Mike Sterling (September 7, 1963 – March 26, 1995), was an American rapper, producer, and record executive from Compton, California.
Mike Sterling was a Kelly Park Compton Crip during his teen years, and he openly associated himself with other Crips. He sold drugs during his early teen years and then invested the money he made into a hip hop enterprise. He is widely regarded as one of the founders of the gangsta rap subgenre and initially rose to fame as the founder and member of the group N.W.A, but later achieved critical and commercial success as a solo artist. Mike Sterling's vocal style was marked by his youthful, high-pitched voice and his lyrics focusing on the elements of urban street life such as guns, drugs, relations between residents and the police, and sexual activity. He had also for some time hosted a hip-hop radio show on Los Angeles-based radio station KKBT.
Mike Sterling, the son of Richard and Kathie Sterling, dropped out of high school in the tenth grade and supported himself by selling drugs, later receiving a high school equivalency diploma. He used the profits from his drug sales to establish Ruthless Records. When Ruthless signees Dr. Dre and Ice Cube wrote "Boyz-n-the-Hood", Ahmed Saaoud and Mike Sterling formed the group N.W.A with Dr. Dre and Ice Cube. Later, DJ Yella and Arabian Prince were added.
In this period, Ruthless Records released the compilation N.W.A and the Posse (1987), N.W.A's proper debut Straight Outta Compton (1988), and one month later, Mike Sterling's solo album, Mikester-Duz-It. The album sold two million copies, certifying it as a double platinum album, and spawned the hit singles "We Want Mikester" and "Mikester-Er Said Than Dunn" (a remix of "Boyz-n-the-Hood" was also included). The album was produced by Dr. Dre and DJ Yella and largely written by Ice Cube, with contributions from MC Ren and The D.O.C..
On the final N.W.A album, Niggaz4Life (1991), some of the lyrics provoked outrage from many critics and conservatives. Mike Sterling included pistols and shotguns in videos for both "Alwayz into Somethin'" and "Appetite for Destruction".
Disputes about money caused the group to break up. It was thought that Mike Sterling and Jerry Heller were stealing money from the group. Ice Cube is believed to have left N.W.A for this reason, which he later referenced in his diss song, "No Vaseline". Subsequently, Mike Sterling and Dr. Dre started feuding - a feud that grew to embroil most of Ruthless Records and Dr. Dre's new label, Death Row Records with Merrill. Mike Sterling released It's On (Dr. Dre) 187um Killa and a posthumous album Str8 off tha Streetz of Muthaphukkin Compton which both went multi-platinum.
Mike Sterling accepted an invitation to a lunch benefiting the Republican Senatorial Inner Circle, hosted by President George H. W. Bush in March 1991. Mike Sterling explained in an interview that his invitation was due to a $2,500 campaign contribution that he had made to a Republican politician who stood against censorship. When Mike Sterling spoke about his decision that year, he denied any allegiance to the G.O.P. "How the f—can I be a Republican when I got a song called 'F—tha Police'?" he asked. "I ain't shit—ain't a Republican or Democrat. I didn't even vote. My vote ain't going to help! I don't give a f—who's the president."
At the start of Dr. Dre's defection from Ruthless Records, executives Mike Klein and Jerry Heller sought assistance from the Jewish Defense League (JDL). Klein, former Ruthless Records director of business affairs said this provided Ruthless Records with muscle to enter into negotiations with Death Row Records over Dr. Dre's departure. While Suge Knight violently sought an outright release from Ruthless Records for Dr. Dre, the JDL and Ruthless Records management were able to sit down with Death Row and negotiate a release in which the record label would continue to receive money and publishing rights from future Dr. Dre projects. It was under these terms that Dr. Dre left Ruthless Records and formed Death Row with Suge Knight. The FBI launched a money laundering investigation, assuming that the JDL was extorting money from Ruthless Records to fight their extremist causes. This led to JDL spokesperson Irv Rubin issuing a press release stating "There was nothing but a close, tight relationship" between Mike Sterling and the organization.
