comment #1

astrophore says ...

Read O'Hehir's rave in Salon. He's one of the best critics working today. Doesn't mean he's right about Watchmen, but I respect him.

comment #2

EDouglasCS says ...

Kris Tapley is a "fanboy"?

comment #3

actionman says ...

i fucking HATE this "fanboy" nonsense

comment #4

Deathtongue_Groupie says ...

Does anyone else get the feeling that when summer arrives, Jeff's still going to be posting negative Watchmen reviews?

Oh, wait, forgot about Star Trek, which means this all him just warming up for the big Jeff Vs. The Fanboys battle royale that's to come.

comment #5

CitizenKanedforChewingGum says ...

Jeff Wells: With Watchmen, the fanboys may be winning the battle, but this summer they will lose the war!

Btw, the term "fanboy" has become such a tired cliche shortcut term that it's practically lost all its meaning anymore (and I'm not convinced it had much to begin with). On another board, I actually saw someone being accused of being a "Fellini fanboy." While that was actually pretty amusing, the word has just become a meaningless parody.

I won't use it anymore.

Well...except to explain that I won't be using it anymore.

comment #6

mrNo says ...

Yawn....this is getting boring. Snyder made a great film out of an "unfilmable" piece of source material. The flick is great and says much about the future of adult genre fare.

comment #7

Deathtongue_Groupie says ...

I think I finally understand Jeff's fanboy issue - he understands he is being left behind by even the "cool kids" now.

At my screening yesterday, there were was a group of late 30's guys seeing it together. Each one was about as anti-fanboy as you can get in terms of appearance. One was the epitome of a jock - in great shape (he had jogged to meet the others) and, according to my wife, ruggedly good looking. So much so I had to suppress a chuckle when he started talking about spells and potions.

Yep, that's right - the entire macho tribe knew each other from sort of online "EverQuestr" type MMORPG game.

I think this explains Jeff's "takedown" approach to this stuff. Lacking a way to appreciate it unless it rises above the general genre level, he attacks it in an attempt to look superior to it. Because each one is a reminder of how more and more marginal the kind of films he prefers are becoming. I say this as an observation and not in a pejorative way.

Hence, the post's title of "Late to the Table" is pretty ironic.

comment #8

Gordon27 says ...

"I think we can blame the woeful, stomach-churning, cringe-worthy failure that this is on the frothing-at-the-mouth fandom that scared Snyder and company away from being creative"

I don't think that's fair; when has Snyder ever shown that he can be really creative? I mean, obviously, yeah, he wasn't creative here, but nothing else he's done has been creative or original; it's all just been hyper-stylized.

comment #9

Zac Bertschy says ...

Calling someone a "fanboy" means 'you liked it and I didn't and I can call you that to dismiss your opinion without actually defending my own or engaging you on any sort of intellectual level'.

The term used to legitimately mean "you'll mindlessly defend whatever genre trash you're into without recognizing any of its flaws". Now it's just what people who don't like [popular movie based on popular character] will call anyone who liked it.

comment #10

D.Z. says ...

Dunno if I'm a "fanboy", since I actually *don't* like Alan Moore's comics. And yet, every time I see these adaptations of his, I end up appreciating and "getting" his take more than that of the hacks who don't have the cajones to deliver on the concepts which made the original work so powerful. Oh, and that still goes for AHOV, even though I'll do the New Beverly a favor and mention the screening w/ the writer tomorrow.

Deathtongue: You don't have to worry about Star Trek, since every one's gonna hate that one, and watch Wolverine instead.

comment #11

Manitoba says ...

Leah Rozen in the March 16 issue of People gives Watchmen one and a half stars out of four. She calls it "often tedious" and concludes it "will please fervent fanboys but leave the rest of us wondering what the fuss is all about." Mention is also made of the "excessively gory violence." Jeff, I'm looking forward to checking out your chat with Tony Gilroy. If my memory is correct ,he is one of the sons of Frank D. Gilroy, Pulitzer Prize winner for The Subject Was Roses.

comment #12

Pinko Punko says ...

Star Trek will do OK.

Jeff doesn't like when he thinks there is unsophisticated pre-loaded excitement because I think he forgets that a lot of people don't see 20 films a month, and people start at the bottom of the ladder. Crap is universal, then after crap some people will also make time for non-crap. This is the way of a big chunk of the audience.

comment #13

BurmaShave says ...

If only it were that simple. Jackie Earle Haley's Rorscach is legendary. Some of the filmmaking is first-rate. The Dr. Manhattan flashback is one of the better sequences I've seen in ages. Pretty much everything related to Manhattan, and Crudup's performance, was outstanding. Jeffrey Dean Morgan's Blake is the people's champion. Makeup, cinematography, visual effects, all world-class.

