How the Dragonball Movie Nearly Did Not Suck (and Why It Sucked Anyway)

"They did not accept my decisions. Maybe they thought the decisions weren't suitable, so they didn't use them."

Stephen Chow, producer of the
live-action Dragonball movie

... and more importantly, fan of the manga.

Don't worry about spoilers, by the way. This movie is already spoilt.

The clue is in this poster.

As soon as we got out of the exam hall after the very last paper of the semester, my trusty fanboy partner, Shaki, and I beelined to the biggest screen in Malacca with the mindset of someone wanting to get over something very painful as soon as possible (I am fully aware that we're starting to sound a little homo, having so much in common). We knew the movie is going to suck at proportions so epic it'll blot out the sun, collapse some galaxies and cause erectile dysfunction to Dragonballs fans worldwide for the ensuing couple of months at least - but we were still adamant about watching it. It's like driving pass a car crash. Tragic, awful and painful to see, but you simply can't take your eyes off it. Dragonball Evolution is the 20-car pileup cinematic equivalent, all containing dead babies in the front seats and trunks.

I'm pretty sure most people already have some sort of working knowledge of the manga and anime this movie's adapted from (anyone in my age group would almost definitely have grown up with the Malay translation of the comic books) so I shan't waste any space writing about them and go right into the reviewing,



How It Nearly Did Not Suck.

Boobs.

Yeap, boobs. Jugs, tits, tatas, honkers, hooters, handwarmers, bazoongas, chest torpedoes and jigglypuffs. The Weapons of Mass Distraction.

The wily people who made this movie has one simple stratagem. Every time something stupid, ridiculous, or grossly unfaithful to the manga appears on screen - and before anyone can snort in disgust or groan in pain, or cry out loud for our raped childhoods - they distract us with any two of the six tits they hired to star in this movie. Every time I open my mouth to complain to Shaki, I got gob-stopped by some chesticles jiggling into view. The timing of their appearances were impeccable, I tell you. This is just speculation here, but do hear me out.

First examine the theatrical poster up there. Who's in it?

Goku is, naturally, since he's the star of the story. Bulma is too, since she's the female protagonist, at least in the earliest stories.

Bulma is also the all-important provider of fan service.

Then there's Chi Chi, Goku's love interest. You can say that his girlfriend (later wife) should be a pretty important person to him but in the manga, it's a stretch to even consider calling her a tertiery character. She only appeared for like one chapter when Goku was still a kid and for a short period later in one of the tournament arcs. Then they got married and had a kid off-panel. Her role for ever after in the Z series was that of a nagging wife, bitching about how Goku should stop getting himself killed and how their son Gohan should be studying instead of learning martial arts (appearing in less than one panel per volume).

And the last chick in the movie, pretty much proves my little theory outright. She's called Mai, and she's a henchwoman in the service of Pilaf in the earlier stories. Many would not remember her - or even remember who the heck Pilaf was at all (he's the guy who freed Piccolo, if you can't recall, and has a role smaller than even some of Piccolo's lackeys). In this movie, she's Piccolo's right hand woman and sole follower. And get this; she has more screen time than Piccolo!

Also, she wears a formless trench coat most of the time in the manga. In this movie, well, take a look at her outfit yourself,

"The better to see you with, my dear."

Eriko Tamura, a Japanese actress and singer, played Mai. Golden Globe Award (which is like an Oscar, only no one cares if you win one) nominee, Emmy Rossum, played Bulma. I admit that I have had little exposure to her past performances but from what I can see in the Dragonball movie, I'd say that her talent is limited. In fact, she only has two talents,

Man, I like to get my hands on some of that talent.

And then there's that Korean-American actress who played Chi Chi, Jamie Chung, whose biggest claim to fame to date is being as a cast member in the MTV reality show, The Real World. She may be an unknown, yes, but for all we know, she might be hiding some real sweet acting skills somewhere,

Skills you're born with.

It means boobies in Spanish too, apparently. Learning foreign languages is fun!

I bet many of you didn't know that Jamie Chung once appeared in the 2007 Adam Sandler vehicle, I Pronounce You Chuck and Larry too. C'mere, I'll show you,

See if you can spot Jamie in this picture out of all the Hooters girls.

In fact, the director was so impressed with her performance that he decided that we need twice as much of Jamie Chung's Chi Chi as we were suppose to get. He devised (yes he did, 'cause he rewrote the damn script) a contrived scene in which Mai stole some of Chi Chi's blood and used it to magically or bio-genetically impersonate Chi Chi, and we're all treated to that grand old cliche of the hero not being able to tell his girlfriend apart from the clone,

There is now twice as much boobs in sheer white nighties.

