re: watchmen
Saw midnight showing. Worth price of ticket; maybe not loss of sleep, but I'll let it slide.
Initial reaction can be summed up by the list I scribbled in the car on the way home (had to go to town half an hour away to find theater showing it at midnight):
I had more issue with Snyder's directing style than anything else, but it was a pretty big issue. See icon for tame, G-rated version of what you see in Watchmen. Gore, gore, gore. Ugh.
Still, see note: Nothing was added. What was already there was just played up like whoa.
Don't know if I would watch again. With a fast-forward, maybe.
got to get to class,
-rave
ETA: Back from class. Some clarifications I though of:
-Obnoxious soundtrack mostly due to overplaying of songs & score. (Score didn't do anything for me.) Mostly the originals of any given song were used (but really, a My Chemical Romance original for the credits? Really? That's worse than a Smashing Pumpkins song from the Batman & Robin soundtrack for the trailer), but in a few cases I don't count that as a plus -- I can't stand Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah. I appreciate the use of originals, but the fact that every single fucking time a song started, everything went into slow-mo (not that that was different from EVERY OTHER THIRTY SECONDS OF THE MOVIE) and then too much of the song was played... that got on my nerves. Would rather there had been more integrated music; the same songs playing within the story, not layered over as part of the soundtrack. Too much rubbing the politics in my face.
-What was up with Nixon's nose? It was so distracting, almost too cartoony for something that is, granted, based on a comic. And the age prosthetics in general? Not the best I've ever seen, and come on, genre movies, if you want to reclaim the Best Makeup Oscar, you need to get your shit in order. Age makeup in non-genre flicks has won for like three years in a row. Don't tell me you can't be at least as good as Benjamin Button.
-Pretty much everything that was obnoxious was because of the slow-mo. The soundtrack would have been fine if not for the inevitable lingering shots of asses, tits, exploding Viet Cong, flying guts, whatever. The only song I would keep at full length is The Times They Are A-Changin', which goes over the opening credits and is AWESOME. The credits are genius. They tell the story of Under the Hood through photos, gestures, expressions and Dylan, pretty much. Rivals the Fellowship of the Ring opening for Best Condensing of a Complex Alternate History Without Losing the Spirit of the Text.
-Omg gore. Why. Okay, nothing was added that wasn't in the comic -- that's awesome. In fact, massive amounts of the dialogue was verbatim from the source; panels from the comic are painstakingly reconstructed and GORGEOUS to look at, and yeah, the comic is gory as hell. But it's way different when instead of the implication of violence in line drawings, you get full-on 3-D Dr. Manhattan deconstructing people, Dan & Laurie beating the shit out of some knot tops (compound fractures, teeth flying, fingers torn off, body parts mashed to pulp in fucking slow motion is just plain unnecessary), and the Rorshach stuff is just... indecent on any level. I mean, yes, he is not a decent human being and he does horrible things. I'm not saying that his actions should have been changed for the movie, to be more user-friendly. I understand that he is a vicious, violent, uncompromising, cruel and unusual bastard. I'm just saying that Zack Snyder's artistic choice to show us axed-open dog heads, faces being bitten off, people being killed with boiling oil, sledgehammers, flamethrowers and grappling hooks, etc etc, in slow motion is in bad taste and not adherent to the idea of brutality as presented in the graphic novel: abrupt, meaningless and an awful fact of everyday life, not lingered on but endlessly debated over during the nonviolent scenes.
-Part of the bad taste I have in my mouth is probably not from the movie at all, but from the audience in the theater. They. Laughed. At. Everything. Maybe I wrote "excess glamorization" down last night not because of any actual glamorization in the movie (after all, most of the shots are reconstructed panels of the comic; if it's in the movie, it was in the comic, so where is this added element of pretentiousness coming from in my mind?) but because the audience reacted with such disaffected awe & cynical amusement to the gore and the violence. These are probably kids who follow the current trend of the torture porn genre in mainstream horror. I have not watched anything as gory as the Watchmen movie since... the first 40 minutes of Saving Private Ryan, I guess, and I can't imagine people laughing at the gore in that scene any more than it computes in my brain that the gore in Watchmen was somehow supposed to be funny. It wasn't fucking funny, you little dipshits. It's hideous and tragic and Ozymandias does what he does, condemnable as his actions may be, to put a stop to or at least to reduce the prevalence of that kind of senseless bodily violence in a self-destructive world. Rorshach recognizes that he is a product of that violence and that he cannot live without it and that's why he asks to be killed. He cannot compromise. He is the end product of the doomsday clock, the "End Is Nigh" signholder, already well over the edge that Ozymandias barely manages to pull the world back from the brink of. It's philosophy, it's humanity, it's tragedy, so STOP LAUGHING AT THE DOGS FIGHTING OVER THE SIX-YEAR-OLD GIRL'S LEG BONE.
