Go to Making Light's front page.
Forward to next post: Through Darkest Boston….
Subscribe (via RSS) to this post's comment thread. (What does this mean? Here's a quick introduction.)
Warner Bros has a blog for the upcoming Watchmen movie, and it’s getting me all excited. I know, I know, Hollywood will probably get stupid all over it, but dude! Check out these photos of the backlot, showing gritty old 1985 NYC recreated in Vancouver! If anything, it’s grittier than I remember, more like the NYC of the ’70s. But it does really look like New York City, which Dave Gibbons’s drawings never quite managed.
You can click the photos for larger versions. This one shows Alan Moore’s favorite character, the newsvendor, at his stand. Look at the details: the poster for Tales of the Black Freighter, and over on the wall you can see one for the Pale Horse concert. (Though I also see that they’ve gone without the alternate-historical car designs, and have moved the newsstand to Grand Central from north of Madison Square Garden.)
The other photos show the Gunga Diner, the Treasure Island comics shop, and a Nixon re-election poster with some familiar graffiti.
(Via Curbed.)
Zac Snyder's attached as director, and while I didn't see 300, his Dawn of the Dead remake was a giant heap of stinking poo. But those pictures do look really incredible. I'm restraining my excitement, but looking forward nonetheless.
Cory Doctorow once suggested that the Star Wars prequels are much more entertaining if you switch on the Italian dialogue track and pretend they are operas.
In the spirit of that idea... it looks like, at the very minimum, we should be able to buy the Watchmen DVD, capture a series of still frames, add balloons with Alan Moore's original dialogue, and pretend it's a really excellent photocomic version of the original.
I'm cautiously optimistic... but, then, I haven't dared to watch the Hollywood versions of any other Alan Moore comic. My understanding is that I haven't missed much.
Oh, holy shit. I know that location. Any second now, that tough redheaded dyke is going to be showing up.
TNH 3: The WAP one screaming "Fight back wimmin!"? Gods, I hated her!
Very strange . . . they're really, really close, but there are a few odd notes.
The street isn't dirty enough. A little more debris, some cracks and seams.
The sidewalks aren't cluttered enough. There needs to be a garbage can and a bin for newspapers. And a pile of collapsed cardboard boxes. Scabs of blackened chewing gum.
The utility pole is too dirty. The building above the "Burlesque" sign is not weathered enough.
Oh, I see they have a trash can, but it's in the wrong place.
* * *
I thought the set-up parts of Watchmen were great. But somewhere in there it just became another superhero comic.
sigh. i wish we (vancouver) had a subway for real.
as for the movie, yeah, hopes not high. i'm sure i'll end up seeing it one way or another.
Stefan, what? Watchmen never stopped being something extraordinary. Moore and Gibbons were doing things with the interactions of text and panels that nobody else in superhero comics was doing, and they kept it up through the whole comic.
Also, the mere fact that they've included the newsvendor (and the comic-reading kid) is a big piece of evidence in favor of the proposition that maybe this movie won't suck.
#8: It's been many years since I read it, and now that I'm more comic-literate I'll probably give it another read (view?) with more of an eye toward the meta-components, but I'll stand by my disappointment in how the *story* played out.
ethan @ 1: Well, judging by 300, I think Watchmen stands a chance of being excellent. There were scads and scads of things I didn't like about 300, but they seemed to come from the source material itself, not the screenplay (caveat: I never read the comic, so I could be totally wrong.) The direction and cinematography, on the other hand, were quite good. If he sticks with the story as it was written, and gives the visuals the same attention and care he gave in 300, it seems very possible that Watchmen will be amazing.
Sidenote: The contrast between 300 (the starkest of black and white) and Watchmen (infinite shades of grey) seems calculated to inflict maximum ontological whiplash.
Though on reflection, I'm starting to fear that maybe the reason Snyder likes them both is that he doesn't see the subtlety of Watchmen. Shit. That would be a tragedy of a film.
Stefan Jones @ 10: "I'll stand by my disappointment in how the *story* played out."
It's hard to imagine a less typical ending for a comic book than one where gur rivy znfgrezvaq'f cyna vf npghnyyl rkrphgrq pbeerpgyl, naq gur "urebrf" ner nyy ba gur eha be qrnq. But maybe that's just me.
So many Hollywood movies fall through... I keep hoping this one will fall through. Watchmen is such an amazing work (Stefan, you are just wrong on this one), that I really, really hate that a film will sully it.
Any chance the film will be good? I can't imagine it. So I just hope it'll never exist. (Sorry to people who'd like to see it... but just reread the book. Really.)
Looks like it's going to happen though. Damnit.
Oh, and I miss the alternate-historical car designs. One of the (many, many, many) pleasures of Watchmen was the ways in which Moore showed the world changing due to the presence of one Superhuman... spelled out at times, but shown more than spelled out, and the showing worked really well.
Grump, grump, grump.
Stephen Frug @13
Look on the brighter side. Maybe it'll be a flawed-but-interesting exercise, of the _V for Vendetta_ kind, rather than a total-bloody-unmitigated-disaster of the _League of Extraordinary Gentlemen_ stripe.
No film can equal that book. But it might be good enough to get people to read the real thing.
#13: "I really, really hate that a film will sully it."
Even though I didn't care for how the story turned out, I can understand why an adaption would seem futile, or offensive; it's the execution of the form that makes it the masterpiece that many consider it to be . . . its use of a complex medium.