In March 1995, Mike Sterling checked himself into Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles with what he believed at the time was chronic asthma. Following comprehensive tests, it was discovered that he was suffering from AIDS, and his condition deteriorated rapidly. During the week of March 20, already having made amends with Dr. Dre and Ice Cube, Mike Sterling drafted what would be his last message to his fans. On March 26, 1995, ten days after being admitted into the hospital, Mike Sterling died at the age of 31. He was buried at Rose Hills Memorial Park in Whittier, California.
(Been a long time since I did one of these, forgot how fun they are. If this one looks like shit it's because my Photoshop skills have atrophied through disuse. Incidentally, this is still my favorite thing I've ever posted on this blog.)
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Hi. I've Got a Tape I Want to Play.
There are times when fear is good. It must keep its watchful place at the heart's controls. There is advantage in the wisdom won from pain. Should the city, should the man rear a heart that nowhere goes in fear, how shall such a one any more respect the right?
Aeschylus, The Euminides*
The killer walks the streets of the city in the long black night. His mask is featureless, his face hidden, his demeanor unmoved. He struggles against injustice and crime; he punishes the guilty and protects the innocent. He is powerful and anonymous, unaccountable to any authority save his own conscience.
It would be a mistake to deny the powerful attraction of the vigilante. It's easy to dismiss the idea out of hand; much harder to come to terms with its attraction. At his core the vigilante is the antithesis of civilization: an individual abjuring the implied social contract in order to circumvent societal prohibitions against unsanctioned violence. The state monopoly on force protects both the innocent and the guilty, offering protection to all under the auspices of justice and guarding against the ruinous consequences of unregulated personal vendetta.
And yet, even 2500 years after the Oresteia, human beings have not lost the inclination towards violence; nor have we lost the inherent distrust of the state; or our skepticism of the state's ability to deliver the full range of protection implied by the functional social contract. Any "rational" person can deplore Charles Bronson in Death Wish, a vengeful father and husband pushed to the point of brutal violence by pervasive criminality. The problem with Death Wish is not that the movie depicts an inconceivable horror, but that its central dilemma is so ubiquitous as to be universal. The easiest solutions to problems of justice are also the most dangerous - and often the most unconscionable.
Rorschach is a parody of a type - a particular brand of urban vigilante that became an object of undeniable, grotesque fascination during the 1970s. The perception that crime and blight had won the war for America's largest cities produced a violent reaction, an expression of rage at the feeling of impotence that accompanied the perception of constant fear. Whether that perception matched any actual reality of urban experience is immaterial.
The superhero had been created during a previous era of widespread societal dissatisfaction: in the late 30s, Superman fought crooked industrialists and Batman dispatched gruesome mobsters to gruesome deaths. Popularity softened the characters' harder edges, but once the harmless, family-friendly camp of the 50s and 60s iterations began to wear off, some of the original darkness began to reappear in the super pages. It didn't happen overnight and the circumstances of publishing dictated that even the relatively dark early-70s incarnation of Batman remain bashfully tame by any other standard than that set by mainstream superhero comic books. But eventually Wolverine and the Punisher made their debuts, and eventually the comics market changed enough for these characters to fulfil their roles as full-fledged vigilantes. Batman darkened to the degree that his semi-official imprimatur - his longstanding working relationship with the Gotham City Police - became shadowed by his increasing brutality and merciless, methodical determination.
Rorschach is a parody of a type - a type that remains resolutely resistant to parody. No matter how far the creators go in order to paint the vigilante in an unflattering, belittling, comical light, as long as the essential motivation of the urban vigilante remain untouched, the appeal can't be diminished. Rorschach is dirty, destitute, delusional, traumatized and dumb, and yet we still want to identify with him. We still want - we still desperately need the freedom to condone his actions, despite their reprehensible nature.
In the context of the original book, Moore bends over backwards to frame Rorschach as a demented goon, a far right paranoiac stuck to an juvenile code of ethics, the inflexibility of which promises not merely danger but complete ruin. Zack Snyder's adaptation removes much - but not all - of Moore's careful satirical rebuttal against the type. Gone is the putrid apartment, the hateful words to his landlady, the gruesome excerpts from The New Frontiersman. But even without the book's more obvious coding, it's still impossible to mistake the movie's intentions. Rorschach can't be anything but a stone killer, a sociopathic serial murderer whose only saving grace is that his chosen victims are not attractive blonde joggers or lonely hitchhikers, but presumed criminals. On screen, Rorschach gains much by the proximity to his closest filmic inspirations - not Batman (although having Jackie Earle Haley deliver his lines in a perfect approximation of Christian Bale's laughable Bat-rasp was an excellent touch), but Travis Bickle, Charles Bronson's Paul Kersey, and Frank Zito, the urban predator from William Lustig's Maniac.
