Laserblast: Silence of the Lambs, Wonder Woman, Watchmen & More
Originally published at Watchmen News. You can comment here or there.
From cinefantastiqueonline.com:
By Drew Fitzpatrick • March 3, 2009
So, what’s cooking with this week’s DVD and Blu-ray releases?
Watchmen: The Complete Motion Comic (Warner Bros DVD & Blu-Ray)
For once, the advertising ballyhoo for a major motion picture is telling the truth - Watchmen actually is the Greatest Graphic Novel of our time, and the early word on Zack Snyder’s adaptation is very encouraging. Watchmen is a densely packed, multilayered epic, and the fact that Snyder was able to get a studio to sign off on a nearly 3 hour, R-rated comic adaptation based on source material that few outside of rabid fans had ever heard of, has him deserving of high praise by our estimation. Warner Bros is going to be anxious to begin getting a return on its large cash outlay, and the first tie-in release arrives this week - Watchmen: The Complete Motion Comic - though it’s far less revolutionary than it sounds. Essentially, this 6 hour, 12 episode serial uses the original artwork to create a slick version of the old Power Records LPs where you would read along with a large format comic while the record played in the background. As the camera slowly pans around each frame, there is minor movement in the backgrounds and characters drift rigidly into and out of the frame (no attempt at animating or syncing lip movements). The major downside is the presence of only a single male narrator (Tom Stechschulte, who does about as well with the material as is possible under the circumstances) which makes certain passages rather awkward, but this is unlikely to bother anyone with a few hours of audio book experience under their belt. The good news is that the presentation is complete, whereas the necessities of a feature film have dictated the removal of certain material (including the Tales of the Black Freighter comic within-a-comic) and the alterations of others (the cataclysmic event that ended the book has been altered significantly), adding value to this project.