in the word “God”; instead, the word contains a whole spectrum of meanings, some of which are contradictory or even mutually exclusive. Had the notion of God not had this flexibility, it would not have survived to become one of the great human ideas. When one conception of God has ceased to have meaning or relevance, it has been quietly discarded and replaced by a new theology. A fundamentalist would deny this, since fundamentalism is antihistorical: it believes that Abraham, Moses and the later prophets all experienced their God in exactly the same way as people do today. Yet if we look at our three religions, it becomes clear that there is no objective view of “God”: each generation has to create the image of God that works for it.

The book is interesting from an academic perspective, but it also speaks to me on a very personal level. I can relate to the author’s struggle with religion; I felt the same doubt and I asked the same questions. The author, who was born Catholic, attempted to experience God by entering a religious order. As a young nun, she studied apologetics, scripture, theology and church history. She learned a great deal about the faith, but she failed to glimpse the God described by the prophets and mystics.

Jesus Christ, about whom we talked far more than about “God”, seemed a purely historical figure, inextricably embedded in late antiquity. I also began to have grave doubts about some of the doctrines of the Church. How could anybody possibly know for certain that the man Jesus had been God incarnate and what did such a belief mean? Did the New Testament really teach the elaborate – and highly contradictory – doctrine of the Trinity or was this, like so many articles of the faith, a fabrication by theologians centuries after the death of Christ in Jerusalem?

She eventually left the religious life, but her interest in religion continued.

When I began to research this history… I expected to find that God had simply been a projection of human needs and desires. I thought that “he” would miror the fears and yearnings of society at each stage of its development. My predictions were not entirely unjustified, but I have been extremely surprised by some of my findings, and I wish that I had learned all this thirty years ago, when I was starting out in the religious life. It would have saved me a great deal of anxiety to hear – from eminent monotheists in all three faiths – that instead of waiting for God to descend on high, I should deliberately create a sense of him for myself. Other rabbis, priests and Sufis would have taken me to task for assuming that God was – in any sense – a reality “out there”; they would have warned me not to expect to experience him as an objective fact that could be discovered by the ordinary process of rational thought. They would have told me that in an important sense God was a product of the creative imagination, like the poetry and music that I found so inspiring. A few highly respected monotheists would have told me quietly and firmly that God did not really exist – and yet that “he” was the most important reality in the world.

This idea seriously blows my mind. I’d never heard such a thing in any of the Catholic schools I attended. This book is giving me a lot to think about.

It looks amazing… for a movie that isn’t Watchmen.

I love badass superhero movies as much as the next person, but Watchmen was not meant to be just another glossy leather-and-chrome comicbook adaptation. The depth and breadth of its storytelling puts Watchmen in a completely different league from even The Dark Knight, awesome as TDK was. Watchmen remains the only graphic novel to win a Hugo Award and it’s the only graphic novel to appear on Time Magazine’s list of 100 best novels of the 20th century. It’s the crown jewel of the medium for a reason.

Watchmen is about a team of aging superheroes who are past their prime and who are struggling in different ways with the fact that their glory days are behind them. Most of them are retired, but some continue to work behind the scenes as powerful forces who influence the political economy of a world on the brink of nuclear war. The story is not a simple showdown between hero and villain. In fact, it’s a deconstruction of the conventional superhero archetype. It’s an exceedingly complex tale that expertly weaves together dozens of individual plotlines and explores themes like the nature of authority and social power, fascism, free will and determinism, absolutism, consequentialism and moral relativism.

How a two-hour film is going to give justice to this sprawling epic is beyond me. Alan Moore said it himself, “With a comic, you can take as much time as you want in absorbing that background detail, noticing little things that we might have planted there. You can also flip back a few pages relatively easily to see where a certain image connects with a line of dialogue from a few pages ago. But in a film, by the nature of the medium, you’re being dragged through it at 24 frames per second.” (EW)

I can appreciate the great visual styling of the Watchmen movie, but it looks and feels nothing like the comic. I understand that certain comicbook elements don’t translate well on film (e.g. real people would look ridiculous in costumes that looked exactly the way they did in the comics), but that’s just one of many reasons why some comics should stay comics. The Golden Age look and feel of the Watchmen comic is, for me, not just an aesthetic but integral to its storytelling. The very contemporary packaging of the movie has made me wonder (and fear) what else they’ve streamlined/updated/modernized. I’m bracing myself for a V for Vendetta-type butchering. (To make V for Vendetta more “relevant” to the current political climate, it was turned into a political satire about neo-conservatism, when the original story was really about fascism and anarchy.)