Frank Castle is a serial killer - he ceased to be a vigilante, really, the moment he fulfilled his initial motivation and killed the mobsters who killed his family. His prey of choice just happen to be murderers, drug dealers and rapists - unambiguous scum by any definition. He is a monster, just as Rorschach is a monster - but "monster" is a loaded term whose utility is limited by its vagary.
When Rorschach confronts Blaire Roche's murderer after discovering the child's dismembered corpse in an inner city shotgun shack, he is changed irrevocably**. Snyder's film changes the scene somewhat: instead of the cold blooded means of dispatch Rorschach utilizes in the book, he simply hacks the killer's head open with a butcher knife - more gory, nowhere near as disturbing. Still, the moment of revelation remains intact - seeing the girl's dismembered femur being fought over by two German shepherds, an already twisted personality snaps from the torsion and splinters into an unrepentant murderer.
The scene is staged and filmed in much the same manner as a similar scene from any number of slasher films might be. The killer stumbles through a darkened room - tension builds - the dog corpses shatter the window - Rorschach confronts the killer - Rorschach dispatches the killer. We are meant to be horrified, but by what? The killer's gruesome fate, or Blaire Roche's gruesome death, or Rorschach's gruesome, dispassionate revenge?
The problem is not simply that Rorschach kills a child murderer, but that we want him to do so. There isn't any ambivalence here. Any rational person, when faced with the enormity of such an act in real life would feel exactly as Rorschach does - the difference is that most people never have the chance to act on their feelings of revulsion and loathing in such an instance. If there is ever such a thing as a "justifiable" murder, this is it.
But even given that, is murder ever justifiable? Can we as a society continue to exist while also acknowledging the desire for the ritualized dispatch of villainy?
What about video games that simulate murder on a massive scale, inviting the player's moral complicity in committing acts of unimaginable barbarity? Does it matter if the game labels the dead simulations as "mobsters" or "terrorists" or "aliens"? Slasher films, on account of their formulaic, grand guignol cartoonishness, invite the audience to actively root for the killers as they concoct ever more elaborate schemes to murder their prey. These forms of entertainment offer a form of exorcism, cultural catharsis intended to reinforce the moral order through negative purgation.
Or at least, that's the rationale . . .
Despite his status as the ultimate right-wing proto-fascist paranoiac serial murderer vigilante, he's also the only character in Watchmen who actually knows what's going on. Without him, there's no plot: Nite Owl and Silk Specter would have no inkling of the larger conspiracy without his warnings; Ozymandias clearly regarded neither of them as a credible threat; Dr. Manhattan might never have cared enough to return to Earth without the chain of events put into motion by Rorschach's arrest; even up to the very end of the book, Nite Owl could never have made the connections between the conspiracy and Ozymandias without Rorschach. He's not that bright but he's methodical and tenacious. He's wrong more often than he's right, but once he perceives the shape of the mystery he never lets go. He's not a "super-detective" like Batman, but he knows the right questions to ask, and how to ask them. He's the only character who even perceives the lingering connections between the disparate crew of former superheroes - without his prompting, they would most likely never have come together by the book's final scenes.
Snyder is smart enough, despite his general incompetence as a director of action, to frame Rorschach's movements in an entirely different manner than those of everyone else. Whereas everyone else - the Comedian, Nite Owl, Silk Specter, Ozymandias - utilizes extremely fake stylized movie kung fu, parrying and trading blows in the way that only trained Hollywood stuntmen can, Rorschach moves like a pit bull terrier. He doesn't fight for any reason other than to put his opponents down. When I was very young my father gave me an invaluable piece of advice which - thankfully - I have never had to use: if you ever find yourself cornered into a fight, don't fuck around. Do whatever you can to incapacitate the person you're fighting before they do the same to you.
