So Near Yet So Distant

There was a summer in my childhood when all my brother and I did was rent laserdiscs and had movie-marathons, and of the titles we recall liking, most of them were sci-fi ones by James Cameron or Steven Spielberg. Years later I would get the DVD of most of those films, but the one that I still couldn’t find is about extraterrestrials descending to a run-down apartment in New York, and repairing it. The name of that movie is *batteries not included, and I’m going out of my limb here, but I’m guessing the DVD copy won’t have batteries too. I’ve only seen that movie once, yet I liked it very much for two things. The first is that the extraterrestrials—sentient flying saucers smaller than a matchbox—were way adorable. The second is that the tenants of the apartment they saved were close-knit. That may sound mundane to anyone, but that meant a lot to me because it makes me wistful of the ties that I feel is absent in the building I’ve been living in for more than 15 years.

I live in a 16-storied condominium in the middle of a city. And in a place where tall buildings are common, this one is a boring, unremarkable slab of gray, without anything to make it stand out. It also likes to resist changes: the only significant one I’ve seen in all my years living here is that we now have cameras inside our two elevators. The parking lot still looks the same, the security guards working nighttime still sleep on their job, and our elevators are still slower than a crippled spider. It still has the same tenants, and the idiots are still idiots about the elevator even after 10 years of usage: they press up when they mean to go down, and they don’t hold the door open for incoming passengers.

And while it may sound like I’m not very fond of people living here—which is true, for some—that does not mean I want to distance myself from them. It also wouldn’t be so bad if my case is an isolated one, but no, everyone is insular and there’s no sense of kinship. All my 15-years here, I see the same tenants greeting each other with the same old dull topics. They’d say the how-are-you’s or the how’s-business’s for the sake of being polite, without any interest of hearing the answers. I’ve never seen, or heard, of anyone here asking another to hang out somewhere and to see movies together so that they can have animated spoiler-intensive conversations while taking the elevators home.

Last November, after reading about how my neighbor infuriates me, my friend Ryan chatted with me to console me from all my frustrations. And while I appreciate his small act of kindness, I soon resented the stress that the topic was giving me. So to lighten up the conversation, I told Ryan about a cute girl who also lives in the same building where I live, and that I wouldn’t mind getting to know her.

And then just a few days ago, I did get to talk to her. She was on the seat next to me when I was commuting my way home, so I introduced myself to her as a person who lives in the same building as she does. And then I found out that she also works in the same building where I work, which is an hour away from home. We also went to the same university and studied in the same high school. One would think that in such situations, there would be loud utterances of I-can’t-believe-it!’s; instead, none of us were particularly floored by what we’re learning from another.

I don’t know what is weirder, that we work, live, and study in the same place, or that we’re not fascinated by those facts. All I know is that if such amazing coincidences fail to amaze us, then chances are, we won’t become very close friends, like how we are distant to everyone else from where we live.

Slow days

The one thing that I avoid doing on my blog is to announce things I will write about at a future time, because I have a tendency not to make do with those plans. And so today, even if my blog is in a stagnation period, I still will not say the stuff I have coming up.

But I swear I’ll post something substantial next week, once I get this one done.

In the meantime, if you really want to know about what I’m reading now, it’s David Sedaris’ “When You Are Engulfed in Flames”. I usually read fictions, so with this one being a collection of essays I’m still trying to get the hang of reading it continuously for some period. I have to say, though, that the author has a gift of writing the funniest passages I’ve read in a book. It’s not unusual to see me in public with this book in hand laughing out loud and in the act oblivious to the embarrassment I seem to be causing myself.

Go get it if you can. I still haven’t read his other books though, so I can’t say which of his stuff is his best.

,= )

My copy of Alan Moore’s Watchmen has a concise testimonial flying aloft the cover: “One of Time Magazine’s 100 Best Novels”. I peruse that list often, and though I’d love to see more than just 1 comic book/graphic novel (let’s just dispose “graphic novel”; it’s nothing but a lofty way to say comics), I understand and agree with it including Watchmen.

There’s probably a word that means a genre of fiction told by altering the world history, so if someone could fish this word out for me, please do so. Watchmen has a revised history being that, with the aid of comics-like costumed heroes, America has won the Vietnam War and thus prolonging Richard Nixon’s tenure as a president. He’s still the president by 1985, and constitution has been amended to include a new law called Keene Act. Provoked by public outrage against costume heroes, it outlaws “hooded vigilantes”, forces them to reveal their identities, and retires them.

Those who complied are Nite Owl, an ornithology-enthusiast who dons a cowl reminiscent of Batman; Silk Spectre II, a daughter of Silk Spectre strained to pass on her mom’s legacy; and Ozymandias, the world’s smartest man. Rorschach, a trenchcoat-wearing gumshoe who wears a mask that follows the theme of the eponymous ink blot test, refuses to give up his ways and continues to enact his brand of justice in the underground. The Comedian, a tough-guy patriot with a chip on his shoulder, and Dr Manhattan, a godlike being capable of creation, destruction and teleportation, retain their jobs legally, as long as they work for the government.

