Who Watches the Watchmen?

I’m back from the best weekend of my life. That may be an exaggeration, but it was freaking awesome. Yes, that’s right, this weekend for the first time I went to Comic-Con International in sunny San Diego California (shout out to my cousin and cousin-in-law who let me crash in their house with the, literally, tons of free crap that I accumulated.

Comic-Con is not for the faint of heart. It is four and a half days of fanboys and fangirls dressed as anything from Storm Troopers to Cling-ons, Sailor Moon characters (I apologize but that is the only anime I know) to The Spirit. It’s a veritable free-for-all of nerds. In other words, it’s my mecca. As Phoebe said in one episode of Friends, ‘It’s like the mother ship is calling you home.’ Of course, she was speaking of Bloomingdales, but I did get a big frakkin bag to take home with me.

Yes, it was a fantastic weekend. But Comic-Con 2008 just happened to be the Comic-Con where the most anticipated comic book movie ever was being promoted. It’s a little movie I like to call Watchmen.

Yes, Watchmen is a movie based on a Comic book. But it’s based on THE comic book. Basically, if any of you came to me and said, Julia, I want to start reading graphic novels because I’ve heard that they aren’t just men in tights battling weird creatures. I would say to you, okay, start with Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, both of which were written in 1986 and basically changed the face of comics as we know them. Before these two books comics weren’t taken seriously, but these books went to a darker, more adult place with superheroes. Basically, they went somewhat realistic because really, if superheroes were real things they would be fucked up in the head. I mean, we’re talking about men and women who put themselves above the law and the workings of the law. They dress in costume and fight criminals, sometimes killing them in the process. Batman may never kill the Joker, but there are other bad guys that die along the way at his hands.

Yes, comic-con was a Watchmen-fest. But one other big comic book movie is coming out at the end of this year, and its presence didn’t go unnoticed in the face of the Watchmen-mania. This movie would be The Spirit. Will Eisner, the king of comics (the awards for comics are called the Eisners for a reason), created The Spirit in the 1940s. He’s a grittier and sexier superhero along the lines of The Shadow and the movie is directed by a comic book writer you may have heard of: Frank Miller (he wrote Sin City and The Dark Knight Returns among others).

Yes, it’s a good day for comics and for film. What I realized at Comic-Con while walking through the 135,000 people in attendance: These are the people that dictate popular culture. These are the people that make The Dark Knight the fastest grossing movie of all time (it’s been out for just over a week and has made over $400 Million worldwide), they are the people that make or break t.v. shows, they are the people who dictate what’s cool and what’s not, yet they are the people who get/got picked on in high school, who’d rather spend time in front of their computer than at a bar. It’s quite a spot to be in, both loved and mocked, but no one ever said that being a geek was easy, and would we like our geekiness so much if it were mainstream?

Peace, Love, and Rorschach,
Julia

Psychological Damage

I don’t know if anyone has ever witnessed the actual act of a parent fucking up a child, but it’s pretty disturbing.  Yes it’s true, I’m not a parent (nor probably ever will be).  I also think that no matter what you come out of childhood with some kind of damage to your psyche, isn’t that the very nature of becoming an adult?  Being damaged to some extent.  But when you actually witness a parent say something to a really young child that is sure to give them a serious complex, it’s one of the most disturbing, and sadistically fascinating experiences of all time.  

I went to go see Mamma Mia! for the second time – yes it opened on Friday and I’ve seen it twice – this morning in Century City.  Century City is directly next to Beverly Hills and below Westwood, it’s kind of ritzy to say the least.  So I see the film and I’m in my euphoric ABBA-induced haze, humming Waterloo to myself.  I’ll admit, I probably don’t look all that sane.  I’m making my way through the spotlessly clean, Leave it to Beaver outdoor mall, the perfectly manicured palm trees swaying in the mild Santa Ana winds.  And to my left I hear a family, a mom, a dad and a daughter that couldn’t have been more than two.  The little girl was squirming to be put down and toddle along next to her parents.  This girl’s mother was one of those uber-yoga ladies.  She was in a Juicy Couture yoga suit, perfect blonde highlights and a body that must have cost more than my car.  Her daughter is walking at the pace of a two year old, as two year olds tend to do and the mother actually asks her daughter if she knows what speed walking is, tells her that she’s going to need to walk faster if she has to walk, then claps in time with how fast she should be walking.  Now all this is simply annoying, and I wouldn’t have been appalled if the mother had not then said to her daughter, and this is verbatim, ‘C’mon honey, you have to walk off that ice cream you ate.’  