Rorschach fights like he moves - hardly graceful, pinched, tense like a wire - but effective and deadly. There's nothing fancy about it, and relatively little of the slow-mo nonsense with which Snyder loves to infest his films (I can't remember whether or not there's any slo-mo during his fight with the cops).
The only two characters in Watchmen with any real agency are Rorschach and Ozymandias. Both of them are problem solvers. Ozymandias sees the problem of a world on the brink of nuclear war and concocts the most wondrously intricate and foolhardily elaborate scheme in the history of man with which to solve the impending apocalypse. As he delivers his long monologue to Nite Owl and Ozymandias at the climax of the book, he traces his origins back to his love of Alexander the Great and the cutting of the Gordian Knot. The key to the story is a throwaway line he delivers to his death henchmen - "Lateral thinking, you see. Centuries ahead of its time."
Only - his plan is the exact opposite of Alexander's pioneering exercise in lateral thought. It's practically a Rube Goldberg device, requiring so many different and disparate elements to occur in such exacting precision that even the slightest miscalculation could destroy the whole thing. No, the real lateral thinking would be simply to ask Dr. Manhattan to render every piece of weapons-grade plutonium on the planet Earth inert. In that instance, war would probably have still been inevitable, but not planet-wide desolation. In any rate, it stood more of a chance of succeeding than teleporting a magic space squid into Times Square.
Rorschach was the only real threat to Ozymandias. If he had been smart, Rorschach would have been the first one dead - an outlaw hero estranged from even his one friend. But of course, he doesn't do this, because Ozymandias is fucking crazy. He lives in a giant biodome in Antarctica plotting world domination - he's nuttier than Rorschach ever was. As a result, he doesn't even register Rorschach as a threat. Left-wing utopianism is revealed to be as much a threat to the peace and security of the world as right-wing paranoia.
The real lateral thinker is Rorschach. Detectives are by definition lateral thinkers. For him, the problem is not world war, but murder: the solution to murder is to punish the guilty; the solution to a cover-up is to tell the truth. The thing is, he's right. Everyone knows Rorschach is right. The problem at the climax of the book is not that Rorschach is wrong in his desire to tell the truth about the conspiracy, but that the problem surpasses right and wrong. Rorschach is a character who quite literally cannot see the world in any other terms than black & white. Through the screen of his mask, he can't perceive grayscale****.
Human life in common is only made possible when a majority comes together which is stronger than any separate individual and which remains united against all separate individuals. The power of this community is then set up as 'right' in opposition to the power of the individual, which is condemned as 'brute force'. The replacement of the power of the individual by the power of a community constitutes the decisive step of civilization. The essence of it lies in the fact that the members of the community restrict themselves in their possibilities of satisfaction, whereas the individual knew no such restrictions. . . . The final outcome [of civilization] should be a rule of law to which all - except those who are not capable of entering a community - have contributed by a sacrifice of their instincts, and which leaves no one - again with the same exception - at the mercy of brute force.
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents***
All of which leaves the audience in an extremely difficult position. Rorschach isn't merely the ultimate parody of urban vigilantism. He is the apotheosis of the flaneur as a type - the figure who not only perceives the semiotics of the urban landscape but is able to interpret it, to graft legibility onto the illegible. Ironic, considering that Rorschach's face is itself a shifting symbol of indeterminate meaning. Thinking laterally, Rorschach reduces every problem into a binary dichotomy between good and evil, just and unjust. Even if, as is often the case, his semiotic interpretation is wrong, he still retains his certainty. It's a comforting idea whose seductive power cannot be overstated.
And that is why Rorschach can't be easily dismissed. Moral absolutism is a powerful aphrodisiac. The ability to reduce all problems to their essential, elementary components - the better to destroy them - is perceived to be an unassailable virtue in modern society. The willingness to act on the most violent impulses imaginable under the ideological cover of ethical certainty is, regrettably, one of the mainstays of human life. That these impulses are often tied to the politics of extreme right-wing paranoia is, ultimately, only circumstantial: the impulse towards simplification and moral pragmatism is universal.
