And Max said... No?

Sometimes my life really does serve as a warning to others...

So, some may call this a spoiler. I call it being NICE.

Friday of last week I saw The Watchmen.

It was, hands down, The Worst Film EVER. Now that this major milestone in my life has been met I can move forward with a degree of confidence that every movie I see forthwith will at least be better then that. Saying that it was the worst movie ever takes some doing, because it took pretty much an act of God to dislodge Howard the Duck out of that spot. Lets give The Man a hand for having fooled me all this time.

Now before I get carried away, I'll tell you this: I love me a good super-hero/comic book type flick. Who doesn't? Also I quite enjoyed the last graphic novel-turned film by the same director which was 300 and a fantastic good time. I wrongly used these things as a basis as to why I should enjoy the watchmen. Silly silly me.

First off, the movie and its whole storyline is so convoluted and messy. The film drags on for nearly three hours and every SECOND is crammed with so much that you neither like nor care for any of the characters. The costumes look not unlike things I've seen 13 year olds wearing on Halloween. I should have known it wasn't going to get any better when the coolest guy in the entire film looks like a dirty sock and talks with a Christian Bale "Batman" voice the whole time, the villain resembles and dresses like Siegfried sans Roy with Tiger-esque thing in tow, the heroine basically dons latex lingerie and her love interest looks like a dopey 80's Chevy Chase wannabe that even Clark Kent couldn't pretend to be intimidated by. It was basically a dream for the nerd set. They got to see a fairly graphic sex scene between two "super-heroes", some eye-roll inducing romantic moments and then a sudden swift change to completely gratuitous violence.

And last but not least by a long shot, we have "Dr. Manhattan" or as I like to call him: The Naked Nuclear Blue Dude. This character is the only one in the whole movie that has any true abilities (despite the fact that the rest of them manage to kick everyone else's butt with nothing going for them other then the fact they have a 70's porn star mustache and are wearing their mother's old bath robe or a head band). I don't know about you but the quickest way to make a superhero not cool is to make them invincible. What fun is that? Whats Superman without kryptonite? Whats Wolverine without the bad dreams and equally bad attitude? Whats Spiderman without girl troubles and self loathing???
Anyway... moving on to the real issue here. Doc likes to pretty much spend the film nude and the director pretty much likes to make the camera angle crotch level.

Never in my life had I seen blue penis. And now I've seen more then I ever wanted to.

Thank you Watchmen. Thank you.

Three reasons I'm not a landscape photographer...

Recently I went down to Utah Lake with my sister in the aim of getting some pictures of the lake before it thawed and when it starts to pile sheets of ice along the sides. Its a really cool time of year and it doesn't last long. Unfortunately we pretty much missed it. There were some ice slabs but definitely not what i was hoping for, which is where we get to the first reason I am not a landscape photographer:

1. Landscape photographers have to get up at the butt-crack of dawn. They have to stay out late. They have to have precise timing. I procrastinate. Sometimes I miss things that won't be along for another year, cause that's how I roll. Yeah, what? Don't judge me.



2. Landscapes lack a certain creativity of shooting. Now before all those landscapers come out of the wood work and refute my statement and tell me I'm not one because actually I suck at it (which I won't deny) I just wanna say that the landscape is the star. There's only so many ways to shoot it; different years, different seasons, times of day, but in the end it will never be more interesting then a person. More beautiful maybe... but I guess that depends on the audience.

3. And lastly.. the landscape photographer, to be good, needs to spend a lot of time with--well, the landscape. I think I went over how I feel about the great outdoors at some detail here. And if that's not really enough to show you how I feel about it, this last picture is an illustration about how it feels about ME.





















Yes I did manage to escape hypothermia in case you were wondering.