This morning found me getting up much earlier than I wanted to in order to get to an 8 AM appointment with my insurance agent.
After signing the papers and writing a check (from next year on the insurance payment will be taken out of my escrow account), I swung by McDonald’s to get some breakfast.
For some reason the McDonalds around here have been having someone actually sitting outside to take your order in the drive through, which is odd enough, but today this one also had someone outside to take your money, though you still got your change at the window.
Anyway, I got home and ate it, finding that the hotcakes on the McGriddle weren’t fully-cooked and seemed to be lacking the dollop of maple syrup that’s ordinarily mixed into the batter.
After that disappointing breakfast I said, “Screw this,” and went back to bed, where I dreamed that, in the interim between now and moving into my new apartment, I was living in an attic apartment in the home of the doctor who doesn’t grasp the concept of sleeves and his emaciated plastic wife from E!’s Dr. 90210 (I watch it every once in a while to see the before shots of the already decent-looking chicks as they stand around in their underwear to be examined before their surgeries). Some creepy old racist conspiracy nut – a friend of the family, apparently – had invaded my space while visiting my landlords. He was convinced that I was unemployed because I was home during the day, ignored my claims to the contrary, and kept suggesting places that I should apply to, ranking them based on how committed the proprietors’ were to resisting the worldwide Zionist conspiracy.
(I’ve been visiting way too many fundamentalist/conspiracy nut Web sites lately. But they’re just so good for a laugh that they’re hard to resist.)
I woke up, briefly, at one point and saw that it was 10 and decided I should get up, but then I fell asleep and went back to the same weird dream until my mother called and woke me up.
After that I did the usual sitting around until about noon, at which point I started getting hungry.
I had to go to a meeting in Dulles at 3, and I didn’t want to go somewhere for lunch (I haven’t been grocery shopping this week because I don’t see the point of loading up the fridge just to have to relocate the food), come home, and then go out again a couple of hours later, but I knew that it would be near-impossible for me to find a way to kill nearly three hours out in the world.
Still, I resolved to try.
I went to the Dulles Town Center first and had lunch in the food court (A foot-long bacon dog – take that, family history of heart disease!), and then tried to kill time walking around.
I went into the Borders Express and shook my head sadly at the ever-increasing amount of shelf-space devoted to Manga and the ever-decreasing amount of space devoted to American comics.
Of course, the first thing I’d noticed was a big book titled Human Anatomy for Artists, which I decided to grab. I browsed for a while longer, but couldn’t find anything else of interest and went to the register, where I was, eventually, greeted by a cute-ish Asian girl who asked if the book was for me or was a gift. I don’t think she actually caught my answer before moving on to asking me if I had the rewards card or whatever they call it. She then asked me if I wanted a bag, and then if I wanted her to double-bag it, as it’s a pretty weighty tome (as well-suited for whomping kids and little people as my Absolute Watchmen), and then talked about how bags always end up ripping on her, which prompted me to say that yes, in my case, double-bagging was definitely a good idea.
Now here’s where we run into one of the (innumerable) Problems of Being Jon ™.
As I said, the girl was kind of cute, and she was considerably friendlier than most service industry people I deal with, to the extent that she may have been flirting with me.
One of the Problems of Being Jon ™ is the inability to believe that someone flirting with me is something that can occur in nature. Yet another is that, if I get past that first one, I can’t tell if it’s just generic, pointless flirting that doesn’t actually mean anything or if it serves a sign of genuine interest.
For the record, I am able to easily determine when someone is flirting with me because she wants something. In fact, if I ever do decide that someone is flirting with me, and that it is not harmless, meaningless fun, that’s usually the assumption that I make.
Anyway, getting back to the girl at the bookstore, I couldn’t really tell if she was just naturally friendly and bubbly, or if it was something more, and if it was something more, if it meant anything beyond the standard, “I’m stuck here for eight hours; I might as well make the time more enjoyable by flirting with guys – even spastic dorks like this one.”
But whatever. It’s not like any of it matters anyway.
From the Town Center I went on to Wal-Mart, and then to Best Buy, where, after finding the well-hidden display where they were located, I picked up two copies of Superman: Doomsday.
After that I swung by Scott’s pod to give him his copy and kill some time before my meeting.
Excuse Me While I Geek Out Department:
I watched my Superman: Doomsday DVD shortly after I got home and I have to say it was pretty damned cool. Honestly, it’s the movie that Superman Returns should have been. Good story, some actual action, good performances by the voice actors (Adam Baldwin made a good Superman, but made an excellent twisted Superman, delivering his lines in that role with a creepy flatness and quiet menace that made you appreciate just how utterly terrifying a Superman who isn’t safely guided by his unerring moral compass could really be).
Anne Heche did not initially wow me as Lois, and I’m not entirely sure that she ever won me over, as I think that it was the overall portrayal of Lois – her dialogue, her behavior, and her skillfully animated mannerisms – that I warmed up to, making the voice almost irrelevant. Still, I do think Heche put forth a decent effort.
Speaking of creepy, James Marsters really laid on the creepiness as Lex Luthor, particularly in the unapologetically homoerotic sequence that added an interesting layer of complexity to the Superman/Luthor dynamic without being too cliché or tacked on. I don’t necessarily buy into that interpretation in general, but in this instance, it worked, in a skeevy sort of way.
And peaking of skeevy, John “Bender” Dimaggio made the Toyman into one of the skeeviest, most disturbing villains I’ve seen in a while. In the early 90’s Toyman in the comics was reinvented as a psychopathic child-killer. It was a disturbing interpretation of a classic, albeit mostly harmless, villain, but it had nothing on the interpretation of Toyman in this movie.
Toyman provided just one of the many “Holy Shit!” moments in the movie.
(There were even a couple “No Fucking Way!” moments as well.)
I really liked the style of the animation (though I question the wisdom of the whole cheekbones thing on Supes), as it had elements of some of the animated versions that have preceded it while still creating a look that was unique to this production.
The story presented in Superman: Doomsday, while following the basic plot, differed wildly from the comic storyline on which it was based, but honestly, there was no way to take that story, which had so much going on and so many intricate webs of continuity, and which was able to run for upwards of half a year, and actually fit it into a 70 minute movie without making radical changes.
So it’s not so much a question of if it would be changed, but whether or not the changes worked. And I think they did.
Overall, I think this effort bodes well for DC’s line of direct to DVD animated features and servers as an excellent start, and based on the sneak peek at Justice League: The New Frontier, the next movie in the queue, things are only looking up as we move toward the third project, The Judas Contract.
I hope that DC has many more in the pipe, and if they don’t, I would humbly suggest that they consider adapting the oft-mentioned Great Darkness Saga, Selina’s Big Score (like Frontier, a wonderful story by Darwyn Cooke, and is the story that godawful Catwoman movie should have been based on), Batman: Hush (I am so fucking kidding about that; please, please, PLEASE don’t make a Hush DVD), pretty much any one of Gail Simone’s Birds of Prey story arcs (though the one in which Black Canary trades places with Lady Shiva would be a good choice), a JSA story (maybe the relatively recent one, the name of which escapes me, in which they square off against Per Degaton as he attempts to destroy the JSA in the past), and something focusing squarely on Kirby’s Fourth World (seeing as how you’re going to be killing The New Gods off it could serve as a fitting obituary). Oh, and the first Generations story that Byrne did (the two follow-ups were okay, but that one was the best of the lot, and the one that I see as most adaptable).
But seriously; you’ve got plenty of great stories, new and old, to choose from, so keep them coming.
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