Who Watches The Watchmen? Well, It Looks Like I Might Have To.

So today’s training was just as fraught with images of Carla Gugino’s backside as yesterday’s (more on the lovely, talented, and inordinately spankable Ms. Gugino in a bit), but it didn’t really matter, as there wasn’t a lot I had to pay attention to.
Most of the day was spent simply practicing using a switch management tool that, apparently, we’ll hardly ever actually use in our jobs.
So that was fun, and not at all pointless.
Towards the end of the day, as per usual, we shadowed some existing employees. The guy I was sitting with had really long fingernails. Like, Asian super-villain long, all manicured and filed to a point. I have to say that it creeped me right the fuck out, especially when he would point at something on the screen and his nails would be pressing right up against it.
And that was the extent of the day’s excitement.
When I got home, I watched a crappy vampire movie that I’d downloaded based on the fact that Carla Gugino was in it – and, more to the point, has a lesbian scene in it.
Said scene was with Lucy Liu, who would not be my first – or twentieth – choice for someone to pair up with Ms. Gugino for a Sapphic romp, but even so, it was worth checking out.
(Lucy Liu just doesn’t do it for me. Who would be my first choice? Hard to say; there are so many to choose from. Hell, I’d probably give honorable mention to me in drag.)
Of course, as she always is when she’s in a supporting role, Ms. Gugino was criminally underutilized (and over-dressed, despite the few shots of her in a bustier and one in her bra, the cup size of which I don’t know), and the hot girl-girl action was not so much in the way of hot or, honestly, action.
There was about 10 seconds worth of footage stretched out over 20 half-second flashbacks, done in the standard – and annoying – quick cut style.
Plus there was a lot of blood, which really isn’t my thing.
As for the rest of the movie…meh. Given the title – Rise: Blood Hunter – I would have guessed that it was based on a video game, but I don’t see anything about that in the IMDb entry.
It was a pretty standard story – think Blade with Lucy Liu filling in for Wesley Snipes – and the constant quick cuts just made it generic and uninteresting.
The movie avoided most of the usual vampire conventions – they didn’t even have fangs – but kept the one part of the mythos that’s always bothered me: not casting a reflection.
No reflection as shorthand for soullessness has always rung false for me: if you’re physically there, you’re going to have a reflection. Supernatural or not, not having a reflection just doesn’t make sense.
Of course, it is a convenient mechanism for convincing someone that you are a vampire, so as a method of advancing the plot I can see why they used it.
Then again, if you’re going to do a big establishing shot in which a character stands in front of a full-length mirror in which she’s not reflected, you might want to avoid following that up by having her walk past a bunch of reflective surfaces in which her reflection can be clearly seen. Just a thought.
My other complaint about the movie was all of the pointless nudity.
I don’t mean gratuitous, I mean pointless. Why have a woman walk around shirtless for five minutes if you’re going to shoot the scene from a crane 100 feet away or keep the camera at head level? What’s the point? Given that you can’t see anything, it doesn’t even qualify as gratuitous.
It also makes no sense given that there were other scenes in which you could catch a clear glimpse of her naked body, which indicate a willingness on the parts of the actress and the filmmakers to provide actual nudity, though most of them could have easily been a body double, given the low light conditions and the general lack of shots in which face and breasts are seen in the same frame.
But whatever. The only real plus to the movie? Seeing Nick Lachey’s throat get slit.
(Not really. I mean, yeah, you do get to see that, but honestly, who cares?)
Anyway, in looking at her IMDb entry, I saw that Ms. Gugino has been cast in the role of Sally Jupiter/Silk Spectre I in the upcoming Watchmen movie, which makes me feel even more conflicted about the movie than I already did.
On the one hand, there’s a big part of me that really would love to see a well-done Watchmen movie. On the other hand, no movie, no matter how well-done, could ever do justice to the source material.
And on the third hand, Carla Gugino.
She really is perfect for the role, as she has the right look to play the young, sexy, buxom version of Sally, and could easily be made up to look the part of the older – but still kind of sexy – Sally. And I would love to see her wearing the Silk Spectre costume.
So I don’t know. I think that, based on 300, director Zack Snyder will be respectful of the source material, but there’s just too much there – and all of it essential to a real telling of the story – for it to be translated well.
(Even more conflict: on the fourth hand Matt Frewer has been cast as Moloch. Dammit!)

