In Medias Res: What Kind of Geek Should I Be?

Monday, March 02, 2009

What Kind of Geek Should I Be?

So, I have a free pass to an opening night show at our local Warren Theatre megaplex. That means no crossing town to catch some obscure foreign flick at the only theater in Wichita that reliably shows the few that come our way. And since Melissa and I watch practically everything on Netflix these days anyway, that means it simply won't do to use this pass for chick flicks or to catch up on all the Oscar contenders we've missed or various and sundry other middlebrow fair; no, this pass is fated to take me to the movies to see some big Geek Event Film, the only sort really made for the the big screen these days. The question is: which one?

1) The Watchmen, opening this Friday?

2) Star Trek, opening May 8th?

3) Or hold out until Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is released (eight freaking months late!) on July 17th?

I'll see all of them, eventually. But which should I be most determined to hang out with my fellow obsessive fans at on opening night? Half-Blood Prince is probably the obvious choice that longtime readers might make; my Harry Potter geekcred is thoroughly established. But my Star Trek fascination is pretty darn healthy too. And as for comic books and their film adaptations...well, let's just recall that Alan Moore's The Watchmen was key to helping me realize where I'd gone wrong in supporting, however tentatively, Bush's invasion of Iraq, and let it go at that.

In truth, this decision is mostly up to Melissa, as I hardly ever go out to films on my own, and the odds for convincing her to go along with me to one of these three films on their respective opening nights are probably: The Watchmen, extremely unlikely; Star Trek, about fifty-fifty; Half-Blood Prince, pretty good. But still, give me your sage advice, my dozen or so faithful readers. If I need to change her mind, I can tell her the Teaming Masses of the Internets told us what to do.

15 comments:

Karen Hall said...: Do Star Trek. The fellow fans will be just as interesting as the show. (Plus, it's J.J. Abrams, so you know it will be good times...); Monday, March 02, 2009
Rob Perkins said...: Gotta be Star Trek. Kim and I are already planning to do the midnight showing.; Monday, March 02, 2009
John Hamer said...: I never goto movies, but I'm actually going to both Watchmen and Star Trek. Anyway, if you only get 1 for 3, it's gotta be Star Trek. Harry Potter shouldn't even be in the running.; Monday, March 02, 2009
Baden said...: Star Trek forsure Russ.; Monday, March 02, 2009
DrJubal said...: Go to Watchmen and leave your wife home.; Tuesday, March 03, 2009
Jacob T. Levy said...: Watchmen. I think there's plenty of reason to be nervous about both Watchmen and Star Trek, but the worries about Star Trek (which you explained and described very well in that "boldly go" post) are enough to make me watch the trailer (even on the big screen) and say, "eh. This would only be interesting insofar as it was Star Trek, and it just doesn't feel like Star Trek to me."

Whereas with Watchmen, when watching a trailer I have to sit there reminding myself, "It's probably going to suck. Don't get suckered by the trailer. Don't believe what you're seeing. Remember that it's an unfilmable formal experiment in... ah, heck, *that* part looks cool!"; Tuesday, March 03, 2009
Russell Arben Fox said...: Okay, so far the votes are Star Trek 4 (counting John's vote here), Watchmen 2, Half-Blood Prince 0. Keep the votes coming.

In my e-mails thusfar, Star Trek is also winning, and Watchment making a strong second-pace showing. Perhaps there's some selection bias involved here on the basis of who I'm friends with. Except that I thought I knew a lot of Potterholics like myself. (The argument one friend made--or rather, which this friend's teenage son made--is that Harry Potter isnt geeky anymore; it's totally mainstream. There's a point to that...); Tuesday, March 03, 2009
Anonymous said...: Go with Star Trek. I fully expect the stench of the unwashed comic geek to make the Watchmen movie an experiment in Smellovision. It will likely be better at home. :); Tuesday, March 03, 2009
scritic said...: Go for Star Trek. The trailer seemed promising and the trailer for Watchmen was, I thought, a disaster! At least that way you won't feel like you've wasted your free pass for a bad movie.; Tuesday, March 03, 2009
Anonymous said...: In response to John C.'s last comment, I am personally bring 4 teen-age boys (one of whom made the comment about Harry Potter being mainstream) to opening night, thus ensuring the full Smellovision experience for one theatre.; Tuesday, March 03, 2009
Anonymous said...: I'd go see Half-Blood Prince. I stopped seeing the Star Trek movies after the one where they transport the whale into the future.; Tuesday, March 03, 2009
Anonymous said...: Star Trek Rebooted and Harry Potter are mainstream, not geeky.

