Superhero Filmmakers: Where's Our Watchmen?

did you take 3 minutes to actually calculate the size in inches of a movie screen?

give him some credit, it was 2 minutes

oh wait

6 looked liked a 5

I had to find out what the size of a movie screen was first!

ANYWAY.

I thought the mars clockamajig looked great! The only effect in the trailer that looked kinda shoddy to me was the Vietnam bit.

I'm cautiously stoked, but I don't blame anyone for being uber-skeptical about this at all.

dawn of the dead was a decent remake but i don't know why anyone need to see it, really. 300 was pretty retarded. this one could be good, it at least looks interesting, as i should hope it would.

this is kind of a shitty comic book anyways

out.

I'm wish Shakey and Pash and AlexSF. I wish this hadn't been made.

I look at it from the angle that, since it has been made, I am hoping for the best from it.

^

pretty much

For years, the MPAA has prohibited weapons from being pointed at the “viewer” in advertising, presumably for fear that it will freak them out. That’s why you always see guns pointed at angles on movie posters and in film trailers.

RONG!

http://www.klast.net/bond/images/ge_usadv.jpg

Thirteen years?

After a second watching, I am lolling at Dr. Sadface.

i agree that there is no point to this really and i've always been against the idea kind of in principle but now, i mean, the movie's made, i'm gonna check it out. i mean, i could rage about it all day but at this point might as well wait to see it first.

Yeah, what slocki and Ned and others said. Lots of things -- Lolita, Naked Lunch, etc. -- have been called "unfilmable" over the years, and yet decent movies have been made of them. Now, clearly Snyder is not Kubrick or Cronenberg. Hell. he's not even Ron Howard or something. But he's also not McG or Michael Bay or Brett Ratner; he appears to have some clue as to how to direct actors, and he appears to want to make the best movie possible of the source. I hope what appears to be an almost slavish desire for fanservice doesn't overwhelm getting to the meat of the story, but all I can do is wait and see.

i am going to enjoy the CGI show

i would forget about trying to enjoy this film as a representation of the book's story - total waste of time. but as a representation of and tribute to the book's visual ideas and style it should be good (people will complain about the effects realism no doubt - dem loons).

i agree that there is no point to this really and i've always been against the idea kind of in principle but now, i mean, the movie's made, i'm gonna check it out. i mean, i could rage about it all day but at this point might as well wait to see it first.

-- s1ocki, Friday, July 18, 2008 3:14 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Link

Yeah, that sums it up. I'm sure I'll go see it too.

Last night I had the thought that while Hollywood is crapping all over Alan Moore's no-adaptation preferences, I'd love to see a Miracleman/Marvelman film. It would be interesting to watch it gradually turn from slick and cartoony to grim and bloodspattery over two hours. It would be 500% awesome to see the Warpsmiths on screen. But the property is so tied up by that fuckhead Todd Macfarlane that it probably won't happen.

but as a representation of and tribute to the book's visual ideas and style it should be good.

except it looks nothing like the comic book...? the color scheme of the book is really bright and garish (duh, just like much of the comic book history the story references). and as for visual ideas its clear there's a ton of details that they've changed for all sorts of stupid reasons. Using comic panels as a storyboard /= tribute to book's visual ideas (actually its fairly cheap and lazy)

New Alan Moore interview at Entertainment Weekly:
http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20213004,00.html

He really does seem to be generous with his time for interviews when it's all about stuff he doesn't really give a shit about or would rather not think about.

except it looks nothing like the comic book...? the color scheme of the book is really bright and garish (duh, just like much of the comic book history the story references). and as for visual ideas its clear there's a ton of details that they've changed for all sorts of stupid reasons. Using comic panels as a storyboard /= tribute to book's visual ideas (actually its fairly cheap and lazy)

-- Shakey Mo Collier, Friday, July 18, 2008 3:36 PM (33 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

dude you need to chill on this

McFarlane owns Miracleman? When did that happen?

Yeah, this is news to me too.

In 1996, Todd McFarlane purchased Eclipse's creative assets for a total of $40,000. It has been suggested that McFarlane was mainly interested in the Miracleman rights; the rest of Eclipse's characters and properties were incidental, though he did not expect to keep them idle. McFarlane's plan was to reintroduce Eclipse's characters through two new Image Comics anthology titles, Todd McFarlane's Twisted Tales and Todd McFarlane's Alien Worlds. However, these were never printed and to date the only Eclipse character to appear again has been The Heap in McFarlane's Spawn title.