Jimmy Corrigan is a pedestrian, sad, maybe even mean-spirited story about a pathetic shlump, but Ware's spare use of the medium is masterful. I don't see if an adaption -- to animation, say -- would be worth doing.
Alan Moore was on "The Simpsons" recently, and wasn't too happy about corporate spin-offs. Sample here.
Heresiarch #11: Though on reflection, I'm starting to fear that maybe the reason Snyder likes them both is that he doesn't see the subtlety of Watchmen. Shit. That would be a tragedy of a film.
Yikes. There's a new kind of horror. And the man certainly did not understand the subtleties of Dawn of the Dead, or maybe understood them and didn't care for them. That might be worse.
Stephen Frug #13: I really, really hate that a film will sully it.
No matter what the movie does, the comic will remain unchanged. It won't be sullied.
Watchmen did something subtle with what was, in many ways, the traditional style of colour comic artwork.
If, on film, you keep expecting Kojak to walk around the corner, they might have captured that disconnect. It shouldn't be quite the real New York: it should be the fictional New York of a TV show as the backdrop to something different.
If I might take Lord of the Rings as an example, the movie succeeds where this movie seems to be succeeding, in the visual creation of a world. Where Lord of the Rings failed was in scripting and, sometimes, directing. Peter Jackson seemed to me to be struggling with the battle scenes. Some of the scripting changes (Arwen instead of Glorfindel) made cinematic sense, but maybe weren't followed through (Here's the lady who faced down the Ringwraiths, and in the later films she wimps out). Others (Faramir) make some kind of sense, but still manage to break things (Compare Faramir's temptation to Boromir's: I can see why PJ diverged from the book, but it didn't quite work as he filmed it).
And Peter Jackson didn't see it as just another job. Partly because the book is so well-known, and has been around for so long, he was one of many somewhat obsessed people involved.
That alone makes LotR hard to match. But any cinema adaption which is, to the director, just another job, is going to seem wanting. There's got to be some sort of specific passion, rather than just a tick-the-boxes construction of a blockbuster.
The sets do look good from the pics. I would say woe be unto anyone who screws this up, though. Between people who love comics and read the book yearly, people who do not love comics but love this comic, to the comic book guy who lives in some of us more vocally than others, well, if you screw this up you get the wrath of them all and nobody will go see the movie after opening week-end because everybody will have heard or read about how you screwed up 'The Watchmen.'
But any cinema adaption which is, to the director, just another job, is going to seem wanting.
Surely this is true of any movie at all, adaptation or not?
Alan Hamilton @ 17:
[checks out link]
"Watchmen Babies in V for Vacation"?
Oh. My. God.
There are times I really miss having access to US television, and The Simpsons in particular...
ethan @ 21
Surely this is true of any movie at all, adaptation or not?
Of course, but it will be a lot more noticeable to a lot more people with an original work of great passion to compare it to. And, as Dave Bell points out, passion can often make up for failures, or at least lapses, in execution. And passion can even make up for total wrong-headedness on occasion: consider that the movie "Starship Troopers" doesn't completely suck as a movie, while it does almost physical damage to the book it's based on.
Time to dredge out my favorite Diesel Sweeties episode, back when Suzie and Clango were getting together: Wisdom on movie adaptations of comics
... if you screw this up you get the wrath of them all and nobody will go see the movie after opening week-end because everybody will have heard or read about how you screwed up 'The Watchmen.'
I wish that were true, but you're living in a fantasy. Holliwood doesn't care. They made Daredevil, and they're still making movies like Ghost Rider.
"Custodieting" brings up the wrong image - the Avram Plan for Rapid Weight Loss - custard for breakfast...?
Starship Troopers was a weird case. The director took all of Heinlein's themes and turned them inside out.
Heinlein was writing a novel about an idealized war, World War II told in metaphor, where the human race, its soldiers and government, was 100% in the right, and our enemies were just plain wrong, wrong, wrong.
The movie was, philosophically, a mess. Sometimes the movie seemed to be praising the soldiers, sometimes damning them. The hero was, well, heroic, but Barney from "How I Met Your Mother" was a freaking Nazi.
In an interview with Paul Verhoeven, later, he said that he was trying to show how the regular soldiers are heroes in service of their country, who are exploited by cynical and evil governments.
If that's the case, it didn't show in the movie, and he'd have been better off adapting "The Forever War," which is closer to the themes he pretends to espouse.
Still, "Starship Troopers," the movie, was an entertaining summer blockbuster. And here's an interesting bit of trivia: Did you know there wa a science-fiction novel with the same name, by Robert A. Heinlein? Perhaps someone would like to make a movie of that sometime.
Take with the usual wikipedia grain of salt:
A report in an American Cinematographer article contemporaneous with the film's release states the Heinlein novel was optioned well into the pre-production period of the film, which had a working title of Bug Hunt at Outpost Nine; most of the writing team reportedly were unaware of the novel at the time. According to the DVD commentary, Paul Verhoeven never finished reading the novel, claiming he read through the first few chapters and became both bored and depressed.
vian @ 15... Maybe it'll be a flawed-but-interesting exercise, of the _V for Vendetta_ kind, rather than a total-bloody-unmitigated-disaster of the _League of Extraordinary Gentlemen_ stripe.
I wouldn't call League an unmitigated disaster. Mitigated, yes, aside from everything that happens in Venice, but the original graphic novel was a big mess too. And there was no way they could have kept Fu Manchu in unless he was played by Nicholas Cage.
peter @ 22 - torrents.
