AND ZEPPELINS BLOT OUT THE SUN

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

The Birth of a Genius

Chris Mcgowan is now 21. Happy Birthday McG.

Sunday, March 8, 2009

Major Knuckles and the Tambourine Walk

In Dublin, there are fifty different monuments to James Joyce and this one, a 3rd floor mural in Isaac's Hostel (76% Approval Rating on Hostelworld.com), dedicated to gilded lions that hang out by sewage pipes. The hostel also boasted communal showers that operated for half-minutes at a time, spraying ice water, an equally frigid room with bunkbeds(!) and little else furniture-wise, comforters made of velcro, a somewhat demented desk clerk who tore a map clear in-half while attempting to direct hostelers, an adjacent roomful of giggling French girls that may have been twins but regardless of zygote-sharing exploded into laugh apoplexy every night at around 4 A.M. The Wi-Fi was more than passable. Carmen's grade: 70% (3.5 strawberries).

Prior to getting mugged, Carmen and TCS's wanderlust led them into this scenic Irish ghetto. Childhood flights of imaginative fancy, especially those involving garbage, are truly inspiring to see, and Carmen couldn't help reminiscing about boyhood afternoons spent mummifying himself in used toilet paper, forging wigs out of tampon strings, and basically rolling around in big piles of refuse until the sun sank into the horizon and his mother rang the dinner bell.

St. Stephen's Green is now up there on Carmen's All-Time Park's List, somewhere between Central Park and Bay Lea. The rolling, verdant concourse was super green even out of season, and the bundled children roamed, and swans eased down the mini-lake, and everything was near bloom.

OH LOOK AT THE DUCKS!

Just around the corner from Isaac's Hostel were 1. O'Shea's Pub and Restaurant and 2. This Horrifying Doll Thing. O'Shea's was Carmen and CTS's main haunt for the trip, providing one of the better bar experiences in Carmen's pretty short positive bar experiences list. There was fiddling and mandolining and bar-wide clapping and chorusing and the overall mood clocked in at cheery.

LION BARS GOOD

Whether these exist in the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA or not, Carmen had never experienced Nestle’s little leonine treasures up until this point in his life. You must. The delectable bars mix the cathartic crunchiness of Nestle’s Crunch with the smooth chocolate taste of Milky Way to wondrous effect. While never quite reaching the vertiginous creamy heights of 3 Musketeers, Lion Bars provide a tasty escape for those looking for a novel way to slowly poison their insides with processed mini-bricks of chocolate! Why the wrapping has a tiger on it no one knows.

Saturday, March 7, 2009

MEN WATCH WATCHMEN

   No movie in recent memory has elicited a nexus of indecipherable emotions in Carmen’s brain parts as Zak Synder’s Watchmen did. Watching the film on a nearly IMAX-sized screen in an I-could-eat-off-this-carpet Dublin theater whose individual screening rooms listed specs on leg room, audience capacity, and speaker dimensions, Carmen was subject to a near perfect viewing environ for the movie, especially when considering the self-exhorting bro that performed pre-film push-ups and crunches in order to prepare, the obligatory Asian crouched in the corner peaking looks at the theater’s doorway over his Nintendo DS screen. Visually, Watchmen is awe-inspiring. The frenetic pacing and distinct color palettes and set design and costumes and Zak Synder’s mega-stylized camerawork all fuse together and morph into a nine-headed monster that literally pummels the eyeballs with satisfaction. That said, the film is decidedly, undeniably flawed—as is all truly great art—but these shortcomings were so juxtaposed with filmic brilliance-and coupled with the blinding steaming weirdness of the thing, the lines of demarcation became more than blurry between what Carmen considers good/bad in a traditional sense and what is weirdly good/bad in his own deviant perception.
     The first fault lies with the musical choices. Watchmen’s score, the eerily ominous mellotron rolls from the opening of the second trailer, is incredible, perfectly capturing the film’s cerebral, chimerical vision, and playing background to its best sequence: the death and rebirth of Dr. Manhattan; but, unfortunately, somebody in there chose to also include popular music in the film as well. These songs rarely work in conjunction with what’s transpiring on screen and work even less when comparing them to the score. Secondly, Malin Ackerman can’t act. Thirdly, the movie, a much more direct narrative, only serves to point out the really quite flawed denouement that the graphic novel presents. There is no logic to it, never was, and this becomes really apparent when recalling that the events that unfurl are a result of the world’s smartest man and a super-human demigod whose intelligence transcends all human limitations. And this is the just the tip of the iceberg.
     There is a sex scene in this movie that defies description. It produced a feeling in Carmen so complex that to even try to discern between jubilant joy and high-strain horror isn’t even worth it.
     If anything, Carmen can’t recommend any movie more than Watchmen because no other movie can divide a person, and an audience, like it can. There is so much to love and so much to hate that everyone will leave the theater with a different subjective experience. So 4 out of 5 strawberries.

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

The Henchmen Have Gathered in Waiting

With Watchmen's release less than 1920 minutes away, Carmen is hunkered down for a cascading lights-coming-up-in-the-theater roar of "pretty good, but nowhere near as good as the book." Carmen is guilty of using this cockamamie criticism, partly to show that he reads books and is consequently big-brained and partly because that's what you say when you see a movie based on a book. People love saying this. Whether this has something to do with an increasing less-literate society's continued paradoxical reverence of the written word or people just like the way it rolls off the tongue is tough to say, but it probably has to end, especially when it gets to "pretty good, but nowhere near as good as the graphic novel." Because you know how everyone likes graphic novels....CP can see why Watchmen was revolutionary on merit of its scope alone, but that said, how it was able to transcend the thick barriers of narrow-mindedness is somewhat of an anomaly. So it has become increasingly obvious to CP that critics and message board lurkers are merely convinced that the graphic novel is good because its on TIME's fiercely accurate 100 GREATEST NOVELS OF ALL-TIME (FROM 1923 to PRESENT) LIST. Now, this is one frenziedly weird book. FACT: People don't like weird stuff. Yet somehow, every reviewer (while--and this goes for every, last review regardless of opinion--each states that the ending is an improvement over the graphic novel's, that the montage to Dylan is incredible, that Matthew Goode was miscast, that JEH is great, and that the dialogue doesn't transfer well to the screen) is mindlessly in love with this arguably complex, bizarre graphic novel. Carmen doesn't buy it. These are the same critics that hailed Slumdog Millionaire, Gran Torino, and Burn After Reading as masterpieces. If anything, they have read TIME's list, and have, once again, agreed to agree. How not a single one of these professional critics is able to step away from this supposedly completely opaque shadow that the graphic novel casts and see the movie from an objective standpoint is really sad, how they immediately accept the world in the "classic" book but find it unable to consider the filmic equivalent (a medium that mind you, literally saturates the senses) is not out of fault of the movie (and this goes for other adaptations) but on the viewer himself, who is unable to detach from preconceived notions of the source material. They should just accept the movie as a movie as they accept the book as a book. Somewhere in here is why you don't see many film-to-book adaptations.

Prior to offing himself, David Foster Wallace neatly stacked the pages of his decade-in-the-making incomplete manuscript for The Pale King for his wife to find along with his hanged body. Carmen thanks him heartily, for the prior.