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Author Topic: Watchmen  (Read 41377 times)

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Brentai

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Re: Watchmen
« Reply #220 on: March 07, 2009, 12:42:39 PM »

WHO WATCHES THE BUILDERS LEAGUE?

Clearly, not OSHA.

Hollis Mason doing a Fred Savage voiceover throughout the thing probably would have helped.  He's basically in the story to explain the main themes in very small words for the thickies.
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Sharkey

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Re: Watchmen
« Reply #221 on: March 07, 2009, 01:20:50 PM »

I liked it, aside from two major complaints.

The action scenes were too damn long. They were infrequent in the book and treated with only a few panels each. It's pretty clear that (in the comic) they were intended to be short, brutal, realistic and have painful and immediate consequences. It was a stark contrast to the violence portrayed in mainstream comic books where, say, Spiderman or whoever gets punched across the city every two panels. The film could have stood out as just as much against recent comic book movies if its fights weren't drawn out into ten minute long Matrix bullet-time spinning kick bullshit with the occasional graphic compound fracture (which, disturbingly, always earned cheers from the people I shared the theater with.) This is a pretty textbook case of what the kids call "missing the fucking point."

Worse, that fault stands out painfully against my second complaint: I don't care if cities are destroyed by blue explosions or a giant vagina squid. If anything, I might actually prefer the way it played out in the film. What pisses me off is that millions of people die, and it gets less screen time and exploration than, say, Night Owl spending a year and a half slow-mo dropkicking inmates while walking down a prison hallway. That squid bluesplosion is the climax of the film, and needs some serious attention to convey the actual gravity and consequence of what happened. Hell, the depiction of the carnage was one of the longest, most inconsiderately brutal parts of the book, and it was absolutely needed. The film gives us a few seconds to look at a hole in the ground, and then we're back to guys knocking each other through walls. It's completely fucking backwards.

I'm heard some of the rationalizations for both of these things, and honestly, I think they're retarded. The way the brutality and violence was handled in the film undercut much of the point of the damn thing.

Hell, it's pretty much stated that the Comedian doesn't put up much of a fight against Veidt in his apartment, yet for some fucking reason we watch those two go at it for what feels like hours. It makes me a lot less sympathetic about any of the rest of what was lost from the film when shit like that should have been the absolute first thing to go. Fuck, it never should have been there in the first place.
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Catloaf

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Re: Watchmen
« Reply #222 on: March 07, 2009, 02:29:32 PM »

The only defense of action scenes that I can think of is that they look really unrealistic and crazy.  So much so that it's saying:  "Hey!  The idea of a superhero as it's ingrained in our culture is as ridiculous as a fight between two normal human beings turning out like this!"
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Brentai

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Re: Watchmen
« Reply #223 on: March 07, 2009, 02:44:50 PM »

I dunno, one of the scenes from the GN that really stuck with me was the one where Laurie and Dan get jumped by maybe two or three small-time thugs, and between the two of them they just barely manage to avoid getting their asses stabbed to death.  It really drove home how not-so-fucking-uncanny the Minutemen really were.  If there are really flying bullet-time kicks all over this film then they have well and truly grabbed the wheel of the piece and started speeding the car in the other direction.

Then again, maybe I should just watch the thing.
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Arc

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Re: Watchmen
« Reply #224 on: March 07, 2009, 03:30:37 PM »

You'll have a ball with the film. Dan & Laurie face-off against nine thrasher hoods, explosively breaking open elbows, jabbing knives into their necks, and using corpses as bullet-proof cover, all while entirely missing the violence - as - sex metaphor (complete with lighting up a cigarette when finished) that the novel intended the scene to serve as.
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Norondor

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Re: Watchmen
« Reply #225 on: March 07, 2009, 04:41:39 PM »

Alan Moore proven right, world stunned

he knew the movie would be violence-glorifying trash because of his SNAKE MAGIC
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Kazz

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Re: Watchmen
« Reply #226 on: March 07, 2009, 05:40:28 PM »

don't you people understand

good movies don't draw audiences

slow motion punches do

i'm not going to see this film.  or any film, ever again.
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Ocksi

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Re: Watchmen
« Reply #227 on: March 07, 2009, 05:50:58 PM »

I was happy about the action scenes.  Completely out of place?  Sure.  Way too long?  Yeah, the Veidt/Comedian fight especially bothered me because Veidt didn't just uppercut him through a window.

But it's been years since a movie held the camera still long enough to actually see someone throw a punch.  I was happy they didn't take the way too common fast camera shifts that are in every movie with an action scene since I don't know when.

EDIT: actually, this was something I noticed earlier in the movie, especially the first scene with the original Silk Spectre.  Snyder seemed to keep the angle-moving down a lot; he seemed way happier having the dialog appear just as it did in the frames it was lifted from, than to have it shifting the camera away from the room.  I liked it!
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Bongo Bill

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Re: Watchmen
« Reply #228 on: March 07, 2009, 05:52:22 PM »

I maintain that a bit of spectacle now and then never hurt anyone (aside from the odd stunt man). It's a very tall order to take something like Watchmen and try to turn it into something that can serve as both the many-layered deconstruction of the source material and as the popcorn that the most visible layer seems to require. I'm not convinced that the medium could support it, not least because cramming twice your daily recommended value of clever symbolism into every scene works so much better when you can take it at your own pace. I don't think that you can make a good and successful movie with as much subtext as Watchmen had; if some of it has to be cut, and cutting it fundamentally means going against the themes of the source material, then it should at least be cut in the most visually interesting way.