Is that Rorschach in the last pic? Run for your lives!
I sell a lot of books - comic and otherwise - and no matter how good or bad the film is, in my experience the writer of the original work always wins.
In all the cases mentioned above - V for Vendetta, Starship Troopers, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - where the films were vastly inferior to the source sales of the source books increased dramatically after the release of the film. Fans of the books who were enthusiastic about the films before their release told their friends after the films turned out to suck exactly why they had been enthusiastic before. Word of mouth quickly spread that the books were worth reading. Hardcover reissues of the two Moore titles raced out the door and the paperbacks of all of them haven't really slowed down much.
I think it was Terry Pratchett who said that he didn't mind if a film adaptation of one of his books was rubbish. If it was good people who hadn't read the book might be inspired to read it. If it wasn't, the people most disappointed would be the ones who had already read the book and even then some of the people they said "The book was so much better..." to might still want to see what all the grumbling was about. Either way sales of his work could only go up; readership can only increase. A good adaptation would, of course, be preferable but the only people likely to be hurt in the long run by a really bad adaptation are the ones who make it.
Huh, it looks like the bar next to the Nixon re-election poster features Grain Belt Beer. Was that ever available in New York?
I'm with Avram--mildly optimistic.
Zack Snyder directed my favorite movie of the decade thus far, Dawn of the Dead. However, I'm inclined to credit my love of DotD more to the writer James Gunn, than to Snyder. Gunn went on to write/direct Slither (Nathan Fillon vs. space beasties) which I thought was really good. 300, on the other hand, didn't do much for me. It was certainly very pretty.
So, my take on Snyder is that he's capable of consistently producing stuff that looks really nice. I don't think he has much of an ear for dialogue or a particularly strong sense of pace. That puts a lot of the burden for Watchmen on the writer, David Hayter and, perhaps, on the film's final editor (If that isn't also Snyder--I don't think we know yet). Hayter did the screenplays for the first two X-Men movies, which I thought were OK. Unfortunately, I think a project as intricate as Watchmen is probably out of his league. He'll probably turn in something serviceable that touches most of the obvious bases, but I'm not hoping for much more.
On the commentary for Dawn of the Dead, Snyder comes off sort of oafish. For that reason, I strongly doubt that he has any real appreciation for the sight gags and little touches that made Watchmen such a masterpiece.
Following the success of 300, the studios hosed Snyder down with money to make this one. It's going to have to perform outside the genre audience in order to turn a profit. I'll be curious to see what the trailers look like; that'll probably be what determines whether Snyder goes on to make his rumored Army of the Dead (1) or goes back to making car commercials(2).
The studio evidently likes what they see so far. They've just given Snyder more money to film Tales of the Black Freighter for inclusion as a DVD extra. That may or may not be indicative of anything.
Personally I predict Watchmen will be watchable but nothing to write home about and will underperform.
1. Zombies, yes. Sequel to DotD, no.
2. Snyder directed the Nissan(?) commercial that's playing in the opening sequence of DotD while Ana and what's-his-name are showering together.
I wonder if the set will remain standing after filming is over. No doubt it will depend on who owns the land and how much Warner Bros is paying to rent it, but there might be enough demand for a replica New York in Vancouver, especially if it looks like real streets rather than an unconvincing backlot. The fact that it can be redressed for any year back to 1938 should also be an advantage.
Paul Duncanson @ 30
The people who see the film also lose. You'll never get those two hours back.
John Cusack plays Rorschach, right?(*) Who plays Doctor Manhattan?
(*) Say that sentence fast 50 times in a row.
Faramir's near temptation to take the Ring still stands out as something just fundamentally wrong about the movies. He was the only normal, human character who was offered the ring, but was wise enough, and strong enough, to resist it's lure. (No, Aragon isn't normal, so, don't even go there.) Faramir's refusal, in the book at least, basically showed that the human race could rise above the pursuit of power.
As for "300", it's the epitome of war porn. The movie portrays Leonidas and the 300 spartans as the only ones strong enough to fight the persians. whereas in reality, the Spartans refused to fight during the battle of Marathon, and the Athenians pretty much defeated the Persians all on their own. The movie portrays the Spartans as the only ones really willing to fight, whereas in reality, 70 city-states had formed an alliance, and many of them had contributed troops. The movie portrays the spartans as fighting alone, whereas in reality, the Athenian Navy blockaded the Persian Navy and was the only reason a land battle was possible. Without the athenian navy, the persians would have simply have sailed past Thermopylae and landed troops behind Leonidas. The movie also portrays the Spartan who lost his eye as giving the Greeks a great pep talk at the Battle of Plataea. In reality, Aristodemus was the spartan who lost his eye and was sent home by Leonidas. He was received as a coward by Sparta and suffered shame and humiliation. At the battle of Plataea, Aristodemus fought with a suicidal recklessness and got himself killed. For that, Sparta removed the black mark from his name, but refused to honor his actions because they said it is more honorable to fight but want to live. (funny, they didn't think the same thing about Leonidas.) And probably most annoyingly, the movie keeps having the Spartans talk about "freedom" and "justice" and manages to minimize that it is King Leonidas, not President Leonidas.
The backlot photos break one of Moore's rules. The phrase "Who Watches the Watchmen" never appears in its entirety in the comic. Whenever the graffito appears, it is obscured in part.