Funnily enough, this is just about the only thing director James Wong nailed perfectly in concept. In Chi Chi's first appearance in the manga and anime, she's dressed in what I can only describe as a slut-suit, giving many of us hormonal pre-teen male readers at the time confusing feelings in our pants,

Chi Chi's slut-suit killed a dinosaur. No shit. That's really what happened in the original story.

And in that same first appearance, Goku touched Chi Chi's crotch to determine whether she's a girl or boy (because Goku is adorably brainless that way). It's obvious that Chi Chi was intended by Akira Toriyama, the author and artist, as a walking fan-service dispenser. Now, for our collective sanity, let us not go into the specifics of Chi Chi's age at the time.

Jamie Chung's Chi Chi in Dragonball Evolution served pretty much the same role as jailbait Chi Chi in the manga. I'm pretty sure I saw her cannonballs more often than I saw the titular dragonballs in the entire length of the movie. Now that I think of it, her appearance in this movie did nothing at all to influence how the main plot goes (except that bit where she seduced a horndog Goku, and in the process, helped him master the Kame Hame Ha - I'm not making this up).

Still, in spite of the valiant efforts the makers of this film, 20th Century Fox, director James Wong and the 6 breasts they casted in this movie in trying to make us forget how much this movie sucks by clouding our faces with boobs (hold a moment, I'm having the awesomest little mental visual at the moment), they didn't quite manage to achieve what they wanted. This movie tried so hard to blow us fans, but in the end, it just blows.



Other Stuff That Nearly Kept the Movie from Sucking

• The "Ki" attacks were quite nicely adapted to live action. I just wish there's more. On a related note, "Ki" is the correct pronunciation (I've read some Malaysian reviewers who complained about it). I know it was "Chi" or "Qi" in our Malay version of the manga, but "Ki" is Japanese.
• Bulma's capsules got interpreted pretty well too, and I wish they feature the capsule tech more prominently. Bulma throwing one at Mai and activating it at the same time was one isolated brilliant stroke in the movie. Too bad they didn't just let the motorbike crush Mai. That would have been a scene beyond awesome.
• Piccolo's airship really reminded me of the one he had in the manga.
• The landscapes they feature in this movie strongly resembled those desolate nowheres the warriors in Dragonball and DragonballZ often fight in.
• Emmy Rossum looked like Bulma. Really. Acted a bit like Bulma too.
• Piccolo is green. The actor who played him, James Marsters, a fan of the anime, insisted on it. Luckily, they listened to him.
• Master Roshi (Kame sennin) is a lech, just like in the manga! And the cheesy bright shirts! They left out his tortoise shell but still.
  

Stuff That Killed This Movie

• Executive stupidity. I'm betting that it was some fat cat Fox exec who is sorely out of touch with the world and pop culture at large who suggested that Goku should be an American high school kid so that "viewers can relate to him better". Justin Chatwick's Goku in Dragonball Evolution is an annoying piece of shit compared to the Goku we all know and love. He bitched about being different and not being able to fit in at school. He moaned that he has no skills with women. It's a fucking cliche storm. They fucking made Goku a stereotypical high school loser! That's completely missing the point of the character. Goku is suppose to be functionally retarded and raised in the wilderness by his grandpa. He shouldn't even know that there are such things as girls or women! He discovering civilisation was what made early volumes of the Dragonball mangas such a joy to read. The whole high school angle wasted a perfectly good half an hour that could have been used to beef up the Piccolo storyline more. In fact, that's not the only thing it wasted. They actually created two archetypal high school bully jocks (original characters, said Wikipedia - MY ASS) to antagonise Goku. And they said the reason (really good) characters like Goku's best friend Krillin (or Kurin, to us Malaysian fans) couldn't be fit into this movie because they think that there's already too many characters! AND THEY HAD ROOM FOR A COUPLE OF HIGH SCHOOL BULLIES AND A HENCHWOMAN OF A THIRD RATE CHARACTER NO ONE REMEMBERS IN IT!!! God, 20th Century Fox makes my blood boil. They can't make anything good, and they tried to sue Warner Bros. over some rights issue regarding the Watchmen movie. I hope they all contract venereal diseases and die in a lot of agony.
  

Kid and teen Goku.

