Superhero Filmmakers: Where's Our Watchmen?

watchman's playing at the imax downtown... I should probably go see it before it disappears in a week

what's this watchman movie you speak of

u know - two and a half men can be hilarious sometimes, i think the fig leaf would better conceal vast waste of will and grace reruns.

i'm pretty sure i can see u in there

Tighten up that grip

Two and a Half Men is not ever at all hilarious ever, nor at all.

Dreadfully beside the point, tho.

that's two and a half suggest bans, then.

j/k

never seen an ep of that show

"The comic was written by Alan Moore and drawn by Dave Gibbons, and became to comic books what The Sopranos is to TV: an intellectual fig leaf concealing the vast wasteland of Two and a Half Men reruns."

surprised this isn't getting more derision frankly

i mean i'm not really that comics dude but this smacks of "Atmosphere is the best rapper in the game because he talks about REAL LIFE"

^

I'm no giant comics consumer either... well, not GIANT... and I can't help but be pointedly unamazed by the things Ebert is amazed at. I've read Watchmen about ten times, maybe that's the trouble.

But really, if ever there were a superhero movie that didn't require fanboys. I feel like I read it in high school. It was one of the fun assignments.

Speaking of which... Richard E Grant doing Hamlet = fantastic use of YouTube.

Oh but this is way fun, too, if you like beating your head against the wall. If you visit the last youtube clip from the ebert page on youtube itself, you will be treated to pages upon pages of youtube commenters arguing about whether an electron is a particle or a wave. It's like quantum ILM.

Seeing this in an hour and a half or so.

Seeing it at the Cinerama Dome on Sunday night. Am withdrawing from this thread until then.

(Cross-posted to ILC:)

Wow, that was... not that good. Hardly surprising. Those were some bad actors, and weirdly the Wilson brother who plays Nite-Owl looks as though his face was drawn by Steve Dillon.

Love the way a film which panders so much to the torture porn crowd (lovingly extended sequences of arms being angle-ground off, heads being hatcheted, child's leg being eaten by dogs, rape attempt in slow-motion, etc) attempts to have cake/eat it with bullshit about importance of humanity, etc, etc.

Dialogue/narration which worked on the page REALLY REALLY doesn't work coming out of actors' mouths. Especially not these actors.

"The comic was written by Alan Moore and drawn by Dave Gibbons, and became to comic books what The Sopranos is to TV: an intellectual fig leaf concealing the vast wasteland of Two and a Half Men reruns."

it's a great line though

esp w/r/t all the sin city type stuff we've seen lately

"The comic was written by Alan Moore and drawn by Dave Gibbons, and became to comic books what The Sopranos is to TV: an intellectual fig leaf concealing the vast wasteland of Two and a Half Men reruns."

you can say that about any medium though

I was supposed to be seeing this with a group of friend right now... but 13$ for something that's going to disappoint me? I decided on fuck you Veidt

3:30 AM. just got back from the theater, and i have to say...it was pretty damn great. they did screw up a few things (especially the mars scene), but it was 10x better than what i was expecting.

well played, snyder...well played.

oh, and there were enough fat dudes in ill-fitting t-shirts, in the theater, to....well there were lots of 'em, is my point...

Is the ending changed like there used to be rumors about?

http://gardnerlinn.com/watchmensquidhope2.jpg

so does the blue guy have his willy out for the whole movie?

is there a watch man in this movie

thank you kenan
I'm hoping this will go to our 3 dollar theater in a couple of months

you can say that about any medium though

i wouldn't say that about painting. i mean, sure, rembrandt lords over 99% of painting, but it's not like museums contain a thin layer of good painting over a vast sea of crap. there's a 1000 year tradition of amazing painting and there are always 100s if not 1000s of world class painters to learn about. is the same true of comic book movies - or even comics?

i mean at any given time there are hundreds of amazing painters at work.

are there that many good TV shows?

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3067/3332056779_e190676592.jpg

It was hella flawed, but I enjoyed it.

yeah, manhattan's penis makes 2 appearances.
yes, the ending is changed quite a bit.

excellent review here:

http://www.debbieschlussel.com/archives/2009/03/the_watchmen_li.html

awww
I thought kenan's answer meant the ending wasn't changed.
way to make me sad.

