First of all, for all of you who had any doubts, the movie was fantastic. Not a kids movie, by any stretch of the imagination, but fantastic. I encourage all of you to go see it as soon as you have finished reading the comic, this weekend. Don't get caught up trying to find inconsistencies, and just enjoy the movie. And the comic.
All of the midnight showings here in Tucson sold out, which is perfectly appropriate. If this movie does even half of Spiderman's opening weekend then it will be a testament, in this economy, of the greatness of this movie. Especially given that Spidey opened on a Wednesday and Watchmen respectfully opened on the traditional Friday. I can not encourage you strongly enough to go see this movie. And when you do, I pray your experience does not immitate the following:
We get there, fortunate to secure seats together because the courtesy of squeezing to the middle during a sold out movie does not seem to overcome to unwillingness to sit in the seat directly adjacent to a total stranger. The previews took a while to get started as the highly skilled and probably not at all impaired laborer running tprogector needed seven tries to get the sound, screen alignment and focus all working simultaneously. Which makes sense, because if you have a movie that is selling out, a completely common occurance these days, you would want to make sure your least competant employees are in charge of that sort of thing. Can any of you even remember the last movie you went to see that was completely sold out? Lord of the Rings? Way to put your best foot forward El Con. I am totally not going to go the Foothills theater for the next movie I am excited about seeing.
On the bright side, when the previews did get running they were in danger of batting a thousand until they threw the newer and dumber Seth Rogan movie in at the end. Public Enemies, the John Dillinger story with Depp and Bale, Star Trek, which looks great despite J.J. Abrams' involvement, Xmen Origins: Wolrverine where we finally get Gambit, Bale in Terminator: Salvation, and the Hangover which looks like we might actually get the Vegas movie we always wanted, and Pixar's UP, having finally seen a preview thatconvinced me to go see it. Well done there. That's how we get people back into the theaters.
Another pleasure in going to the midnight release is the joy of sharing a theater with all the super cool kids who pregame at the bar and then are incapable of following the plot so ask questions to each other loudly during the course of the movie, offering a pleasing running commentary that helps keep the rest of us engaged. Then there were the two Rhodes Scholars who couldn't find their seats so seated themselves on the step next to me and proceeded to make phone calls during the movie until passing out in the ailse. Literally.
None of that was enough to overshadow the film, which was everything I could hope it would be. Let me know what you think.
*This post was sent from my Blackberry Mobile device.
Here is the update on our Biggest Loser Coaches Challenge. I began the competition at 210 pounds with a 27% body fat percentage. At our half way point I am Now 190 pounds with a 19.5% body fat percentage. The math on that works out like so: 27% of my 210 pounds was fat, which is about 57 pounds of fat; currently 19.5% of 190 pounds is fat, which is about 37 pounds of fat. That means that in four weeks I lost 20 pounds, all of which was fat. Kind of like this guy. I am going to tell you what I did, so you can have the fun of losing too!! Sorry, I was reading one of those self help books, and they always get real excitable. But I am going to tell you.
On the dietary front I kept things pretty simple, followed a few simple rules which are not earth shattering. It was easy to keep, so easy in fact that for the next month I am going to ratchet up the strictness of the diet to see if I can be more efficient about losing. These are the rules:
1 – Don’t be American. By this I mean get rid of the steak and potatoes and your hard earned beer. Red meat is loaded with saturated fat, having 20 times that of a chicken breast. In addition to that the grains they feed cows lead to a higher, hidden caloric/carb content and sucking down the antibiotic cesspool they toss in to keep them from exploding cannot be all that good for you. The potatoes are a fast carb that that is harder to use in exercise, turning more easily into fat. There are potatoes that when eaten with their skins provide a slow burning carb, but I generally don’t pay attention to my potato types, so I just got rid of them. Which was hard for me, as I would eat potatoes for every single meal if I could. I also threw out these All American foods: mayo, white bread, and any breading that you fry. Seriously, it is just an already sketchy food that is used to soak up fat, directly. What are we doing eating it anyway? Why not just get a high fructose I.V.? This is easier than it might seem at first. Almost any real restaurant has a chicken and veggies, or fish option. And whole grain bread is easy to find, and in my opinion tastier anyway. Alcohol of any sort by nature is an empty calorie, as in your body will not use it. I’ve heard rumor that red wine has some fat burning qualities, but not from anyone with letters after their name.