• The fight scenes were short and anticlimatic. Even the final one. Piccolo: punch Goku, punch Goku, punch Goku. Goku: punch Piccolo, punch Piccolo, punch Piccolo. Kame Hame Ha. Piccolo dies. Man, in the manga, a fight can last through several volumes while each combatant kept upping the ante on the other. I heard they got the guys who did the fight scenes in the Matrix movies to do this. What went wrong?
  
• Chow Yun Fats sucked at being wacky. It's painful to hear him talk and he said things so unfunny that his words can give people cancer. And he has no beard, isn't bald and only wears his trademark shades for a short while in one scene.

Abomination.

How he should appear. Look, it ain't rocket science, okay.

• Piccolo had no antennas, wore fake rubber muscles and the actor's hair was clearly visible under all that make-up. Would it have killed him to shave his head? Would it have killed them to motion capture Marsters and build Piccolo from feet up in CGI, like what they did for Doctor Manhattan in the Watchmen flick? Piccolo didn't look like a Namekian alien at all. He looks like a B-movie demon or a television series baddie. Shame on you, James Marsters, calling yourself a fan. The only reason fanboys haven't killed you yet is because you got them to make Piccolo green.

And they didn't show his regenerative capabilities too! Travesty! Nincompoops!

• Goku's grandpa, Gohan, has to be most annoying old man ever to grace the silver screen. I feel like screaming in pain every time he do that daft old Asian guy laugh.
  
• The dialogues in Dragonball Evolution sounded like they quotes taken from Primary school essay assignments. The character interactions were bewildering, particularly Bulma's romantic side-plot with Yamcha - or Yamu, in the Malay version. Their lines made me want to hurl. The prayer Goku made at the end to summon Shen Nong using the Dragonballs absolutely took the cake. Shaki and I burst out in manic laughter the moment we heard it, infecting everyone else in the theatre when we did. Soon everyone else was laughing too. It was that horrible. You got to hear it to believe it.
• This is a lousy movie even if you're not a Dragonball fan. The quality of production, the actors' abysmal performances... what is there to love?
  

Bottom line is, these Hollywood types should stop putting their own spin on things that are already wildly popular. These people are incredibly arrogant if they think that they can actually improve on some franchise which have already garnered its own vast, worldwide fanbase by its merits alone. You know something? I think Zack Snyder, director or 300 and Watchmen, could have directed an infinitely better Dragonball movie. Now that's a man who always stick to his source material. And after Watchmen, I'm sure he's itching to make something that has a lot of mindless fights in it. He can even put the same muscles on Goku and the other Dragonball warriors they way he airbrushed them over the Spartans in 300.

Or the Japanese should response. They should show these stupid white idiots how to make a real live-action Dragonball movie, and make a bajillion more dollars than Dragonball Evolution ever will. It was an insult to the word evolution. Do they even know what it means?



Angry Dragonball fanboy,
k0k s3n w4i

Who Watched the Watchmen? I Did!

"Heard joke once: Man goes to doctor. Says he’s depressed. Says life seems harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in a threatening world where what lies ahead is vague and uncertain. Doctor says 'Treatment is simple. Great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go and see him. That should pick you up.' Man bursts into tears. Says 'But Doctor… I am Pagliacci.'"

Rorschach's Journal, Chapter II of Watchmen

This should give you an idea what sort of comic book this is.

Those idiots who has been telling people that Robert Downey Jr and Batman are appearing in this film need to be smacked hard.

Friday afternoon, March 6, 2009. Worldwide premier of the Watchmen movie. For the majority of moviegoers of Malaysia, a new superhero movie opened. For Shaki and I, it's the culmination of a dream long awaited, to put it in the corniest terms I know. Just the two of us, we went to the nearest cineplex as soon as we got out of our Ophthalmology exam to catch it. We've been waiting heckuva long time for this film to be made, to see what many have deemed "unfilmable" - to see thousands and thousands of comic panels condensed into a two hour plus long picture and still preserve the essence of the story and its spirit. Alan Moore, the writer of Watchmen, has this to say about a live adaptation of his work; "...frankly, I didn't think it was filmable. I didn't design it to show off the similarities between cinema and comics, which are there, but in my opinion are fairly unremarkable. It was designed to show off the things that comics could do that cinema and literature couldn't."

Alan Moore has divorced himself from any Hollywood project of Watchmen, and had instructed that all resulting royalties the Watchmen film should be given to Dave Gibbons, the artist. Who can blame Moore really? Just look at The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and V For Vendetta. If you don't see any problems with those two films, you've obviously not read the comics they were based on. Still, I don't see why he dislikes Zack "I-don't-change-a-single-damn-thing-from-the-source-material" Snyder (the director) so much. Then again, Moore isn't the most regular and level of men. Just look at his description in his Wikipedia article. It reads like it belongs on Uncyclopedia more;

"He is a vegetarian, an anarchist, a practicing magician and occultist, and he worships a Roman snake-deity named Glycon."