And yet couple that with Patrick Wilson's one-dimensional Dan Dreiberg, who should be hanging out with Dwight Schrute and Michael Scott. Malin Akerman, gorgeous, but with a performance that wouldn't cut it on an episode of HOUSE. . Matthew Goode, clearly just sleepwalking until he gets to audition to play James Bond, is unforgivable. Fucking with so many little things for no reason. NIXON. Nixon fucking looking like Marv's dad and not being remotely like Nixon, but some half-assed cartoon. Jesus christ.

The grimace-inducing music cues. With the exception of only one, the All Along the Watchtower one, because by then I realized the movie was completely retarded and just smiled.

It it were simply awful, that would be easier to take. But this is something much more heart-wrenching.

comment #14

D.Z. says ...

http://www.darkhorizons.com/interviews/1386/zack-snyder-for-watchmen-/

comment #15

BurmaShave says ...

I would say fuck you DZ for your random links, but that was basically related, and also, holy shit, Florian Von Donnersmarck is directed THE 28TH AMENDMENT? Which is still alive?

comment #16

frank_delsa says ...

Excuse me, Nixon not looking like a realsitic Nixon is reatrded? How? Maybe you didn't realize that Watchmen's world is highly stylized, and a Naturaltistic" approach would be utterly wrong. As if Dave Gibbons art were "naturalistic" in the first place. And I know that there are people out there who think that, but I normally assume they're high on crack, or were high on crack when they read the GN.
And seriously, if the movie is "retarded" then the graphic novel is retarted, because 95% of the original Moore's work is up there on screen. And if you count The Black Freighter cartoon, and the extra footage that will be in the director's cut, then the percentage rises.

comment #17

Rich S. says ...

Just got out of a 9 a.m.(!) IMAX showing. I liked it quite a bit, in fact, more than I thought I would.

I can't speak with detachment, since I've read the comic at least twice. But I thought it was an excellent translation of the source material. Jackie Earl Haley as Rorschach of course comes off the best, but I also thought Billy Crudup did an excellent job with Dr. Manhattan. He gave the character a depth I wasn't expecting.

Everyone else was also pretty good, with the exception of Malin Akerman, who reads her lines like Marcia Brady. But I got to see her naked 70 feet tall, so that made up for a lot.

If there are any real problems with the movie, they are the same as the source material. The movie loses steam just about any time Dr. Manhattan, Rorschach or the Comedian aren't involved, particularly in the second half. And it wraps up far too quickly.

The ending is about as good as can be expected, even if it doesn't hold up to fifteen seconds of examination. But that's not the filmmakers' fault. After he created the world and fleshed out the characters, I don't think Alan Moore particularly cared much what happened with the plot. It shows in its translation to the screen.

I thought Zack Snyder did about a B+ job. There are a couple of extremely unfortunate musical cues that really stop the movie in its tracks. The biggest mistake he makes is making the first fifteen minutes, particularly the credits sequence, so strong that he has trouble living up to it the rest of the time. Had the whole movie been as strong as the credits, it would verge on modern masterpiece.

So, I would highly recommend it for anyone who's read the comic. Recommend it to genre fans. Urge caution to slavish fanboys who worship the squid. And give it a mild recommendation with caveats to everyone else.

comment #18

George Prager says ...

The colossal box office failure of WATCHMEN is going to give the studios pause. One superhero per movie is enough. And if that superhero isn't BATMAN or SPIDERMAN, then you should pass (IRON MAN being a fluke).

comment #19

CitizenKanedforChewingGum says ...

Nice to see you're open to new cinematic experiences, George.

comment #20

George Prager says ...

It made what MISSION IMPOSSIBLE made in its opening weekend...13 years ago.

comment #21

nemo says ...

Are people really pretending not to understand what "fanboy" means or claiming it's a meaningless word?

For a refresher course, see William Shatner on SNL encouraging Star Trek fans to get a life. Or Triumph the Insult Comic Doc interviewing people at a Star Trek convention.

"But I got to see her [Malin Akerman] naked 70 feet tall, so that made up for a lot."

Well, that should help make up for the loss of the squid in its tentacled glory.

comment #22

nemo says ...

Oops, those were Star Wars fans standing in line that Smigel a.k.a. Triumph was interviewing.

comment #23

Deathtongue_Groupie says ...