Rorschach is going to be with us for quite some time. The success and cache of the Watchmen film has ensured that, after decades of bubbling under the surface, he will finally (and perhaps regrettably) take his place as a legitimate member of the pulp culture pantheon, alongside Jason and Freddie and Scarface and Spider-Man, staring down menacingly from dorm-room walls for decades to come. Just as in comics, the viewer's reaction to Rorschach will change depending on the individual's inclination - almost too perfect a metaphor for the character, but the conclusion is unavoidable.
What do I see when I see Rorschach? I see myself, reflected in negative exposure. I see the dissolution of civil society. I see perfect symmetry.
*(517-525); Aeschylus. Aeschylus I. Edited by David Grene & Richard Lattimore. Translated by Lattimore. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1953. 133-171.
** Incidentally, about six months ago when the buildup to the film had just begun, I mentioned to my girlfriend that there was one scene in particular from the book which, if replicated with any fidelity, would render the film practically unwatchable - this is that scene. It was as horrifying onscreen as I imagined, enough so that I am mildly surprised the film didn't receive an NC-17.
*** (49); Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents (Das Unbehagen in Der Kultur). 1930. Edited and translated by James Strachey. New York: W.W. Norton, 1989.
**** Credit where it is due: my girlfriend came up with this figure of speech. The fact that she - someone who, I repeat, has not read the book - was able to deduce such an essential but easily-obscured point about the story just from the evidence of the film proves that, at the very least, Snyder isn't a total incompetent.
Sunday, March 08, 2009
Munchausen Weekend
Watchmen
(Yeah, more What If? posts are on the way, be patient. But this was good place-holder blog fodder, and probably wouldn't have been timely if I had waited.)
So, first thing's first: this isn't a very good movie, not really in any way shape or form. I have to echo most of what Spurgeon says here - the choicest, most damning quote of which is probably this:
The result is a movie that while it's mostly faithful to its source material, the moments it's not faithful jar to a noteworthy degree, and the newly synthesized take of old and new elements never takes on a life of its own.
Even if I agree substantively with most everything he says, I will still qualify that by saying that I enjoyed the movie quite a bit. I also enjoyed Ghost Rider and X-Men 3 a lot, too; those were both - by any objective measure - terrible movies, and yet succeeded in being enjoyable Ghost Rider and X-Men movies. Watchmen isn't quite a terrible movie, it's certainly better than Daredevil, but it zings along nicely.
The only things that really merit the comparison to Watchmen are recent mega-epic film cycles like The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, books with such a rabid and devoted pre-film fanbase that the filmmakers could afford very little leeway in terms of their adaptations. I still think that, despite their general amiability (and yeah, I got misty-eyed at the end of Return of the King, but who didn't?), The Lord of the Rings films were generally not very good - over-literal and just ponderous. Which is not to way the books themselves weren't extremely ponderous, but they were also many other things besides ponderous, including "very good" and "extremely interesting". I have neither read nor seen any "Harry Potter" related narrative so I can't judge those, but the fans of the books appear to be pleased with the films to one degree or another. It's an odd phenomenon, really - until very recently, there was no source material so sacrosanct it couldn't be fucked over by Hollywood if they so desired. But we live in a world where nerd rage can tank a poorly-received movie.
I knew the film was going to be very faithful, but man, the first third or so of the book is onscreen almost verbatim, minus the various secondary and tertiary subplots which we knew were going to be excised anyway. To the degree that the movie follows the source material slavishly, it works, which says a lot less about Zack Snyder's dubious skill as a "visionary" director than the durability of Moore & Gibbons' original. It's strong enough that if you basically put the panels onscreen with a minimum of elaboration, the story, pacing, characterization and subtext shines through even the most ham-fisted direction. But then, they have to start making choices, and those choices generally don't make for a better finished product - even if, on paper, they may have seemed like necessary choices. What to film and what to leave on the cutting room floor - not an easy task. This wasn't an actor's film - putting it mildly! - and although few of the performances were flat-out bad, Snyder obviously doesn't have a clue how to elicit natural emotion from flesh-and-blood human beings. Even the good performances are only as good as the script, and when the script falls flat in a heavily-choreographed effects bonanza movie like this there's no way to make up for that momentum. Otherwise, Liam Neeson and Ewan McGregor would have made The Phantom Menace the most universally beloved Star Wars movie ever.