2 – Eat more. Don’t skip meals. I know that at this point it is no great secret that having six to eight meals a day is a better food processing system than doing the one meal a day plan, but it always struck me as kind of annoying. I don’t always have the kind of schedule that allows me to eat that often. This was the one more difficult aspect of the plan, but I managed by convincing myself that things like smoothies, a handful of almonds, or a sizable piece of fruit counted as a meal. I’d go to work after breakfast with some almonds, a turkey sandwich, and a banana and bingo. Three meals down. And skipping meals can either lead you to over snacking, which isn’t a real big issue if you snack the right way, or it can trick your body into starvation mode which will lead to a counterproductive storage of fat.
3 – Take a night off. When I was settling myself into this challenge I was taking advice from any number of sources. I was standing on my head for 5 minutes a day, bathing in salt water, eating only raw meat… Well, while I decided to limit my sources of advice, one thing that kept popping up is the benefit of giving yourself a night off, relaxing and eating and drinking as you like. I have heard plenty of reasons for this that are sometimes scientific, sometimes ephemeral, sometimes metaphorical, and in one case ecumenical, but I think the brunt of it comes down to most of us just not being able to deprive ourselves on a truly dedicated basis. With which I agree. At the end of the week I want to sit down with my friends and enjoy a taste beverage or 12. So I took a night off.
That really is about it. I did exercise, but I don’t really like running, so I didn’t do much of that. I worked out at a gym 4 days a week, doing ridiculously light weights, as in the kind that get girls looking at you sideways because you are lifting less than they are, and did 3 sets of 20 reps for everything. That means that I would lift the weight 20 times, take a 30 second break, and then repeat twice for those of you not fluent in gymgeek. The point of this was to be burning more weight while not putting on the pounds or bulk that comes with muscle. Which has worked out fairly well.
Which brings me to Phase 2. I have currently 37 pounds of fat hanging on my frame. That means that if I jack up the number and intensity of my workouts, and buckle down on the diet, I should have plenty of fat left to work with. My ambition is to cut another 20 pounds of fat in the next month, which would leave me at 170, with 10% body fat. I promise to let you know how it goes. For any of you who took up my challenge a month ago, I am currently winning our coaches challenge, so whomsoever of our readership wins the readers challenge will have our prize money to give away to a charity of their choosing. Best of luck!!
I didn’t read comic books as a child. Chalk it up as a number of things that I didn’t really do that seem to be a bit out of the norm. I didn’t go to many movies, or watch TV, play video games, listen to music… My idle recreational pursuits we limited to petty acts of violence, burning, breaking, blowing up and killing just about whatever I could get my hands on. I balanced this latent sociopathy with a heavy diet of the written word. Given that I grew up in that now archaic age before the profusion of cell phones to any 10 year old with opposable thumbs, that Dark Age before the glorious wings of the internet lifted us all up into shared illumination this meant that I read actual books. For those of you unfamiliar with the media a book is a collection of paper covered with words on each side and bound together at one end. This bound end is called the spine, as it is usually hardened by the glue or the stitching that is holding the paper together. The individual pieces of paper are called pages and are protected by a thicker piece of paper, sometimes a piece of leather, which is called a cover. The height of popular book making as an art form was reached toward the end of the 1800’s where the stitched spine was covered leather with the title embossed in gold leaf, and the front and back covers a piece of marbleized wood with leather again protecting the corners and all the pages were trimmed in gold leaf. You can see some of these marvelous books if you watch period pieces like Pride and Prejudice. Or you can Google it. Since then we have economized our books into paltry things that are printed on cheap paper and bound together with whichever glue is cheapest at the moment, scarcely worth reading let alone keeping in a prominent position in your house. All the better, though, as it creates more room for your DVD collection.