Rich S. - sentiments about Alan Moore's ending exactly. Which is also true of most of his stuff that I have read - interesting characters set withing worlds that have been researched to death, but never seems to deliver an equally engaging ending. The removal of the squid helps the film work better in the naturalistic tone Snyder goes for.

I wonder if the Saw movies are the reason they changed Rorscach's backstory. It was the one thing that bothered me about his depiction, because it was not in character.

George - where did you get to see a R-rated MIssion: Impossible that opened in March and ran nearly 3 hours?

comment #24

George Prager says ...

These WATCHMEN apologists make Palin's defenders seem sane.

comment #25

Kyle_D says ...

"And seriously, if the movie is "retarded" then the graphic novel is retarted, because 95% of the original Moore's work is up there on screen."

Film is a different medium than the graphic novel, and what works in one doesn't necessarily work in another. That's been Moore's own point all along. It doesn't matter that the content is the same, because the feel of one compared to the other is completely different.

Did you hear My Chemical Romance's pop punk cover of Dylan's "Desolation Row" over the film's end credits? It illustrates the same point. Each version follows the same chords and same lyrics, but as done by Dylan, the song is a classic. As done by My Chemical Romance, it's a disposable piece of junk.

The most successful adaptations usually don't try to follow the plot scene by scene; rather, they get creative and use the medium's strength's to recapture the mood and ideas of the original. Notice how the credits sequence is pretty much the only universally praised sequence in the film, and it's the only sequence that's liberated to bring it's own ideas to the table and present them in a way that's not slavish to the narrative structure of the original graphic novel.

The central posits of Watchmen have always been "What if we treated superheroes seriously, rather than with banal reverence? What would be the actual ramifications of their existence in our world TODAY?" Snyder's reverence for the material was true to its narrative, but in direct opposition to the ideas that made the original work so compelling. I would have loved to see what Paul Greengrass would have done with this material.

Grading the film on its own terms for what it set out to do, I'd say it's only okay. Snyder never comes close to capturing the gloom of impending armageddon that permeated the graphic novel. That's a byproduct of cutting the all the everyday peripheral characters and Tales of the Black Freighter, but it's a reason the ending doesn't register the way it should on screen. That should have been a sequence with the same "holy shit" punch-in-the-gut impact as the baptism assassinations at the end of The Godfather. Instead, it's disturbing easy to shrug off, so you start to pick apart the logic. The actors never seem to be on the same page; some play it straight, some err on the side of camp, while poor Malin Akerman just seems lost at sea. Goode lacks the star power to sell his role.

But...I was never bored. I never hated it, but I never particularly liked it. I was completely indifferent to it, which is about the worst response a Watchmen movie should elicit.

comment #26

frank_delsa says ...

First of all that's not Moore's point AT ALL.
Moore's opposes any adaptations of anything, no matter how faithful or loose.
Secondly, I'm sorry, but The Chemical Romance Desolation Row cover is pretty different, so, not only it doesn't illustrate your point because they're actually using the same medium Dylan used, it doesn't illustrate it because they're not being faithful. They're taking liberties.
The subtext of the lyrics though, it's the same. So, if you're criticizing the lyrics, you have to come to terms to the fact that you're criticizing Dylan as well, not just The Chemical Romance.
My position on adaptations is very simple, you can be faithful or not, that's just a creative choice, it doesn't mean anything in terms of quality.
Personally, I think keeping the whole thing in the alternate 80s, is a ballsier choice than set it in contemporary times, simply because by divorcing it from the issues "du jour", you add an universal element to the whole affair.
I personally also think that the squid wouldn't necessarily work in the movie, and the different ending actually adds some interesting elements to it. Some complain about the lack of carnage in New York, it doesn't really bother me. I do agree that the there's something that feels a bit rushed. A. It's not a deal breaker for me, B) It seems pretty obvious that the director's cut will tackle that.

comment #27

corey3rd says ...

saw a matinee this afternoon using my "2 free Pink Panther 2" tickets from the DVD boxset.

About 1/3 of the crowd wandered out halfway through the film.

What mattered most about this film is seeing Jackie Earle Haley getting hardcore in prison. Kelly Leak was kicking ass in the cafeteria line. He ought to be playing Seth Rogen's role in Paul Blart 2.

comment #28

boltbucket says ...

"About 1/3 of the crowd wandered out halfway through the film."

An entire THIRD of the theater walked out?

That's bullshit and you know it.

comment #29

CitizenKanedforChewingGum says ...

"I would have loved to see what Paul Greengrass would have done with this material."

Careful what you wish for. The chances are equally good (if not better) that it would have been an absolute disaster than a cinematic masterpiece.

