It's Only A Paper Rose

As you might guess, our Christmas celebration was a necessarily quiet affair, partially due to a lack of social connections and partially due to most of our spare cash going towards moving debts.  That said, it was still perfectly enjoyable and surprisingly bountiful besides.  Thanks to the aforementioned debts, we weren't able to buy gifts for our friends this year, but we found a lovely set of holiday cards that we enjoyed sending out instead, and received a number of nifty ones in return (as well as some packages from a particularly stubbornly generous friend).  Brian and I did give each other a few books, shameless bibliophiles that we are (amusingly, the one furnishing our house remains short of is adequate shelving).  My mother, who finally retired from being an Alaskan attorney and moved to Florida last month, paid more than half of the cost of shipping a bunch of her furniture down here, including her beautiful granite-topped oak table and chairs, her gigantic Christmas tree and the ornament collection we amassed while my brother and I were growing up, a garden bench for our patio, and all kinds of miscellaneous bits and bobs.  On the whole, I ended up with quite a few of the things I was hoping for this year - a nearly-completely-furnished house (courtesy of my mother and Craigslist), a tree so big we had to bend the top over to fit it in our living room (thanks to my mother), lots of books (thanks to Brian and an elf off of my friendslist), the last volume of Absolute Sandman for my collection (thanks to the aforementioned stubbornly generous friend), some cosmetics and bath things from the Body Shop (thanks to Santa), and a wonderful turkey dinner (thanks to Brian again).  Plus we went to see Sherlock Holmes, which was a remarkably fun movie - a nice amount of well-scripted action balanced with a surprising amount of cerebral problem-solving.  Purists probably won't like it much, but as a thinking-person's action entertainment, it succeeded quite well.

New Years' was spent having pizza and surprisingly good wings - the local delivery place has a "golden tangy" sauce that's really quite delicious.  Adam got back in town just in time for us all to watch the clock tick over, eat mince pie and pull some poppers before watching some Robot Chicken and a silly hacker movie from the 90's.  And Brian had his one night of the year on which to get tipsy on champagne, slightly freaking out Adam in the process.

Job search is ongoing.  The interview at the newspaper went remarkably well - the woman was impressed with me in general, but she'd already filled the position.  Still, she thought I'd fit in at the office well and knew of an opening in sales, so she was going to have the advertising manager give me a call when he has a moment (sometime in the next week or two, most likely).  Nothing else super-promising has been coming up, so I guess we'll see.  I think I'd be good at it too, and hey - commissions!

Much as I've been enjoying quiet unemployment, I think I'm ready to go back to work - now that the moving-in is all pretty much over with, I'm feeling restless during the day.  Plus, while I know we're lucky to be able to live comfortably and still pay things off on Brian's salary, an additional income would help immensely in getting us debt-free again.  And it'd be nice to have some spare cash between paychecks for splurges like wine dinners and shows and things.  But in the meantime, we have a nice warm house with nice comfy furniture and lots of books and nice cuddly kitties, which is pretty hard to complain about.  So I'm not going to worry about money, I think.  Maybe that'll be my New Years' Resolution - less consumerism, more materialism.  Stop wishing I could buy more things and start focusing on enjoying the things I already have.  Seems like a pretty good philosophy to me.

As you can see, “New Moon” is not for me. It seems like it should be. I’m a fan of supernatural stories. I was once a brooding teenager who dreamed of gothic romance. But I absolutely hate what Stephanie Meyer has done. She’s reversed everything that Joss Whedon did for female empowerment. She’s taken all the sex out of the sexy vampire. She’s boiled the “inner demons” metaphor down to nothing, and dressed it with a slightly condescending and bigoted sauce. [...] I know that there will always be bubblegum pop for tweens but this is so much worse than the Backstreet Boys. This is, to borrow a phrase from the source material, a lion in lambskin. It’s intellectually and socially detrimental to both literature and cinema, simultaneously. The fact that so many girls will see this movie and drink up the messages like poisoned Kool-Aid depresses the hell out of me. But there’s nothing I can do about it. You’ve already picked your team.

YES.

That is all.

As yesterday was a holiday celebrating (depending on the nationality of the person you ask) either the courage and bravery of America's military servicemen or the soon-to-be-horrifically-failed treaty that ended World War I, Brian and I took the opportunity to spend yet another day exploring Tucson. I'm a bit ashamed to admit that we still haven't gotten around to doing a number of the activities we mean to (visiting the Desert Museum, having dinner at Janos, etc.), but I'm sure we'll get there - we seem to be visiting on an at-least-once-weekly basis. (It's still a little odd, thinking that there's an actual city only a medium-length drive away, when for so long the only way for us to visit large cities was to spend two and half hours on a plane.)