McFarlane clearly had plans for Miracleman, but had neglected to consult Neil Gaiman, the last person to have held part of the rights. In 1993, Gaiman had created the characters Angela and Medieval Spawn for McFarlane. Gaiman claimed that he had created them with the understanding that he would retain creative ownership of them, an ownership which McFarlane now disputed. His plans stymied, in 1997 McFarlane reached a supposed verbal agreement (and according to Gaiman, a written one as well) with Gaiman in which Gaiman would cede his half-ownership of Cogliostro and Medieval Spawn in exchange for which McFarlane would trade his rights to Miracleman. A subsequent letter from McFarlane to Gaiman would void this deal, if it ever legally existed, as McFarlane claimed that he already owned the two characters and pointed to a copyright notice on Spawn Issue 7 and cited them as the product of work-for-hire. He also stopped paying Gaiman royalties around this time for the action-figures and other items featuring the characters that were still in print. This was another of the direct causes for the legal action. At the time, no one was aware that the rights for Miracleman were not included in the purchase of most of Eclipse Comics' assets and both men believed that McFarlane held a large stake in Miracleman. That was a fact that would not become clear until after the lawsuit concluded. It turned out that McFarlane did, however, own two trademarks for Miracleman logos. Gaiman and Marvels and Miracles, LLC would take action to try to block him from being able to reregister these trademarks.

He's obviously a complete cunt, especially as he was always shooting his mouth of about creators' rights when Image first launched.

^^^for realz

I am super-pissed there is no collected edition of the stuff, and my brother has all the individual issues we bought as kids :(

slocki you don't understand, the thingy on the celluloid doesn't look exactly like 4-color glossy ergo THIS MOVIE SUCKS QED.

Wait...

So you're mad that, instead of faithfully recreating all of the comic book tropes that were recontextualized in the source material, they are recontextualizing the comic book movie tropes of the past 20 years? Do I have that right?

not exactly - I was pointing out that blueski's criteria for enjoying this film makes no sense

ie this film is not a tribute or homage to the comics' visual style

Oh, okay. I wasn't really paying attention to the part you quoted (lol).

I'd argue that the film is a tribute/homage to the inspiration of the comics' visual style (ie, repurposing the visuals of predecessors in its genre) but I wouldn't argue it very strongly.

that seems to be Snyder's excuse but yeah I don't find it very convincing

You don't find it convincing in that you think it doesn't work or you think he's lying about why they updated the costumes?

oh its probably a little from column and a little from column b

column A bah

40 grand for all of eclipse's creative rights sounds like a total fucking steal; I'm astonished that idiot hasn't done something profitable with it.

He caught Dean Mullaney's nuts in a vise at just the right moment. Eclipse lost their back issue stock in a flood in '93, Mullaney and Cat Yronwode divorced about the same time, and then there was the direct market collapse/speculator bubble-pop that shrank the whole industry.

not exactly - I was pointing out that blueski's criteria for enjoying this film makes no sense

representation of and tribute to != emulating or matching particularly

"40 grand for all of eclipse's creative rights sounds like a total fucking steal; I'm astonished that idiot hasn't done something profitable with it."

Not getting Miracleman sort of deflates it though.

T Ewing sez

I don't think its unfilmability has anything to do with "complexity" or flashbacks (?!) but with the way different narratives are laid on top of each other and interlaced - the juxtaposition of recurring images, dialogue, narrative text boxes that refer to different things on the page at the same time, etc. The comic revels in simultaneous and symmetrical narrative strains in a way that simply cannot be achieved with film (maybe it could be done with a lot of split-screening, which Snyder has apparently not bothered with...?) Moore deliberately exploited comics' unique potential as a medium.

I don't think the Lolita or Naked Lunch comparisons are particularly apt - Lolita is not particularly unfilmable in any way (it has a linear narrative and an unreliable narrator, both of which cinema is well equipped to handle). Naked Lunch is, strictly speaking, nothing like the book, and succeeds because it was made by a master director with the input of the author and largely just uses the text as an inspiration for imagery juxtaposed over the author's own autobiography. The thing is, both of those novels were considered unfilmable due to their sexual content and not because of any structural complexities - neither of them is a book about books (a la Nabokov's "Pale Fire" or Calvino's "If On A Winter's Night a Traveller" is) in the way that Watchmen is a comic book about comics.

I mean someone could've made a movie of Lolita or Naked Lunch at any time - the problem is they would've been censored and/or banned.

shakey can you just wait till you see the goddamned movie before you disprove it

lol, obviously no!

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/31478

Shakey read that link to Tom's piece and, you know, think a bit.

Nicely condescending, Ned.