Goiter Salutes Stupidity

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

Sometimes I see really stupid stuff on the Internet, and I am compelled to share it with people.

I realize I already have two temples to dumb. One is the AICN thread. The other is the Alabama thread. Some dumb just needs its own space. AICN and Alabama are things that are specifically dumb. The things I'll be dumping in this thread are more generally dumb.

Feel free to use this thread to salute things you, too, deem to be stupid.

(I realize the previous line will look like an invitation to salute either me or H***o. Or, you know, both.)

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

My first two salutes:

Why Leonardo DiCaprio Didn’t Win the Oscar

Zack Snyder Hits Back, Says He Made Watchmen to Save It from the "Terry Gilliams of the World"

[Quasar]

Zack Snyder doesn't warrant his own stupidity thread?

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

I don't want him getting a big head.

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

By which I mean that I assume creating a Snyder thread would lead to the swelling of his glans.

He wouldn't even need to know of this site's existence. His ding-dong would just sense it.

[Mal Shot First]

That Vanity Fair article lost my interest when it claimed that Leonardo DiCaprio didn't get an Oscar because he's too cool. I didn't even feel like reading the justification for such a stupid claim. It's not the coolness he displays that didn't get him the award, but the fact that the main two actors also competing for it portrayed characters in extremely difficult situations with tremendous emotional impact on the viewer. It's not DiCaprio's coolness per se, but instead the role that he portrayed that didn't get him the Oscar.

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

Good thing I've never observed a single instance of anyone ever describing Matthew McConaughey as "cool."

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

I just went to the Wikipedia page for "glans penis." Their lead image was a bit of a "Hello!" moment for me.
I guess I expected to see an illustration--in the lead, at least. The flesh-and-blood images are usually down lower in the article.

Why'd I go there, you ask? I wanted to make sure I could still refer to it simply as "glans," since I'm always seeing it written out "glans penis" these days. When I was growing up, we just called it the "glans." People have gotten fancy on me.

[Djack Zteelecock]

I just read the VF article on Leo and "cool" and Oscars, and I didn't think it was completely horrible. I think the author got caught up in his "cool" theme, which didn't necessarily work, especially since he didn't seem to differentiate that well between the actor being cool, and his performances being cool. Obviously, good characters actors might have a cool image but occasionally play uncool characters. I thought there was a little bit of an interesting idea that vulnerable characters are more likely to win Oscars for their actors than dominant characters, though I'm not sure this is really news, but at least it seemed like something that might be on point, though of course there are probably many exceptions. Denzel in 'Training Day' came to mind. One thing I think would be relevant to the Leo thing, though, would be that while I think Leo has turned into a good actor (basically starting around the time of 'The Aviator'), he's still not amongst the greatest actors around today. His range is a little limited. It's also kind of hard to win an Oscar, you'd think, just from a statistical approach. The author of the article points out that not too many actors have won multiple acting Oscars, yet contradictorily tries to make a point that Brando and Nicholson, both two-time Oscar winners, only each won ONE of their Oscars during the height of their coolness. Hmm, good point. The author also points out that James Dean never won an Oscar. Another good point. I mean, the guy had all of three films where his roles would've been substantial enough to be considered for acting awards before he died, and he was nominated for Oscars for two of them, but clearly his coolness held him back.

[Mal Shot First]

Jim Carrey and Bill Murray were obviously too cool to win Oscars.

[Dalty]

Hmmm, ditching Doc Manhattan and with a bug nuts ending that is even more diff from the comic. That, plus Gilliam's body of work, puts me on Snyder's side here. Words I never thought I would say.....

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

I think more different from the comic would have worked to the movie's advantage in this case. Snyder's movie felt like a soulless cover to a great song to me. The arrangement was more or less the same. Some things were even copied note for note. It's just that it was clear there was more talent, intelligence, and character in the original.

Gilliam's version would at least have been his own thing with its own voice. It wouldn't have been Moore's Watchmen, but it probably would have been of interest in its own right--like Kubrick's The Shining.

Snyder's version reminded me of those adult revisitings of childhood photos that were all the rage for a while. The originals are often posed, but they also tend to be spirited and at least seem to tell a story. The people in them wouldn't be revisiting the image if there weren't something special about it, after all. Unfortunately, the revisitings are all posed, dead-eyed, and suffer from their very novelty. They're also just slightly off in ways that are bothersome. You see what they were going for, and you see how they just missed the mark.

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

Then again, Gilliam's latter-day stuff has been hit-or-miss for me. I'll always be curious how it might have turned out. I guess there's that, then. I was more or less able to make Snyder's version in my head before I saw it, and I was un-surprised when it ended up being more-or-less the movie I suspected it would be.

[Dalty]

I see nothing in anything Gilliam ever did that made me think "This guy should do Watchmen!"

I also think Snyder's movie gets a bad rap and people do seem to agree with me when I introduce them to it. Those non-familiar with the source.

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

I see nothing in anything Gilliam ever did that made me think "This guy should do Watchmen!"

Should we only let people direct things that are like things they've directed before? I see a guy who has made some interesting movies. That's the major criterion for me.

I look at directors like Raoul Walsh, Howard Hawks, John Huston, Stanley Kubrick, and Robert Wise, and I'm glad they were allowed to hop genres.

Some people unfamiliar with the source material liked Snyder's Watchmen, some didn't. It's hovered around the low sixties for most of its life on Rotten Tomatoes. I gathered from reading the reviews back when that the majority of reviewers had never read the comics. It has a 70% approval rating from general audiences on the same site. The majority of audiences, too, have likely never read the comics. I'm sure a few have picked them up since the movie, but most people just don't read comics.

We're five years on (almost exactly, I think) from its release at this point. It's my impression that some people have strong feelings for it one way or the other. On the whole, though, I feel like it's been damned with faint praise.

I'm not sure I'd be dying to see a Gilliam version if one existed, but I'd at least be curious about it. I think his version might well have been a spectacular failure. I think I'd rather have a version of it that was a spectacular failure than have the half-Snyderized, half-Moore-ish pastiche we wound up getting.

It's all an exercise in speculation, of course. What we got was the Snyder version. I've had to resign myself to it the same way Ozymandias had to resign himself to the present he helped orchestrate.

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

[Jubbers]

In a related note, I asked Goiter if he liked this show I just introduced to him (something I am extremely addicted to right now and which has me eagerly awaiting Thursdays).

His response? "It's ok." and "I don't hate it...."

Since Goiter lives for the extreme-hates and the extreme-loves, I feel like this was the worst possible sentence he could have given it.

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

I also said I was enjoying it and was looking forward to seeing where it was going. I definitely want to watch it to the end.

[Quasar]

You only said that after you got the "You just said the worst thing in the world!" look.

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

This is true.