The alexwayne.com review: Watchmen

Apparently, Watchmen did about $55 million in business this weekend, good enough for first place but not really spectacular or anything. This doesn't surprise me. Most of that money must have been made Friday and Saturday, because at my 5 p.m. Sunday showing, the theater was better than half empty. And at least ten seats were taken up by some teenage girls who giggled throughout the movie. I strongly suspect they had not read the graphic novel.

I have, which gives me a certain perspective on the movie. I thought it was very good, not excellent. As I suspected would happen, some of the dialogue that seemed cool in the comic book didn't translate so well to the big screen. Parts of the movie seemed a little hokey. And the soundtrack was just terrible. At times, it was as if the director had chosen songs in order to deliberately make already, uh, delicate scenes seem even more hokey. Example: An impotent character finally manages to have sex with the female lead. Musical accompaniment: Some kind of Marilyn Manson-ish remake of "Hallelujah." Seriously. Bottom-level creativity there.

Anyhow, I wonder what folks who hadn't read the comic thought about the movie. About midway through, one of the major characters disappears from Earth, reappears on Mars, and proceeds to build this giant glass clock/spaceship thing and float around for a while, pontificating on the nature of man. It was a bit disconcerting even to a fan of the comic. I suspect that stuff like that contributed to the non-spectacular gross.

There's been a lot of debate about the ending of the movie, which is completely different in practice (though not in effect) from the book. But here's the dirty little secret of Watchmen: The book's ending is kind of stupid. I didn't love the ending of the movie, either, but it does make a certain kind of sense that the book didn't. 

There was one pretty tremendous acting performance that deserves mention: Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach. Far and away the best performance of the movie -- although he admittedly has the meatiest role. (Jeffrey Dean Morgan did a great job as The Comedian, too.) Nobody in film today plays a creep as well as Haley -- if you've seen Little Children, you know what I mean. He has a curious bio on IMDB -- from 1993 until 2006, he apparently did not work in film. Nobody ever said Hollywood is smart.

(Speaking of: the Oscars this year were a complete fucking farce, aside from Heath Ledger winning Best Supporting Actor. And since it's been like forever since the Academy Awards and I'm late to this conversation, I'll leave it at that.)

Anyway, I cautiously recommend Watchmen. Be aware that it's not a typical superhero movie and also that it is, like, hyper-violent. Some of the gore even took me aback, and I'm not easily taken aback. And if you haven't read and enjoyed the comic, I think there's a pretty good chance you won't like the movie.

Is that still a recommendation? Eh, go see it.

Been a while, eh?

Some things that have happened since last we spoke:

1. My alma mater won another football championship. We rule. However, I sympathize with people who say that Utah, or USC, or even Texas (a far weaker argument) ought to be recognized as the "real" national champions. Florida is merely the BCS champion. Which is still more than the Utes can say, so suck it.

2. Charlie LeDuff wrote the best piece of journalism I've read so far this year. LeDuff is an interesting story. He won a Pulitzer at the New York Times for writing this. Then he left the paper, under kind of myterious circumstances, and landed at the Detroit News. I like to think that he figured a city as awful as Detroit can't help but be full of great stories.

3. We got a new president. I was on the Mall for the inauguration (working, I'm afraid). It was crowded and very cold. And to those folks who say there shouldn't be money in this "economic stimulus" bill to fix up the National Mall, I say, have you seen the place lately? It looks like a bomb went off. Is that what you want the nation's premier national park to look like?

What an idiot.

I don't know who this Charles Blow moron is, but this is the most facile thing I've read this weekend.

Unless it results in unsafe sex (and Blow concedes from the outset that "hooking up" doesn't), who gives a shit about youth social relationships, beyond a puerile or academic interest? Of all the things I worry about today, the "demise of dating" doesn't even make the fucking list. I'm ashamed that the Times gave him space to write.

Although they did manage to get me ranting about it, so I suppose that might count as a successful op-ed...

Also: Unless they've been living in a closet the last twenty years, anyone under the age of 45 -- not 30 -- probably knows all about "hooking up." Your correspondent most certainly included.

For of such is the kingdom of heaven...

A pair of my friends attend a lovely church in Greensboro, N.C. that recently made the front page of the paper there. (My former employer.)

The church runs a program in which it fills backpacks full of food, and every Friday, hands them out to poor children in some of the schools in the city. The idea is that the kids get free food for themselves and their families, and because it's in a backpack and is discretely distributed, the kids aren't stygmatized for accepting charity.

It boggles my mind that people in this country actually still go hungry. No one in the richest country in the world should ever want for food, no more than they should want for air.  

I am not a religious man. Or even a faithful man, sadly. 

But stories like this one make me appreciate and envy those friends and loved ones of mine who are.  Most are Christians. They are not the sort of Christians who try to tell the rest of the world what to do, and who to do it with; they wouldn't be my friends if they were. They are, rather, the sort of Christians who are unswervingly kind and generous and understanding.

God bless them, if there's a God to be handing out blessings. And give some money to your local food bank this season, if you can spare it.

Our financial crisis could be way worse.

We could be seeing riots in the streets over rampant pyramid schemes gone bad. Awesome.

Remember when I said I love Somali pirates? (By the way, those badasses stole a fucking 1,080 foot Saudi Arabian supertanker the other day.) I love Columbia for similar reasons.

Back to normal nonsense

Apologies for the boring inside-baseball aside, below.

So I came down with kind of a nasty cold this week. Thanks to Google's cool new tool, I know I'm not alone in DC -- apparently there's some kind of bug running around the city that's nasty enough to cause lots of people to Google "flu symptoms," or the like.

New York Times has a good story explaining how it works.

See, there's this guy Jeff Jarvis, and he's kind of an asshole...

