One More Watchmen Movie Post. Hrrm.

Or: Why Tom Spurgeon is a better writer than I am. His Watchmen review is the best one I have read. Unlike mainstream critics, he is actually informed enough to make a judgement on the thing.

My guess is that Watchmen's makers wanted to stay faithful to the work because they believed in it. My further guess is that they never came to an understanding of that work beyond a very facile take on some of its appealing surface aspects and genre correction elements. In that way, they're a lot like many of the book's fans. The result is a movie that while it's mostly faithful to its source material, the moments it's not faithful jar to a noteworthy degree, and the newly synthesized take of old and new elements never takes on a life of its own.

Read it all.

Newsflash: The Watchmen Movie Sucks Ass Bigtime

Holy Sacrilege Batman! What a turgid turd. The guys who play Rorschach & The Comedian do the best they can, but it's an almost unwatchable fuckup.

The best comparison I can think of is the bogus movie they make of Pee Wee's Big Adventure with James Brolin as "P.W" in that great film. They make a movie about the literal plot of the comic, but completely miss the structural elements and tone. And the point, oh yeah, they miss the point--the superheroics are not dry and almost quiet as in the original comic, but nutty wirework, f/x etc. etc. Whatever. Joel Schumaker looks like fucking Jean Luc Godard and Tim Burton like Fassbinder next to this steaming pile of mediocrity.

The plot points about the squid are not a big deal, interestingly. But Nixon with a ginormous Pinocchio nose talking about it? Oh man.

True to form, I rushed out to see it at the earliest possible moment. What the hell, Iron Man and Hellboy were fun, weren't they?

Get that crummy movie taste out of your mouth with this Saturday Morning Cartoon version.

Alan Moore gets the last word (from the interview in Wired which I linked to previously as well)

"My books are still the same books as they were before they were made into films. The books haven't changed. I'm reminded of the remark by, I think it was Raymond Chandler, where he was asked about what he felt about having his books "ruined" by Hollywood. And he led the questioner into his study and showed him all the books there on the bookshelf, and said, Look—there they all are. They're all fine. They're fine. They're not ruined. They're still there. And I think that's pretty much the attitude I take. If the books are as good as I think they are, then they are the things that will endure. And if the films are as bad as I think they are, then they are the things that will not endure. So, I suppose we'll see at the end of the day, whenever that is."