Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Category Archives: At the movies
Quest for spoilers
Karen won’t see Watchmen unless she knows that the ending is faithful in spirit to the ending of the graphic novel, and I don’t really want to go see it by myself, so this morning I’ve been looking for spoilers. I found this interesting article by Meredith Woerner, “How 9/11 Changed Watchmen.” At a minimum, Zack Snyder has turned the volume way, way down on the ending’s carnage. Okay, so we get no squid. I can live with that. But if you dial down the savage violence of the ending, doesn’t it pull the story’s sting?
Sadly, I haven’t found any true play-by-play spoilers. The more I hear about the ending, the more I worry. They’ve included scenes of Dr. Manhattan vaporizing the Viet Cong, but they’ve hamstrung the ending. In the comment thread to Ms. Woerner’s article, AngryLagomorph writes:
it really does come down to that: you can’t show masses of AMERICANS being slaughtered. we’re all that really matters anyway and its our movie so 😛
Indeed. And another great comment from cletar:
So, because of 9/11, there’s no giant squid? Maybe your 9/11 memories are different than mine, but I don’t remember a giant squid figuring into 9/11.
You know what would have made the New York carnage look completely unlike 9/11? A huge-ass squid, that’s what.
That comment thread looks fascinating . . . too bad I gotta go do my Saturday shopping 🙂
Of course, the ending could have been worse — here’s the ending as massaged by the major studios. Very funny.
Totally off topic, but my research this morning led to this old gem: Studio Script Notes on ‘The Passion,’ by Steve Martin.
Oscar Night Nostalgia
Here’s Sacheen Littlefeather declining the Oscar for Marlon Brando (for his performance in The Godfather) — embedding disabled.
I wondered whatever happened to Ms. Littlefeather, and the Wikipedia article isn’t disappointing.
I haven’t watched The Academy Awards in ages. During med school, I guess, or perhaps internship . . . the Awards would come around and I’d realize that I had not seen a single one of the movies. In the last 20 years, I’ve only seen six of the Best Picture winners: Silence of the Lambs (and how the hell did that win — oh, look at the competition), Unforgiven, Braveheart, American Beauty, Gladiator, and LOTR Return of the King. I love movies; it’s just that I don’t watch them anymore.
I went to a retirement party today, which made me wonder what I would do in retirement. Write, obviously, but you can’t write 24-7. Cook. Shop. And, maybe, catch up on all the movies I’ve missed.
D.
The Squid is out!
Watchmen fanboys and fangirls everywhere are up in arms: Zack Snyder has ditched the Squid!
Gone is Adrian Veidt’s plan to unite mankind by the threat of alien invasion. Instead, we have some kind of frame-up job with Dr. Manhattan as the target. Needless to say, such a fundamental shift in plot sends shockwaves through the whole damn storyline.
I think I understand WHY Snyder did it. Manhattan was, to some degree, a peripheral player. One might delete Manhattan from Watchmen and have an intact, tighter plot . . . minus the heart of the story, but hey, Hollywood has screwed the pooch before. But this . . . they’re not screwing the pooch; they’re raping the whole dog pound.
Anyway, by drawing Manhattan deeper into the central plot, Snyder binds him to the central storyline and creates what is, in theory, a more coherent whole. But what’s left is no longer Watchmen. It’s a different story with Watchmen characters.
Watchmen fans are not amused.
(That’s Bruno Ganz in Downfall, a performance my wife regards as The. Best. Fuhrer. EVAH. “He’s not a cartoon bad guy the way every other actor has played Hitler.”)
Watchmen the graphic novel is a classic in large part because of the powerful ending. Adrian Veidt’s narcissism leads him to believe HE knows what’s best for mankind, and HE knows how to fix humanity . . . and he concocts a ends-justifies-the-means scheme wherein fear and violence lead to nothing more than fear and violence and, ultimately, armageddon. But I doubt that made it into the movie, either. We’ll see.
D.
Post-apocalyptiana
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Earth Abides by George R. Stewart
Fallout 3 by Bethesda Software
As a kid, I read Mordecai Roshwald’s Level 7, a grim post-nuclear holocaust tale in which humanity ekes out a few final weeks of existence in underground bunkers. This stuff fascinated me. The time was the 70s and the Cold War was very much alive and frigid; we had regular duck-and-cover drills, and you could set your watch by the local Civil Defense siren’s weekly howl. I still dream of blinding flashes, of the anticipatory horror before the arrival of a flesh-vaporizing shockwave. Level 7 wasn’t great literature, but its uncompromising lack of sentiment gave it an enduring place in my memory.
I read Earth Abides back then, too, and I recall it as an almost romantic vision of post-apocalyptia. The holocaust is viral, not nuclear, and the humans are struggling but not doomed. Apathy is a far greater threat than man’s darker nature, which appears only in scattered incidents. A man uses a loose woman as bait for a trap. Another man carries a venereal disease and is disposed of by a community that would just as soon not deal with that particular vestige of the past.
It’s a fun book, in a way, because Stewart (who was a Berkeley English Professor) seemed to care less about the question, “What will a few survivors do with an empty Earth?” and more about the question, “What will the Earth do without Man?” It’s an ecologist’s fantasy, a rumination on the decay of society’s trappings and the response of the creatures who live because of or in spite of humanity.