Most people I know probably don't care much about the future of journalism as an industry, and I don't blame them; there will always be news, from somewhere, produced by someone, so from the point of view of a consumer, who cares who the someone is?

But those of us who work in the industry kind of obsess over crap like this:

I have heard about this dude Jeff Jarvis for a while, without really paying close attention to what he actually says. He is one of a growing body of "new journalists" who say, generally, that print is dead (probably true) and that all the old ways of doing journalism are defunct (not so sure about that).

People like Jarvis promote things like "citizen journalism," which basically involves news organizations recruiting people off the street to report for them. (For free, of course.) An easy example is CNN's "iReporter" thing, where they encourage viewers to send them video of car crashes or fires or whatever disaster happens to be going on in the neighborhood.

That's fine, as far as it goes. But it's no replacement for professional journalism.

Anyhow, I've long had an uneasy feeling about Jarvis and his acolytes. I wasn't sure why; it just seemed to me, a working journalist, that this dude Jarvis, a former journalist turned consultant, was more talking down to the industry than working with it. While he seemed to know what was wrong with journalism (people don't read papers anymore, duh), he didn't seem to know so much how to fix it, or what was still right with the profession.

"Citizen journalism" ain't the answer, put it that way. It ain't even part of the answer, best I can tell.

Ron Rosenbaum puts my uneasiness into sharp focus in this Slate piece.

My favorite part is this little bitch-slap:

It makes you wonder whether Jarvis has actually done any, you know, reporting. Particularly when he tells you that in doing his book on the total wonderfulness of Google, he decided it would be better not to speak to anyone who works at Google, that instead he's written about the idea of Google, as he construes it, rather than finding out how they—the actual Google people—construe it. What he's done, Jarvis claims, is to "reverse-engineer" the reality of Google. This means deducing how Google got to be what it is and do what it does by conjecturing about its effects from the outside.

Allow me to make a conjecture: Did Jarvis sound out Google informally and get rebuffed, prompting him to "decide" he wouldn't talk to them "on principle"? Of course, I could ask Jarvis about this, but that would be mere "reporting"; it's more fun to "reverse-engineer" his decision.

Jarvis has responded on his blog. And in the first paragraph, his response really crystallizes, for me, everything unlikeable about the man:

I am the honoree of an attempted hatchet job by Ron Rosenbaum in - what’s the name of that site? Salon? no, Slate (I always get them confused).

This crap is straight from The Politicians' Guide to Responding to Criticism.

Step 1: Adopt a haughty, better-than-thou attitude ("I am the honoree...")
Step 2: Dismiss the criticism as a personal attack, or "hatchet job."
Step 2: Denigrate the critic, in this case by pretending you don't know what publication he's from.

What an asshole.

P.S.:

Here's what's wrong with journalism today, in my view. Back in the early 90s, the geniuses who run most of the nation's newspapers -- still the primary source for most of your news, no matter where you think you're getting it -- made the fateful decision to give away everything they produce for free on the Internet.

Now, the entire public is conditioned to getting its news for free. And surprise, surprise, it turns out that giving away everything you produce for free isn't a very viable business model.

Here's my suggested solution: Every newspaper in the land should start charging one cent to read each article it publishes online, or perhaps even just a fraction of a cent. Condition people to understand, like they used to, that news isn't free; it's a product like anything else, and you've got to pay for it if you want it.

Otherwise, good luck with your "citizen journalism."

Update: This guy Simon Owens sent me a nice e-mail the other day with the subject line, "Alex, a news tip for your blog." I am sucker for any kind of tip, news or not. Anyhow, Simon has ripped Jarvis at his own blog and also sends along the work of a colleague, who wrote about something called "crowdfunding" for journalism.

I don't know about this "crowdfunding" stuff as a business model for an entire industry, but I do think that there's a strong possibility all the best journalism in the country will be produced by nonprofits in the near future.

Also: very cool that people other than my mom and sister occasionally read my blog. Not that I don't appreciate my most loyal readers, but still. Thanks, Simon.

My piece of history

I'll try to keep this as apolitical as possible.

So I'm in a bar called Lucky Strike tonight, watching the election returns. It's an upscale bowling alley/bar in Washington's Chinatown neighborhood, which is less China and more The Gap.

When I get there at seven p.m., it's a racially mixed crowd. The returns start rolling in. Every time Obama wins a state, there's applause. So clearly, there's a partisan bent to the place, as you would expect in Washington DC.

When CNN calls Ohio for Obama, there's loud applause.

When CNN calls Virginia for Obama, there's crazy applause.

I look around. Most of the white people have left. The bar crowd is 80 percent black.

I remark to my one of my friends: "I doubt these people have ever cared very much about election returns."

It's a generalization and maybe an unfair one. I don't know.

Shortly after Virginia is called, the polls close on the west coast. CNN calls the presidential election for Obama.

The place goes nuts. There is applause, screaming, an impromptu chant of "yes we can."

A friend of mine goes to the bathroom. He comes back and reports that two grown black men are in the men's room, crying over Obama's election. Crying.

As historic as this moment is, I wonder if something has gone under-noticed here. This is huge for black America. Probably bigger than the media has realized; certainly bigger than I realized.

I walk home from the bar, across the city, up the National Mall and past the Capitol. The Capitol is lit up and is as beautiful as ever. The Mall is quiet. But all around me, in the city, car horns are honking, people are cheering, and the city is alive; it is electric.

It is an amazing feeling.

Addendum: For what it's worth, I thought John McCain delivered one of the most gracious and touching concession speeches I've ever heard last night.

Addendum two: I deleted a piece of information from this post; someone I love and trust thought it might get me into trouble. I disagreed, but removed it anyway. Better safe than sorry, I suppose.