Meet Alan Moore.

Now, I've been reading reviews of the film on various blogs since yesterday and before I go right into one of my own, there are just a few things that need to be addressed. Chief of these is the ignorance of most people about the source material itself, the original limited 12 issue graphic novel (1986 - 1987). The funniest thing anyone said in these reviews are; "I hope there is a sequel". Yeah, funny. Funny like an aneurysm. Also, I've been reading about some interviews where reporters ask Zack Snyder and some of the actors about a possible sequel. It must have taken heckuva lot of willpower on their part just to hold back and not strangle these morons. For those interested, Zack said, and I quote;

"To continue is to either rehash the same idea again or you're going to try to fix the characters, which goes against everything the book stands for..."

I like the guy who played The Comedian, Jeffrey Dean Morgan's answer better;

"The fans would kill us if we tried to go and do something else. If we tried to do a prequel that wasn't written by Alan Moore, we'd get crucified. We couldn't walk down the street. Unless Warner Bros. wants all of their actors to get killed, I think it's a bad idea."

Watchmen (not THE Watchmen, okay, so say it right) was a DC Comics projected pitched by Moore which originally involved the Charlton Comics characters which DC purchased in 1985. Due to the nature of the story, Watchmen would eventually render most of those characters unusable for future publications, which DC didn't want because they paid good cash for them. The soul of Watchmen is a deconstructionist one, of the superhero genre no less - and in order to break your regular superheroes into realistic, human terms - Moore needed superheroes comic readers knew and recognise.

So, since the Charton Comics characters were off limits, Moore went ahead and created a line of original characters modeled after the Charlton ones. Rorschach was based off Mr. A and The Question, both are objectivist vigilantes created by Steve Ditko. Doctor Manhattan's inspiration was Captain Atom, Nite Owl II's was Blue Beetle and Ozymandias' was Thunderbolt.

I've also been reading how some brain-dead reviewers are talking about how Watchmen lacks originality, about how similar its backstory of the government outlawing vigilantes is to The Incredibles. This is why I always do sufficient research when I'm writing on any subject. It's so I don't get called brain-dead by people like me.

Now, I shall review the film, sans spoilers. Yes, this is a very long post. I hope you like reading.



The Story.

A teaser poster for the film drawn by Dave Gibbons, the original artist himself.

I have no quibbles about the story in the movie, which is excellent. That's because the story in the graphic novel is excellent, and the movie departed little (if at all) from it. One dark, rainy New York night, The Comedian, Edward Blake, one of the few costumed heroes employed by the goverment after masked vigilantism was outlawed by the State, was murdered in his apartment, and thrown out to spatter on the streets below. Rorschach, a wanted man by the police for continuing his vigilante work against the law, investigated the Blake's death and set out to warn four of his retired colleagues - Dan Dreiburg (the second Nite Owl), Laurie Juspeczyk (the second Silk Spectre) and Jon Osterman (Doctor Manhattan), who is the only character in both the film and the graphic novel to actually possess superpowers.

The most significant altercation to the original plot has to be the climax, of which I will not reveal here. But I can tell you that when it was first announced the change, lots and lots and LOTS of fans were outraged. I was a little pissed myself too when I first heard about it, and wondered if Zack Snyder and his screenwriter have lost their fucking minds.

Now that I have seen the new ending, I shall humbly admit that I was wrong. Quite amazingly, I actually like the movie's reimagining of that event better than I like the graphic novel's take! The movie managed to preserve every thematic significance of that event while cutting off the one and only part in the original story which I consider unbelieveable, incongruent and unnatural (Shaki simply called that part "stupid").

What I'm not happy about is that they have hurried through Walter Kovacs' psychotherapy session and snipped off a bit of his backstory, like why he started fighting crime as the vigilante Rorschach in the first place, and how he got his mask with its ever changing oily black blots on white. I hope to see that in the extended DVD version, along with the chilling Nietzsche quote at the end of Chapter VI used to describe Rorschach,

"Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster.
And if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."

I also hope to see the story within a story, Tales of the Black Freighter, in the DVD. It's going to be fully animated if I'm not mistaken.

You can see the poster for the Tales of the Black Freighter in this shot, and the kid reading it.

The Characters.