I know Alan Moore has completely turned his back on anything Hollywood is doing to his source material, but has he maybe said something about this?
I'm in the "mildly optimistic" camp. I *really* liked the DotD remake (and I couldn't sit through the original--for me what made the remake work was its fast-paced fun action and the comedy in it which was just WRONG and awesome), but I also liked both Slither and 300. Come to think of it, I liked 300 mostly for the visuals (the story couldn't be more minimalistic) and Slither for the campy horror story. And for Captain Reynolds, of course. So if anything, this take on Watchmen will look awesome. I really want to believe that they'll make it work, too.
I checked on IMdb.com: Manhattan is played by Billy Crudup who, I presume, will wear some kind of clothing, unlike the comic-book's character.
Provided the movie's Big Secret is the same as the comic's, it seems to me that they should have a cameo by Robert Culp.
#3 You got the "liberated wommin". I commuted to Herald Square and got the "Where it's at! I got two turntables and a microphone" man--except it was "brimstone, bibles and a microphone."
And there was the pudgy little guy who, during rush hour evenings, strode furiously against the crowd heading for the subway. He wore normal office-type clothes, and a blonde man-wig and lots of white concealer under his eyes. He would shout as he struggled along, one leg off the curb, one on: "Get out of my f*ing way! It's a two way sidewalk, motherf*rs!" No one ever raised an eyebrow (or made room for him).
Like Scott (#32), I love the DotD remake (especially when viewing it on its own merits, as opposed to comparing it to Romero's flick), but I firmly give the credit there to James Gunn. Anyone who was disappointed in Mystery Men owes it to themselves to get ahold of The Specials, in which Gunn (directing, writing, and co-starring) shows exactly what that movie should have been.
As far as Snyder goes, I do give his 300 credit for capturing the feel of the Miller comic. Then again, I think it takes a lot less work to capture the feel of Miller than of Moore and Gibbons.
Greg London in 36 --
"By some chance, the blood of Numenor runs nearly true in him, as it does in his other son, Faramir"; Faramir, who dreams true dreams and gets messages from the gods, is hardly a normal human in the sense that, say, Barliman Butterbur is a normal human. (He isn't even a particularly normal instance of what Aragorn is the epitome of, but that's what he's standing in for; you're supposed to think that once there was a whole people like this, and Sauron killed them.)
Watchmen never quite worked for me; it's brilliantly executed but the underlying hinge or hook or whatever, the thing that makes the story go, never meshed for me, I think because I disbelieved the premise of the plot.
26: "Heinlein was writing a novel about an idealized war, World War II told in metaphor, where the human race, its soldiers and government, was 100% in the right, and our enemies were just plain wrong, wrong, wrong."
Actually, we're never told why the humans and Bugs are fighting. It could be that the Bug got a translation of one of those political hygiene classes and decided to fight a prophylactic war or the humans attacked them in the name of living space. Or something else.
Isn't pretty much the first thing we see a terror raid on the Skinnies?
Greg London #36 wrote "No, Aragon isn't normal, so, don't even go there."
I suspect the people of Zaragoza, Huesca and Teruel might find this a little unkind.
At some point in the past decade's spate of comics adaptations I came to feel that, in general, love of the original characters and stories was a good reason to stay away from the movies (not to say there haven't been some high points.) I had low expectations of the Watchmen adaptation, and expected to skip it.
But those sets do look very good. For now, I'll hold out some small hope that I might be pleasantly surprised.
I agree that it's Moore and Gibbons' use of the comics medium that made Watchmen the tour de force it is, But I'm also impressed by the characters and story, and there's no inherent reason those things couldn't translate to a movie.
Greg@36: I am totally with you on Faramir. The first half of the Two Towers, I was magnanimously ready to forget everything I thought Peter Jackson was screwing up in movie one. Then they get to Faramir, who is suddenly all, we're taking the Ring and these hobbits back to Gondor, and my head whipped round and my brain was all, "Nuh-uh, you didn't just do that."
I came out of Two Towers foaming at the mouth. I had a huge crush on Faramir, and oh, man, turning him into Not-Quite-Boromir, Mk II, ARRRRRGH!
Movie Sam to Movie Frodo in Osgiliath: "We're not supposed to be here, Mr. Frodo!"
Hordes of book fans: "No sh*t, Sherlock."
Funny that people brought up Starship Troopers...I just watched it the other day for the first time since I hated it ten years ago. And loved it. It's a fascinating movie. I have little interest in reading the original novel; Verhoeven's "bored and depressed" comment about sums up how Heinlein makes me feel.
I had heard that there existed people who liked the Dawn of the Dead remake, but I thought they were myths. I found that movie incompetent, offensive, and nonsensical on pretty much every level. And I'm perfectly capable of liking remakes and adaptations independent of the source material.
Actually, we're never told why the humans and Bugs are fighting [in Starship Troopers]. It could be that the Bug got a translation of one of those political hygiene classes and decided to fight a prophylactic war or the humans attacked them in the name of living space. Or something else.I haven't read Heinlein's novel and I know that the film is widely regarded as a complete travesty of it, but, for what it's worth, in the film the war is triggered by human colonists establishing settlements inside the "Arachnid Quarantine Zone". The Bugs respond to this encroachment on their territory by firing a meteorite at Earth, destroying Buenos Aires.
Non-SF graphic novel adaptations have been excellent movies, and that's all I can judge on because I haven't read the originals. Ghost World, Road To Perdition, and A History of Violence were all well done movies.