The Times They Have A-Changed

So the time change has already happened.
This is the first time in four years that it hasn’t really affected me. On my old Friday-Sunday shift, I would have had to go in to work Sunday morning with an hour less of sleep. Not so with the Thursday-Saturday shift.
Of course, one drawback to this shift is that my days off seem to fly past even faster than they did on the old schedule. I’m not entirely sure why that is.
I guess it’s just because I just don’t do anything on Sunday, so being a wasted day, it just slips past in a hurry, whereas on the old shift I did all of my shopping and whatnot on Monday when it was my first day off, rather than totally wasting it.
That’s my theory, anyway.
Speaking of wasting my Sunday, I was invited over to Jamie and Casey’s house tonight for “movie night” for the opportunity to watch X-Men on Blu-Ray.
I’ve seen the movie often enough that the prospect of seeing it in high def isn’t that enticing. Also, it would interfere with my Sunday night TV, which isn’t really that big of a deal, but the biggest problem was that it would have involved doing something on a Sunday, and for whatever reason, I have a really hard time bringing myself to do that.
Seriously, I don’t even shower or get properly dressed. I totally waste the day.
(Even when I don’t go anywhere on my other days off, I still at least take a shower. Not so Sunday.)
In yesterday’s mail I got a rather baffling letter from Sprint talking about how one of the great benefits of working for Stanley Steemer is the fact that employees get a significant discount on Sprint wireless services, but that an error had resulted in employees receiving a much larger discount than they were supposed to their last statement.
Given that I don’t actually work for Stanley Steemer (despite the fact that there is someone at work named Stanley whom I often refer to as being tough on dirt, gentle on carpets), I wasn’t sure what any of this had to do with me, especially considering that my last statement had been normal, reflecting the discount I do get as an employee of the company I actually work for, so I gave them a call to make sure that, I wouldn’t be getting double-billed in April the way the poor schmucks at Stanley Steemer will be.
Turns out I wasn’t the only non-Steemer to get the letter, as apparently the errors didn’t stop at just not billing them enough this month.

Even Though No One Cares Department:
I know that most of my five or so regular readers don’t given one shit about comics, let alone two, but I still feel the need to talk about them here, so I’m going to briefly mention my feelings about the fact that in last week’s issue of his series Captain America died after being shot by a sniper.
Having just read the actual issue, my feelings are now, after the initial shock, the same as they were after I learned that it had happened: mixed.
The cardinal rule with the death of a comic book character is that it will never last. Death in comics is almost never permanent.
So am I worried that we’ll never see Steve Rogers again? Not really. Even if the actual intention of everyone involved is that he’s dead and will remain dead, that can, and no doubt will, change.
However, I am upset that it happened not simply because it happened, but because it was pretty much the only logical outcome of the current state of affairs in the Marvel Universe, a state of affairs I’m not particularly fond of or pleased with.
The only thing that keeps my feelings about this from being squarely on the negative side of the fence is that the story is being handled by Ed Brubaker – who, ironically, I had just showered with praise here on Wednesday, the same day the issue hit newsstands, before learning about the death.
As I said, Cap’s death fits squarely with the current status quo of the Marvel Universe, and that, more than anything, is the problem. Nothing about the current state of the MU seems conducive to producing good stories unless those stories come from supremely talented creators like Brubaker, and, quite frankly, Marvel just doesn’t have that kind of talent pool.
The whole idea behind bringing the MU to its current state is to try to make it more like “the real world,” which I think is, quite frankly, silly, and will ultimately lead to the problem known as the uncanny valley. The notion first came up in the field of robotics, but can be applied to any endeavor that tries, in some fashion, to imitate life.
Basically, as you get and closer to creating an approximation of life eventually you reach a point, called the uncanny valley, at which what had seemed previously seemed relatable becomes alien and repulsive.
So in many ways the MU seems like the real world, but there is something about it that just doesn’t feel right, in a way that wouldn’t be a problem if it were just slightly more removed from the real world.
(Honestly, I think that the uncanny valley effect is what kept me from ever really getting into Seinfeld. The people on the show sort of looked, acted, and talked like real people, kind of, but there was something just not right about them. Something alien and repulsive.)
Ultimately, though, my real problem with the death of Cap and the current state of the MU is that the MU has become a place in which someone like Cap can only be viewed as “quaint” or a “relic,” and has to be gotten rid of because he just no longer has a place.
A world in which someone who believes in things like freedom, a government for the people and by the people, and standing up for what’s right in the face of tyranny is an amusing throwback and an embarrassment that needs to be gotten rid of is one that I have a hard enough time living in, and certainly isn’t a world that I want to read about and imaginatively escape to.
So there’s my take on it.
On other comic-related fronts, there’s an article here about the casting of a Watchmen movie that asks for people to contribute their thoughts on who should be in the cast (it also includes a link to a publicity still of Rorschach created by the director to try to drum up studio interest in the project).
Here’s who I think should be in the cast: no one.
As tantalizing s that image of Rorschach is, I just don’t think a movie should be made (particularly given some of the really scary rumors about casting mentioned in the article). I think that even the best-intentioned creative team would not be able to put together a movie that is anything other than a pale imitation of the source material or that does anything other than insult its fans. It’s just too big and too complex to be translated to another medium.
So there’s my take on that, too.

I suppose that’s enough rambling on about stuff that only Scott is likely to care about (and which he already knows because we talk about this crap all the time anyway), and since I have nothing else to talk about, that makes this a good point at which to just shut the hell up entirely.