The actors chosen to play the masked adventurers (note that I did not use the term Watchmen - because they've never called themselves that - the word refers to the latin phrase, "quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" which means, "who watches the watchmen") were mostly spot on, particularly Rorschach. Some might think Jackie Earle Haley's put-on gruff voice to be little too similar to BatBale's laughable effort in the Nolan Batman movies, but I beg to differ. I think Haley nailed Rorschach's "dreadful monotone" perfectly, with quite a big bonus helping of drippy contempt. And his physical acting was simply flawless. Rorschach is my absolute favourite character from the comic (and my favourite comic book character after the Joker), so I have had great expectations for his debut on the big screen - and I must say I was very impressed. Jude Law wanted this role initially (the actor is a big fan of the comics and the character, and even has a Rorschach tattoo on him). I certainly wouldn't have minded that after seeing Law perform in Road to Perdition as the psycho photographer.

Rorschach breaking into The Comedian's apartment.


Same scene live. Why the fuck is there a police tape strung across the window? Were they expecting people to come in from there?

Alternatively, Jude Law would have been a better Ozymandias. My least favourite screen version of the Watchmen characters has to be Adrian Veidt A.K.A. Ozymandias. Matthew Goode's Ozy struck me as whiny, weak and needs to put on a few pounds. Ozymandias in the graphic novel was buff, confident and exudes charisma like a skunk exudes stink. Still, I thought how he alternates between German and American accents when speaking in private and publicly was a nice touch. And I get that his suit is suppose to be a parody of BatNipple Clooney's Batsuit in the Batman and Robin movie; but why spoil the character's appearance for a cheap shot?

Patrick Wilson was another perfect casting choice. He embodied out-of-costume Nite Owl II, Dan Dreiberg, to the last feather. I can't get over how similar he is to the mental vision I've always had of the same character. My only complaint is that he was a bit too thin. Nite Owl should have flab aplenty so we can groan at his sex scenes with... never mind.

And Billy Crudup's Doctor Manhattan gave me the willies the first time he spoke in that electric, reasoning voice of his. The presence was almost overwhelming for me, and even though I have imagined it to be deeper, more basso, I kinda like this better. I'm also glad that they kept him mostly nude, like in the graphic novel. It signaled to us fans that they aren't going to do a half-assed adaptation, making changes just because some of the stuff in the comic were offensive (like Doctor Manhattan's swinging beef rod and meatballs). It's very easy for some studio execs to insist on putting some pants on him, but they didn't. The nudity, in my opinion, is a crucial feature of Doctor Manhattan's characterisation. It shows his increasing detachment from the human race as the decades went by.

Apparently, God is a giant smurf. That symbol on his head signifies the hydrogen atom, by the way. They didn't show in the movie how he came around to putting it there.

The Comedian's actor, Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Silk Spectre II's actress, Malin Akerman, were okay, I guess. I suspect she's chosen not for her acting chops but more for her resemblance to the character. The chin was unmistakable. Shaki said that they should have just went with the hottest chick they can hire.

Note chin in graphic novel.


Same scene in movie, sans runny mascara.

The Cinematography.

The lavish use of chroma key have allowed most scenes from the comic books to be recreated at an astounding level of attention to detail and resemblance to the pages of a comic book, though the real set pieces weren't too shabby either. Snyder's signature bullet-time fights were applied generously in whatever little fight scenes there are (which is significantly more numerous than there is in the graphic novel) and the one at the very beginning where the Comedian were attacked and murdered was FUCKING SOLID. All the other fight scenes succeeding it never quite matched up to its intensity and sheer fuck-uppery of furniture and other such smash-able things set contrastingly to the soothing track, Unforgettable. In fact, I felt that it might have been a little too strong a start, making it hard for the rest of the film to live up to it.

Most epic kiss ever.

The montage of living stills set to Bob Dylan's The Times They Are a-Changing in the film's start was a stroke of genius as well. Aside from being an awesome visual appeal, it managed to convey a lot of historical in-jokes, backstory and plot details which definitely wouldn't fit in average feature length motion picture. This one's mostly for the fans, unfortunately. If you've never read Watchmen, most of it would just fly right over your head.

The headline article in the newspaper she's holding is actually a real, full article you can read in one of the issues of Watchmen.

What sucked was some of the computer generated stuff. Bubastis, Veidt's mutant lynx, looked especially fake in some scenes. It made me wonder why they didn't just stick some faux ears onto a tiger or something and run with that instead. Would have looked tonnes better. And it might just be me, but I think they overdid Doctor Manhattan's blue glow a little too.