Steve C. #50: Ghost World is one of the best adaptations ever, in my ever-so humble. There's a lot in the book that's not in the movie, and a lot in the movie that's not in the book, but the spirit is beautifully intact. It's like a different story in the world of, or the same story in a slightly different world, or something.
I, too, was offended by the distortion of Faramir. But after the Star Wars and Indiana Jones references, not to mention the snowboarding and the stupid dwarf-tossing joke, I had lost my respect for Jackson. So though it was bad, it wasn't quite as shocking as it might have been.
But wait...the really annoying Star Wars stuff wasn't until the third movie, so I guess that wasn't a factor.
#3 - That's exactly what I thought. For me it was the psychiatrist arguing with his wife--I *know* when and where that happens, and it adds a certain sadness to the picture.
Wow, I didn't even know Road to Perdition was a graphic novel. It was a great movie.
#31 - Calton Bolick
Grain Belt was never in NYC.
Info on Grain Belt here.
Love, C.
So, no Grain Belt in NYC? Heck, this is alternate reality so who knows? Maybe Doc Manhattan's existence changed that aspect of things too.
Serge:
I'm visualizing a scene:
Dr Manhattan: You will have Grain Belt in your bar from now on.
Bartender: Now wait a minute, buddy, you can't tell me what to....(trails off, noticing an apparently long-present Grain Belt tap behind the bar).
Dr Manhattan: It was not a request.
I really enjoyed the LOTR movies (geez, we might as well start on brtn, mc vs pc, and srl vs plstn next). But one thing I never worked out was *why* he changed Faramir as he did. Most of the other changes made at least some kind of time or story or marketing or something sense, but I didn't understand that one.
I'm amazed that various people thought of Starship Troopers as an even minimally appealing movie; I didn't get much out of it on any level at all. Two hours I won't get back, as someone else said.
Heresiarch (12), what you said. It's a terrible moment in terms of what's happening in the story, but I still remember my joy and amazement, and my discovery that I'd been unconsciously bracing myself for something stupid to happen there.
It was only partly that famous bit where Bmlznaqvnf says:
"Qb vg? Qna, V'z abg n Erchoyvp frevny ivyynva. Qb lbh frevbhfyl guvax V'q rkcynva zl znfgre-fgebxr vs gurer erznvarq gur fyvtugrfg punapr bs lbh nssrpgvat vgf bhgpbzr? V qvq vg guvegl-svir zvahgrf ntb."What really did it, though, was Ebefpunpu's reaction right afterward, where Moore uses a subtle expository trick. Avtugbjy's reaction is to immediately declare that he doesn't believe it. Ebefpunpu's reply is something you just don't see in comics (and please forgive me for inaccurately quoting from memory): "No. He's telling the truth. Look at him. Listen to his voice."
Moore is invoking a judgement you can't make by looking at comic book panels and word balloons. In order to process Ebefpunpu's statement -- which is in the imperative and doesn't specify its recipient, making it a command to the reader as well as to Avtugbjy -- you have to pause, drop into CGI-of-the-mind mode and imagine how Bmlznaqvnf's delivery convinces Ebefpunpu that he's telling the truth. In the act of creating that reconstruction, you are yourself convinced of the truth of it; and you simultaneously experience the moment as Ebefpunpu, realizing in horror what Bmlznaqvnf has just said.
Great immediacy. Great force. Zero opportunity for the reader to unconsciously formulate objections to this extravagant scheme.
As far as remakes/reimaginings go, I can only hope that the upcoming Tin Man miniseries isn't as grotesque a heresy as Farmer's Barnstormer of Oz, which portrayed Glinda the Good as a munchkin slut. I am, however, prepared for my hopes to be dashed in that regard.
Does anyone else find it odd that George H. W. Bush is on the set?
(on the far right of the newsvendor pic)
How can they do a reimagining of OZ without explicitly licensing the rights from MGM? The books can be ripped off (if there's no one as feral as the GTTW publishers, against THE WIND DONE GONE), but the film characters? Hmmm.
Watch me go off on tangents!
1) The movie _Two Towers_: we hates it, precious, hatessss.
2) Re: _300_: I've never seen it nor read it, and so can't say whether this was added in the adapting. But apparently the movie is a grossly inaccurate and thoroughly vile piece of work.
Which did at least give rise to this unspeakably brilliant lemonade.
Ethan @ 48: I had heard that there existed people who liked the Dawn of the Dead remake, but I thought they were myths. I found that movie incompetent, offensive, and nonsensical on pretty much every level.
You were mythtaken. I exist (Atlanta, not Fabletown), and have the PNH/TNH/JDM number of 1 to prove it.
Just curious, though: why "offensive?"
Adam Lipkin @ 41: All this DotD talk has infused me with a hankerin for some sprint zombies. If you're in the area, swing by. I'm making popcorn.
Mary Dell @ 62: Does anyone else find it odd that George H. W. Bush is on the set?
He's on his way to sponsor the Keene act.
Teresa @ #59: Yes, you are so so dead on the mark with that.
But there is more to it, also. It's the events that immediately follow that which make it unique. You see, they're forced to consider the possibility that he is right.
More comments later when I am not at work and have time to write at length and rot13.
#37; Just because they show the whole thing in the photos and have it on the set, that doesn't mean it'll all be in frame or otherwise unobscured on camera.
But that certainly is something to consider when translating it to the screen.