Meantime, we've found all sorts of nifty or interesting places, including the HEUUUGE cheese section at Costco (quite a change after the single tiny fridge-case of it in Juneau), a bakery called Beyond Bread that does the most amazing bread, sandwiches, and desserts you can imagine, and a mall that's got (maybe) three open stores in the whole thing. That last was rather eerie to walk through - at first we thought it had just closed early, but then we realized that the various shops weren't just closed, they were also empty. The mall itself was still well kept up and had security patrolling the corridors, but aside from a Target, a Ross, and exactly one independent store, the whole thing was deserted. Pretty creepy stuff. (Fortunately there was a bigger one down the way that was completely full, so we soon determined that the economic crash hadn't been *that* bad in Tucson.)

One of the reasons I'm liking Tucson quite a bit - it's apparently a literary enough town that it can support two used bookstores in a single shopping center. In the same complex as Beyond Bread, there's a gigantic used book/movie/game place called Bookman's, and a much smaller new/used bookstore called Mostly Books. We visited the latter yesterday and brought back quite a haul - the new translation of Don Quixote that Brian's been looking for (true story: when we went to the local Hasting's and asked if they had "the Edith Grossman translation of Don Quixote", the girl behind the counter gave us a blank look and went, "Is that a book?" Augh...); a Charles Dickens compendium that included A Christmas Carol and two books of his I'd been meaning to read, Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities; a nice illustrated hardcover version of Journey to the Center of the Earth that Brian couldn't pass up, and a copy of Rebecca (another classic I'd been meaning to read for some time, and was recently reminded of when NPR had a segment on haunted house stories for Halloween). $50 total, mostly for hardcovers too. I love used bookstores, even if they are hard on my bank account.

At the past urging of Brian's mother, we also hit up Trader Joe's across the way. I'm still continually amazed at the general cheapness of wine down here; I realize a lot of it is simply that it doesn't have to go so far and therefore shipping is much, much cheaper. Still, though, $5 wine (especially perfectly decent $5 wine) is completely unknown in Alaska, but seems fairly common here. I think there's more wine in our cupboard right now than there has been in years. Come summer I may need to get one of those portable wine-cellars to keep it all cool.

Then it was to the multiplex to catch a matinee of Zombieland (which was quite enjoyable), and to the Olive Garden for a tasty (if humongous) dinner, and then back home. All in all, a perfectly pleasant day - and now I have books to read!

Perhaps I should look around town and see if there are any used bookstores here that could use a knowledgeable employee. It wouldn't pay as well as secretarial work, but I think I'd enjoy it a lot more.

Honestly? I think District 9 is going to be like Children of Men, for me. Which is to say, almost everyone I know will enjoy it from "moderately" to "a hell of a lot", the critics will sing its praises, and I'll be left going "Did I see the same movie?"

I get the point they were making, and I certainly appreciate the darker aspects of human nature they were trying to bring to light, but the complete lack of subtlety did nothing to win me over. Combine that with the facts that the lone pair of sympathetic characters get maybe a combined 25 minutes of screentime, most of the cinematography was in that awful nausea-inducing pseudo-documentary shakycam, and (as seems to be the norm for films Peter Jackson's had a hand in) there were probably more than half an hour's worth of CGI-laden action sequences that could have been dropped completely without hurting the story one bit, and I kind of wanted my two hours back. I mean, sure, the fight scenes were choreographed well - at least I could tell what was going on at any given moment, which doesn't quite seem to be the norm for shootouts in the movies any more - but I don't go to the movies to see explosions and effects, I go to see storytelling. And the story they told frankly didn't impress me.

I think what it comes down to is, I just don't like stories that are solely about how awful people can be to each other (or aliens, although since the aliens in most stories of this nature are stand-ins for some group of people I'm counting them in the same category). I already know what happens when a minority group becomes unpopular with the majority; I already know what's going to happen when one person has something of value in an environment where most people have nothing, I already know how things will play out when everyone involved is at the lowest common denominator of trust*. These things are not interesting to me, because they're predictable - people who are scared enough will always act a certain way, and others will react to them in a same way, and it's a vicious cycle that just creates more shit for everyone. I know all of that, you don't have to write your story specifically to cram that message down my throat.