But I must praise a scene near the end where Veidt stood amongst the ruins of his Antartic retreat, Karnak. Really brought to mind those lines from Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem, Ozymandias, which Moore slipped in at the end of Volume XI,

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

If you know what that entire poem means, you'd see how it relates to this movie in light of Dreiberg's and Doctor Manhattan's parting words to Veidt. I thoroughly commend Snyder's ability to deliver so much gravitas in so simple, so short a shot.



The Summary.

It a good flick for the uninitiated, and an AWESOME flick for fans (though some rabid fans from the other polar end might disagree). The film did not dumb down the complex themes of the original graphic novel excessively and thus, might leave some of the more stupid viewers scratching their heads, but nobody gives a shit about them anyway. However, I'll agree with writer Alan Moore's contention that there are just some things a comic book could have conveyed better compared to a movie, like one of my favourite bits from Watchmen which they left out in the film; an excerpt of Hollis Mason's (the first Nite Owl), autobiography which made me understand why men would dress up in ridiculous costumes and fight crime. It punctuated Volume I with the poignant, somewhat tragic line,

"... And although I've never worn a set of false bosoms in my life, I've stood there dressed in something just as strange, with tears in my eyes while people died laughing."

Or maybe Alan Moore would have to eat his words after all. It was reported that Hollis Mason's autobiography, Under the Hood, will be a feature in the DVD in the form of a documentary. I'm shitting my pants in anticipation here.



Last Word.

Rorschach, taking a rose from The Comedian's grave.

If this movie does what I think I will do, the face of superhero movies will be changed for good. We can be done with all that simple origin story of hero and his archvillain, and how he will go about stopping the bad guys. That shtick gets old. Watchmen was written for that very purpose - to shit on that line between good and evil, that black and white objectivist mentality that Rorschach is determined to defend (on a sidenote, Alan Moore is unhappy that Rorschach is so popular amongst the fandom, and can't understand why anyone would like a person with such stubborn, inflexible, impractical ideals). Well, I don't like Rorschach's republican philosophies of moral absolutism one bit, but it didn't stop me from recognising what a complex, tortured man he is trying to make sense of the meaningless chaos of the world. That's the reason why he's named after the Rorschach inkblot test. Making sense out of randomness. Moral pareidolia.

I can go on and on about the many themes and interpretations of the graphic novel and the other characters, all begging deeper analysis and understanding - but I think they don't really have a place in this review. What I do hope is that people would go ahead, pick up the comic books and read for themselves. Watchmen really is an amazing piece of fiction. It's not the only graphic novel on the Time Magazine's list of "The 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present" for nothing, you know. They should be studying this in high school literature classes in Malaysia, not John Steinbeck's stupid wallbanger "man finds wealth finds misery" novella. Man, I've read toilet graffiti that show more intelligence than The Pearl.

Last word of my last word; this movie kicks ass.

The cover of Volume I of Watchmen.

Related post:
Lesbians Making Out Snuck Past Malaysian Censors.
The Clown Prince of Crime and The Dark Knight Review (in similar fanboy format).



Watchmen fanboy,
k0k s3n w4i

Lesbians Making Out Snuck Past Malaysian Censors

"Take away the right to say 'fuck' and you take away the right to say 'fuck the government.'"

Lenny Bruce

That's the Film Censorship Board of Malaysia up there hurtling down to certain doom. Here's to hoping.

After waiting for what seemed like forever for it hit the big screen, Watchmen is finally here! I'll definitely be writing a fanboy gush and review (update: done) like the one I did for Heath Ledger's Joker and The Dark Knight last year soon but in the meantime, there's something else about the film (or rather, the Malaysian theatrical post-censorship version of it) I'd like to draw everyone's five-minute's worth of attention to.

Three words, people: Lesbians Making Out.

The scene comes in near the end, where Adrian Veidt (or Ozymandias, the Smartest Man in the World, as he called his masked vigilante persona) was seated in front of a wall of screens in his Antartic base which appeared to be broadcasting programmes from all over the world while his genetically engineered lynx, Bubastis, was lying by his side.

Evidently, the man likes watching TV a lot.

As you already should know, Zack Snyder, the kick-ass director who directed the live adaptation of the testosterone snack bar gore-fest which was Frank Miller's 300, also directed this. All of us know that the only reason he was chosen was because he was a great stickler for fidelity to the source material - so much so that critics have moaned and bitched like the moaning bitches they are that Snyder has absolutely no vision of his own as a director, and that his works (especially 300 and Watchmen) are basically screen translations of the graphic novels, with zero creative input from his side. His characters talk and walk exactly like how you would imagine their paper counterparts would. His scenes are basically clones of the comic books' frames.