Yeah, the film version sort of hedges its bets. But at least it is still recognizable as Watchmen. For better or worse, Greengrass's would not have been -- I'm not even sure why he would want to retain that property's name for his original concept.

comment #30

George Prager says ...

You can't shine shit.

comment #31

CitizenKanedforChewingGum says ...

So what comic book movies have you enjoyed, George?

comment #32

corey3rd says ...

It was around a third. It didn't help that in a theater that seats 200, there might have been about 40 people in the room. about a dozen people wandered out and didn't come in.

Also the horrifyingly bad and loud version of Desolation Road cleared out the room fast. There wasn't as single person sitting there swearing they were going to watch all the credits as a sign of respect to the filmmakers.

comment #33

Kyle_D says ...

Sorry, but it is part of Moore's point.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/herocomplex/2008/09/alan-moore-on-w.html

From the above article: "Moore said that with "Watchmen," he told the epic tale of a large number of characters over decades of history with 'a range of techniques' that cannot be translated to the movie screen"

Secondly, while they are working within the same medium, the cover does illustrate my point insofar that pop punk is as different from folk as film is from the graphic novel, as animation is from live action, etc. The chords and lyrics that resonate in one form won't in another. Play Moonlight Sonata on a piano and its beautiful. Play it on a clarinet, not so much. In a similar way, an ink brush and a movie camera are different instruments. Snyder tries to hit most of the same beats and uses the same words that work in the graphic novel, but they don't resonate on screen.

My point would be that you can go faithful, but only when the effectiveness of the storytelling isn't tied to the strengths of the medium. In the case of most great works, it is because the medium is as endemic to the message and its interpretation as the message itself. It's a creative choice that has an ENORMOUS bearing on the quality.

comment #34

George Prager says ...

TJ O'Pootertoot

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0S2rGXaCEk

comment #35

D.Z. says ...

frank: "I personally also think that the squid wouldn't necessarily work in the movie,"

If Abrams was fine with the idea a year ago for Cloverfield, Snyder can do the same thing.

bolt: "An entire THIRD of the theater walked out?"

I can vouch for a significant number of walk-outs at my theater.

comment #36

frank_delsa says ...

Well, I once heard a wonderful Heavy Metal cover of My Way, but that's beside the point...

Moore says: "I chose to tell these stories as comic books, because I feel that the best way to tell them, and that's that." Not just Watchmen, but any of his stories...Of course there are interviews with him made in the late 80s in which he expresses quite a different point of view, and he's quite exicited about a possible film adaptation of Watchmen, but this is beside the point too.
The point, my point, being that Watchmen is instead highly cinematic. Not everything can be translated easily of course, but most of it, yeah, it can. The Naked Lunch, for example, as a book is waaaaaaay more complicated to adapt, and requires many more changes, even to its structure in order to do so (and David Cronenberg did a mighty good job at it, by the way). But Watchmen is, first and foremost, a decostruction of the superhero figure by means of a noir-ish/science-fiction whudunit. Of course there's also a layered political subtext, but, my point is, that political subtext is in the film too. And the movie worked as a movie, for me. It's an imperfect, highly ambitious, dense, and visually striking piece of cinema, and let me underline "Cinema", and I'm flabbergasted at people dismissing it as the work of a hack, or a moron, or whatever it's trendy to call Zack Snyder these days.

D.Z., I actually enjoyed Cloverfiled a lot, but the tone and feel Snyder was after in Watchmen was different. The squid would have been too much a WTF.

comment #37

D.Z. says ...

frank: Cronenberg didn't adapt a damn thing from Naked Lunch. All he did was use its style to talk about the Beat movement in general.

comment #38

CitizenKanedforChewingGum says ...

D.Z. Author Profile Page says ...

"I can vouch for a significant number of walk-outs at my theater."

They were probably attempting to watch it in a theater without you.

comment #39

D.Z. says ...

Kane: Nope, they were trying to watch it without being repulsed by the characters.

comment #40

jamesD says ...

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comment #41

Gordon27 says ...

"I can vouch for a significant number of walk-outs at my theater."

I am 100% sure that it was because DZ kept shouting things at the screen
when they played 'The Times They Are A Changin'", DZ said, "Hey, Wonder Boys failed because it used too many Bob Dylan songs!"
When The Comedian got beat up, DZ said, "Hey, this is from a Shaw brothers movie!"
When Rorschach appeared on screen, DZ said, "What is this, There's Something About Mary?" [note: I don't understand what he meant either]

It got really annoying, so people left.

comment #42

D.Z. says ...

Gordon: Nope, I didn't say anything. But nice try.

comment #43

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