That said, Watchmen as a film is a mixed bag. There are some great performances, notably Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach. There’s the occasional great scene, and some of the dialogue resonates pretty well. But these flashes of brilliance are overshadowed by the rough execution of the plot.

The opening of the film ruins the murder mystery that is the central focus of three-quarters of the plot. The murderer is practically revealed from the start, with a silhouette of his unique body frame in view as he commits the act. To beat the point into our heads even further, the character spends the rest of the movie falling into every possible Hollywood villain trope imaginable – yet the revelation that he’s the villain is treated like an unexpected plot twist when it finally arrives.

The fight scenes are standard fare for an action film: over-the-top with excessive use of slow motion. With two exceptions, Watchmen’s characters are all portrayed as humans until it’s time for them to fight, and then they turn into – well, superheroes. This wouldn’t be a problem if the film gave us any prior indication that these characters are imbued with special abilities. As he breaks a man’s bones through his forearm with a flick of the wrist, Dan Drieberg, for instance, goes from a mild-mannered man in the midst of mid-life crisis to Batman on steroids in a single scene.

Ultimately, Watchmen tries to stay too true to a story that was written specifically to highlight the strength of the comic medium. Certain lines that work in comics come off as too expository and unwieldy on film. The second half of the movie feels too compressed as it explores the origins of the main characters, builds toward the climax, and ties up some of the subplots, dampening each of the respective plot elements.

The original 1986-1987 Watchmen series was seen as a revolutionary work of literature that advanced the comic medium and transformed the superhero genre. Expecting the film to do the same for superhero films was a bit too much to ask.

The Dark Knight already proved that you could tell a serious superhero story in the film medium – what makes the movie work so well is that it’s an original story that is designed to highlight the strength of film. Watchmen, on the other hand, tries too hard to translate a comic story onto the silver screen. The result is a passionate but unwieldy product that doesn’t always quite work out.

Maybe Alan Moore was right when he said that some stories are only meant for the medium in which they were originally told. Still, I’ll give director Zack Snyder some credit for bringing one of my favourite stories to life in a workable fashion. I just wish he had employed as much creativity in the plot as he did for the opening credits.

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Ten years after Sandman, 20 after Watchmen, and 30 years after A Contract With God, graphic novels are becoming movies, comic writers are hired to write for shows like Lost and Heroes, and Hollywood writers like Bob Gale and Joss Whedon are somehow writing graphic novels. Comic books have hit the mainstream – again.

Comic books first became legitimate forms of storytelling in the late ‘80s, when Art Spiegelman’s Maus won the Pulitzer Prize, Alan Moore’s Watchmen won the Hugo, and Frank Miller wrote The Dark Knight Returns and Batman. The astounding success of these Holy Books of Comicdom attracted to the industry speculators who thought comics were a goldmine, and hoped that every first issue would be as successful as a future Action Comics #1 – where Superman first appeared.

But, then people started buying comics for resale value, not caring about the quality of the story. The comic book industry responded by printing covers made of fur – seriously – and drawing women with bodacious tatas. Sure enough, the industry collapsed on itself, companies went bankrupt, and comic book aficionados were left with piles of worthless of comics full of bad writing, ugly art, and the word X-TREME somewhere in the title.

The Will Eisner anecdote – regardless of its veracity – introduces a problem with comic books. The problem is that comic books never really went mainstream. They just hit puberty and changed their name to seem more suave. When a subculture goes mainstream it undergoes what a neighbourhood does when it’s gentrified: it’s cleaned up, the substance is thrown out, and it is stripped of what made it great in the first place. In that sense, comics haven’t gone mainstream at all. There are still tons of great books out there from all types of genres. You don’t become mainstream just because some intellectual properties are sold to a film industry that is devoid of ideas and faces declining profit margins at the box office.

Instead of reassuring me that I am no longer considered a weirdo for my comics fetish because comics are now cool, just enjoy comics for what they are. Whether it’s a real life account of day-to-day life or a cliché story full of plot devices, big boobs, and the word X-TREME somewhere on the cover, there’s something there for everybody. And at the end of the day, if reading comics takes my mind off of the impending economic apocalypse, who gives a hoot if Joss Whedon is writing X-Men?

Duong Pham is a U3 Economics student. Share your comic book lovin’ with him at duong.pham@mail.mcgill.ca.

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M is for Madoff – As in Bernard Madoff, a modern-day Charles Dickens villain, who through a giant pyramid scheme stole over $50-billion from his clients. Some of his clients include big-time Hollywood directors, multinational banks, universities, and charities. While awaiting trial, he was sentenced to house arrest in his $7-million home. I’m told that devouring a baby would net him three months in a minimum security prison.