What's interesting in a story isn't when people act shitty to each other. What's interesting in a story is when people overcome that instinct - because, no matter how desperate the situation, no matter how scared the people, there's always that opportunity to overcome the think-of-only-yourself urge and make the choice to be a decent human being. Think of the ferry scene in The Dark Knight, for example; that one little moment is quite possibly the biggest triumph in the whole story, and it doesn't even belong to a 'good guy'. That is what makes people (and stories about people) interesting - not when they behave according to their predictable reptilian brain, but when their higher instincts kick in and they do something no one expects, something that is not only protective of themselves but also promotes the survival of everyone involved*, something that inspires the rest of us to be better like them. But in stories like District 9, where almost every character is functioning at the absolute lowest level of interaction*, I just can't see the point.

*There are actually terms for these concepts in game theory, which I'm good at understanding instinctively but suck at explaining because math isn't my strong suit. It's interesting stuff, though, and quite applicable in the realms of psychology and economics.

I know I stopped providing updates mid-honeymoon, so hopefully the upcoming pictures (*looks pointedly at Brian*) and a few more highlights will suffice:

• If ever visiting the Big Island, I cannot recommend snorkeling in Kealakekua Bay strongly enough.  It's a beautifully sheltered area on the western side of the island (therefore with the better weather, especially in the morning) with some of the clearest water and most amazing coral reefs - it's like snorkeling in a giant aquarium.  It's part of a state preserve, so you have to either get there without a car (hiking and kayaking are two popular choices) or take one of the many cruises; we went on the Fair Wind II morning cruise and would recommend it without reservation.  Get it?  Reservation?
• I bought two bikinis, despite living in a place where I barely use them.  To be fair, both of them look fantastic, and one was on clearance, but, still...why did I buy two bikinis?  Oh yeah, because the place that sold them had posters all up the (very spacious) fitting room saying "Love Yourself", and the woman who ran the shop was extremely helpful and sweet.  I figure that's the sort of place that's worth supporting.  Maybe I'll see about going swimming more often, too.
• Hapuna Beach does not look real.  It looks like every beach Hollywood has ever shown you, in full Technicolor glory - white sand, bright turquoise blue water, palm trees swaying in the wind, more coral reefs off to one side if you're a good swimmer and feel like snorkeling.  Well worth the forty-five minute drive from Kona, and the sand in crevices you didn't know you had until days later.
• On a related note - boogie boarding is possibly the most fun I've had in ages.  (How did the sand get between the layers of fabric in my swimsuit?  How??)
• True Blood, while firmly placed in the land of "guilty pleasure TV", is actually quite well written and decently acted, even if some of the actors' accents are all over the map (quite literally - Bill Compton's especially seems to take a drunken tour of the South whenever he speaks a sentence).  It's a good turn for Alan Ball; I enjoyed Six Feet Under up to about the fourth season, after which it completely blew off the fine line between black comedy and gut-wrenching drama that it'd been walking and went almost straight depressing character self-destruction (to the point of unwatchability for my lightheartedness-appreciating self).  With True Blood, the subject matter at hand is so completely ludicrous and so firmly in the realm of pulp entertainment that it keeps Ball from getting too serious with it, which I think works in its favor.  There are still some excellent dramatic moments, but when it comes right down to it, it's a Southern Gothic pulp vampire romance - there's just no way a story like that can take itself seriously, and Ball wisely doesn't try.
• I have now stood on the northernmost point of the United States (Point Barrow, at the very tippy-top of Alaska) and the southernmost point.  The literal-mindedly-named South Point is an interesting place for a lot of reasons.  The trade winds blow directly and continuously (there's a wind farm there that provides a good chunk of the southern Big Island's power), and that combined with the strong currents make for excellent, but very hazardous, fishing.  The native Hawai'ians' solution to the problem was rather ingenious; they would bore holes in the volcanic rock, thread strong ropes through those holes, and tie their canoes to the ropes so they could haul themselves back to shore when they were done.  You can still see the holes - Brian got pictures of a couple - and when you see the fierceness of the surf around that point you feel sorry for anyone who fell overboard, especially as (our guidebook informed us) the currents continue uninterrupted all the way to Antarctica.  I guess if there were a southern Hawai'ian Mafia they'd send you to 'sleep with the penguins'...

