Gods in the Machine: a coda for BSG

This weekend the finale of Battlestar Galactica aired, bringing a satisfying end to one of my favorite TV series. I thought I’d talk about that, since I seem to be into talking about things these days, and I want to hear your thoughts too.

But, seriously – MAJOR SPOILERS for the finale and the entire series up ahead. Seriously, I’m not holding back, even the photos are going to be massively spoilery. So don’t keep reading if you’re not caught up. You’ve been warned!

There seems to be a pretty wide consensus that Battlestar started off as an amazing show, but then somewhere in Season 3 started to drop in quality. I’m not sure I’ve ever really shared that view. I don’t know if people just didn’t like some of the writing decisions, or didn’t like some of the Cylons becoming good, or whatever. Some parts of the last season meandered here and there, but no show’s perfect.

But I will say that, as the show went on, it started to frustrate me in its decisions of what to show and what to assume the audience will infer. I don’t want a show to hold my hand and explain every little point, but I did feel there were some major opportunities for exploration and illustration that the show consciously ignored. Especially in Season 4: I really wanted to spend more time with the newly-activated Final Five Cylons, seeing how realizing their true nature had changed their lives. Watching them trying to keep their secrets on a ship with very little privacy. (We did see hints of this when they’d hold Secret Meetings here and there, but I didn’t feel that many of those scenes spoke to the uniqueness of their situation. They almost could have been a band of common saboteurs and most of the scenes would have played out the same way. But then again, maybe that’s the point?) After the big midseason reveal of Ellen as the final Cylon, God(s), I wanted to see someone react to it! Even her husband’s reaction was truncated by the Executive Producer credits. We can only assume everyone else learns this; and an off-handed gaffe of Lee’s the next episode does reveal that at least someone was told, but it’s unclear exactly who, and seriously, who wouldn’t love to have seen his reaction to this news? Or Bill’s reaction, or Six’s? I don’t know.

Which is my roundabout way, I guess, of saying that I didn’t really expect the series finale to wrap everything up in a neat little bow. It’s just not how the show rolls. We do get a lot of answers, some great character moments and satisfying payoffs. I was surprised and impressed by the climactic battle during the first half (how can you not love the spectacle and symbolism of a modern Centurion cold-blooded shooting the head off the retro model?) and of course greatly taken by the emotional denouement. But as great as the episode is, and as appreciated as all the answers are, there is one answer that’s problematic, because (or in spite) of the fact that it’s a non-answer; it’s a small aspect of the show, but also something that informs everything that happens, Has Happened and Will Happen Again. The problem is God.

Not that I think the presence of a higher power is inherently a problem in fiction, science- or otherwise. There’s a great episode of Futurama where Bender gets lost in space, floating alone through nothingness. Well, almost alone: a collision with a small asteroid results in a race of ant-sized people living on Bender’s belly, and these people are quick to christen their metal benefactor as God, worshiping him and praying for his help and guidance. Bender loves this, of course, but ends up pretty bad at playing All-Powerful Deity, at first doing too much for his people, then not enough. His failures culminate in his worshippers nuking each other out of existence, and Bender is left sad and alone again – until he meets a faceless cosmic entity that is, essentially, the real God. In contrast to Bender’s rookie mistakes, this God advocates a soft touch, saying “if you do things right, they’ll wonder if you’ve done anything at all.”

Man, if you do believe in a higher power, this sounds pretty convincing, doesn’t it? If you can do anything, but you’re benevolent and you want your people not just to survive but to be able to survive, you’ve still got to be careful and subtle. And at first it would seem that Battlestar’s God – or “creator” or “unseen force” or whatever “he” wants to be called – is just that, speaking to Baltar and Six in daydreams, sending Roslin back to that Opera House again and again, subtly manipulating events and movements to deliver Hera safely to the not-exactly-promised land. There’s lots of appropriately soft touching going on… until we get to Kara Thrace.