-Also, the little dickwads would not shut up about the nudity. I began dreading the moments when Dr. Manhattan would walk on screen because of the sudden wave of jeering from the guys, halfway-uncomfortable giggling from the girls and general "LOL BLUE PENIS" disruptiveness.
-Laurie actress was not very good. I kind of expected that. Everyone else surprised me with their awesomeness. Dr. Manhattan and Rorshach were the two I had doubts about, but they were freakishly perfect. The makeup team apparently can't do age prosthetics for shit, but Walter Kovacks was so identical to the man in the comic that you would hardly believe that the drawings weren't modeled off of this actor instead of the other way around. Dan Dreiberg is dead-on, if just a tad young-looking for the part. But the actor plays middle-aged fairly well, even though he isn't middle-aged. Billy Crudup manages Dr. Manhattan's godlike distance conflicting with his lingering human affectations pretty well, insofar as a mostly blank stare can be considered acting. (There are little twitches and subtle moments that prove he isn't just being Keanu Reeves, though.) Even the minor characters were perfect, including the ones you only see for a sum total of one or two minutes. (The news vendor, the Black Freighter kid and Rorshach's psychologist, for example.)
-I need to shut up now because I have real work to do. All told: It's worth your money. It's a faithful and well-executed adaptation of the graphic novel and it's aesthetically stunning. If you squick easily, get your ear-stuffing fingers primed and just be prepared to look quickly at the wall or the ceiling or something whenever a fight scene starts. If you've read the comic, there isn't anything unexpected -- but however gross you can imagine it being in live action, that's how gross it is times 100. Snyder absolutely does not understand the meaning of the tasteful Fade to Black or the theory that what the viewer's imagination can supply to fill in blank spots is always scarier than what they see spelled out for them. Snyder is a speller-outer. Also, don't be too sleepy going into the theater, because the movie is about 35% longer than it should be due to abuse of slow motion.
The end.
Initial reaction can be summed up by the list I scribbled in the car on the way home (had to go to town half an hour away to find theater showing it at midnight):
I had more issue with Snyder's directing style than anything else, but it was a pretty big issue. See icon for tame, G-rated version of what you see in Watchmen. Gore, gore, gore. Ugh.
Still, see note: Nothing was added. What was already there was just played up like whoa.
Don't know if I would watch again. With a fast-forward, maybe.
got to get to class,
-rave
ETA: Back from class. Some clarifications I though of:
-Obnoxious soundtrack mostly due to overplaying of songs & score. (Score didn't do anything for me.) Mostly the originals of any given song were used (but really, a My Chemical Romance original for the credits? Really? That's worse than a Smashing Pumpkins song from the Batman & Robin soundtrack for the trailer), but in a few cases I don't count that as a plus -- I can't stand Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah. I appreciate the use of originals, but the fact that every single fucking time a song started, everything went into slow-mo (not that that was different from EVERY OTHER THIRTY SECONDS OF THE MOVIE) and then too much of the song was played... that got on my nerves. Would rather there had been more integrated music; the same songs playing within the story, not layered over as part of the soundtrack. Too much rubbing the politics in my face.
-What was up with Nixon's nose? It was so distracting, almost too cartoony for something that is, granted, based on a comic. And the age prosthetics in general? Not the best I've ever seen, and come on, genre movies, if you want to reclaim the Best Makeup Oscar, you need to get your shit in order. Age makeup in non-genre flicks has won for like three years in a row. Don't tell me you can't be at least as good as Benjamin Button.
-Pretty much everything that was obnoxious was because of the slow-mo. The soundtrack would have been fine if not for the inevitable lingering shots of asses, tits, exploding Viet Cong, flying guts, whatever. The only song I would keep at full length is The Times They Are A-Changin', which goes over the opening credits and is AWESOME. The credits are genius. They tell the story of Under the Hood through photos, gestures, expressions and Dylan, pretty much. Rivals the Fellowship of the Ring opening for Best Condensing of a Complex Alternate History Without Losing the Spirit of the Text.
