And that is a good thing. Because he is the talented one. So here goes:

Big apologies to Chris for it being so late – a recent bout of flu, laziness and an addiction to MMORGs seems to have mysteriously swallowed up all my time. But anyway – here’s my belated review for Watchmen (hopefully before it disappears completely from the top 10 – or before the next big event movie turns up).

If comic books are something you’re only dimly aware of and sneer at as
juvenile rubbish – the reading material of spotty geeks and social failures,
something with the literary complexity of Watchmen might come as something of a surprise. The book’s author, Alan Moore is something of a legendary figure in comics, one of the rare breed of writers who took a medium and turned it on its head and produced works of a rare standard that defy conventional genre categorisation.

Like V For Vendetta (the last of Moore’s books to be given the movie
treatment) Watchmen deals less in conventional drama than with viscerality and a heavy political subtext. Taking place in an alternate 1980’s where Richard Nixon is enjoying his fifth Presidential term and the United States is cowering under the very real shadow of nuclear annihilation from the Soviet Union, the world the story takes place in is a noir nightmare of whores, drug dealers and morally ambivalent antiheroes.

Against this grimy backdrop of violent demonstrations, child abuse, rape and murder – a group of unlikely superheroes (the titular Watchmen) prowl the streets of New York City, fighting a nightly battle against the thugs who inhabit it. What sets these characters immediately apart from the norm is that none of them (save one – more on that later) has any superhuman powers. This has the effect of removing the fantasy elements from the story and putting the emphasis very much on the psychology of the characters.

This isn’t your usual Peter Parker teen-angst stuff. The “heroes” of
Watchmen are at odds with everything that we’ve come to expect from the concept – ranging from the masked Rorschach – a monosyllabic psychopath who tortures and kills anything in his way; to Silk Specter – a insecure female crime fighter trying to adjust to fill her mother’s shoe; to the narcissistic Ozymandius – a former superhero turned billionaire
industrialist; and the Comedian – a sadistic rapist who, as one of the other
character remarks “is practically a nazi”. The Godlike Dr. Manhattan (the
victim of a freak accident involving a particle accelerator and a can of
blue paint) is the only one of the characters with supernatural abilities
and it soon becomes clear that these powers came at the expense of his
humanity.

If all that sounds like pretentious academic nonsense, well… it is. What I’m
saying in a nutshell is that Alan Moore is not your typical comic book
writer, and Watchmen is anything but the typical superhero comic book. The upshot of that however is that anyone expecting a conventional action superhero film like Spiderman or Iron Man is going to be disappointed (very very disappointed in fact) by this film.

And that’s really the problem with making a movie based on a work with such a narrow cult appeal as Watchmen. When you think about it its really amazing that the movie got made at all – as it must have occurred to studio execs that this wasn’t exactly something that lent itself well to mass appeal, or indeed to the inevitable round of merchandising that has become obligatory to major film releases.

So Watchmen: The Movie. Is it any good? If you’re a fan of the comic then
this is as faithful an adaptation as you’re likely to see. While there are
changes to the story which will likely generate hisses of outrage to rival
that of the Tolkien purists over the LOTR movies – its surprisingly faithful
to the source material down to the composition of some of the shots and the dialog. That’s certainly a good thing for the fans, less so to the
mainstream audience who will likely be scratching their heads as to what is
going on, or why they should care about any of it.

Having read the comic book myself relatively recently I felt the adaptation
was rather slavish, perhaps because I knew what was going to happen and
started to mentally check off the plot points in my mind. I didn’t dislike
it – but I didn’t really come away from the movie with much of a feeling
about it at all. Its certainly well directed, with the usual kind of
stylized violence that punctuated ‘300’ – director Zach Snyder’s last
comic-book adaptation (though thankfully with less of the painfully OTT slow motion).

Certainly I can see how people who hadn’t read the book could be easily
confused – why does Rorschach’s mask ripple like that, WTF is that purple
tiger thing following Ozymandius around? Ultimately these things are trivial
– and the true test of the movie’s success is whether or not it conforms to
the themes in Alan Moore’s novel. Thankfully it does, though there are cuts
(as I said) they are fairly economical and the 2 ¾ run time provides enough
detail to encapsulate the story.