For the record: I’m still convinced that Kara is the daughter (whether real or adopted) of Daniel, the missing and vaguely-referenced Cylon model #13. That’s really the only thing that would explain her visions, her special destiny, and, come on, her father teaching her the Cylon theme song which points to the coordinates of Earth. It’s weird that this is never explicitly stated in the show, but it would be even weirder to mention the presence of a 13^th model and then never do anything with it (Ron Moore has basically denied this, but you know, so little is said in the show either way that there’s really nothing to disprove my theory, so there). But, okay, fine, it’s Battlestar, not everything is going to be explained. I’d assumed that, having come back from the dead, she was either the first Cylon hybrid or the first Human cloned using Cylon methods or whatever. But her last scene in the series turns everything on its ear. Lee, in the middle of a wide, empty green field with Kara, is discussing what he wants to do with his “retirement”. He excitedly turns away for a moment, taking in the brave new world – then turns back to find she’s gone. Having just said that she feels like she’s served her purpose. Remember, this is a wide empty green field; it’s not like she’s found a tree to hide behind in the last four seconds. No, Kara Thrace is gone, as in disappeared, as in off the mortal plane, as in she is dead and probably has been since we all saw her die back in Season 3. Well, shit.

Ghosts and angels and visions are not exactly unheard of in the Battlestar world. But Kara’s presence was more long-term than a fleeting daydream, and far more tactile. Since coming back from the dead, she’s shot people. She gave Gaius her dogtags. She brought back a spaceship that people have used! This was not some mass hallucination; this was an honest-to-God flesh-and-blood human being who had a job to do, did her job and a lot else along the way, and then just ceased to exist when her job was done. Okay. She has to have been an instrument of God. There’s no other possible explanation. It makes sense, right? You can buy into that, can’t you?

But here’s the problem. Once you have bought into that, how can the series maintain its dramatic tension? How can we worry for our characters when God can just bring them back to life whenever?

These resurrections are nothing new for television, movies or any kind of serialized media. But generally there’s some sort of explanation, half-assed as it usually is, where oh the bodies were switched at the morgue or I managed to escape before the building exploded or actually that was my twin sister. But here, for Kara Thrace – as it is for several issues of the show – the explanation is that there is no explanation. It was God’s will and we have to go along with it.

It’s almost like Bender took over the show for a few minutes. God’s really making his presence known here, which could beg the cynical question, why do the humans even need to bother? It’s the age-old question of free will vs. predestination, and the show seems to come down pretty hard on the side of predestination in at least this one area. Gaius says in the finale that “God isn’t on anyone’s side”, but that seems kind of disingenuous given the effort God is making to ensure our heroes get to Earth. On the one hand, that’s a pretty ballsy move, especially for a work of Science Fiction, a genre that gets its kicks in finding rational explanations for the impossible. On the other hand, we also begin to lose interest when we discover our protagonists have omnipotence on their side. It’s almost like the fix is in, and it’s a bit disappointing to discover that you didn’t win the fight solely on your own merits.

To its credit, though, Battlestar is as bittersweet in its victories as in everything else. Whatever I expected the characters to do if they did find Earth, it wasn’t to split up and live whatever life nature throws at them. It seems a little much that everyone would give up on simple essentials like toothpaste and toilet paper, but I do like the thematic idea that both sides end up rejecting the technology that brought them to death’s door. But, God, there’s just a staggering lack of any kind of unity amongst our heroes once they arrive. There’s no fraternal desire to stick with the friends made during tough times. These guys have been cramped up together for so long that they can’t imagine anything better than getting away from everyone. Lee wants to go climb every mountain he can find, but doesn’t seem at all interested in a future with Kara. Bill bids a strangely permanent goodbye to his son – what’s he planning? And poor Chief (who, in my opinion, has to be the true hero of the series – to have suffered through such a horror show of heartbreak and duplicity, and yet still have the will to even live, is probably the most superhuman feat of all) exiles himself to a decidedly unpopulated island, assumedly so there won’t be anyone else left in his life to betray him. But everyone’s at an odd peace with their decisions, controversial as they may be. It’s almost like they’re already living in an afterlife. And it’s pretty sad to learn that almost all of these characters end up as genetic dead ends: if Hera truly is mother to all of us, then the Adamas and the Tighs and all the other bloodlines we know and love won’t be much longer for this world after all. I think that may actually be the most depressing aspect of the entire show, for me, in a weird existentialist way.

But emotional response is what it is. I mean, who am I kidding, I love Battlestar to death, and I’m going to miss it a lot. I may bitch about a few things here and there, but really this was as great a finale as anyone could hope for a show that’s always been a cut above; deeply thoughtful, often controversial, always entertaining. Today, the show has left a huge void in television that I don’t think we’ll see filled anytime soon.

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There be Traps!