N is for Naked Position – When you go naked, you take a position. For instance, owning 500 shares of General Motors that isn’t protected from loss or hedged. It’s a fairly common practice. When an institution like AIG insurance goes naked, it loses about $100-billion. Believe it or not, I did not just put this here to make a cheap sex joke.

O is for Overnight Rate – Whenever you hear or read something about interest rates being lowered or raised, it’s referring to this – the rate at which commercial banks can borrow money from the central bank.

P is for Pieces of Paper with No Intrinsic Value – According to the critics of the economic bailouts, this is something produced by the institutions we have bailed out. According to me, this perfectly describes a university degree. So that being said, where the fuck is my bailout?

Q – How many words in the English language begin with “Q?”

R is for Real Estate – “Also a synonym for risk-free investment because of the relative safety and stability of real estate. Real estate investments rarely fall making them the best place to put your money.” – A dream I had last night where I was speaking to a financial advisor from 2003.

S is for Stimulus Package – A large sum of money invested by the government in things such as public works projects and job creation initiatives. A stimulus package is like taking a mixture of drugs that may give you an amazing high, but if mixed improperly might do nothing, cause a bad trip, or kill you. Let’s hope the Obama Speedball, err $819-billion stimulus package, doesn’t kill us.

T is for Too Big to Fail Policy – There are certain things in this economy that depend on the existence of a few large firms. Problem is, which firms make up that list? A more apt analogy perhaps would be like deciding which member of a pretentious indie rock band to eliminate without compromising their indie cred. The monotone lead singer, the weird chick in the back who does nothing but clap, the triangle player with the asymmetric haircut, or the bassist who’s always wearing shirts that make reference to early nineties pop culture?

The rest of the letters don’t have words or terms I can use, so I’ll end it off with a thought. We are now living in a world where the various governments of the world have spent $10-trillion on bailouts to rescue their respective financial sectors because it’s too big to fail after years of telling us that they’re isn’t enough money for education, health care, or the environment. Instead of placing blame or trying to argue who should get how much, maybe the question we should be asking is should anything be allowed to become “too large to fail” in the first place.

Duong Pham is a U3 Economics student. Send him your alphabetic solutions at duong.pham@mail.mcgill.ca.

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B is for Bailout – A bailout is an act of giving a loan to a firm to prevent it from falling into financial ruin. When all streams are exhausted, the government is usually the lender of last resort to step in.

C is for Credit Default Swap (CDS) – Imagine that you own a home. Imagine that you buy insurance for that home. To do so, someone evaluates the value of said home – say $100,000 and then decides they’ll sell insurance on it if you pay them $10/month. If this home burns down, the insurer is obligated to give you $100,000. Now imagine a world where instead of buying insurance on your home, you can sell insurance on your own home to someone else. Now when your home burns down you’re on tap to pay the person you sold that insurance to for $100,000. Now imagine that in the same world, your neighbour can sell insurance on your home to someone else and your home burns down; your neighbour now owes someone $100,000 as well. And that is in a nutshell is how a CDS market worked – except that it’s valued at $56-trillion dollars.

D is for Depression – The feeling I get when I listen to Arcade Fire – it also describes a severe downturn an economy that will make the act of listening to Arcade Fire feel more euphoric than a couple experiencing simultaneous orgasms.

E is for Economy – Something that once resembled a reliable Swiss watch but now resembles a cheap Chinese knock-off labeled “Rollecks” that you can buy on the street for $5.

F is for Federal Reserve Bank – An American governmental institution responsible for handling monetary supplies, the regulating financial system and providing financial services to the U.S. government. In recent years, it has also become an institution responsible for bailing out the asses of everyone who makes more than $1-million a year.

G is for Golden Parachute – A large sum of money given to a CEO when they leave their job for things ranging from being fired, resigning, retirement, going to prison or running a company and the pensions of all the employees to work for said company into the ground. Who says we live in a meritocracy?

H is for Housing Bubble – A rise in demand for property, in this case fueled by low interest rates and loose lending regulations. Of course, this was nay followed by the housing burst, when people realize that they can’t afford the homes they bought and all the paper assets tied into them become worthless leading us to where we are today.

I is for Investment Banking Industry – Once the dream destination of many of the world’s finance majors, like the dodo bird and civilized debates on Israel-Palestine, the investment banking industry no longer exists.

J is for Jobs – Or lack thereof.