As I was saying, I did not read comic books as a child. While my peers were enjoying the wonders of Superman, Spawn, the X-Men and the like I was burning through every western ever written, Hopalong Cassidy, the Sackets, Zane Grey, Max Brand… You name it, I read it. Middle school saw the introduction of Tolkien and the marvelous world of all things scientific and fantastic. Intermittent sprinklings of historical texts popped up and then it was everything Shakespeare which led into the romantic poets and so on. I disdained comics as juvenile. The point of reading was the writing, not some goofy pictures of scantily clad women who were serving as much as anything else to ease the sexual tension of pre-adolescence, post-adolescence, and all those beautiful years in between.
A series of interactions, none of which had to do with the scantily clad women, opened my eyes to the value of comics as a legitimate genre of literature. The first of these was a graphic novel by Craig Thompson called Blankets. I am not being a nerdy elitist, well I guess I am, but not about calling it a graphic novel instead of a comic. There is a difference. The same way that there is a difference between Saturday morning cartoons and Toy Story. So when reading this graphic novel I was struck by the depth of the story, the occasionally florid prose and the constantly florid drawings. I went out and bought his next book, which was a graphic diary of his trip to Morocco. I was hooked. I started reading all sorts of comics and graphic novels and quickly discerned that the ratio of quality to drivel in the genre was much the same as in literature in general. For every Tolkien you have to suffer through Harry Potter, Twilight, Dragonlance, and the rest. For every Robert Bolano you have to put up with Grisham, Clancy, King, and on down the list.
Just as I was beginning to despair I ran into two authors who saved comics for me. The First was Neil Gaiman, in the Sandman series. The stories of the God of Dreams, and his travails conveyed so much of the power of dreaming, of hope, of stories that it carried me away, bringing me into their world in a way that only literature had ever been able to. The second was Frank Miller, but not the Miller of 300, and Sin City. His graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns was a landmark of emotional commitment for me. If you have ever idly wondered what happens when Batman fights Superman, one of the possible answers is put forth here. Better is the question of why would they fight. After this I more frequently came across the quality work, the Alan Moore, Brian Bendis, and I realized why they had managed to cross the line from sheer pulp to literature.
I know that comics are becoming trendy and cool in pop culture. I mean, there was an entire plot arc of the now defunct OC given over to the creation of a graphic novel. I would caution you against letting that color your opinion of the genre. As one who regularly dismisses things for no reason other than that they are popular, I understand the desire completely. But you would be missing out on one of the most creative and versatile means of literature our society as come up with.
Joseph Campbell has a theory that every hero’s story is the same story, that it goes through the same path, the same challenges, to the same end. Each new hero is but his particular society’s understanding of a different face of this same hero. Comics have been the face of that hero through the development of America’s modernity. We don’t have a predominant religion, mythology, no meta-narrative that we carry with us. We are too broad, too diverse for any common story. So we have born a thousand smaller stories, our own American mythology. For those of you who have never deigned lift a comic, here is a list of the cream of the crop. Most of them are available in a single collected form, but you can get them in the original single issues if you prefer, but please. Read the comic. Don’t let a movie maker steal your right to enjoy your own mythos.
- Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. For reasons listed above, and the fact that one of the true modern instantiations of the ancient hallowed vocation of the storyteller expresses himself best in this media.
- Alan Moore’s Watchmen. Moore does the best job of anyone in the business of letting the superheroes be human, have doubts and conflictions. Before going to see the movie, read this epic retake on the classic American superhero.
- Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. For the reasons above, and because Miller’s vision of Batman is the foundation for the rebuilding of the Batman movie series. And because, seriously, Batman fights Superman.
- The Death of Superman. For all the obvious reasons. Because people would stalk the writers threatening to kill them if they didn’t bring him back. Because The death of the hero is the most central fulcrum of the plot of the hero. Because it isn’t just a clever name.
Now I am not saying that any of these make it into the Canon, the sacred collection of texts that are an imperative read for their quality and importance. Tolkien alone of the fantasy genre has made it in, over the frequent and vehement objections of the literati. Eventually the art form might produce a work that will be granted admittance to that hallowed hall, but for now, it is at least in the yard. If not knocking at the door.
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