Having just finished a script a few weeks ago, I'm now kind of floating wild in the wind, looking for the next direction to take. The next big thing that requires my focus. I've been sketching out ideas for a couple new scripts - or, I guess, new ideas that I'm turning into script form, but could easily morph into a different format further down the line. Point is, I'm throwing a lot of ideas at the wall and seeing what sticks.

And in some ways this is my favorite part of the process. It's just wild, untamed crazy stream-of-consciousness for the most part, where I fill pages of Word Documents with rambling speculation and false starts and conversations with myself. And as I do this more and more, I'm beginning to get a good grasp on what to write and what not to write. Yeah - as paradoxical as it sounds, even when you're brainstorming and anything goes, there are still major things you should avoid. You wanna know what they are? Well, okay:

-Negativity. In sketching out my main character's goals, I realized I'd set myself up for a challenging balancing act. And, in written conversation with myself, the next phrase I wrote was literally "Man! That is going to be so hard to pull off." And those words just hung on the screen as the end of the thought. Where could I go from there? As I looked over the words I'd just typed, all I could think about was how hard it was going to be. But you can never overcome an obstacle if all you do is focus on the obstacle itself. I couldn't type any further. I was at a mental roadblock. So... I backed up and deleted that sentence. And suddenly I could work again. As simplistic and reductive as it sounds, ignoring negativity was all I needed to start brainstorming again. I guess you could say that creativity is by nature inclusive, not exclusive; so putting some kind of negative value judgment on it won't help you much at this stage. (I still don't know how to pass that particular obstacle, but that's ok; I have several other directions I can work in. The important thing is that the creative process continues.)

-Egotism. The story I'm working on is high school-centric, a coming-of-age story about a kid who enters high school with specific expectations only to discover he's been pretty misinformed. (At least, that's what I'm thinking right now.) And I've been making a lot of headway on the major characters, their desires, obstacles, the really important story points. But at one point a weird thought popped into my head: "This script is going to be my revenge on high school." I really did not enjoy high school for several reasons - and, appropriately enough, a lot of the turmoil I went through then will probably pop up here or there in the script, at least on a subconscious level. But suddenly, revenge was first and foremost in my mind. How exactly was I going to do this? Was I going to target the system itself, or students, or cliques, or parents or... well, after a minute I realized I wasn't helping things. If I'm focused on using my writing as some (pretty hollow) form of revenge, against whatever or whoever, I'm not helping the story. I'm not helping the characters, and I'm not helping the audience. In the end all I'm doing is... well, you know the title of this blog. The point is, write a story for the sake of the story! Don't come at it trying to make a grand statement or exact revenge or make yourself look cool. In the best stories, the creator(s) should be invisible. Take your ego out of the equation and you've already taken a huge step.

The ego thing is actually tricky to balance. On the one hand, you have to trust yourself enough to put your ideas down, and you have to assume whatever story you create is going to be compelling enough to find an audience. You need self-confidence for this or you'll never get past daydreaming. On the other hand, you also need to mistrust yourself enough to be able to take criticism and - gasp! - make changes to your work. But it's not like anybody has an Ego Dial on their head that can be turned between Low, High and Off - so things can get complicated. For every writer screaming "Kill Your Darlings!", there's another successful guy admitting "I just write for myself". I guess, if anything, that shows you there's more than one path to success.

Anyway, my point is that it's very easy to hinder your own creativity, so don't do it! You'll have enough people trying to do that eventually as it is. But that's a topic for another time.

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Dead Rock and Roll, Remodeled

What makes a bad story? Or - if it's a different question - what makes a story bad?

I'll admit I enjoy a bad story every now and then, whether it's a book or movie or TV show or whatever. I think a lot of us enjoy a kind of creative schadenfreude, and there's a certain unique enjoyment you can only get by gathering around with your friends to experience something just indescribably, laughably bad.

But, okay, as a writer, I can also try to justify this viewing/reading/listening as a tutorial of What Not To Do. I could learn a lot about filmmaking and storytelling by watching any of this year's Best Picture nominees; but, in theory, I could learn just as much watching something like Zoltan: Hound of Dracula.




Yesterday, as we sat down to re-watch the infamous MST3K classic "Manos" the Hands of Fate, a no-budget '60s "cult horror film" generally recognized as one of the worst (and most unintentionally hilarious) movies ever made, I began to have new and unsettling thoughts. "This movie is awful," I thought to myself, "but did it have to be?" And, following the only genuinely creepy few seconds of the film - a quick gloss over a decrepit mantle, with what looks like the ashen silhouette of a dead man burnt into its relief - I began to have an even more unsettling thought: "could I remake this into a good film?"