In the first scene, The Comedian is thrown out of a building, and Rorschach takes his death as proof that someone is conspiring to murder all of the costume heroes, causing him to find all the surviving ones. Meanwhile, there are looming threats of nuclear war as USA and Soviet Union’s animosity reaches boiling point.

Though the labyrinthine plot follows the whodunit template, what it ultimately does is question the motivation for wearing silly costumes and fighting for an individual’s brand of justice.

In my view, Moore deserves a place in the pantheon of American literature because his stories are just as intricate as anything by John Steinbeck, but unlike the works of anyone in Time’s list, his medium of choice is not written novels, but comics. Over the years, comics carry the stigma of merely being the middle ground between movies and novels, which makes for an inferior version—for movies, comics is like the still pictures, and for novels, comics is like the condensed texts. Watchmen debunks that claim by applying techniques that wasn’t widely used in comics before, and wouldn’t work (or at least achieve the same impact) on novels or movies. Newspaper clippings, autobiographies, magazine articles, and character profiles inserted between chapters expands on Watchmen’s fictional world. Comic books within one are told for juxtaposition while the actual story keeps moving forward. Scenes transition with same alignments but different places, objects, and people. Captions and dialogue boxes lay on top of indirectly related panels for effect.

Even from a technical standpoint, Watchmen is praiseworthy, but what made it unforgettable is its handling of its characters. Comic book heroes can be said to be the surrogate mythological gods and goddesses of America, so what Watchmen did was tear apart the romanticism they get and instead portray them as flawed and deranged. It defined a new generation of comic book writers decrying the silly-fantasy aspect of superheroes, bringing them back to earth, effectively making them more lifelike.

It’s nothing short of amazing.

It’s also nothing short of amazing how Zack Snyder manages to miss the mark completely in his movie adaptation, despite his efforts to stay true to the comics. If your only exposure to the source material is on Wikipedia’s plot summary—and why should you do that?—then yes, you’ll find the movie slavishly exact.

Before I go with how the film goes wrong, allow me to give the movie credit for achieving something nobody expected: make me feel stronger that Watchmen the comic book is a work of pure genius, and the devil for that, like how they say it, is in the details. The movie omits, or at best, glosses over those details, and ends up like a soulless telling of Watchmen.

Remember the autobiographies, the comic books, the newspaper clippings, and the profiles I mentioned a while back? None of them made it in the movie. The left and the right-wing publications that shape the civilians’ ambivalence for costumed heroes? Absent. If you’re going to understand the Watchmen lore purely from the movie alone, good luck understanding the civilian’s perspectives, because they have zero screen time. In the comic book, you’ll often see them congregating on one newsvendor while lamenting about the state of the world. Without the civilians, the movie takes away one vital character of the comics: New York City.

Yes, the city, the big apple itself. Some of the best stories—the comics included—are the ones where the settings assume their own characters. If you want examples, try Oceania of 1984, Macondo of 100 Years of Solitude, and that street in Brooklyn in Do the Right Thing. These places are memorable because they are multi-dimensional, you know you have certain requirements to survive in it, and you know that were you raised here you’d be a different, perhaps worse, person, yet you can’t resist imagining yourself in them anyway. I know the lifestyle of NYC is ubiquitous knowledge and in most movies NYC is chosen for convenience’s sake since you can fill in whatever you know about the city to the story. But the comics’ NYC is a different beast. This is not the real-world NYC where the populace’s brisk-walks to high-rise offices and coffee shops are common sights. Watchmen’s NYC is a far more hostile, polluted and sinister. It’s grimier, and you’re more likely to be mugged and beaten up here. It’s not a place for tourists at all.

So what part of this is apparent in the movie? The movie does not even make it clear that this is happening in New York – it might as well be anywhere else. Since there’s not a glimpse of the civilian’s life, nobody will get any chance to observe the costumed heroes the way they’d be perceived in the movie’s world, so why should those who’ve never read the source material care if the costumed heroes are banned? Why should they feel affected by the looming nuclear war? And though the city does look polluted and grimy, the movie styles it up too much. So instead of looking like slums from Harlem, this one resembles some film-noir alleyways that look alluring due to stylistic touches from past “golden” eras. I mean, what dystopia world is supposed to be this beautiful? I love noir, but this one’s just ridiculous.

Come and think of it, I’m very peevish about Zack’s stylistic choices. They’re why the defense “This movie only lasts 160 minutes, so you can’t expect Zack to cram everything in” is invalid. Yes, it’s impossible to cram everything from the comics in that time span, but he could’ve put in more stuff in his movie. Instead, he slow-mos everything to oblivion. Even turning of doorknobs takes 5 freaking seconds. The problem is that all these slow-mos, besides being cheesy and overdone, have the weird effect of polarizing two audiences of the film: the ones who never read the comics will feel that it’s too long, while the ones who have read it will feel that they’re being short-changed of plot details.