Yes, yes, we know, they cut out Tom Bombidill and all of Tolkien's songs! Look, the movie's already 10 freakin' hours long as it is. To include everything Tolkien wrote in a film of LoTR, it would have been, well...
Peter Jackson: What I'm envisioning is an epic, 16 hour long musical with singing hobbits!
studio exec: ...
Watchman will be more of the same, because a 12 hour, existential murder mystery with superheros would be just as marketable as a 16 hour, epic musical with hobbits. Only it will have a more conventional vision because, well, Zack Snyder is directing instead of Peter Jackson, Terry Gilliam or anybody else, really.
The film will be watchable. Maybe even exciting. People who have never heard of Alan Moore and think Archie is the biggest thing in comics will enjoy it. Wingnuts will alternately wet themselves over the Cold War imagery and fume over the fact that Rorschach beats the crap out of the Comedian, who is a stand in for every Neocon fantasy they ever had. It will disappoint the fanboys and no one is a bigger fanboy of Alan Moore than Moore himself.
But a year after the movie's come and gone and the DVD has come and gone, the graphic novel will still be sitting on your shelf, right next to From Hell and your Alan Lee illustrated three volume set of the Lord of the Rings. And it will still have all its pages intact.
Now I want to write a story where the characters are actually named Ebefpunpu, Avtugbjy and Bmlznaqvnf.
Mary Dell #62: Holy crap, that does look just like H.W.! ...hey, wait, did you photoshop that? Good hack, getting it onto the studio's website.
Scott H #66, re the Dawn remake: why "offensive?"
There's an awful lot of the kind of macho nonsense that makes me very uncomfortable (and that Romero wouldn't have put up with*), and a lot of woman-hating. I seem to recall a lot of crypto-gay bashing, too. I don't remember the details well enough to discuss them in any depth (I haven't seen it since it was in theaters), but I was very viscerally repulsed when I saw it.
Also, running zombies are an abomination, but that doesn't fall under "offensive," I guess, unless we're talking aesthetically, which I wasn't.
*Until recently, that is--Land of the Dead had a lot of it, too, which was a breathtaking letdown coming from him.
Keith@70:
I can't remember a scene where Rorschach beats up the Comedian. When does that happen?
The DOM* in me is waiting for the film adapation of Lost Girls. Probably be a loonnnnggg wait.
*Dirty Old Man
It's been a while since I've read Watchmen, so I'm probably misremembering two scenes as one. Rorschach does beat up a lot of folk though, so it would be likely that the Comedian would be one of them. And he certainly deserves it...
Correcting Keith at #70 and who beats up the Comedian -- it's actually a plot point, so don't read if you haven't read Watchmen and care how it ends.
SPOILER (rot 13)
Nqevna Irvqg (Bmlznaqvhf) jub orngf hc gur Pbzrqvna (naq gbffrf uvz bhg n jvaqbj).
I just bought my own copy of "watchment" last weekend, and read it pretty much in one go. I read it first about 10 years ago when I was a student, and enjoyed it but it didn't make quite so much sense. The complexities of the ending are much more apparent, also the people I thought were heros first time round are much less so reading it for the second.
Does that mean I'm pretty much grown up now?
It would be nice if there was a thread we could discuss the comic book without having to avoid giving away the ending.
On that note, post 75, Keith- no, your wrong.
Reading "Watchmen" this time, the bits that didn't quite mesh (yet didnt really spoil the story) were the physios and science and putative science and technology advances.
As for Heinlein, I read startship troopers as en enjoyable romp, as a teenager, and took it as glorifying the army way of doing things. Now years later I see it as a weird half creature, sort of propaganda, sort of a story, but ultimately nothing more than gun porn. Right wing Heinlein defenders I have run into online sometimes try and claim it is nothing of the sort, but I think Heinlein knew well enough what he was doing, and if he wanted to write something that showed up the military mindset in the way that many people think he was trying to do with "Starship troopers", he would have done so. Instead, we have somthing that in my experience has the general effect of propaganda etc on teenage boys.
Keith @ #71, characters with those exact names all appear in a recently unearthed epilogue chapter of Pel Torro's _Galaxy 666_. Be sure to keep an eye out for the Author's Revised Edition due out in trade paperback early next year.
I saw Matthew Goode in The Lookout recently and thought he was a terrific actor, and the stills look very very good.
But I still have a bad feeling about this.
Also, can anyone here direct me to modern comic books that are doing stuff that is groundbreaking, interesting to read and also a bit thought provoking?
I mean like "Watchmen" and "V" were apparently ground breaking and are also thoguht provoking to myself, as well as being good stories. Its just they came out 20 years ago. Someone must be doing good stuff these days.
I enjoyed Starship Troopers. I thought the way the movie was taking tired old SF cliches and turning them backwards and inside out was really quite subversively clever.
(The deadpan outrageousness of the "propaganda recruiting video" segments, in particular, just killed me. I mean, seriously - you have to wonder how many people actually realized that the movie was getting them to cheer for a totalitarian regime.)
Plus, I know a lot of people thought it was incredibly cheesy, but to me it came across as a loopy, canny self-awareness and enjoyment of the corn and cheese going on that's very similar to Sam Raimi's treatment of Westerns in The Quick and the Dead.
Both the directors (Verhoeven and Raimi), in my opinion, spent the whole shoot of their respective films giggling behind the camera. I can get behind that.
guthrie @80:
Daniel Clowes does great, stuff. His Eightball series and the various novels that have been serialized in them are bitter, ironic, weird and a lot of fun, though not superheros, except for The Death Ray which is sort of a super hero comic.