There's no doubt that this film is pretty terrible on every level, from the wooden acting to the incompetent shot framing to the almost-nonexistent plot. But there is a plot, as bare-bones as it is; and that plot came from a rough outline, which in turn came from a germ of an idea which surely must have looked far better in writer/director/star Hal Warren's mind than what Manos eventually became. Could that idea have actually borne fruit? What's the difference between a shitty story and a story made shitty?

If I had to summarize the plot of Manos, keeping my opinions out, it would go something like: "A vacationing family spends the night in a desert shack, not knowing they're the prey of a nearby satanic cult". OK. So far, so not bad. A logline like this could pretty easily form the basis of a decent film, and, if the stars align, maybe even a great one. It's not impossible to imagine.

But let's add in some more details. Let's clarify that the cult is essentially one man and his harem of wives, all of whom only come out at night; let's also say that the family is initially cared for - and then betrayed by - a deformed and creepy caretaker named Torgo. And (spoilers!) we admit that the cult will successfully imprison the family, with the wife and daughter (who can't be older than five!) added to the harem, and the husband/protagonist taking up the caretaker position after Torgo apparently dies. Also, the main cultist sleeps outside on a slab of rock while his wives sleep tied to poles (though they seem able to free themselves at any time). The wives also love to wrestle each other for hours at a time. And don't forget the guy wears a black robe-thing with gigantic fucking red hands on it!

See? It's tricky to spot the point of no return.

But there's examples in other media too. Take the relatively-unknown novel The Lost Truth by Mike Pesko. Pesko wrote most of the "military thriller" (?) as a teenager, and was lucky enough to have it printed by a small publisher. Check out some of these highlights:

""Come on, men," Fletcher shouted to his hundred soldiers as he ordered ten of them into the air. He directed half of them to take out the two big gunners and the other three to hold the easily vulnerable transport ships in captivity and demand an unconditional surrender."

""Get your ass out of bed," the commander barked with a different timbre than used the last time they talked."

"There was more than one way to capture or kill a foreign military general. If casualties on their side were large compared to your casualties, then you have killed the foreign general. If you took out his capital building, then you have captured him. There were also other miscellaneous ways."

Although we've wanted to turn this into a movie - so faithful to the book that every time we see a map of Dushku (yes, Dushku) it changes from an island to a series of islands to an archipelago to whatever else - I also confess to imagining the possibilities of, you guessed it, remaking the book to see if it could really work. At its base, The Lost Truth is about a man struggling to unite diverse groups of people against an enemy force almost completely indistinguishable from their own.

God, put that way it sounds a lot like Battlestar Galactica, doesn't it? Even moreso when we add the detail that it takes place on a distant planet populated with humans much like us. But let's keep going. Let's add the detail of the enemy forces: the deadly, galaxy-traveling Are (yes, Are) race, who are able to possess humans because they're one-dimensional beings (this couldn't possibly have been an intentional joke), though they never have a larger goal besides victory through warfare. Also, a series of ill-defined neighbor countries who are always at war for generally left-wing reasons such as personal freedoms or democratic voting recounts. And, hey, a lot of sea life died due to an orbit change because the sun doesn't have enough gravity for Dushku anymore. Again, that slippery slope is tough to navigate.

But here's the thing. Despite how Manos and The Lost Truth turned out, there's no reason to think Hal Warren or Mike Pesko couldn't go on to produce competent pieces of work. The creativity is obviously there, even if craftsmanship is lacking. These guys obviously had stories they wanted to tell, and I couldn't fault anyone for that. But what would it have taken to make these works competent? Would they even be recognizable in comparison to what we have now? I wonder if The Lost Truth could have been saved by an editor or writing classes. I wonder if Manos would have prospered with a larger budget (and all the improvements that entails). Would we all be better off? Or are these works actually more important to us as failures, as warnings to future travelers along the road of creativity?

Truth be told, I don't have answers for any of this, aside from "Everything is the way it is" and "Speculation will buy you the greatest mansion you'll never see". I can't think of a single infamously bad work that someone has tried to recreate as an actual good story. It might be a fun experiment for those with the time and inclination, or an unexpected cash cow for a Hollywood that's obsessed with remodeling over new-modeling.



