If you’re anything like me, you may have a deep resistance to anything that has received a little too much hype. “You’d love this! It’s just your sort of thing! It’s a classic!” and so forth. Perhaps it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, but it’s been my experience that most things that have been pumped up that much will disappoint. It’s all about managing expectations.
Side note: I think this is the genius of Mike Myers movies. The previews are among the most leaden advertisements I’ve ever seen for comedy films. However, I usually find myself enjoying his movies to some degree, and I suspect this is due to the fact that my expectations were so low.
There are exceptions. So, in the interest of positivity, I thought I’d share some of the things I was told I would love and I did, in fact, wind up loving them.
Watchmen (comic book)
Along with Frank Miller and Klaus Jansen’s The Dark Knight Returns, this Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons book was immediately recognized as an event that would change comics forever. I was primarily reading funny indy comics like Flaming Carrot Comics, The Trouble with Girls, Normalman, and The Tick at the time and had no interest in checking out a (relatively) mainstream book featuring characters I’d never heard of.
I don’t remember why Sean suggested I read it (probably because he’d just introduced me to the Grant Morrison run on Doom Patrol and I was suddenly very into this sort of thing), but I plopped down and read them all back to back. Given the density of the writing and the long prose sections, this took a while. Then I read ’em again because…oh my.
It’s unfortunate that Watchmen really did change comics because the approach of treating the heroes not as selfless do-gooders or mustache-twirling villains was unique. The “heroes” were just people, which was much worse. The deconstruction of the idea of “hero” was so complete that comics didn’t really recover it until Morrison’s All-Star Superman.
OK, so it was influential, but was it good? Yeah, it was riveting. If you can get past the trademark Moore rape scene (don’t care if that gets spoiled), it’s a fantastic mystery/thriller from page one and, more than any other book, works as a “graphic novel” in that it is a completely realized story over a limited number of issues. It was every bit as good as advertised.
Portal (video game)
I never played any of the Half-Life games, so I was only vaguely aware that this existed when it was released. But, on the forums, you couldn’t get away from it. Imagine the worst of the Monty Python and Rick and Morty fans tossing references back and forth and you’re still nowhere near it.
“Instantly meme-able” is great for pop culture awareness, but was the game as good as the quotes? According to literally everyone, the answer was “yes.” So, I looked into it a little. It was a nice short game with lots of interesting physics puzzles based around the idea of pairs of portals that allow you to step through one and emerge through the other while conserving momentum.
It’s just you and perhaps the most deeply unreliable narrator in the history of narration, trying to complete a series of tests. Neat! And then, you complete the last one and…well, there’s more and that’s all I’m going to say. The puzzles start simple and turn diabolic as the game goes on. The sense of humor makes “dark” look like a Sanrio character.
And holy cow, the end credits.
Anyway, Yahtzee Crenshaw of Zero Punctuation, who rather famously hates everything, reviewed it and wound up with rather strong feelings about it:
I’d heard it was good. I honestly think it’s the best game I’ve ever played.
The Good Place (television)
I don’t watch a lot of broadcast TV and haven’t for a long time. That’s not a statement meant to convey any superiority; I engage in plenty of screen entertainment but it’s just not normally network television. So, I hadn’t seen any of the ads for The Good Place when I started hearing about how I very much needed to watch it.
Nicole bought season one on one of the streaming services and we plopped down for the pilot. My first reaction was “how the #$%%^ did this get made?” The setup was so far from any sitcom I’ve seen before or since, and it was pretty irreverent for a network show. Kristen Bell and Ted Danson were obviously having a blast doing setting the stage for what was an absolutely genius twist at the end of the pilot.
So, now we have a mystery that’s also a screwball comedy with additional random silliness flying everywhere because, with this tableau, you can do pretty much anything you want. Season one was all about trying to figure out what the heck had happened and the payoff is absolutely stunning.