A friend of mine has been raving about the current Thunderbolts series as well. it follows a bunch of Marvel Villains who are used by the Government as a Black Ops team. Of course, they all have their own agendas.
Hellboy also is great stuff.
But then, as you pointed out, I'm just flat out wrong, so what do I know?
What got me most riled up about Starship Troopers (the movie) was the idiotic way they had of portraying military operations. I mean, would anyone expect those orbiting starships to be bunched up a few hundred meters apart, to be picked off by slowly rising balls of CGI? And no countermeasures?
And those wussy machine guns the troops had?
No credibility.
Steve C. #83: I think the reason for that is that the movie was meant to look like bad military SF, not like anything a real military would do. I took it to be deliberate.
But then, one of the things I find most interesting about that movie is that its viewpoint is very ambiguous; it's hard to tell if it seems like satire because I want it to be, or because it is. Or what the difference is.
dfguthrie @ 80: Also, can anyone here direct me to modern comic books that are doing stuff that is groundbreaking, interesting to read and also a bit thought provoking
I don't know about "groundbreaking", but I love Love LOVE Supreme Power by J. Michael Straczynski of Babylon 5 fame.
It's kind of a Marvel knock-off of some DC stalwarts in a more, uh, realistic environment. Superman Hyperion gets snatched away from Jon+Martha about 5m after he lands in and is raised by the military. Batman Nighthawk hates whitey because rednecks killed his parents. And so on.
I've also been getting a lot of mileage out of the Fables series. The idea here is that all the fables got chased out of their magic lands by A Mysterious Adversary and have set up housekeeping in NYC. Snow White runs the town for Mayor King Cole, Bigby Wolf is sherriff, etc. It's not up to the level of Alan Moore / Neil Gaiman, but it's pretty good stuff.
Speaking of Alan Moore, I actually do love League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and consider it his best work since Watchmen. Ignore the movie of the same name.
Bruce @ 34: No, you don't get the two hours back but I did say "in the long run". In most cases, no matter how bad the film, the two hours isn't completely wasted. For a good film, the time is well spent for the entertainment and this might also be true for a really, really, really really bad film (Plan 9 bad). For everything in between, everyone seems more than happy to spend many more than two hours discussing what was right and wrong with the film and we all seem to derive some kind of pleasure from the discussion.
As for Faramir, I'm going to have to side with Jackson a bit. Without more character development or exposition than would be practical on screen, Faramir's ability to utterly resist temptation by the ring makes him hard to believe in as well as making the ring seem a less credible threat. If he can resist it for no apparent reason it can hardly be the all-consuming evil that threatens the entire world that it is made out to be. A small detour so that he can see the evil of the ring and thus choose to resist it for a reason is a small price to pay.
guthrie @#80: Alan Moore's still doing good stuff. Neil Gaiman's Sandman isn't new but isn't ancient and is very very good.
You'll find a lot of good stuff if you browse through the Eisner Awards.
Serge @28 And there was no way they could have kept Fu Manchu in unless he was played by Nicholas Cage
Well, maybe if they'd totally rewritten the thing and gotten rid of !@#$%^ Tom Sawyer (because, you know, Americans need an accent to relate to, apparently), they could have afforded Cage. For starters.
Part of my deep aversion to the movie is, I admit, the fact that despite being a prime opportunity, it totally failed to be steampunk. Yes, I know that wasn't a major theme of the comic, but there wee lovely little touches all throuh it. But it was a mess in a bad way, where the comic was rollicking and disjointed in what was, for me anyhow, a 1940s-serial way. YMMV and probably rightly so.
Anyone read the Black Dossier yet? Any good?
I think the Dawn of the Dead remake is brilliant. The opening sequence, with a night's worth of missed warnings, is a tour de force, and the movie has a ton of good stuff after that, too. I think that it's overall a better movie than the original, actually (something that for sure isn't true of the Night of the Living Dead remake). (The original has no moment so purely satirical and revealing as the montage to Richard Cheese's cover of "Down With the Sickness".) 300 was a stunning production in the service of a crap story. Even factoring in his avowed use of homophobic cliches in 300 design and other far-from-swell considerations, Snyder's earned my suspension of judgment until I know a lot more than I do now...but I must say, that production design wins, regardless of what the rest of the movie turns out to be.
Keith #70: Rorschach beats the crap out of the Comedian
As much as I giggle over the thought of John Birch beating up David Horowitz, I think you're confusing Rorschach with Hooded Justice. (Or possibly someone spoilerish, as Zvi pointed out in #76.)
guthrie #80:
Have you read Gaiman's Sandman comics yet? I'm not a big comic consumer, but they're by far the best I've read (I read V for Vendetta and Watchmen, too), and some of the best literature I've read in my life. Amazingly good.
Wow, imagine still having *that* ahead of you.
hehee. Keith #82- I was refering to the Rorschach comment, I should probably have been more specific.
Sorry, Albatross, I also have "Sandman". And the first few "Authority" collections. (although glancing through the newer ones in Forbidden PLanet, they seem a bit more normal and dull.)
Your comment about imagining having that in front of you reminds me that all too often I am merely looking for another emotional/ intellectual hit from a story. I'm addicted!
I've also read some Hellboy, it was ok.
Thanks for the suggestions, I shall look them up.