The trip back was not entirely happy - I somehow managed to mix up our departure times and by the time I'd realized my mistake we'd already missed our first flight.  Fortunately we were able to catch another intra-island flight in time to get our original to-mainland booking, which saved a lot of hassle but cost us $200 a person in ticket change fees.  (And once I stopped panicking, I realized I could've gone to their website and booked us with a different reservation on that same flight for roughly half that.  D'oh.)  So I spent a lot of the time feeling upset and frustrated at myself, and Brian once more got to prove that he's the best husband in the world by being supportive and understanding and not even getting pissed at all.  I swear, I'm still occasionally surprised that boy married me.

We stopped in Seattle on the way back, which was fun; we went and saw the 80's music laser show at the Pacific Science Center, which included some very amusing animated drawings to the Ghostbusters theme, as well as my favorite moment - a laser-outline-drawn DeLorean (complete with the OUTATIME license plate) traveling through a time warp to Huey Lewis & The News' "Back In Time".  Plus we got to have dinner with a high-school friend of mine, and when our path back to the hotel was blocked by a parade along 4th Avenue, he took us through the transit tunnel underneath the street, which was really quite cool to see.  Plus now we know where the light rail from the airport ends up if we feel like making a little effort to save $70 in cab fare next time we visit.

I was going to write about the readjustment period we've been going through this week, but it's time to go see Easy Virtue at the recently-revamped local art-house theater.  We'll have to see if they've gotten any cushions for their infamous benches...

Brian and I went to see Public Enemies today, and then I came home and discovered that half my friendslist had done the same. So, because I'm lazy, and because he basically touched on everything I was going to say about it, I'm going to link to epi_lj's post on it, and call it good. (Thanks, dude!)

I realize this isn't exactly news, but I feel the need to state for the record - Pixar has some of the most amazing artists and storytellers in the world in their stable.

As evidence, I present the opening sequence to Up, their new film. Universal and beautiful and heartbreaking and yet somehow personal as well, it's every bit as wonderful as the opening of Watchmen, but with one major difference - the movie that follows it is even better than the opening. (I haven't cried that much since I was a fifteen year old girl going to see Titanic.)

Normally I'd try to describe the plot, but this is honestly a movie that needs to be experienced. So I'll just say - whoever you are, wherever you live, go see it. It's that amazing, and that global.

Depending on how long you've known me, you may or may not be surprised to discover that I used to be a hard-core Trekkie. I knew all kinds of trivia, burned my way through a goodly portion of the novels that were published at the time (tail end of the 90s, so well over a hundred), and had all sorts of magazines and reference books and other memorabilia that, combined with my cross-reference connection-forming brain, formed a rather impressive concordance. (One of my cherished memories from when I was 16 or so was reading a memoir written by the husband of an actress, who at one point is mentioned as having been in Star Trek - so I immediately put the book down and look up her name in one of my reference books, which gives me the name of the episode to look up in the episode guide, and as I'm reading about it suddenly realizing "Oh! There was an article that had pictures from this episode in one of my magazines!" and pulling that magazine off the shelf and finding a picture of the actress in question right there. It was like having my own personal Star Trek-themed Wikipedia, back before...well, before Wikipedia.)

Somewhere along the line, my enthusiasm for it all just waned. It probably coincided strongly with moving to Barrow at 17 (and getting rid of most of my books as part of the move). I still enjoyed the shows and the stories therein, but I no longer actively sought out obscure trivia, I no longer spent all the money I had on toy phasers and the like, and I grew tired of the (mostly mediocre) novels. And after I graduated high school and went to college and such, there were other things to hold my attention. And of course it didn't help that the franchise itself was flailing at that point - what with the sadly-uneven Voyager having ended, the red-headed stepchild Enterprise never really finding its tone and eventually getting cancelled, and the largely-execrable Nemesis grinding the movies to a halt. Star Trek had ended with a whimper, it seemed, but it had ended, and I'd moved on with my life, and that was fine.

So it was with not a little trepidation that I received the news that there was a new film coming out. And as further information became available, said trepidation only increased - sure, the previews looked promising, and the casting seemed pretty spot-on (holy Christ Sylar looks just like young Spock!), and it all sounded like it could be great, but did we really need more Star Trek? Was it really possible, after how long it had been around and how completely bogged down the series' various incarnations had gotten, to give it vitality and youthful vigor again, and - most importantly - to make us feel excited about Star Trek again?

Apparently, yes.

