Fresh Loaf

ELECTRIC SLIDE: Unlike animated features, live-action adaptations require intricate and expensive special effects, such as Jon Osterman's (Billy Crudup) transformation into Dr. Manhattan for 'Watchmen.' (Photo courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures)

After more than 20 years, DC Comics’ Watchmen will make the quantum leap from comic-book page to live-action film with its release this Friday. If hype and anticipation translate to even a fraction of box office success, Watchmen will affirm the popularity of superheroes — and even R-rated antiheroes — as Hollywood’s saviors. The blockbuster could join the ranks of such record breakers as the Spider-Man trilogy and the Oscar-winning The Dark Knight.

Superhero movies make the transition from ink and paper to celluloid the hard way, however. Saving the world and defeating flamboyant evildoers is the least of it. Simply making an exciting, convincing superhero movie that doesn’t insult an audience’s intelligence practically demands a miracle. Cinematic, super-powered derring-do requires massively expensive special effects, along with the challenge of casting flesh-and-blood actors to play literally two-dimensional, archetypal roles with impossible physiques and ridiculous costumes.

For every hit like The Dark Knight, there’s at least one costly flop: take the nipple-costumed Batman & Robin or Halle Berry’s embarrassing Catwoman. Even with the successes, audiences face flaws like the obvious CGI-rendered Spider-Man and Hulk in their first movies, or unfortunate choices such as Ian McKellen’s dumb-looking Magneto helmet in the X-Men films.

Animation holds out an easier approach; it goes with comic book stories as comfortably as a cape and cowl. The best cartoon features and TV series can do an end run around the real world’s limitations to offer an unlimited canvas that emulates iconic comic book art while putting exciting designs into motion. The right voice performances can even convey emotional heft without hanging a tights-wearing movie star from wires.

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The Clickable Advent Calendar is almost over for 2008, so here are some items I couldn’t get to, in the spirit of “stocking stuffers.”

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention humorist David Sedaris, who made his name with acerbic commentaries on Christmas, particularly The Santaland Diaries (the theatrical version of which currently runs at Horizon Theatre and stars Harold Leaver, whom I interviewed in 2004). This year, for some reason I’m flashing on Sedaris’s “Front Row Center with Thaddeus Bristol” in which a typically caustic theater critic takes on a school pageant.

Other favorite holiday TV shows include “Justice League’s” Christmas-themed “Comfort and Joy” (which features a great subplot in which the Flash and a bad guy called the Ultra-Humanite team up to give some orphans an impossible-to-find Christmas gift), the “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special” and pretty much any “South Park” Christmas installment. (I found this video of Cartman’s “Swiss Colony Beef Log” via a The Onion A.V. Club.)

Slate has “A slide show of some of America’s weirdest holiday light displays” (I particularly like #2, from Batesville, Miss.)

The blog Musical Fruitcake lives up to its billing as “A collection of the worst Christmas songs ever recorded.” Hear a girl sing “Mom and Dad, Please Don’t Steal for Me This Christmas.” Speaking of Christmas music, Andisheh drew my attention to WFMU’s Beware of the Blog post on MORE Christmas Disco!

Alejandro pointed out the Elf Yourself site, and since I saw it, I know at least one friend who’s elfed-up her family.

For atheists and agonistics alienated at advent, here’s Thomas Bell’s secular variation on “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus,” “Yes Shirley, There is a wide body of evidence suggesting there may be a higher order to the universe.”

And finally, for your Christmas Eve reading, “A Download from St. Nicholas:”

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