Maybe they were right to call it "unfilmable." If this movie fails to capture the essence of its source material, it was not for lack of talent or appreciation, which is more than can be said of most adaptations. I'm going to go watch it again.
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Thad

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Re: Watchmen
« Reply #229 on: March 07, 2009, 05:54:02 PM »

entirely missing the violence - as - sex metaphor

I don't really think it did.

Not that it's a good scene, but it's pretty obvious they're turned on at the end of it.

But it's been years since a movie held the camera still long enough to actually see someone throw a punch.  I was happy they didn't take the way too common fast camera shifts that are in every movie with an action scene since I don't know when.

Except the parts where they did.
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Norondor

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Re: Watchmen
« Reply #230 on: March 07, 2009, 05:59:52 PM »

Maybe they were right to call it "unfilmable."

It makes me slightly sick that there's a word like "unfilmable" in the world. it doesn't have to be filmable, it's a comic book. in fact, nothing is filmable, or at least nothing should be besides things that start out as films. they, films, are not like other things and they shouldn't be made of things that don't want to be films. fuck the world, i swear to god.

also i had to edit the word "flim" so much while i was writing that short post that it's not funny.
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Rico

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Re: Watchmen
« Reply #231 on: March 07, 2009, 06:46:47 PM »

Maybe they were right to call it "unfilmable."  If this movie fails to capture the essence of its source material, it was not for lack of talent or appreciation, which is more than can be said of most adaptations. I'm going to go watch it again.

I'm going to call bullshit on that, because while parts of the movie strove to be almost stupidly-faithful to the comic book, they also went way out of their way to not only overemphasize comic-book violence as has been noted repeatedly here but they even CHANGED THE ENDING.

I propose that if they appreciated it all that much they could've at least filmed the damn story as it appears in the damn book.
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Catloaf

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Re: Watchmen
« Reply #232 on: March 07, 2009, 06:49:26 PM »

entirely missing the violence - as - sex metaphor

They should've cross cut the battle and the overly long sex scenes together into one much more entertaining and suggestive scene that probably wouldn't seem time excessive.
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Brentai

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Re: Watchmen
« Reply #233 on: March 07, 2009, 07:12:04 PM »

oh god schtupping to the burly brawl theme

gotta try that next time
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jsnlxndrlv

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Re: Watchmen
« Reply #234 on: March 07, 2009, 07:43:59 PM »

Seconding Bongo Bill here.  When you're reading the comic, you can take as much or as little time as you'd like going over each panel and page.  The book's contents may provide the raw material for the message you take away, but the actual shape of that message is cut from the patterns of your attention.  That's why my memory of the book has the vaguest synopsis of the Black Freighter's story as well as a glossed-over squidsplosion; meanwhile, I seem to recall Hollis Mason and the other Minutemen occupying a much larger portion of the story than they probably did.

So while I'd agree that the violence has a disproportionate representation in the movie, I wouldn't consider that unfaithful to the source.  I must have reread the Rorschach/Big Figure section three times before I actually finished the book.  The book may not have fetishized heroic violence, but it didn't need to; the reader himself could do that just fine with the book as-printed.


I guess I just don't understand the objections to the word "unfilmable".  Stories move between media all the time; it seems like the use of words to describe the relative difficulty of a story's translation from one format to another is inevitable, if not laudable.
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Bongo Bill

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Re: Watchmen
« Reply #235 on: March 07, 2009, 09:49:54 PM »

A good story can be adapted to any medium, but there's more to Watchmen than a good story. It used comic-book techniques for which film has no suitable equivalent. Snyder did a bang-up job making up the difference, but there are some places where it just doesn't work. I don't know how much of it is attributable to celluloid not being ink versus how much to Zack Snyder not being Alan Moore, but I think that losing the squid made up for a lot of Hollywoodish indiscretions. I don't mean like the choreographed fights; more like the oil executives scene.

It's pretty clear, if you're looking for it, where they cut out the things that will be restored in the director's cut; I anticipate that those things will make up for a lot of the problems with the theatrical cut. For instance, we'll care a lot more about what happens to New York when we've met Bernard and Bernard; Ozymandias and Comedian just needed more screen time than was available to show them being something other than a complete monster or a complete douchebag; Rorschach's particular worldview didn't get exposed well enough because we hardly got to see his shrink at all.

Despite his portrayal, the movie has managed to make me more sympathetic to Ozymandias. His long-term plans are still as much a subject of controversy as before, but short-term, the movie made it clear that he prevented an apparently otherwise unpreventable nuclear holocaust. In the book, at least for me, the significance of that tended to get lost among all the rhetoric.
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Mongrel

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Re: Watchmen
« Reply #236 on: March 07, 2009, 09:52:10 PM »

It's odd the way that works, since the book CONSTANTLY references impending nuclear armageddon.
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Bongo Bill

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Re: Watchmen
« Reply #237 on: March 07, 2009, 09:53:37 PM »

Possibly significant, revealing that we all deal with impending extinction in different ways, and for me it's denial. Or something.
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Brentai

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Re: Watchmen
« Reply #238 on: March 07, 2009, 10:02:33 PM »

Part of the plan involved creating the scenario in which nuclear holocaust was an immediate threat.

Arguably if he hadn't done half the crap he did he wouldn't have had to do the other half.
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Mongrel

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Re: Watchmen
« Reply #239 on: March 07, 2009, 10:09:04 PM »

Well, the Ozymandias side of that debate is that he only accelerated matters.

That the world was going to hell was one of the main points of the Crime-Busters scene, after all.
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