The achievement that J.J. Abrams and his cast have pulled off with their re-imagining is nothing short of astonishing - not only have they given the aged and creaky franchise a hypospray full of adrenaline, steroids, and the Waters of the Fountain of Youth, they've done so damn near seamlessly. Sure, it's a bit jarring at first matching up the unfamiliar faces with the oh-so-familiar names, but the actors slip into their personas almost distressingly well. (I know lots of other folk have said it before me, but Chris Pine deserves special props for managing to so perfectly channel James T. Kirk without ever channeling William Shatner - I frankly think he makes an even better Kirk than, well, Kirk did.) The story is a mess, both pseudo-science- and plot-hole-wise, and the villain barely even one-dimensional, but somehow you don't care; the film makes it very clear that its whole reason for existence is to get your favorite crew together, and you go with it - because it's fun!

For all of that, however, I think the real test of the newly-renovated franchise will be the sequel. It's quite the feat they've pulled off, yes, but getting things restarted and getting people excited about Star Trek again is only the first part. Trek's best stories have always been the ones about people and human nature. Rubber-suited aliens and computer-generated quantum singularities are all well and good, sure, but as plot devices rather than plot points. What's really interesting is how the people involved react to them, and how they deal with the inevitable misunderstandings and ethical quandaries that crop up (as always happens in human interaction), all of which was noticeably absent from this installment. I'm not saying that the next film has to be a stodgy and dour philosophy-fest - I think it's perfectly possible for the new version to maintain its gloss and youthful zip and still tell a deeper story. I just hope that it doesn't take all the excitement and goodwill that it's built up and just give us empty, flashy, Transformers-esque action without anything beneath to make you think.

But I admit to having a lot of hope. This particular franchise reboot is already miles ahead of, say, Superman Returns (which was equally glossy but frankly soulless and unengaging); J.J. Abrams has impressed me once, and I'd like to think he can do it again.

A while back, Slate had an article on a popular BitTorrent uploader who went by the name of aXXo, and who has a sterling reputation for providing high-quality digital rips of new films.  Popular theory holds that s/he/they have connections to the film industry, which could explain how they can provide crisp versions of movies that haven't even made it to DVD yet; however the method, aXXo is apparently quite revered in the movie pirating circles. 

I found the article interesting from a social psychology standpoint, but the technological aspects didn't thrill me as I personally don't pirate films much myself.  I don't have anything in particular against the practice - yes, it's ethically questionable, but if the movie studios would bother to provide a means of reasonably-priced digital distribution I have a feeling that (just like the music business did when iTunes came along) most downloaders would happily buy legal copies.  However, when you're a home theater enthusiast, especially one on a crappy Alaskan bandwidth connection (where downloading HD movie files would take days), the lack of quality with pirated films becomes a pretty big issue.  And besides, Netflix has pretty much everything I'm interested in watching, anyway.

That said, I've recently started following the industry (especially the indie/alternative circuit) a bit more closely than I have in the past, and there have been a couple of films that were making the rounds of the festival circuit that I'm quite interested in seeing.  Unfortunately, neither were released in theaters here (no big surprise), and neither seems planned for a DVD release.  So, what's a young filmgoer to do?

Five minutes with Google and I had torrents open for both of them, both provided by - you guessed it - aXXo.  I still don't plan to pirate movies regularly, but in this particular instance I'm glad the option was there - and given some of the experiences I've had in the past with downloading fake or poor quality files, I have to admit it's nice to have a "trusted brand" to go to.  So, aXXo, although I'm not quite ready to declare you a god, I have to say - thanks for being there for me.

First off, the reports of Snyder's adaptation being damn near identical to the original story have not been exaggerated in the least. While there have been a few instances of streamlining (most notably at the beginning and end), much of the movie proper seems to have simply taken the comic as a storyboard and gone from there.

What's surprising, and where Snyder deserves some mass props, is how well this works. Comics, for all that they're more visual than regular books, are not movies, and trying to directly transliterate the one format into the other is going to introduce inherent issues in structure, pacing, and general storytelling no matter what you do. Sadly, Watchmen doesn't escape those entirely, but the aforementioned instances of streamlining (combined with the fact that it's a fairly cinematic story to begin with) do a fair amount to alleviate them.

