PhotoChopShop: Wheels-a-spinnin'
FIRST, HAT'S off to Pat Joseph for spotting Watchmen at Wal-Mart before I did. It's a good thing he did, because if I had seen that thing in person, on one of my many frequent visits to Wal-Mart, heads would have rolled. In 2006, I wrote a book called A Child's Garden of Smurf Cock. Wal-Mart wanted nothing to do with it. Watchmen, as most of you know, is essentially the same book. What BS.
Should I bitch about the Watchmen movie? Hmm... maybe a little.
There's more to bringing a comic (or book, or screenplay) to life than actors reciting lines in the right costumes. If that's all it took, any one of us could have filmed the damn thing at Dragon*Con. Dressing a Downy retard in green tights and having him parrot Hamlet word-for-word is not good Shakespeare.
And you know what? I didn't need it to be 100 percent faithful! Most of what few changes they did make were pretty sharp-- Dr. Manhattan's streamlined monologue on Mars, Sally Jupiter's tearful admission to her daughter, Big Figure slicing his henchman's arms instead of his throat (which makes a lot more sense), replacing Captain Metropolis with Ozymandias in the first Crimebusters meeting. But these were just cruel teases. I've seen Bible movies with less compunction about tightening up the narrative.
But they had a trailer for that new Dillinger movie with Johnny Depp. That looks pretty sweet. Except everyone who's seen High Fidelity knows how it ends. Maybe that's not the point.