Maybe if I make a movie about how Eisenhower was President in 1972, we "lost" World War II, and Bin Laden was gonna bomb the World Trade Center then, I'll be cool, too. . . so long as it's "dark" and I include a bunch of rape, torture, explicit sex scenes, and extremely graphic killings, and oh, write a "graphic novel" a/k/a comic book about it, first.

I don't just worry that this is the new superhero movie being marketed to your kids today. I worry about the ones that will be even more depraved a decade from now.

G-d help this country (minus Hollywood).

The problem with the suggestion that he's making is that he seems to be looking for comics with SOMETHING TO SAY and there's plenty of that, it's just that it doesn't always parade itself in the manner that Watchmen does. He wants to know where all the Great Comic Books are, but he ignores all the stuff like (better-read comics folks forgive me) Bone or Strangers in Paradise or Preacher because they're obviously just funny papers unworthy of serious consideration.

whoa this was a big xp to moonship re: the Sopranos figleaf thing

well i didn't really like bone or strangers in paradise or preacher ... so ... maybe a better analogy for my position is grant morrison or something. "zenith" was awesome. "doom patrol" mostly great. "invisibles" sometimes great sometimes awful in equal measure (often in the same issue). and the rest ... 99% shit, if you know what i mean. well, except "the filth", which was like same deal as "the invisibles".

i'm a comics fan but i find the signal-to-noise ratio awfully low as compared to books, music, "fine arts", etc. and television and hollywood abysmally low re: signal-to-noise. maybe this is just my old-fogeyish-ness talking?

i take your point on "something to say" though. obviously most of the best comics are the ones that have nothing or very little to say. see: early heavy metal 1977-1981, moebius' "airtight garage", most of "doom patrol", tintin, etc

A.O. Scott:

Speaking of acts of congress, “Watchmen” features this year’s hands-down winner of the bad movie sex award, superhero division: a moment of bliss that takes place on board Nite Owl’s nifty little airship, accompanied by Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” (By the way, can we please have a moratorium on the use of this song in movies? Yes, I too have heard there was a secret chord that David played, and blah blah blah, but I don’t want to hear it again. Do you?)

The sex may be laughable, but the violence is another matter. The infliction of pain is rendered in intimate and precise aural and visual detail, from the noise of cracking bones and the gushers of blood and saliva to the splattery deconstruction of entire bodies. But brutality is not merely part of Mr. Snyder’s repertory of effects; it is more like a cause, a principle, an ideology. And his commitment to violence brings into relief the shallow nihilism that has always lurked beneath the intellectual pretensions of “Watchmen.” The only action that makes sense in this world — the only sure basis for ethics or politics, the only expression of love or loyalty or conviction — is killing. And the dramatic conflict revealed, at long last, in the film’s climactic arguments is between a wholesale, idealistic approach to mass death and one that is more cynical and individualistic.

This idea is sickening but also, finally, unpersuasive, because it is rooted in a view of human behavior that is fundamentally immature, self-pitying and sentimental. Perhaps there is some pleasure to be found in regressing into this belligerent, adolescent state of mind. But maybe it’s better to grow up.

Watchmen Condoms

lol 163 mins, never seeing this

HOOS, it's not that he's saying comics OR television sucks, just that there's about three of each (Maus, Persepolis, Watchman/ Sopranos, The Wire, uhhhhh....) that always get pulled up as "SEE, THE MEDIUM IS IMPORTANT"; that's the fig leaf in question that distracts from the mountain of shit.
That said, I can't help but think that part of why watchfans are so reflexively 'nuh-uh!' about bad reviews for a film they haven't seen (even and maybe especially so when they're badly written) is that they come off as an indictment of comics and people who read them.
Watchmen is being held up as 'Adult Comics' and while that may have been somewhat true in '85, it's pretty much totally inaccurate now.

im so excited to never see this movie and hate it anyway

^^^ close to my position.

I was trying to describe the graphic novel to a couple friends who are pretty clueless about it and one of them was even unfamiliar with the term "graphic novel". I made the mistake of using the phrase "adult comics" and she immediately jumped to, "So it's like porn?".

i kinda didn't realize that this was co-written by Solid Snake.

I don't even like the original graphic novel. So with the trifecta of bad reviews from Anthony Lane, J. Hoberman and A.O. Scott (three critics I tend to read the most) I'm just gonna pass on the film in theaters. Maybe I'll Netflix it, or torrent it.

panned by mark kermode on radio 5 just now