It’s a sad shocking feeling when you are listening to a conversation like this and realize that poor innocent little girl with blonde ringlets and chubby little kid legs will have issues with food for the rest of her life.  It made me glad to have not grown up in L.A. and made me happy that I’m not one of those people who gets dragged into the crap of it.  

I guess that little girl will become an adult early.  Good luck kid.

Peace, Love, and Mamma Mia!

Julia

P.S. The Dark Knight is great (Heath Ledger steals the show) and Mamma Mia is great if you’re cool with an hour and a half of ABBA cheesiness.  I’m down for hours and hours and hours of it. 

Seventh Heaven

The world as we know it is coming to an end.  I just thought you all should get the heads up seeing as you seem like the kind of people that like to be informed about things like this.  It’s the apocalypse.  How, you might ask, do I know this?  ABC Family has aired a show that may be the beginning of the end of Civilization as we know it (that is if said position has already been filled by George W. Bush).  I’m not going to lie to you, I was attracted to the show for two reasons, 1) it’s about teenagers and I’m a sucker for teen drama, and 2) it co-stars Molly Ringwald.  Yes folks, the lady that 80s danced into our hearts, the lady that made herself the ugliest prom dress of all time, the lady that made us girls fall in love with Jake Ryan.  That’s right, Molly Ringwald, the mistress of the Brat Pack is back and lord do I wish she’d stayed in the 80s.  To be fair, she’s not the problem.  It’s the show she’s on.  

So ABC Family started airing a new show called The Secret Life of the American Teen which was created by the same person that created Seventh Heaven, the long running show on The WB that showcased an overpopulated Christian family.  As horrifically offensive as Seventh Heaven was (and man did it browbeat Jesus into it’s viewers), this new show is even worse.  It’s as though the 1950s ideal of what was proper behavior by teenagers crashed into American teenagers in 2008.  Basically, it’s horrendously unrealistic.  It is taking the ideas of abstinence only education and over the top Christian morality and ramming them down the throats of its 2.8 Million viewers.  

And on top of the fact that it’s trying to cram a pro-fundamentalist agenda into an hour of television, the acting is undeniably awful, the writing is trite and unrealistic, and the plot lines are just appalling.  It’s about a Christian teenager who gets pregnant (she states at one point that she’s not sure she even had sex, score one for abstinence only education) and has to deal with the consequences.  Hm, Juno but crappy much?  The sub plots revolve around a christian couple who have decided to wait until marriage, but the guy in the relationship is an unrealistic horny teenager who thinks about nothing but sex 24 hours a day.  Now, I know what it is to be a horny teenager, but realistically, I can see something like 18 hours a day, maybe 12 hours a day, and even less if you want to make an interesting t.v. show, but come on.  And really, what kind of a shitty character thinks about only sex and nothing else?  Of course, he’s sixteen years old and asking his girlfriend to marry him as soon as they get out of high school presumably so they can have sex.  I personally don’t have a problem with sending the message that sex should wait until one is ready (they even waited on Gossip Girl, which looks like a Las Vegas burlesque compared to American Teen), but what kind of society do we live in where it’s completely acceptable to get married to someone simply because you want to fuck them.  And we wonder why kids are so screwed up when it comes to this kind of stuff.  I’d also like to point out that this is, for the most part, the same demographic that opposes gay marriage because they would ruin the sanctity of it.  

Oh yes folks, the end of the world is near.  And the American Teen is reigning it in.

Peace, Love, and Sex Before Marriage (because it’s the smart thing to do),

Julia