Yeah. now we're talking.

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Who Judges the Watchmen? Or Really, Who Doesn't?

Alright! We doing this! Come on, Greatest Graphic Novel of All Time! Bring your Hollywood Blockbuster brother! I ain’t care! It’s on!

So, yeah, I saw Watchmen. I’d read the book several times – and reread it again in the days leading up to the film’s release, which, in hindsight, may not have been the best idea. But it’s clear that those who have read the book will have a pretty different viewing experience from those who are coming in with fresh eyes.

If you’ve never read the comic, written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons, I honestly have no idea if you’ll enjoy the film. And I’m not sure that reading my review will be of much help to you. But I’ll try a quickie. The film looks amazing. Production design is awesome, special effects generally great, good fight sequences that aren’t too overdone. Patrick Wilson is particularly great as the nebbish Nite Owl, and Jackie Earle Haley’s intense few scenes out from under Rorschach’s mask are really satisfying. Most of the rest of the acting is good, though there are some weak links, and a few line readings fall flat. The retro soundtrack is pretty killer. And the plot moves so fast you can’t help but get swept up in its velocity; whether you can follow the intricate plotting or not, you’ll never be bored. At best, you’ll come out of the theater wanting to read the comic (and if so, good! Go out and buy a copy, you won’t regret it). At worst, you’ll be entertained for two and a half hours, and will have forgotten about most of it after a week or so.

But if you have read the comic before, or want to know how it translated – we’ve got a lot to talk about! And I am going to talk about a lot, including the ending, so here’s your Spoiler Warning! Come back later if you need to.

More than a few people have called Watchmen “unfilmable”, and while I don’t agree with that in a literal sense (in a perfect world, it would make a great miniseries or even a series of films), it makes sense from a practical standpoint. The Hollywood system being what it is, mass consumer culture and short attention spans being what they are, a fan of the comic couldn’t reasonably expect anything more than an imperfectly enjoyable 3-hours-or-less adaptation. And that’s pretty much what the film is.

A lot had to be taken out, obviously, but most of what’s there is slavishly faithful to the comics, for better or for worse. While most of the memorable images from the book have been recreated verbatim, so has a lot of dialog that sounds like it came from, well, a comic book from 1985. Some of the lines have not aged well. Many of the heroes’ costumes look pretty awful, but that was true in the comic, too (poor Doctor Manhattan went through four “outfits” in the series, and the least offensive, ironically enough, was his birthday suit), and I think that actually works to the benefit of the story, adding “lack of fashion sense” to the litany of flaws these characters have.

The story itself moves at a breakneck pace. It has to: there just isn’t enough time to get through everything the filmmakers want to tell, even after pruning almost half the plot of the book. And although there are a few times where the speed prevents a few character moments from really transcending, by and large I think the writers did a great job distilling everything into as compact a package as possible (especially the new ending, which I’ll get to in a moment). Yes, everyone has a favorite scene or character or theme that was cut, but that’s the nature of the beast. And the filmmakers are at least able to throw in references to the omissions where they could: the excellent and complex production design is full of fanboy nods, from the Gunga Diner blimp to the post-disaster Millennium billboards. Though Bernie the newspaper vendor and Bernie the young reader don’t get a story, we do see two extras obviously meant to be them during the climactic scene of disaster, so it’s not difficult to imagine that their story has been going on, perhaps in the theater next door. Even Laurie’s childhood snowglobe is there, if just for half a second. Snyder and co. earn a lot of goodwill from me just by making the extra effort to at least imply the presence of details that couldn’t be thoroughly examined.

But the film’s emulation is so exacting that the few moments of actual innovation feel out of place. Though most of the heroes in the story (actually called “The Watchmen” several times in the film, though not once in the novel, interestingly enough) are portrayed as sad-sack, out of shape or out of touch, each of them gets one or two shiny new Bad-Ass Fight Scenes, which may annoy the purists but were probably added to appease everyone else. And certain characters, once normal humans, can now punch through concrete and survive multiple-story jumps – also presumably for spectacle. It does kind of go against Moore’s painstaking effort to show these characters as humanly as possible, masks on or off. But if any of this increased bad-assery benefits anyone, it’s the Silk Spectre, who wasn’t given much to do physically in the comic beyond beating up a thug and leading folks across a bridge. I don’t think Moore treated the women in Watchmen very favorably; they’re forever only reacting to the men in their lives, too clearly defined by their need for affection or companionship to be able to do very much. Poor Janey Slater especially reads like a Fainting Nellie out of some old genre sci-fi, so it was good to see her get a moment of proactive payback (whether real or manipulated) in the film.