-Omg gore. Why. Okay, nothing was added that wasn't in the comic -- that's awesome. In fact, massive amounts of the dialogue was verbatim from the source; panels from the comic are painstakingly reconstructed and GORGEOUS to look at, and yeah, the comic is gory as hell. But it's way different when instead of the implication of violence in line drawings, you get full-on 3-D Dr. Manhattan deconstructing people, Dan & Laurie beating the shit out of some knot tops (compound fractures, teeth flying, fingers torn off, body parts mashed to pulp in fucking slow motion is just plain unnecessary), and the Rorshach stuff is just... indecent on any level. I mean, yes, he is not a decent human being and he does horrible things. I'm not saying that his actions should have been changed for the movie, to be more user-friendly. I understand that he is a vicious, violent, uncompromising, cruel and unusual bastard. I'm just saying that Zack Snyder's artistic choice to show us axed-open dog heads, faces being bitten off, people being killed with boiling oil, sledgehammers, flamethrowers and grappling hooks, etc etc, in slow motion is in bad taste and not adherent to the idea of brutality as presented in the graphic novel: abrupt, meaningless and an awful fact of everyday life, not lingered on but endlessly debated over during the nonviolent scenes.
-Part of the bad taste I have in my mouth is probably not from the movie at all, but from the audience in the theater. They. Laughed. At. Everything. Maybe I wrote "excess glamorization" down last night not because of any actual glamorization in the movie (after all, most of the shots are reconstructed panels of the comic; if it's in the movie, it was in the comic, so where is this added element of pretentiousness coming from in my mind?) but because the audience reacted with such disaffected awe & cynical amusement to the gore and the violence. These are probably kids who follow the current trend of the torture porn genre in mainstream horror. I have not watched anything as gory as the Watchmen movie since... the first 40 minutes of Saving Private Ryan, I guess, and I can't imagine people laughing at the gore in that scene any more than it computes in my brain that the gore in Watchmen was somehow supposed to be funny. It wasn't fucking funny, you little dipshits. It's hideous and tragic and Ozymandias does what he does, condemnable as his actions may be, to put a stop to or at least to reduce the prevalence of that kind of senseless bodily violence in a self-destructive world. Rorshach recognizes that he is a product of that violence and that he cannot live without it and that's why he asks to be killed. He cannot compromise. He is the end product of the doomsday clock, the "End Is Nigh" signholder, already well over the edge that Ozymandias barely manages to pull the world back from the brink of. It's philosophy, it's humanity, it's tragedy, so STOP LAUGHING AT THE DOGS FIGHTING OVER THE SIX-YEAR-OLD GIRL'S LEG BONE.
-Also, the little dickwads would not shut up about the nudity. I began dreading the moments when Dr. Manhattan would walk on screen because of the sudden wave of jeering from the guys, halfway-uncomfortable giggling from the girls and general "LOL BLUE PENIS" disruptiveness.
-Laurie actress was not very good. I kind of expected that. Everyone else surprised me with their awesomeness. Dr. Manhattan and Rorshach were the two I had doubts about, but they were freakishly perfect. The makeup team apparently can't do age prosthetics for shit, but Walter Kovacks was so identical to the man in the comic that you would hardly believe that the drawings weren't modeled off of this actor instead of the other way around. Dan Dreiberg is dead-on, if just a tad young-looking for the part. But the actor plays middle-aged fairly well, even though he isn't middle-aged. Billy Crudup manages Dr. Manhattan's godlike distance conflicting with his lingering human affectations pretty well, insofar as a mostly blank stare can be considered acting. (There are little twitches and subtle moments that prove he isn't just being Keanu Reeves, though.) Even the minor characters were perfect, including the ones you only see for a sum total of one or two minutes. (The news vendor, the Black Freighter kid and Rorshach's psychologist, for example.)
-I need to shut up now because I have real work to do. All told: It's worth your money. It's a faithful and well-executed adaptation of the graphic novel and it's aesthetically stunning. If you squick easily, get your ear-stuffing fingers primed and just be prepared to look quickly at the wall or the ceiling or something whenever a fight scene starts. If you've read the comic, there isn't anything unexpected -- but however gross you can imagine it being in live action, that's how gross it is times 100. Snyder absolutely does not understand the meaning of the tasteful Fade to Black or the theory that what the viewer's imagination can supply to fill in blank spots is always scarier than what they see spelled out for them. Snyder is a speller-outer. Also, don't be too sleepy going into the theater, because the movie is about 35% longer than it should be due to abuse of slow motion.
The end.