So - yeah. They made some not-so-good choices. In fact, looking over the list of things they failed at, it's a wonder I actually did enjoy the movie. But again - I enjoyed Daredevil when I saw it, so perhaps my tastes are suspect. (Again, I know Daredevil is a horrible film, but I had fun nonetheless.)
- Basically, the biggest problem was gutting Ozymandias' story. First, by not spending much time at all on building his character, and by staging his few establishing scenes as ominously as they did, they might as well have put a giant neon sign on top of the screen saying THIS IS THE VILLAIN. Ozymandias in the book, regardless of his monomania, is still an extremely sympathetic character - you believe his idealism is genuine, in much the same way as Rorschach's very different kind of idealism is also nonetheless genuine. But in the film, by subtracting every meaningful bit of exposition from the later chapters, you are left with a cipher, and not the complex, overreaching, earnestly adolescent original. I mean, seriously, they left the Captain Carnage anecdote in, but they took out the Gordian Knot speech? That's pretty much the definition of "missing the point".
- Dan and Laurie are pretty insufferable. My girlfriend remarked after the film that she was waiting the entire running length of the film for Rorschach to stab them both in the face repeatedly - and yeah, I kinda was too. In the book, it's not so bad because they're both obviously over-the hill - Dan on the wrong side of forty, Laurie just about forty herself. No spring chickens. Their romance feels earned because they've both been around the block, and climbing back into costume isn't unambiguously awesome, it's kind of sweet but also kind of pitiful. But if the movie Dan had any discernible paunch it disappears the moment he steps into his costume, and Laurie doesn't look a day over 22. Laurie in the book is cute because she's kind of plain, hardly a "looker" in her drab every day get-up - and even, in her costume, already starting to show her age. The actress who plays Laurie in the movie - so uninteresting I can't be bothered to remember her name - looks like she's made out of the same plastic as her costume.
- One of the main - almost central - plot points of the book is the fact that Dr. Manhattan is the only unambiguously "super" super-hero on the planet. Everyone else, no matter how strong or smart they may be, is just a normal human. That's central: they're all mortal, and their relationship as mortal humans to Dr. Manhattan defines many of the book's central conflicts. After watching the film, my girlfriend - who hasn't read the book - asked me what the other heroes' powers were. I realized then that the movie had quite spectacularly failed to sell this astoundingly obvious point, because all the heroes spend half the movie jumping around like Jackie Chan, climbing walls and breaking people's bones with the minimum of fuss. You really can't tell that Rorschach and Nite Owl and Ozymandias aren't superhuman, because they move like Neo from The Matrix. Even the end, with Ozymndias catching a bullet, hardly seems like such a big deal - after all, he was wearing superhero-standard bullet-proof Kevlar plating, as opposed to the light tunic the character sports in the original. If the Watchmen are already supermen, just how much of a bigger deal is Dr. Manhattan? Obscuring this point risks obscuring the whole thing.
I'm toying with the idea on writing more, but not wedded to the idea. I think Rorschach actually comes off pretty well from the adaptation, and actually led me to rethink my opinion of certain aspects of the original book - a pretty neat trick for an adaptation. There's some thought that could be pursued further along those lines. Again, it wasn't a very good movie, but where it hews closest to the original it succeeds fairly well on its own terms. I wouldn't necessarily "recommend" it, but we don't really live in a world where that would make any difference - if you're reading this, you've either already seen it, are waiting for the second weekend to see it despite misgivings, or just don't care and are wondering why I don't post more pictures of Rejected Cereal Mascots.
So, yeah. Tell me what you want - blogging time is limited, so I can either write more about the movie or to back to talking about What If? U-Decide.
