link barrage 03/15

Here’s your occasional update of all the things on the Internet you should be reading rather than this blog (and judging by my daily stats, you already are).

• OMFGWATCHMEN. Saw it. Hopefully more fleshed out thoughts to follow, but right now I’m a bit ambivalent. I mean, I enjoyed it. But I wasn’t totally blown away by the visuals and I already knew the whole story, so . . . . Honestly, I wasn’t quite sure about my opinion of the movie until the Hendrix version of “All Along the Watchtower” started playing. That song multiplies the awesomeness factor of anything it touches by three powers of rock. 
   
• The Catholic Curmudgeon, AKA J0hn C. Wright, offers his perspective on Watchmen. Here’s a direct quote and useful summary:
  
  And then there is Dr. Manhattan’s big blue penis. This is a penis movie, and there is a lot of penis. Lots of buttocks. Blue buttocks. Giant blue buttocks.

  The man is a poet, I say. 
   

• However, Wright is a bit down on the movie (and apparently the graphic novel), so I think the beginning portion of Patton Oswalt’s blog post here summarizes my feelings better. Was it perfect? No. But it was as good an adaptation as we were going to get. (HT: Pajiba)
   
• One last Watchmen link. This review is positive on the whole the same way Wright’s was negative on the whole, but I especially appreciated this comment: 

  . . . Snyder’s Watchmen is unnecessarily violent at the wrong times . . . and then inexplicably goes soft at the moments when gore is virtually required. I’m referring here to the consequences of the Big Plan, which feel strangely weightless in the movie, partly because (in this cut) no characters we’ve been following are anywhere close to Ground Zero and partly because, unlike every other action sequence in the movie, it’s all very PG-13 all of a sudden. (Contrast this with the opening of Chapter 12 in the comic, which is basically several pages of horrific imagery, unlike anything we’ve yet seen in the story.)

  It reminded me of the blood-less, gore-less, barely-mildly-horrific judgment scenes in the Left Behind series (through book four, at least, which is as far as I cared to go).
   

• If you’re looking for “naked chinese girls,“ this is probably not the place for you. However, if you are looking for some intelligent thoughts on cultural interaction from a close and personal friend of The Blog, you might want to check it out. (For those who are wondering, those three words do appear in the post, just not in that order or context.)
   
• I love to get my CCM hate on as much as any other culturally-liberal-ish evangelical, but good points in defense of genre are made here.
   
• This is a little much, especially on an Anabaptist blog. But I have to wonder if some people would think this is worse than if he had admitted to being gay.
   
• Speaking of being gay, this is a serious article by a man who is Christian, gay and celibate. It’s not an easy thing to be, and he calls on the Church for help and support for himself and other men and women with the same sort of struggles.
   
• This is a great reflection on an Urbana-sponsored blog (I want to go!) dealing with the “revolutionary” perception of Jesus – no, he wasn’t Mr. Rogers, but he wasn’t Che Guevera, either.
   
• Debates like these are ultimately focused around our perception and understanding (or lack there-of) of Matt Stafford’s  place in the Georgia offense these last two seasons. I (and, I think, much of Bulldog Nation) am happy with our former QB’s offensive production, but can’t shake the feeling that there was something we were missing — some potential that our star QB had yet to tap in to. In any case, I think it’s an question to which we may never get a satisfactory answer, which makes these kinds of discussions ultimately pointless. 
   
• Reasoned thoughts on hell, from a blogger who is, in my estimation, already there — he’s writing a thorough commentary on Tribulation Force, second book in the “Left Behind” series. May God have mercy on his soul.
   
• “And you experts in the law, woe to you, because you load people down with burdens they can hardly carry, and you yourselves will not lift one finger to help them.” Do Jesus’ words for the Pharisees and teachers of the Torah in Luke 11:46 also apply to modern-day “eco-Pharisees”? This writer at Jesus Manifesto thinks they might. My own, related thoughts here.
   
• Street-wise black guy and grizzled veteran white guy team up to face national and international threats, with plenty of action and hijinks along the way. I’m amazed it took someone so long to realize that our Executive Branch is a Hollywood buddy-cop movie in the making. However, I’m more partial to a commenter’s suggestion: Joint Chiefs, a buddy stoner movie. Dude, Where’s My Senate Majority?
   
• It’s only a short jump from some of the strategies outlined here to this. I’m gonna go ahead and start digging a bomb shelter under our building and stuffing it with some heavy-duty weapons in a futile attempt to survive the coming robo-mutant-mosquito apocalypse. 
   
• A black couple in Illinois has decided to jump on the “Year of Living [Adverb]ially” bandwagon in a controversial way: they’re going to exclusively “buy black” – that is, from black business owners and black service providers. As expected, charges of racism from white America have come flooding in.

  My smarmy and unnecessarily sarcastic response: Isn’t it great that we whites are so racially progressive and so completely totally beyond any semblance of racism and prejudice that we can see how obvious it is that the only solution to our racial problems in America is simply to pretend that racial divisions and differences don’t exist? I mean, it’s the blacks who keep raising the race issue; we whites are way beyond it. Now excuse me, I have to go watch a TV show staring white people on my couch and TV I bought from stories owned by white people and then have a late-night snack with food I bought from my local white grocery store, and tomorrow I’m going to drive the car I bought from my white dealership to drop my kids off at their white school and then go to my white church group to hang out with my white friends. Racists!

• Speaking of race and stereotypes, it seems there’s finally a solution for Rhythmic Locomotion Impairment Syndrome, which is common for melanin-deficient human beings like myself. 
   
• Why should this cheesy 80’s ballad hold more significance for me than any other? Because according to this nifty site, it was the #1 song on Billboard on the day I was born. I was hoping for something a little less, um, [the sentiment I would express using the inappropriate sense of the adjective "gay," but for which I can think of no other suitable synonym].  Fortunately, subsequent birthdays coincided with the chart ascendancies of “Baby Got Back,” “Wild Wild West” by Will Smith, and “I Kissed a Girl” by Katy Perry. I have, in my lifetime, owned albums containing two of those three songs. That’s about as much as I’m willing to incriminate myself in that matter. (HT: Tim Keel)

Well, now you know what has been occupying my time over the past week or so when I should have been doing things that were constructive and/or didn’t threaten to afflict me with Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. Good thing you were so interested.