But, since there are definitely some issues, first I'll get into the parts that honestly didn't work for me:

• Pacing. This is probably the movie's biggest problem, if (as I said above) unfortunately a pretty unavoidable one. Even though I knew how the story went and where we were at any given point, there were more than a couple spots where I was shifting around in my seat wondering when it'd get interesting again.  Admittedly, a lot of it was Order of the Phoenix syndrome - the story is complex enough that even though it doesn't always hold your attention, there weren't very many spots where things were obviously extraneous.  I think it will help a lot when we watch it at home, in a more comfortable setting.  
• Action. Sort of a sub-point to the one above. While the action sequences were mostly straight out of the book, Snyder's penchant for slow-motion Matrix-style action-porn style did a lot to contribute to the slowing of the story. A couple of setpieces (the prison break, for instance) would have been just as impressive and kept things moving at a better clip; do we really to see every detail of young Rorschach biting a piece out of a bully's cheek? Also, I could have done without the extended-director's-cut-edition of the Comedian's attempted rape of Silk Spectre I. It did nothing to further the story and only reinforced the impression I got from 300 that Snyder has a thing for humiliating women onscreen.
• Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias.  This is a tough one.  Matthew Goode did a perfectly fine job in the role, and he certainly looked the part - I especially liked how they made him look almost emaciated underneath his suits (because of course something as pedestrian as eating wouldn't be a very high priority for the World's Smartest Man).  But somehow, he was never quite as expansive as I'd imagined Ozymandias.  In the book he's almost a twit about the awesomeness of his intellect and accomplishments ("almost" because they really are that awesome and he has every right to be a twit about them); Goode's take on the character is much more reserved and quietly menacing, which works okay, but seems at odds with his flamboyant, almost gaudy taste in clothing and decor.  And also - what was with the accent?  Adrian Veidt is the Smartest Man In The World, and elocution has A Lot to do with how intelligent someone is perceived to be (as Rex Harrison will happily remind us).  Giving Ozymandias a vaguely German, distressingly mealy-mouthed accent only undercuts his believability, let alone the character's charisma.
• Laurie Jupiter/Silk Spectre II.  Again, Malin Åkerman certainly looked the part, but her acting simply wasn't up to par.  Laurie Jupiter's character goes through quite an emotional arc during the course of the story, but Åkerman never convinced me that she was feeling any of it - she never seemed attached to anyone in the story, and so her big emotional moments, robbed of their core, felt like shallow histrionics.  I don't want to pin all the blame on Åkerman, though - a great character director, Snyder is not, especially when it comes to female characters, so I can't imagine she was getting much help on that front.

Hm, that list is starting to look pretty long.  So, if you're wondering whether I actually liked any of it, the answer is - hells yes.  Aside from the aforementioned issues, it all worked together remarkably well.  And, of course, there were some truly standout parts:

• The Opening Montage.  Considering that the way the book established its backstory (through newspaper clippings, excerpts from autobiographies, etc.) was inherently unfilmable, the opening sequence does a remarkable job of doing just that.  Say what you will about Snyder's lack of abilities at character direction (and I will), but he has a fantastic eye for composing an image that both gives you an instant bead on a situation and directly engages your emotions on the subject.  Also, you can never go wrong with Bob Dylan.
• Dr. Manhattan.  The much-discussed glowing blue wang aside, Dr. Manhattan works remarkably well onscreen.  Given that his character's arc basically consists of his growing more and more remote from human emotion, it would have been all too easy for him to just come off as boring and apathetic.  But an excellent performance (both vocal and motion-capture) from Billy Crudup does a lot to capture his vaguely Zen attitude; and the digital artists who created his physical presence portrayed his range of emotion beautifully, despite the fact that it's composed entirely of subtleties in facial expression and posture.
• Rorschach.  Jackie Earle Haley deserves a standing ovation for his performance here - all of the attachment and gut-wrenching emotion that Åkerman's character was missing, Haley delivers in spades.  Rorschach is a hugely tough character to portray because he's so inherently unlikable; he believes with every fiber of his being that humans are no better than animals, and that anyone who transgresses against his moral code - no matter how long ago or for what reason - deserves death.  And yet Haley makes him, if not likable, at least sympathetic; and by the end of the story, we both respect him for holding to his absolutism, and pity him for his inflexibility.

So what do I think of the movie as a whole?  It was far from perfect, but it did a remarkable job bringing the story to the screen, and on the whole I was impressed.  I would warn anyone new to the story that they're probably not going to get everything on the first viewing, but if they stick with it, I think they'll find it rewarding as they figure out how each piece fits together and works with all the other pieces - much like the inner workings of the often-referenced watch.