Stick with Watchmen--a hard R, three hour, live-action comic book adaptation that will either be the commercial equivalent of Jackson's Fellowship of the Ring or Lynch's Dune. The fact that there's so much talk of the filmmakers' deep respect for the material (which, sorry, is shallow and silly) seems to make the Dune scenario more likely, no matter how much money they pump into it. But who knows? Maybe if theater owners stop carding, enough 14 year olds will be able to get in to make it a huge success.; Tuesday, March 03, 2009
Russell Arben Fox said...: John C: as a one-time serious comic book fan who always washed regularly--with dandruff-fighting shampoo to boot!--I take offense at that comment.

Scritic: but, like Jacob Levy, I thought The Watchmen trailer--the first one--totally kicked ass.

Ross: so you are going to opening night of The Watchmen. And yet you encourage me not to. Just trying to keep all the geekcred to yourself, I guess...

MH: tragically, I must confess that I thought the whale ST movie--which was, of course, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home--was one of the better Star Trek movies.

Anonymous: shall I confess how many times--and how much I enjoyed--David Lynch's Dune in the theater as a teen-ager? Ummm...; Tuesday, March 03, 2009
Anonymous said...: I liked Star Trek IV, I just sort of got bored with the whole thing after that. I also like the Dune movie as a kid. Then I read the books and like about the first three or four. After that, they got wore a bit thin.; Tuesday, March 03, 2009
Stephen said...: I'd argue for first choice as Harry Potter, second choice as Star Trek, third as Watchmen.

Now, I'm wildly biased, because I'm sufficiently convinced that Watchmen will make a travesty of a book I care deeply about that I have no intention of going. But still, here's the argument:

Given that the Harry Potter film is more or less from the same series as the other HP films, you're more likely to enjoy it (since -- I'm assuming, or you wouldn't be considering going -- you liked the earlier ones). It's the same aesthetic approach to adaptation. Whereas Star Trek is a new idea in an ongoing franchise (to wit, reboot) and Watchmen is... well, who knows. I, thank the fates, don't.

So I vote for Harry Potter... and if you do the instant-run-off voting in case of a tie, my second-place vote to Star Trek.

SF; Saturday, March 07, 2009

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"Every one of the standards according to which action is condemned demands action. Although the dignity of persons is inevitably violated in action, this dignity would be far less recognized in the world than it is had it not been supported by actions such as the establishment of constitutions and the fighting of wars in defense of human rights. Action must be untruthful, yet religion, science, philosophy, and the arts, the main forms of absolute fidelity to the truth, could not survive were they unsupported by action. Action cannot but be anticommunal in some measure, yet communal relationships would be almost nonexistent without areas of peace and order, which are created by action. We must act hesitantly and regretfully, then, but still we must act."

(Glenn Tinder, The Political Meaning of Christianity: The Prophetic Stance [HarperSanFrancisco, 1991], 215)

"[T]he press was still the last resource of the educated poor who could not be artists and would not be tutors. Any man who was fit for nothing else could write an editorial or a criticism....The press was an inferior pulpit; an anonymous schoolmaster; a cheap boarding-school; but it was still the nearest approach to a career for the literary survivor of a wrecked education."

(Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams [Mariner Books, 2000], 211)

"Mailer was a Left Conservative. So he had his own point of view. To himself he would suggest that he tried to think in the style of [Karl] Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke."

(Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night [The New American Library, 1968], 185)

"All those rely on their hands, and each is skillful at his own craft. / Without them a city would have no inhabitants; no settlers or travellers would come to it. / Yet they are not in demand at public discussions, nor do they attain to high office in the assembly. They do not sit on the judge's bench or understand the decisions of the courts. They cannot expound moral or legal principles and are not ready with maxims. / But they maintain the fabric of this world, and the practice of their craft is their prayer."

(Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 38:31-34, in The Revised English Bible with the Apocrypha [Oxford University Press, 1989])

"The tendency, which is too common in these days, for young men to get a smattering of education and then think themselves unsuited for mechanical or other laborious pursuits is one that should not be allowed to grow up among us...Every one should make it a matter of pride to be a producer, and not a consumer alone."

(Wilford Woodruff, Millennial Star [November 14, 1887], 773)

"We are parts of the world; no one of us is an isolated world-whole. We are human beings, conceived in the body of a mother, and as we stepped into the larger world, we found ourselves immediately knotted to a universe with the thousand bands of our senses, our needs and our drives, from which no speculative reason can separate itself."

(J.G. Herder, Metacritique of the Critique of Pure Reason in Werke in zehn Bänden [Deutsche Klassiker Verlag, 1985-2000], 8:508, translated by Sonia Sikka)

"'Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. 'Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!'"

(Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol [Candlewick Press, 2006], 35)

"The Master said, 'At fifteen, I set my mind upon learning; at thirty, I took my place in society; at forty, I became free of doubts; at fifty, I understood Heaven's Mandate; at sixty, my ear was attuned; and at seventy, I could follow my heart's desires without overstepping the bounds of propriety.'"

(Confucius, Analects [translated by Edward Slingerland, Hackett, 2003], 2.4)

"That drunken poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy, he believed in himself. That elderly minister with an epic from whom you are hiding in the back room, he believed in himself. If you consulted your business experience instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter. Actors who can't act believe in themselves; and debtors who won't pay. It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail because he believes in himself. Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness."

(Gilbert K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy [Bradford and Dickens, 1957], 10)

"Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena grow more and more able to formulate, as the foundations of their theories, principles which admit a wide and coherent development: while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations."

(Aristotle, On Generation and Corruption [translated by H.H. Joachim, Oxford, 1922], lines 316a5-9)

"The man who has gone through college or university easily becomes psychically unemployable in manual occupations without necessarily acquiring employability in, say, professional work."

(Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy [Harper Perennial, 1975], 152)

"[God] does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. . . . His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him."

(C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, revised paperback edition [Macmillan, 1982], 69)

"Money is simply a tool. We use money as a proxy for our time and labor--our life energy--to acquire things that we cannot (or care not to) procure or produce with our own hands. Beyond that, it has limited actual utility: you can't eat it; if you bury it in the ground, it will not produce a crop to sustain a family; it would make a lousy roof and a poor blanket. To base our understanding of economy simply on money overlooks all other methods of exchange that can empower communities. Equating an economy only with money assumes there are no other means by which we can provide food for our bellies, a roof over our heads and clothing on our backs."

(Shannon Hayes, Radical Homemakers, [Left to Write, 2010], 57)

"Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast, / Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen. / Was man nicht nützt, ist eine schwere Last; / Nur was der Augenblick erschafft, das kann er nützen."

"What from your fathers you received as heir, / Acquire [anew] if you would possess it. / What is not used is but a load to bear; / But if today creates it, we can use and bless it."

(Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust [translated by Walter Kaufmann, Anchor Books, 1963], lines 682-685)

"A scholar's business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can't have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having. There is truth and falsehood in a comma."

(Tom Stoppard [spoken by A.E. Houseman], The Invention of Love [Grove Press, 1997], 37)

"I believe in democracy. I accept it. I will faithfully serve and defend it. I believe in it because it appears to me the inevitable consequence of what has gone before it. Democracy asserts the fact the masses are now raised to a higher intelligence than formerly. All our civilization aims at this mark. We want to do what we can to help it. I myself want to see the result. I grant that it is an experiment, but it is the only direction society can take that is worth its taking; the only conception of its duty large enough to satisfy its instincts; the only result that is worth an effort or a risk. Every other possible step is backward, and I do not care to repeat the past. I am glad to see society grapple with issues in which no one can afford to be neutral."

(Henry Adams, Democracy: An American Novel [Farrar, Straus, and Young, Inc., 1952], 53)

"Old men ought to be explorers / Here or there does not matter / We must be still and still moving / Into another intensity / For a further union, a deeper communion / Through the dark cold and the empty desolation, / The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters / Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning."

(T.S. Eliot, "East Coker," Four Quarters [Harcourt, 1943])

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Monday, March 02, 2009

What Kind of Geek Should I Be?

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