In other words, he's precisely the sort of director us fanboys want when Hollywood wants make our favourite comic book, novels or video games into movies. Artistic autonomy, suck my dick, please.

Now, Snyder shot the scene in the frame above almost exactly like how it looked like, and slipped in this little Easter egg,

Why the fuck is Bubastis on Veidt's right, Snyder? You and I are going to have words.

Throughout the movie, the Malaysian Censorship Board have hovered gleefully over our heads, truncating all the sex scenes, cutting the expletives and (most unforgivably of all), blurred out Doctor Manhattan's genitals. What the fuck? I have waited so long just to see Doctor Manhattan's giant blue schlong and ball sac magnified a thousand time on the big screen, flopping gloriously in every direction every time he so much as draw breath - and they blurred them out?! This is sacrilege, people, sacrilege!

Like this, but on IMAX, mmmkay?

Then the scissor-happy morons slipped up BIG TIME. They totally missed out on this frame; a few short seconds of a woman lowering her mouth onto the bosom of another and sucking on it in a TV monitor on the upper right corner. You can even see the nipple! Honest!

Shaki (the only other fanboy of Watchmen I know in my college), who watched the movie with me, didn't see it at all - and I suspect many, many other people didn't either. After all, if a dozen very attentive men from the ministry watching this movie several times over looking for boobs, twats, dongs and sometimes even kisses (yes, kissing offends our Eastern sensibilities too, apparently) couldn't spot it, I don't think many can. Which is why I wrote this post for the benefit of us all. I saw it when no one did, thanks to my infallible Boob-dar. Have I ever told you about my Boob-dar? My amazing talent of extra-mammary perception? It's related to my uncanny ability to see sexual innuendoes in anything anyone says.

Now, go to the cinema nearest to you and look for it. This is one instance of significant history for us smut-starved Malaysians and also for that department in the Home Ministry which no one wanted, but wastes our tax money by existing anyway. It's only a matter of time before the Censorship Board get wind of this and do something before our nation's impeccable morals are sullied forever by this piece of sweet, sweet filth. That's us. We are a weak-minded civilisation constantly on the brink of falling into utter depravity. All it takes is just one naked breast or a bare butt cheek to prod us off that cliff, to transform us into a nation of sex maniacs and whores.

I like to imagine that the guys they hire at the Censorship Board to look for naughty bits in movies are locked up 24/7 and aren't allow to come out at all. I mean, since they are exposed to so much womanly bits (or man things, not judging here) on a daily basis, you'd think that their minds have long degenerated into shriveled, drippy ping pong balls of pure id filled with perverse animalistic desires to take to the streets and to rape every woman in sight.

Ignore that. Here's the take home message,

For the first time ever, ladies and gentlemen, there is a boob, a nipple and another woman sucking on it in Malaysian cinema. Go watch.



P.S. Anyone else spotted this?



Down with censorship,
k0k s3n w4i

Saved a Hundred Bucks, Picked Up Fifteen

"Luck never gives; it only lends."

Swedish proverb

Remember my Sony MP3 Player? The one I wrote about last year? Well, there's this little USB cable that came with it; a necessary implement that allows me to move files in and out of the gadget, and more importantly, charge its battery. In other words, my MP3 player - all half-a-thousand-bucks of it - is little more than a paperweight (one which is too small, too light to actually weight down any paper, by the way) without that cable. It is also not screwed on, superglued or welded to my MP3 player. I think you already know where I'm heading with this.

Naturally, as naturally as breathing, eating or pooping, I lost it. It's kind of like my superpower. I can make things disappear without exerting any effort at all. I can also do other cool things like not move, digest food or fail exams, also by simply exercising my amazing talent of non-exertion.

The market price of the cable at the time of my misplacement of it was RM 50. I said "at the time of my misplacement of it" because that point of time was nowhere near the present at all. I actually lost it sometime last year. That's my other superpower; heroic procrastination.

I only got around to trying to replace it a month ago and visited a Sony store at Bukit Cina. A youngish, tall woman who works there told me they were fresh out of USB cables, but whispered conspiratorially to me that she did have one stashed somewhere which she ordered for herself. She said that since I'm cute and has superpowers, she'd let me have it first so I don't have to wait for her to send for another. Sweet, I said and asked her how much I owe her for it.

She told me that it's probably RM 50 but she insisted on checking with her supplier first. So I sat there and waited while she made a phone call. After a bit, she got back to me with an expression on her face which would probably be more at home on an oncologist.