K is for Kondratiev Waves – A non-mainstream theory proposed by a Soviet Economist in the 1910s. The basic gist of the theory is that the economy moves in large 40-50 year cycles with major ups and major downs. If you buy into the theory and its projections, it basically states that we are in the midst of entering the worst recession seen since the 1750s. I actually have nothing snarky to say here because I don’t want karma to bite me in the ass if this scenario comes true.

Duong Pham is a U3 Economics student. Stay tuned for L-Z next week, and send optimism to duong.pham@mail.mcgill.ca.

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Sweden faced a similar problem in the early nineties. The basic gist of their plan was to buy up the toxic securities, let the worst banks fail, and then nationalize the ones that were too important to fail by buying their common stock. They ended up selling off most of the securities a couple of years later and sold off their ownership stake in the country’s biggest banks, ultimately recouping most if not all of the money. I’m not saying that this is the de facto solution, but it seems like an alternative Americans should explore.

In the Swedish crisis, the shareholders got burned, bondholders were protected, and the taxpayer was ultimately repaid. Being someone with money invested in financial equities myself, I usually understand the risks of investing in a company’s stock. If anyone should be burned for this, it should be shareholders, since they are the ones that assume those risks when they buy stocks. Of course, I’d probably be singing a different tune if I had money invested in a financial institution – but that’s another story.

Remember when AIG was begging the U.S. government to nationalize it for $75-billion, and the government not only agreed, but threw in another $10-billion as if it was a tip for a hot waitress at a fancy restaurant? To me, that’s a sign that the government really doesn’t know how bad this situation is, and that it’s just throwing money around. Doing nothing is dangerous, but I believe simply throwing money at these toxic assets without giving any oversight to the government or without any provisions for the taxpayer who will be taking on most of this risk can be just as disastrous.

Of course I’m also scared shitless that the entire society is unravelling into a Cormac McCarthy book, and that I’ll be wandering the Trans-Canada Highway one day with a neckbeard, wearing a torn-up flannel jacket, and carrying a half-loaded six-shooter for fighting off roving bands of cannibals – so if rationality doesn’t take hold soon, for the love of God, pump the entire 2009 budget into this thing!

Duong Pham is a U3 Economics student.

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The largest financial meltdown in the world, and possibly the universe, has left literally hundreds of CEOs, CFOs, COOs, and VPs with nothing left to live for. Where will Johnson Fitzgerald Jr. IV Esquire get the money to pay for his third mansion in the Hamptons? How will he pay for his kid’s new car? A scant 12 months ago, Fitzgerald was a hard-working CEO who had grown up on the tough streets of the Upper East Side with nothing but upper class parents supporting him throughout his life.

He once owned four mansions – four! – but now he’s in danger of losing one. Worse, his diet of cocaine binges, blue sturgeon caviar, and Petrus wine has been downgraded to more casual nose candy fun and regular caviar on Johnny Walker Blue, all to dull the pain. He even considered cancelling his daughter’s Centurion Card because he doesn’t think he can afford the $250,000 minimum annual spending requirement any longer.

Times like these call for heroes, and we need a hero now, more than ever. Heroes like U.S. Treasury Secretary (and former CEO of Goldman Sachs) Henry Paulson, who is literally putting his entire country’s finances at risk by asking the American taxpayer to pony up a $700-billion bailout package in order to save the asses of the unfortunate few. Truly, he is the man that John F. Kennedy was thinking of when he said, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

Unfortunately, Paulson is only one man and $700-billion is only a 12 digit number. In past humanitarian crises – like the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami that almost took the life of hot supermodel Petra Nemcova – the international community has stepped up its efforts to help out those in need. Well world, as global citizens this is one of those times but now, the United States richest 0.00001 per cent is Petra Nemcova and the tsunami is the sub-prime mortgage crisis. With a simple call to your preferred country club and a minimum donation of $5,400 – less than the average Canadian tuition – you can help make sure that CEOs all over the world will be kept warm while facing those cool autumn nights on their luxury yachts floating somewhere in the middle of the Caribbean.

It is time for us to help out those who cannot help themselves and pull them out of their self-created gutters like they have helped us out of ours so many times in the past with trickle-down economics. Now, somewhere out there wanders a group of confused CEOs wandering the streets of New York City wondering, “How could this have happened?” and somewhere out there in the vast expanse of time and space, Winston Churchill is reminding us whenever the wind blows, “Never was so much owed by so many to so few.”

Duong Pham is a U3 Economics student. He’d like you, our valued readers, to know he’s being completely serious right now.

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