I’ve never felt that this world is in any way real, and it may have to do with the overstated Lomo effect. There’s never sunlight, there’s only muted sunlight, and the night sky looks more like a texturized layer from Photoshop. Here’s newflash to Zack: people still buy postcards. People still get out of their computers and have vacations at the beaches. People still stargaze. Wanna know why? We can perceive beauty without using grungy lenses. I know, I know, it’s hard to believe. But I’m looking at the morning sky now. It’s cloudy, it’s real, and it’s spellbinding. Didn’t the comics bring the superheroes down to a human level? How come movie’s setting feels manufactured?

It’s like Zack lives in a world where nothing ugly exists, only pretty and ugly-pretty. It’s not just his aesthetics, but also the way he presents his characters. In the comics, all the costumed heroes have their origin stories and none of them are pleasant. The movie captured the origin stories well, but did not grasp the ugly consequences on their characters. Unlike in the comics, you’ll find all the costumed heroes here cool in the gritty way that seems so fashionable lately. They’re too cool for their own good. The comic book’s intent was not to present the costumed heroes in very favorable light and as misunderstood characters, but rather as characters who misunderstood the world. Dr Manhattan’s detachment from human life, and Rorschach’s uncompromising ways, and The Comedian’s being the anathema of other costumed heroes, are only given cursory glances. Ozymandias’ obsessions with Alexander the Great and Egyptian death rituals are not explored in depth. I have no sense of Nite Owl’s frustrations in subduing his childish hero fantasy in a world that forbids it, nor Silk Spectre II’s fury as someone who despises everything about being a costumed heroine. I don’t see tensions among the costumed heroes, and them to the world at large. All they do is band, disband, retire, and then regroup, and then engage in epic battles in the process. It feels like watching a reunion concert from musicians you don’t know about – you feel disconnected and you wonder what the fuss is.

It’s not just the characters here are Cliff’s Notes of their comics’ self, but that some are completely mischaracterized because Zack did not put in the details that gives them more dimension. Zack puts all his attention in styling everything up but not add the real meat and potatoes to the plot, and his fight scenes, with all the exaggerated violence and the flying bodies, take away the realism the movie needs. It’s frustrating to care about anything. He renders his characters more as superheroes than as costumed heroes, or as normal people who dress up to enact their justice in ways law doesn’t, without question to the morality of their deeds.

Which begs the question, how exactly does this movie alone deconstruct comic book heroes? Since it’s unclear why the civilians resent the costumed heroes, how will they be thought of as fascists, psychotics, and extremists? What is the fuss with the Keene Act all about, and what is its rationale?

As for the acting, Rorschach and The Comedian deserve praises. Dr Manhattan isn’t too bad. Night Owl and Silk Spectre II, however, are atrocious. They sound dumb when they talk, and are devoid of personalities. I know it’s early this year, but they’d’ve clinched a razzie award had Street Fighter Legend of Chun Li not been released this year – and, mark my words, Dragonball Evolution will also come up with serious contenders.

So, given my disapproval, some may wonder what I expected of the movie in the first place. Honestly, I have never liked the idea of making a Watchmen movie. The moment I saw the trailer, I wrote it off as a loud, bombastic film that will fail to grasp the scope of the comics. And I was more scornful after seeing it advertised as being directed by the “visionary” responsible for 300. In the history of overrated, claiming Zack a visionary ranks up there with awarding Chicago the best picture and calling Nicole Kidman a good actress. You don’t become a visionary by translating comic books to movies. I mean, is it just me, or is comic books the laziest source material to adapt to films? The director doesn’t even have to bother with storyboards anymore, now he can simply use the panels for references! Zack is known to be literal, and none of his movies are his own material, so how is he a visionary? Where’s his creativity?

Some of you may ask which director I would suggest for Watchmen’s movie, and I don’t want to answer that. I never believed in a Watchmen movie anyway. I maintained that stance before, and I still maintain it now, that nobody can translate Watchmen to film in a self-sufficient way while staying true to its source’s spirit. Inwardly, I hoped Watchmen the movie would stink. And stink it did. And I’m glad Alan Moore didn’t attach his name to it. So I hope that when this movie fails to endure in conversations 3 months from now, Hollywood will finally get a clue that they need to stop all these waves of uninspiring superhero movies. Leave the comic medium to thrive by itself, and write some original screenplays for once. That can still be done, can’t it?

Books I’ve Read Survey

(Got this from a friend in facebook, even if there’s almost zero book we’ve both read)

Legend:
O - Owns the book, haven’t read it. Probably a reminder to self about how increasingly huge my backlog is.
X - Read it
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