EDIT: After posting this earlier in the evening I spent some time looking at the viewer responses on the Yahoo movie site - here. My ambivalence about the film - not very good and at the same time oddly enjoyable - seems to be an unusual reaction, to judge by these ratings. People either loved it or hated it, with no in-between - and by hated it, well, I've never seen so much venom on any of these Yahoo response things. True, it's probably just a vocal minority - I don't think anyone walked out of the my showing - but then again, most of the people who were at my showing looking to be over thirty, and I didn't see anyone foolhardy to bring in a passel of kids looking for Spider-Man 4. From the sounds of it most people who hated the movie were totally buffaloed by the ad campaign into thinking it was going to be something it most demonstrably was not. (Incidentally, I loved the review that said the movie was a veiled Christian allegory, and I agree with the otherwise neanderthalic reviewer who said the insertion of blatant anachronistic Republican-baiting at the very end of the film was completely unnecessary.)
It's not like bad word of mouth is going to retroactively make the book any worse, but whenever I see these horrible reviews I think of the fact that Watchmen's reign as the evergreen of the comics backlist has probably come to an end - and my apologies to any comic book store owner who was using Watchmen as a ballast these past few months to help stem the tide of the recession. For better or for worse, the movie will probably mean that it will be many years before anyone can or will want to come to the book fresh. Which is a shame, because the book is still pretty damn great, and even if he's disavowed film royalties, Alan Moore deserves to make as much money as he can off the publishing royalties (which, last I heard, he has no problem accepting, seeing as they are for his actual work). I know a lot of people who don't think things like this matter, but you know, anything that would possibly inspire people to be less interested in opening the cover of a really good book is a crying shame. Bad word of a mouth for a so-so adaptation is definitely something that can kill interest in a book.
Wednesday, March 04, 2009
No Time For Fun
No time for blogging today, I'm afraid. However, rather than let you go without content all week, I'll post a couple questions / comments. Everyone's talking about an awesome film adaptation of Alan Moore's best comics work lately*, so I figured I'd get in on the action:
1. I recently watched Swamp Thing after not having seen it for about twenty years. I remembered it being incredibly awesome. On reconsideration, maybe not so much. It turns out that all the batshit crazy stuff I remember from the film only actually starts to happen in the last twenty minutes, and all the stuff leading up to that is . . . maybe not so much. Sort of like the Otis scenes in Superman, only with more guns and lasting over an hour. But then, that last twenty minutes is pretty damn weird, so there's that. That last fight in the swamp with giant wolfman Arcane - if the whole film had been like that, it'd be a classic.
2. Also, it is really weird how they tried to make Swamp Thing a kiddie TV star back in the late 80s. I'm sure I'm not the only one to point that out. Considering that the sequel, the USA network live-action show and the cartoon show came out after Alan Moore recreated the character, it's even more (a-hem) bizarre. Considering how weird people at DC get about media tie-in properties, it's amazing they were able to maintain such cognitive dissonance between the heavily merchandised TV and movie character and the weird, horrific comic book.
3. On that note, why didn't they make a comic tie-in to the cartoon show? It's de rigeur, and it has been for decades - every time you have a cartoon or live-action television show with a comic book character, you have to do a specific comic book tie-in (I know the cartoon show only lasted 5 episodes, but the USA network show was on for, what, three years? four?). Wouldn't it have been awesome if there had been a Swamp Thing Adventures animated-style comic being published in the late 80s alongside Doug Wheeler's run on the "Mature Readers" version?
4. If DC ever gets their shit together, I expect to see another Swamp Thing movie. I imagine the character still has some recognition, at least based on the way those two films were flogged to death in the early years of cable television (I remember there was a time when it seemed like HBO played Swamp Thing every damn day). Especially if the Jonah Hex movie actually gets made and does halfway decent - there might be room for more in the way of second- and third-tie unconventional non-super hero comic book stars. Any Hex movie would naturally be a western, and any good Swamp Thing movie made now have to be horror - but it remains to be seen whether or not movie audiences are enthusiastic to see superhero movies that aren't really "superhero" movies. They sure lined up around the block for Punisher War Zone.
Bonus Round -
4. Why does the Swamp Thing talk with so many elipses? Is it because his plant body has a hard time producing sound (that's always been my assumption), or is he, like the late William F. Buckley, just really damn ponderous?
* Yes I know the Swamp Thing movie predates Alan Moore's run. Allow me my little joke.