In fact, it was so perfect that I haven’t watched seasons 2-4. This is partially due to what we’ll call “the Arrested Development effect” and partially down to just how complete and self-contained season one was. It didn’t need any expansion. My understanding is that they do stick the landing in season 4 and I’m sure I’ll get around to it at some point, but for now, I’m just going to bask in the memory of one perfect season of television.
The Matrix (film)
This was always in my wheelhouse. There was no way I wasn’t going to see it. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t absolutely sick to death of people telling me how awesome it was. It would “change my whole view of reality,” said people who hadn’t read Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles. It was dark! It was cool! It had martial arts, gunplay, leather, sunglasses, hacking, and something approaching a philosophy. It had HUGO WEAVING DOING A CARL SAGAN IMPRESSION!
Yes, I recognize that the whole world was built on one of the most ridiculous ideas you could possibly imagine. Let’s move past that, please.
Thus, I had an awful lot of built-in resistance when I finally went to see it. All of which crumbled in the first ten minutes. Everything I’d been told was right, but what they hadn’t conveyed was just how tight the whole thing was. Like Robo-Cop (no, seriously, go watch the original), every scene, every shot, had a purpose and the thing ran like a runaway freight train.
The thing that makes a pedestrian thriller less than thrilling is the amount of time you have to pump the brakes to set everything up. A sleek machine like The Matrix hits the ground running and, sure, there’s exposition, but most of the exposition occurs while people are punching each other and that’s a really effective way to keep the momentum going.
Like most of my favorite films, I find something new to love every time I watch it. There’s some clever detail, some little nuance of acting (I didn’t get the Carl Sagan bit until much later), something that blows me away. I’m glad they never made any sequels to it…
Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon (music)
In school, there were so very many stickers, pins, hats, notebooks, and shirts with that damned prism on them. You couldn’t get away from it, especially once chemical recreational aids started to gain prominence among my classmates. You either loved Pink Floyd or you hadn’t heard of them (or you were a roper in your FFA jacket, but even then, you probably kinda liked ’em).
Dating myself here, but almost everyone liked the big dogs of classic rock at the time (Beatles, Who, Led Zep, Boston (so much Boston), Aerosmith, etc.), but the one universal band was Pink Floyd. Everyone liked Pink Floyd, and everyone especially liked Dark Side of the Moon.
Except for me, of course. I’m usually 5-10 years behind my peers in matters of taste. I don’t think I even heard the album until Randy picked up a copy and we listened to it over in his apartment. Then we got a headphone splitter so we could “really” listen to it and we sat and listened on headphones and…dammit. It really was great!
Conceptually, it’s smack-dab in the early high school mindset, but there was a lot of that even decades prior to emo. The songs were brilliant, somehow epic, and approachable at the same time. The recording quality was off the charts. It was just…ok, it was perfect, alright? Nothing at all is wrong with that record. Everyone says it’s great and it is great. It’s neither over- nor under-rated.
The problem with Watchmen is giving it to people before they understand the language of comics. First time readers are only going to see the plot, which is adequate but is just the vehicle for the experiments in the form. Writing that out though, I realize that Watchmen was probably my own on-ramp to seeing beyond plot in a creative work. I was just moving from reading mostly fantasy and horror into Kurt Vonnegut while Watchmen was coming out. In tandem, Moore, his artistic collaborators (not just Watchmen), and KV (I read most all of it while Watchmen was being serialized) were the breakthrough to seeing how stories are made and that they can have meaning beyond the surface of the story. After the first few, I’d re-read the whole series every month then read the new issue. By the time issue 12 came out, I’d probably read #1 upwards of 10 times. Then the book collection came out in 1987, and I read that about every year or two until I didn’t. Every reading was different.
So, yeah, “Watchmen does what it says in the tin.”
Dammit. I wish I’d put it that way. Well said.
“So much Boston.” Truer words have never been written.
I don’t think it’s possible to describe how ubiquitous the white-with-navy-sleeve Boston baseball tees were. I cannot imagine them without feathered bangs (men and women) and an eagle feather roach clip.