The biggest change comes at the end of the story, and by and large I think it actually works really well. Ozymandias’s manufactured threat now comes in the form of framing Dr. Manhattan, and though I miss the squid, it’s kind of astonishing how easily this new ending fits into the story, with far less exposition needed than having to detail secret islands and missing artists and psychic bombs. Going into the film knowing that the ending would be different – but not how – I actually grew really excited during the final scenes in Antarctica. Because – unlike most superhero films where the final battle is always won by the just and moral hero – in the world of shades of gray that is Watchmen, I genuinely had no idea what was going to happen. It was almost like reading the book again for the first time. And being able to produce that feeling, even for a veteran reader like myself, has got to be one of the film’s greatest triumphs.

There were only two changes that really bothered me, and the first is admittedly not a huge deal and more of a fanboy rant, so bear with me. The original Watchmen graphic novel is absolutely stuffed with visual symbolism – reflections, mirroring, image transposition, and, especially when Rorshach is involved, symmetry. Everything in the man’s life is symmetrical, from his mask to the locations he visits to the page layout of issue five. The effort Moore and Gibbons took to impress this upon the reader borders on obsession. So I was fascinated to note, upon rereading the book, the panel following Rorschach’s death in Antartica. Essentially exploded by Doctor Manhattan, all that remains is a spatter of blood on the snow. But where you might expect further, morbid symmetry, the remains are instead wild and random. There is no symmetry in Rorschach’s death, and purposefully so. But in producing the film, Snyder or Hayter or someone must have noticed the omission but missed the significance of it, because the film proudly displays a giant Rorschach blood blot in the snow; a perfectly symmetrical image that the camera lingers on so long that it kind of becomes the morbid punchline of the character’s existence. Zach astutely noted that morbid punchlines are exactly what Watchmen is all about, and that’s true, but I still feel it did the character a disservice that was actively avoided in the source material.

The other negative is far more significant, though it actually begins at almost the same time. In the film, Nite Owl witnesses Roshach’s death, and his reaction is the typical melodramatic “Nooooo!” which results in another failed fistfight with Ozymadias. “You haven’t saved humanity”, Nite Owl says, “You’ve twisted it! Perverted it!” And then he and Silk Spectre exit the building, looking down their noses in Moral Judgment at Ozymandias. Oz’s last scene in the film is a lingering shot standing alone and sad in his ruined home, ostensibly contemplating what’s been lost. As Dan and Laurie begin a happy life together, if not a new one (they appear to continue their costumed adventuring, which is a huge misread of the book’s intent), the film seems to be saying that they were in the clear moral right, that the ends did not really justify the means. Though it’s fine for some of the characters to voice such an opinion, the book itself never takes sides. Rorshach, the only one whose life was black and white, is gone, and the others continue to live in varying shades of gray. It’s one of the great and most unique moments of the entire story (especially for a mainstream comic book), and not a difficult one to understand. So it feels strange and false for the film to actually go to the same dark point the book did, only to make a moral apology for it after the fact. By the end of Watchmen the comic, there are no heroes left; our protagonists are either dead or complicit in the deaths of millions. But Watchmen the movie tries to have it both ways, making the tenuous argument that Dan and Laurie will keep Adrian’s secret but, dammit, that won’t keep them from always trying to do the right thing. It seems like the very definition of the dreaded Producer Note, so Snyder and the writers might not be to blame for this. We may never really know. But it’s there, and for me the 11^th hour sermonizing comes very close to undoing everything the story hoped to accomplish.

Was that change (or any of the others made) truly severe enough to justify Moore demanding his credit be removed from the film? I don’t think so. Yes, Moore’s films generally don’t translate well to the screen, whether in spite of best intentions (V for Vendetta) or due to simple Hollywood apathy (League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, or, God, LXG), so I can understand his vulnerability. But Watchmen the film is hardly hackery or mockery. Time and an impartial eye will tell if it can survive on its own merits, but it’s impossible to argue that the film hasn’t been beneficial to the source material in terms of sales. Thanks to excitement for the film, Watchmen the collected graphic novel sold over a million copies in 2008. That's an incredible achievement for any comic today, never mind one that's over 20 years old. Whatever you may think of the film, it’s brought many new readers to an industry starving for numbers; hopefully many will stick around, curious to read other books from the same creators or of a similar mold. Realistically, what more could you ask for?

