Superhero Filmmakers: Where's Our Watchmen?

"bent on making a better world"

> a lone wolf tough guy bent on making a better world

That sounds more like you're talking about Veidt. Rorschach isn't really interested in that, is he? Only punishing the guilty

"They'll Cry out 'save us' and I'll look down and say 'no.'"

My favorite quote from Moore on Watchmen:
"The gritty, deconstructivist postmodern superhero comic, as exemplified by Watchmen, also became a genre. It was never meant to. It was meant to be one work on its own. I think, to that degree, it may have had a deleterious effect upon the medium since then. I'd have liked to have seen more people trying to do something that was as technically complex as Watchmen, or as ambitious, but which wasn't strumming the same chords that Watchmen had strummed so repetitively. This is not to say that the entire industry became like this, but at least a big enough chunk of it did that it is a noticeable thing. The apocalyptic bleakness of comics over the past 15 years sometimes seems odd to me, because it's like that was a bad mood that I was in 15 years ago. It was the 1980s, we'd got this insane right-wing voter fear running the country, and I was in a bad mood, politically and socially and in most other ways. So that tended to reflect in my work. But it was a genuine bad mood, and it was mine. I tend to think that I've seen a lot of things over the past 15 years that have been a bizarre echo of somebody else's bad mood. It's not even their bad mood, it's mine, but they're still working out the ramifications of me being a bit grumpy 15 years ago."

ya rly

where is Promethea movie lolz

That sounds more like you're talking about Veidt. Rorschach isn't really interested in that, is he? Only punishing the guilty

But punishing the guilty is his way of making a better world, isn't it? In the psychiatrist issue he says something about being free to "carve his mark into the world". It's true though that, even more than Rorschach, Veidt is a critical variation on V (right down to his name), his well-meaning idealism gone horrible wrong.

moore ain't the most humble dude on earth, but YES. the popularity of grim & gritty fin de siècle revisionism bugged the SHIT out of me in the 90s. especially when attached to a smirking kind of "punk rock" nihilist cool. especially when adopted by writers i liked for other reasons (morisson's invisibles, for instance, though he ended up doing interesting things within the approach).

^ nadir of this, so far = sin city (the movie)

Invisibles is amazing. Just on a structural level alone.

yeah, i ended up loving it. but i was very disappointed at first. thought he was working the "young! cool! hip!" angles waaaaaaay to hard. especially after the heart-on-sleeve humanism of doom patrol & animal man, which i LOVED.

especially when adopted by writers i liked for other reasons (morisson's invisibles, for instance, though he ended up doing interesting things within the approach).

Morrison has always been critical of "grim and gritty" though, hasn't he? Even in The Invisibles he had that one issue about the life of the henchman King Mob randomly shot down. And he was probably the first mainstream writer to mourn grittiness replacing old-school sense of wonder, in the final issues of Animal Man.

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^ nadir of this, so far = sin city (the movie)

Yeah, that was pretty awful. Though there wasn't really anything more awful in there than what Miller had already done in the comics.

but prior to the invisibles, i liked the fact that morrisson indulged the freedom offered by "new comics" post miller/moore to tell personal stories without pandering to what eventually became vertigo's house-brand gothpunk cool.

will defend miller's work because he's such a wonderful artist and because his style was HIS. whatever it may have pandered to, it always seemed like the product of a distinct, personal POV.

i've been pronouncing it "Vaydt" all this time btw boy is my face red

Well yeah, the first Sin City story was pretty awesome when it originally came out simply because Miller had managed to distill his whole style into something so pure and striking. But once he started putting out more and more SC stories it was pretty soon a case of diminishing returns. Also, the creative freedom he got after leaving superheroes behind also meant that he was free to explore all the ugly right-wing macho sexist tenets of his personality, which was pretty much what made me stop caring about his work.

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hey wait, why didn't Dr Manhattan just magic up enough food for everyone

The biggest problem/plot hole in the comic, even. So you have a dude who can do anything? So what's the trouble?

It's not a plot hole -- it's the plot!! It's precisely because Dr. Manhattan can do anything that Veidt feels he has to neutralize him; not just to get rid of his destabilizing effects on world security, but so human beings (and especially Americans) can rely on themselves and not their new God.

And Manhattan's reluctance to act is among the major moral issues of the book! It's not like it gets ignored.

Also, the creative freedom he got after leaving superheroes behind also meant that he was free to explore all the ugly right-wing macho sexist tenets of his personality, which was pretty much what made me stop caring about his work.

Abstracting the hard-boiled genre to the point of absurdity is definitely no job for a comic book.

you guys need to read one (1) run of miracleman

he's such a wonderful artist

lolz

Say what you will, the guy's got line and composition.

I really really really like Gibbons and I'll be damned if I can understand why that's lolworthy.

Oh wait, we're talking Miller. I'd defend his work too (most especially the daredevil/ronin style), but that's a whole other thread.

say whatever you want about his content, miller can draw. like oily sez, line and comp for days. pages look as good as anyone's

srsly how is this even in question?

How is what in question?

Saw this too late to sign up - http://www.futurecinema.co.uk

>you guys need to read one (1) run of miracleman

OTM. Moore's run with Veitch and Totleben is up there with his very best work. The Gaiman / Buckingham issues are excellent too.

Hahaha! I OWN one (1) run of miracleman! No, I'm not selling it.

Snap: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/film-reviews/film-review-watchmen-1003945726.story

"When one superhero has to take a Zen break, he does so on Mars. Of course he does."

sums up reviewer's BAD ATTITUDE imo

We pick up the relationships quickly enough, but soon realize these backstories owe more to soap operas than to superhero comics.

Haha, he hasn't read many superhero comics, has he?

get used to these reviews, i fear

variety less negative: http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117939777.html?categoryid=31&cs=1

To be fair though, if you can only understand the film in the context of having read a lot of superhero comics, it's probably not a very good film.

no kidding

The thing is, these aren't so much superheroes as ordinary human beings with, let us say, comic-book martial arts prowess.

YOU MEAN LIKE BATMANG FOR CRISSAKES?

The thing is, these aren't so much superheroes as ordinary human beings with, let us say, comic-book martial arts prowess. OH YEAH, AND ONE OF EM IS GOD.

okay that first review is lolleriffic

I would be more concerned about its negative tone had several easily-verified facts been correct.

there was a bit of a The Dark Knight backlash wasn't there - despite it's monstrous commercial success. Watchmen will probably get more hate and it certainly won't make as much money. maybe not as good a film either (wasn't really interested in The Dark Knight based on trailers and what i heard, for some reason).

> If you're not already invested in these characters because of the original graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, nothing this movie does is likely to change that predicament.

To be fair, this is about what I figured for any Watchmen movie.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3315/3308945971_1be5ba3b1f.jpg

I was talking about Sin City with my drummer the other day - we both agreed that, like 300, as a film adaptation of Miller's work its very true, and strikingly faithful. The problem is the source material is a bunch of beautifully executed crap. A quarter of the way through Sin City (after the shock of how well Miller's style had been translated to screen wore off) I remembered why I stopped reading Miller's comics sometime in the mid-90s: they suck.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3647/3308946249_d0800ae971.jpg

nice to see that David Hyde Pierce hasn't been typecast after Frasier.

loving the fake veidt ads

http://www.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/magazine/17-03/ff_moore_qa?currentPage=all

One thing is that with the comics medium, it has been proven—I believe by Pentagon tests in the late '80s—that comics are actually the best medium for imparting information to somebody in a form that they will retain and remember. That's not just me saying that, that's the Pentagon.