I’m not a purist who complains that adaptations of my fandoms aren’t “canon.” I can appreciate creative decisions to alter certain aspects of a work, provided they’re well done and respectful of the original material. But if you’re going to produce an adaptation that only resembles the original in the way that tic-tac-toe resembles chess, you should just go and write your own damn story.

7th Philippine Toys, Hobbies and Collectibles Convention

We managed to survive without buying anything this year, though it was touch and go for a while with the Revoltech action figures and I was really tempted by the Soundwave MP3 player. The cosplay parade was a lot of fun as usual, with some really creative over-the-top costumes. That’s Ryan’s friend Cookie in the enormous Modok costume, which took him 6 weeks and a whole lot of styrofoam to make.

(It was kind of hard taking pictures with the crowd jostling you the whole time and kids threatening to step on your pedicure so some of these are kind of blurry. Click to enlarge.)

Modok and Ryan

+12

Legendary British science fiction writer Sir Arthur C Clarke has died in Sri Lanka at the age of 90.

I grew up reading Arthur C. Clarke, he captured my imagination by giving me a tremendous sense of what was possible for humanity, and I am deeply saddened by his death.

I found The Star and The Nine Billion Names of God online, two short stories I read a long time ago when I was first discovering my love for science fiction.

Ry and I didn’t stay long, because it was hot and tightly packed and we’ve put a moratorium on buying toys and comics. Also, I need to stop being seen at these things because apparently there’s this rumor among my students that I cosplay. I’ll admit that cosplay appeals to me on some level, but I’ve never done it (Halloween doesn’t count) and I probably never will, because most cosplayers are weird and creepy and I don’t want to be lumped in the same category as them. I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be associated with fat girls in Kool-Aid-colored wigs and revealing outfits eight sizes too small, who’re in character all the time and who, in shrill, high-pitched voices that could shatter glass, blurt out random Japanese phrases while standing in line at McDonald’s. (In the same way that I’m a Star Trek fan but Trekkies freak me out when they converse in Klingon.) I appreciate the effort that goes into cosplaying though, and some of the costumes last Saturday were pretty awesome.

“Bumblechii”
That’s a little girl whose costume was made by her Transformers geek dad.

Iron Man at the food court

What is it with cross-dressers and Sailormoon?
At another con I went to last year this guy dressed as a Sailormoon character got on stage, lifted his skirt and flashed the audience. I’ve been extra wary of Sailormoon fans since.

Overheard at TAGCOM: Uy, tingnan mo o, si Pinocchio.

B1 and B2

Hard Gay – was there ever a name more apt for a visual?
The hotpants that went with that outfit were reminiscent of Bim’s infamous “sexy shorts”.

Bim’s coverage of the event for Comicology here.

I wasn’t expecting it to be a spectacular movie, and it wasn’t, but it was still worth watching for the armored bear fight between Iorek and Iofur Ragnar. I really wanted to see Iorek eat Ragnar’s heart though, but that would’ve been pushing it for a children’s movie.

Lyra’s world looked exactly the way I pictured it in my head.

The transitions were choppy, perhaps understandably so because they had to cram in so many events in the span of two hours. Still, I feel like they didn’t make the best of editing choices. We see Lord Asriel being hauled away and then later on we just find out that he bribed his captors and he’s now in some lab somewhere? What?

Character introduction and development weren’t very good. You don’t get to know anyone well enough to have strong feelings for them one way or the other. Even the Magisterium and Mrs. Coulter, who are so easy to hate, were not well established as villains.

When I first heard they were making a movie, I couldn’t fathom how they were going to explain the arcane metaphysical concepts underpinning Pullman’s universe. Very poorly, apparently. I don’t know if all that stuff about Dust and daemons and free will made sense to anyone who didn’t read the books.

In the second book of the trilogy, Pullman explains that “Dust is only a name for what happens when matter begins to understand itself.” It’s the physical manifestation of either Original Sin or the creative energy of humankind, which Pullman appears to treat as the same thing. It adheres to adults, but not to children. It only starts to settle on humans when they undergo puberty (when their deamons settle into their final form). It is connected with the changes that take place during adolescence (a child’s loss of “innocence” and the onset of self-awareness). I feel like the movie wasn’t able to adequately explain that, thus it’s not really clear why Dust is such a threat to the Magisterium and why cutting away a child’s deamon translates to the elimination of free will.

I think the controversy surrounding the books/movie is ridiculous. Militants of Christian persuasions really ought to be less paranoid. HDM is not about promoting atheism, nor is it against the Catholic Church per se. It’s a critique of organized religion and it explores what could happen if a church (not necessarily the Church) became too powerful such that people in society lost the freedom to think for themselves.