Of course there are some big cuts, and this is what makes the movie rather
controversial in my book. Part of the reason people had been saying for
years that Watchmen could not be adapted into a movie was because the story itself was designed to take advantage of the format of the graphic novel.

The narrative is fairly dense – with stories within stories, excerpts from
books written by the characters – all of these are part of an overall
experience that is a celebration of the comic-book form.

To turn this into a live-action movie is not unlike trying to adapt a
Hitchcock film for the stage – you *could* do it, but why would you want to?

On the plus side – this is a very well directed, well-made movie with
pitch-perfect casting – but ultimately I found it a strangely hollow
experience.

You know, the stuff the studios end up cramming as extra features on the DVD for the collector’s edition.

Which is of course the stuff nobody but die-hard fans watch.

And we only watch it to distract from our disappointment because the comic graphic novel didn’t live up to our expectations.

I love the Watchmen comic graphic novel but am already utterly disappointed. No octopus monster. How dare they? Meh.

The cast of new movie ‘Watchmen’ say their comic-book based fantasy flick goes even darker than ‘The Dark Knight.’

WRONG!

Before I get into the meat of this – I should probably say that if you’re looking for insider info about upcoming movies and shit, you’re not going to find it here – and might want to stop reading about now. Nope – its not about that. Instead  I’m going to have a bitch about my disillusionment of Geekathon and being cooped up in a crowded meeting hall with a bunch of spotty teenagers and the balding, beer-gutted bespandexed man-children that they inevitably turn into.

So I get to NYC hellishly early on saturday morning after a late night spent watching Mad Max 1 & 2 on and off in between a marathon session of EVE Online and numerous cups of increasingly rancid coffee (something in the coffee brings out the beast in me). I looked not unlike this:

Needless to say I wasn’t in a terribly great frame of mind and after struggling through a line so large that it would have done justice to a Charlton Heston bible epic – I was about ready to go home again. Well maybe not… I had paid $40 for the ticket after all… and at mimimum wage that’s a good 6 hours work to pay off. So I gritted my teeth and plunged into the crowds.

Comicon is basically one big tradeshow for people who want to buy merchandise at special discount prices that still manage to be higher than what you can find online. On the plus side – many of the authors and artists are there so you can get your shit signed (for an extra fee). The down side of this is that to see stuff – you’ve basically got to navigate crowds and make constant apologies for stepping on someone’s cape or making accidental contact with someone’s private parts.

Anyway so yes – I saw some cool shit, a few people from TV shows and movies:

If you look real hard - you might make out Lou Ferrigno in the back

A few people might recognise this guy - John Noble AKA the batshit scientist on "Fringe" and the batshit king from "Lord of the Rings.

Even so I couldn’t help but find the whole thing strangely underwhelming. This might have to do with my going by myself – but I just couldn’t work up the enthusiasm to identify with all the tubby balding guys dressed as Jedis or overweight Batmen. Its not that I don’t like the material – I still enjoy a lot of the stuff I did when I was a kid – Star Wars, Batman, Spiderman, Buffy, Transformers – its all good. I just don’t get why mature adults insist on dressing up in strange costumes to go to an indoor comic sale.

I mean… Ming the Merciless is a cool villain and all, but you don’t see him navigating the dairy aisle at the supermarket or vacuuming his carpet.

I can’t explain why but it made me feel a little dirty, as if everyone around me had some weird sexual fetish and spent their free time wearing oversize diapers and doing coke of a prostitutes buttocks.

I felt a burning desire to reassert my masculinity and to distance myself from the deviants. So without further ado – here is my personal highlight from the NYC Comicon. And what a highlight it is…

Its sleazy I know but can anyone blame me? Look at that.... Just look at it!

I don't know what she's selling and I don't care!

In case anyone feels left out – here are some other pix in case a hot chick doesn’t do it for you.

I actually have no clue if this is new or not. You see, I live in a part of the world were we still have black and white television, have to get our asses off the sofa to change the channels, and only recently discovered the advantages of fire and the wheel. I tell you, that wheel thingie is quite handy.

via toys are evil