(no subject)
I had thought that I would not do my usual Saturday stuff today (late rising, extended breakfast, library, market, eat too much in the afternoon, worrying about pointlessness of life), and so I headed off to the Natural History Museum quixotically intending to see an artwork I'd heard about on the radio, and maybe then to the Science Museum to find the Wellcome gallery. In the event, both museums were packed solid with small children, the day was warm and I couldn't find the bloody tree thing*. When I finally got home, I felt achey and fed-up and disinclined to go out again, but the g-d and boyfriend had invited me to see Watchmen with them, so I dragged myself out again and had a rather pleasant time.
Thoughts on the film:
It caught the atmosphere of the comic pretty well, and hauled me right back to the days when I was hovering around Forbidden Planet (the old one in Denmark Street) every month for each new issue. I even liked the way the ending had been changed (since I'd always had a huge problem with the original ending) and the casting and 80s atmosphere were spot-on. The choice of music was a bit, well, obvious. "The Times They Are A-Changing" was obvious but perfect, and while they could maybe have done with a bit more Leonard Cohen ("Closing Time", perhaps), I could definitely have done without hearing "Hallelujah" again. Some bits went on rather too long for me. About an hour in, I realised that we were seeing perfect copies of the covers of each issue of the original and that we were only up to about issue three. Sex and fight scenes both suffer from the same problem when a comic is transferred to film, in that three panels can convey everything on a page, but on film they have to fill in all the bits between each image to extend them into real time, which can be dull (fights) or embarrassing (sex) if done badly. And in the fights, everyone seemed to be extremely powerful and invulnerable, which rather blurred the whole point about Manhattan being the only one with genuine super-powers and the other Watchmen being all too human.
*I looked the tree sculpture up online (which perhaps I should have done before going), and it wasn't anything like what I'd expected from the radio, where it had sounded as if the artist had pressed a whole oak-tree like a single herbarium specimen.
Thoughts on the film:
It caught the atmosphere of the comic pretty well, and hauled me right back to the days when I was hovering around Forbidden Planet (the old one in Denmark Street) every month for each new issue. I even liked the way the ending had been changed (since I'd always had a huge problem with the original ending) and the casting and 80s atmosphere were spot-on. The choice of music was a bit, well, obvious. "The Times They Are A-Changing" was obvious but perfect, and while they could maybe have done with a bit more Leonard Cohen ("Closing Time", perhaps), I could definitely have done without hearing "Hallelujah" again. Some bits went on rather too long for me. About an hour in, I realised that we were seeing perfect copies of the covers of each issue of the original and that we were only up to about issue three. Sex and fight scenes both suffer from the same problem when a comic is transferred to film, in that three panels can convey everything on a page, but on film they have to fill in all the bits between each image to extend them into real time, which can be dull (fights) or embarrassing (sex) if done badly. And in the fights, everyone seemed to be extremely powerful and invulnerable, which rather blurred the whole point about Manhattan being the only one with genuine super-powers and the other Watchmen being all too human.
*I looked the tree sculpture up online (which perhaps I should have done before going), and it wasn't anything like what I'd expected from the radio, where it had sounded as if the artist had pressed a whole oak-tree like a single herbarium specimen.