Author: DOuG pRATt

Watching the Watchmen

Comic book fans have been full of talk about the Watchmen movie for quite a while. Time.com just put out an article about the Watchmen preview at the Comic-Con in San Diego, going on right now.

This sort of coverage represents a validation, approval and acceptance of comics that was unimaginable to me as a kid. The catch is, today’s comic books hold no interest for me, in part because I felt when the Watchmen series came out it was the final word on the super hero genre. Writer Alan Moore had succeeded in extracting everything there was to be said about costumed heroes.

The best place to see the Watchmen trailer is the official site, but I’ll post it here for convenience, if you want to avoid all of the Flash animation that’s typical of movie sites.

[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/2008/JUL/Watchmen.flv 640 272]

Overall, it looks very promising, but the Vietnam scenes have a fake appearance, and Dr. Manhattan isn’t quite as convincing as he should be. Rorschach’s voice is too similar to Christian Bale’s Batman. But all of this can be fixed in post-production. I’m also a bit concerned that if the big climax in the story isn’t handled just right, it will be unintentionally humorous. We’ll know in March.

Lurking in the Shadowlands

I have the book by Brian Sibley, the BBC movie based on his original play is waiting to be watched, and on Friday my favorite (excuse me, favourite) radio station, BBC Radio 2, begins airing Ian Richardson’s serialized reading of Shadowlands. We Yanks will have to hope the installments appear on the listen again link.

Saturday note: “Audio stream is unavailable at this time” is what it says here.

It’s working! Go and listen now at that link above.

Jonathan and Darlene Edwards

Jo Stafford and Paul Weston

Considering Jo Stafford’s stellar career and her versatile singing talent, it’s somewhat ironic that she won her only Grammy for a comedy record. Jonathan and Darlene Edwards were the alter egos of Jo and her husband Paul Weston. They were a dreadfully earnest — or earnestly dreadful — lounge act, with Jo’s perfect pitch helping Darlene with her tin ear utterly destroy songs with stunning off-key precision.

You’ll find a wonderfully awful collection of Jonathan and Darlene here on MySpace. The link to Jo’s label, Corinthian Records, is wrong. Use this one instead.

Signing Off On Exactly

I just heard a story on the radio where the news anchor and a reporter said “sign off on” back and forth half a dozen times. Where did this, and saying “EX-actly”, come from? They’re everywhere today.

Instead of saying “he signed off on the agreement” why not just say “he signed the agreement”? And is there no word other than “exactly” that springs to mind when agreeing with someone?

At least these two turns of phrase came into the vernacular spontaneously. Others are manufactured — for example, the Rovian “boots on the ground”. I really dislike the use of that expression. Will Rovian become a descriptive term like Machiavellian?

P.S. One current expression I like, and enjoy using is, “What’s up with that?”