Hacker Cinema
Constantine
2014 · TV series · 43 min episodes · 1 season
Created by Daniel Cerone, David S. Goyer
ActionAdventureDramaScience FictionFantasy
A man struggling with his faith is haunted by the sins of his past but is suddenly thrust into the role of defending humanity from the gathering forces of darkness.
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5 comments on Hacker News
The link hasn’t totally been severed. Constantine is still present.
My only two gripes are a bad 2.0 sound mix - too much dynamic range, even with compression turned on - and Lucifer was lackluster. Too much “corporate CEO” and not enough fallen angel. Should have pulled in the TV show actor.
But Death, Desire, Matthew, Lucien, even Morpheus himself all rock.
From what I bore to watch, it's a quite faithful adaptation - even if somewhat simplified.
As someone who only read a bunch of those 80s/90s "transgressive" comic books in the late 2000s-early 2010s, thanks to the wonders of the Web (and never saw any sign of anyone else having heard of these particular works in my godforsaken corner of the world, though Gaiman is somewhat known for his collabs with Pratchett), I could draw comparison with "Preacher" and "The Boys" (based on the eponymous works by Garth Ennis), which seem to be doing the whole "comic book to TV show because we bought off all the counterculture and are consequently running out of interesting intellectual property" thing a bit better. Taking more liberties with the source material, too; adding stuff that wasn't in the book but bears the original spirit.
Interestingly enough, those are also more grittier and less "politically correct" tales - even though their protagonists also tend to espouse enlightened views of radical acceptance, and the underlying message seems to be that the real antagonist is not just some entrenched establishment of crooked power mongers, but the mass of NPCs who enable them. Guess violence is timeless and magical realism is only relevant in the context of specific historical moments of cultural transition - who would've known?
Of course, there's comparatively less of that particular conflict overtly represented in the Sandman - it's one of those metaphysical things where most of the action happens in the characters' inner worlds. (Maybe that's why they thought it was such a timeless tale that recasting some of the characters as non-Gothic would be sufficient modernization?) Still, I consider Gaiman's work part of the same campaign of guerilla cultural warfare that was conducted around the turn of the century by teaching the kids lateral thinking, imagination, and of course emotional literacy and compassion. And of course the kids took that and went to become salaried creatives building nostalgic simulacra to mask the terminal disenchantment of the world (no enchantment -> no hope -> workers don't breed). So, yeah, guess we lost that one.
Finally got around to reading William Gibson's "Blue Ant" trilogy, and boy oh boy does the man have a good handle on how the media machine acts to transform artworks and the human experiences that art glorifies into a uniform bland "concept soup". Guess they'll start shooting shows from his desiccated corpus next. (Heard it here first, folks!)
All in all a Constantine/Watchmen tier adaptation. Don't waste time watching it, just torrent the original comic books and enjoy.
I found something in the last few years about the use of a cigarette as a prop. The Vertigo comics character John Constantine is a heavy smoker. Part of his character; he even comes close to dying of lung cancer at one point, and weasels out of it via a deal with some devils. They made a Constantine TV series in 2014, canceled after half a season, and then the same actor reprised the character on the CW's Arrowverse serieses, most notably on Legends of Tomorrow.
In all those appearances, Constantine is shown holding cigarettes, getting them out of a pack, gesturing with them, fussing with and lighting his lighter... but never actually lighting a cigarette or smoking. It's done so smoothly that you probably won't notice unless someone mentions it to you.
There needs to be a better way to sort out titles which can refer to multiple items. For instance, "Constantine" only matches the TV show, not the Keanu Reeves movie; "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" only matches the Bay version, not 1990.
As a European I think this has deepcultural roots, probably in religion. I'm struck by the way many elecators don't go to the 13th floor, or the 13th in a series of numbered streets is often called something else (eg in SF you have 12th Avenue, Funston Avenue, 14th Avenue...). People prefer to say someone 'passed' (presumably to the afterlife) rather than that they 'died'. And of course there's no swearing on TV - although this only applies to American swear words, it's OK to use words that are considered quite rude in English or Australia.
I have a theory that this is part of the American fondness for TV shows featuring English detectives (Elementary, Forever, Constantine and just about every mystery show on PBS): by speaking the same language but coming from a quite different cultural context, they're able to engage in narrative truth-seeking because of their obliviousness to or disregard for implicit American cultural mores.