"Uh, the price went up," she began hesitantly.

"Alright, how much?" I asked.

"It's a lot more than I expected..."

"Uhuh?" C'mon. Get on with it, woman.

"It's RM 160."

"Oh," I said, and a heavy silence followed.

She explained that the original manufacturer for the USB cable had shut down their factory, and that Sony had contracted another company to continue the line - as if that explains why an already disproportionately expensive spare part trebled its original price. What would really explain the absurd rise, however, is that Sony must have recently added extortion to their repertoire of business policies. They knew we couldn't do shit without the cable. Luckily, I am not insane; so I was not at all willing to shell out that much moolah for a simple length of wiring.

"I don't think I'm taking it then," I managed at last. "Thanks anyway."

What, they are using gold wires to make them now?

"Sorry, I was also shocked that they would raise the price this much," she told me right before I left. Sony, there must be something seriously fucked up about your prices if your own sales representatives are apologising for it.

I headed to the Sony outlet in the Mahkota Parade mall next, and the bloke there told me that they just sold their last cable (priced at RM 60, said he) earlier that afternoon, and said that I should return one week later when they get some new stock. I did exactly what he said but by the ensuing week, he too had receive the memo about the price hike, giving me the same story about Sony switching manufacturers and inadvertently affirming its veracity to me. I wish I got a picture of just how genuinely sheepish he appears to be about it (your agents hate you, Sony).

Now, let's fast forward to last Saturday when I was at 1 Utama with Phoebe. I visited the Sony Centre there with the stubborn hope that they might still have some old RM 50 cables left in their inventory. It wasn't a really big hope, I admit. It's just a teensy-weensy one - the sort naive people keep in the face of an impending nuclear holocaust. I asked the middle-aged Chinese dealer guy behind the counter there about it, and waited as he rummaged through a cabinet. To my dismay, what he produced was the RM 160 one. I recognised how it looks like, that smug snakey son of a bitch.

"How much?" I asked wearily, and prepped for worst.

"Wait a minute," he said, thumbing through some receipts and invoices. He became flustered when he couldn't find what he was looking for s0 he asked an equally clueless colleague about it, to no avail. After about another minute of harrumphing at the mess of papers he got on his hands, he finally got back to me with,

"If I'm not mistaken, it should be about RM 70."

Alright. Must keep face straight.

"Are you sure?" Really, really sure about that? The guy might be making a big mistake here, and this is just me giving him a chance to catch up on it. Boy, I feel just like that host guy on Who Wants to be a Millionaire.

"Well, it's thereabouts," he replied unconvincingly. "I can let you have it for RM 68."

Wait, was he trying to... was he trying to sell me the thing at what he thought was an inflated price? I looked at the cable once more just to be sure. Yes, it's the RM 160 one, no doubt about that.

Now hold it. Was I being dishonest here? It's not like I was deliberately deceiving him or anything, right? In fact, I even went out of the way and asked him if he was certain about the price, and he had had every chance in the world to verify it. Also, there's that remote possibility that its the previous two dealers who were trying to pull a fast one on me after all. Exactly what records of stupidity would I be breaking if I told this particular dealer that the other Sony stores were selling the new cables at triple of what he's asking for? I was visibly hesitant about it. Stupid conscience, stop being such a pain. I'm not lying. I'm just practicing pragmatic silence...

"RM 66. Final price," he offered, blissfully oblivious to the real reason for my hesitation.

"Okay," I said automatically and paid him the sum. R.I.P conscience, it's been nice knowing ya.

And today,

Free money.

I was walking through Pahlawan Mall with Shaki today when I spotted a tenner and a fiver lying on the floor, right where I was walking. I stopped and picked them up, natch, and looked around to see if there's anyone nearby who looks like he or she is RM 15 poorer. Truth be told, there wasn't a lot of people there at all. The place is always a little empty on Friday afternoons.

"So, what do I do with this?" I asked Shaki.

"Well, can you see anyone who look as if they are looking for these?" he said.

"Nope."

"Keep it then," he suggested wisely. He's so full of sagacity, that Shaki.

"Right," I said, and slipped the notes into my pocket.

I did keep an eye out thereafter for anybody who might be hunting for the missing cash though, up till the time I left the premises in the evening. There wasn't any, fortunately.

Unfortunately! I meant to say unfortunately! Stupid typo.



On the up side of the wheel,
k0k s3n w4i

Don't Go Anywhere Now...

... Phoebe and I will be right with you in a jiffy day or two! Exam high alert.