I just finished a much different book, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Surprisingly, it has a happy ending, or as happy an ending as one could hope for from such a grim creation. A man and his (six-year-old?) son walk south over a burned-out wasteland of a continent. The son’s obsession that they remain “the good guys” in this world of roving cannibals provides all of the drive and much of the tension: how can they possibly remain the good guys? The father-and-son relationship provides the story’s heart. If you can get past McCarthy’s love of sentence fragments and hatred of quotation marks and apostrophes, the writing is beautiful, even though the subject matter couldn’t be more stark.
What horror overtook this world? McCarthy mentions “concussions” in a flashback, suggesting explosions; but if the apocalypse was nuclear, everyone would have long since died. As it stands, humans have done far better than plants and animals. McCarthy’s wasteland is almost too grim to be believable.
I suspect Fallout 3 got me in the mood for death and devastation on the grand scale. Fallout 3 takes place a couple hundred years after a nuclear war. Some fragments of society persist in a few dozen scattered Vaults, underground shelters with insular, vaguely autocratic societies. Above ground, which is where most of the action takes place, civilization lingers in scattered settlements (Auntie Entity would be proud). Out in the wild, you battle radscorpions, giant mole rats, and various and sundry other ghouls and super mutants. Oh, and this “wild”? It’s the Capital Wasteland, the ruins of Washington D.C., dotted with remnants of the Capital Building, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Washington Monument.
The charm of Fallout 3 derives from its premise: we’re not fighting for our lives in a post-nuclear Earth, but an alternate universe, one in which human culture froze circa Leave it to Beaver. A local radio station plays great hits from the 40s: The Ink Spots “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire,” Bob Crosby’s “Way Back Home,” Billie Holiday’s “Easy Living.” My favorite, perhaps: Danny Kaye and the Andrew Sisters singing oh-so-politically incorrect “Civilization”:
Each morning a missionary advertise with neon sign
He tells the native population that civilization is fine
And three educated savages holler from a bongo tree
That civilization is a thing for me to see
So bongo, bongo, bongo I don’t want to leave the congo
Oh no no no no no
Bingle, bangle, bungle I’m so happy in the jungle I refuse to go
Don’t want no bright lights, false teeth, doorbells, landlords
I make it clear
That no matter how they coax him
I’ll stay right here
Here’s a full review of Fallout 3 over at PC World.
What’s the appeal of these doomed worlds, I wonder? Do they appeal to the misanthropes among us, or the humanists who believe that human nobility is most manifest in the direst of worlds? They’re stories of survival, most of them (Level 7 being the notable exception) so perhaps we like to think that we, too, have what it takes to make it through to the other side. And what a Darwinian jackpot for the survivors! George R. Stewart certainly understood this; his survivors reproduce like rabbits in the aftermath of the plague.
I wish I had something profound to say, particularly regarding The Road. My sister tells me they’re teaching it in high school these days — not bad for a book with a pub date of 2006. But I’m feeling bereft of profundity today, so I’m left with a piss-poor take-home message.
People who eat people are bad people.
D.
Gravitas
The book is Hotter than Hell by Jackie Kessler. Loved it. Seriously.
Jackie, I’ll try to do a serious review sometime soon . . .
D.
Intellecshual.s Too
Edited to add:
Defend me, people! Click on the video below and up-rate your favorite Walnut! This one-star BS must not stand!
I’ve never felt any motivation to reply to a YouTube video. No, not even Chris Crocker’s “Leave Brittney Alone” video, which I thought was such self-satire, how could I ever improve upon it? Boy, was I ever wrong.
Yesterday’s introduction to Magibon was . . . well, it was too much for me. And I’ve been under a lot of stress lately. Something was bound to snap.
Never thought it would be my garter.
This is vile.
Reprehensible. Disgusting. Lower than the Marianas Trench. Inconceivably detestable. Loathsome. Evidence that we are all damned, damned, damned to hell, that the world is irretrievably lost.
Exclusive First Look: The Sarah Palin Porn Flick.
So revolting, I have to include an excerpt from the script.
PALIN: My oh my. That’s quite a toolbelt you have on. It looks heavy.
JOE: I have a big hammer.
PALIN: Oh, I betcha do. I love a big hammer. But I love screwdrivers, too! And wrenches. The fact is I love and respect all of America’s diverse tools, big and small. They’re what helps make us so great as a nation. Here, let me take that off for ya.
Truly eye-popping, you betcha. *wink*
D.
For you Watchmen fans . . .
Director Zack Snyder has been hosting a YouTube contest: create a commercial for one of Veidt Enterprises products (their Ozymandias action figure set, perhaps, or Veidt hairspray) and it could be featured on the televisions playing in the background of the movie. Five entrants have won a High-Definition Canon Vixia HG10 camcorder, and several more have won the $1000 prize. Check ’em out here.
This one for Nostalgia perfume is our favorite.
D.
Stomping on my punchline
If you haven’t seen my video yet, watch it. And rate it over at YouTube. Why don’t people do that? It’s so easy!
After talking to a lot of folks, it seems like few people can hear my patient’s punchline (the payoff for all of those “he likes animals” comments). I’m afraid I did a poor job balancing the music track and the vocal track at that point. Follow me below the fold for the punchline I trounced. (Watch the video first if you haven’t seen it; otherwise, this will be a spoiler.)