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The Name of this Band is The Name of this Band

One of the hardest parts of the creative process for me, still, is naming. Assigning a proper name to a character - or even a non-living object or process - is generally the last part of the journey for me. Maybe I'm a perfectionist, but I feel that an individual's name has to do a good job of encapsulating what makes them unique. Not that I'm about to name a hard-boiled soldier anything as crass as "Ace Shooter", but I think we can find more interesting possibilities than your typical "Jim Smith" or "Lisa Johnson" or "Chris Meyer". Names are literary shorthand for first impressions, and we all know how important those are.

I struggled for a while to come up with a name for this blog. And problems intensified when I found that most of my blogspot title ideas (OK, the best of my ideas) had already been registered long ago. It echoed my struggle years ago to come up with an unused AIM screenname that was still clever and didn't end in an arbitrary string of numbers. (I eventually relented and slapped "720" on the end of my handle. Oh well.)

But, just as I did back then, I was curious as to who had had these ideas before me. Were they of a similar humor? Kindred spirits? Might I befriend these strangers across the vast anonymity of the internet? Or, would I be horrified to find that they appear smarter than me?

Curiosity got the better of me, and I visited all the already-registered pages that I couldn't create. And here they are, if you'd like to join me in exploring what might have been:

expletive deleted: beaten to the punch by a Czech guy who seems to have gotten drunk and trashed the place.
procrastination station: seems to have led a short and sad life, despite sounding like the title of a children's show.
brain cavities: really? not one single entry?
chris is a sexy beast: To be fair, I probably would not have really done anything with this, either.

Those options unavailable, I eventually settled on FEEDING THE SUMO. It's a reversal of the phrase "Starving the Sumo", which is a mantra intended to help adolescents avoid masturbating and was first used in the unintentionally hilarious Christian motivational film Every Young Man's Battle. The idea being that our perverse nature is as hungry as Yokozuna, and if we give him some food he'll bounce us out of the ring. I think.

Not that I'm going to blog about masturbation (sorry), but there is a thematic resonance underneath it all. I'm fond of using the term "mental masturbation" to describe anyone who goes to such trouble to show off their mental superiority that their efforts end up doing more harm than good. But I also think that anyone freely offering up their opinions as if they are of automatic benefit to readers - as I am clearly doing - is kind of engaged in the same egotistical stroking, if less disastrously. Not saying it's a negative (or, if you're Christian, sinful) thing, I just think it's an interesting parallel.

To put it another way: You've got to have some balls to think people are going to care what you have to say. And if your intellectual Sumo does end up informing and entertaining others, why wouldn't you want to feed the guy?

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This blog, and myself, explained

Do I really need another distraction in this world? Does anyone?

Probably not. Though I can boast memberships on nearly a dozen web communities and social networks - and yes, even Twitter - here I am, creating a blog only now, years late to a party that may be past its apex. But I do have a reason to be here, and I hope it's one that keeps me updating it (and maybe even somebody reading it) long after other online crazes have been forgotten.

The reason is the medium itself: writing. I'm currently an amateur writer, hoping to make it professionally one day. To date, I've written a few screenplays, and I have a regular gig co-writing the all-ages comic Rabbit and Bear Paws. I have a bunch of other projects in various states of outlining/scripting/imagining - but these are all giant, complex undertakings of creativity, and sometimes I just want to write a few paragraphs reacting to something. So that means there will be occasional reviews of movies, books, comics, music; maybe random thoughts on the creative process itself. If you're lucky (and if I'm even luckier), I may even talk about my own experiences in the field.

But I want to make sure this stays a blog focused on creativity and creation; if this devolves into biweekly posts of funny YouTube videos, it becomes just another nameless echo station in the virtual landscape and I might as well stop wasting everyone's time. And, as a budding professional, I'd like to avoid burning bridges in the industry and so try to keep snark and shit-talking out of my reactions. So if you see any of that negativity starting to creep into my posts, you have my permission to virtually kick my ass!

Anyway, that's the basics explained. I hope you keep reading. And I also hope I keep posting: the blogosphere is littered with the Best of Short-Lived Intentions, which is actually something I want to discuss in my next entry. That, and the meaning behind the title of this Blog! Dramatic!

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