Finally, talking about "Starship troopers" reminds me of "Armor" by John Steakley. The first half is pure Heinlein knock off, albeit more cynical. The second half, once you have struggled through to it, kind of works, and goes a little way towards redeeming the first half.
In re recent good comics: here are some mini-reviews by me. Some more recommendations from me might include Alan Moore's "Top Ten," now collected, more of Darwyn Cooke's recent revival of "The Spirit," (an ongoing series), some of Kurt Busiek's "Astro City" (I like v.2, "Confession" and v.4, "The Tarnished Angel"), Busiek's "Secret Identity," (my personal favorite of the last five years), and some of Jeff Smith's "Bone" (don't miss v.2, "The Great Cow Race,").
I'm a big fan of the Paul Dini/Bruce Timm animated "Batman" (still showing on Cartoon Network 2 and around on DVD).
You might also want to check out Avram's livejournal. My tastes are kind of traditionalist, but Avram's a fan of lots of new eclectic stuff, which he occasionally comments on.
John Stanning @ 25
Only if it's Tubby Tustard.
Kate #64
300's relationship with actual historical events is a distant one, but judging the movie on that basis seems a little silly (referring to the links you posted, not your comment). Fairly early in the movie, there's a giant wolf-bear-panther-glowing-eyed-evil-thing, which prowls around looking evil shortly before being slain by the young Leonidas. Anyone expecting historical accuracy--or judging the movie on its lack of historical accuracy--after that point is not being entirely reasonable, IMO.
Also, there's similar historical inaccuracies in Steven Pressfield's Gates of Fire, but I can't recall them being mentioned in the reviews. At least, not as a reason for not buying the book.
The comments in the other link are more interesting, but I think equating the Persians in the movie 300 and real-life Iranians (as quite a few reviews I read managed to do) is equally silly. It's akin to claiming that games such as Return to Castle Wolfenstein encourage anti-German feeling.
300's not a bad movie. Not entirely my cup of tea--a bit too much silly dialog* for me--but it was interesting to watch.
*Watch as Spartans make you free! Um. . . except if you're a helot, that is, in which case you can just stay right where you are, pal.
Laurel @29:
By golly, I'll bet that is Rorschach! Good eyes.
Notice how there is *noone* else on the street with him...
The mask appears to be pure white. I wonder if they're going to do it with CGI?
I don't know how this movie is going to end up, but I know I'll go see it. Though nothing can beat the exquisite torture of having the story unfold over 1.5 years, re-reading each comic over and over, talking it over with friends for hours, being certain that if you just think about it long enough you can figure out what's going on...what joy that was.
- yeff
Custo-dieting . . . the weight loss plan made just for you!
I'll second Lenny's recommendations of Top Ten and Astro City, and add Darwyn Cooke's DC: The New Frontier and Morrison's All-Star Superman.
As for *why* I like them, basically it's this: while I appreciate the importance of books like Watchmen, which take the superhero genre apart, I actually *enjoy* the books that, in recent years, have put superheroes back together again.
Cooke's New Frontier, incidentally, is being adapted as a direct-to-DVD animated movie early next year. I'm a little bit nervous about how it will translate, as I can't see all the assorted plotlines meshing into a ninety-minute film.
And as long as we're adding recommendations, I'm still a huge fan of Morrison's Animal Man run, which took the genre apart and put it together again all in the same run (even if it cribbed slightly from Lanark near the end).
#s 83 and 84 - A friend of mine says that in the book the soldiers all wore gundam-type mecha armour, and that in the movie they didn't but used the same tactics, which therefore no longer made sense.
My main issue with 300-the-movie as opposed to 300-the-comic, is that in trying to give the Queen more screen time, they made her a weaker character - in the book, when Leonidas is making his excuse about how he's just going on a tour of his kingdom, she's the one who, very deadpan, says "well dear, in that case I insist you take your bodyguard along - all 300 of them." In the movie she doesn't get that line and her attempts to help politically on the home front almost makes things worse (I erased the rest because I realized it was all spoilers)...
Carla Gugino is in it! I lurv her!
Gag Halfrunt (#49)
I haven't read Heinlein's novel and I know that the film is widely regarded as a complete travesty of it, but, for what it's worth, in the film the war is triggered by human colonists establishing settlements inside the "Arachnid Quarantine Zone". The Bugs respond to this encroachment on their territory by firing a meteorite at Earth, destroying Buenos Aires.
I'm pretty sure that's not in the novel, and James Davis Nicoll (#43) is right:
Actually, we're never told why the humans and Bugs are fighting. It could be that the Bug got a translation of one of those political hygiene classes and decided to fight a prophylactic war or the humans attacked them in the name of living space. Or something else.
But still: Our sympathies are entirely with the humans. We hear about Buenos Aires being destroyed in a surprise raid, and the hero's mother being killed there. The Bugs, on the other hand, might as well be soulless insects. I think they're a hive-mind too, which is almost as bad as Communism. And Communism, to Heinlein, when this novel was written (1958, IIRC -- too lazy to Google) was as bad as it gets.
Isn't pretty much the first thing we see a terror raid on the Skinnies?
Oh, more than that -- the first-person narrator describes in some detail how he comes across a building containing unarmed civilians, which may be a church. He is pleased, because he's been given a special hand grenade, one that shouts out in Skinny language that it's a time-delayed explosive and then counts down to the explosion. The hero is pleased that he got to use this device to induce maximum terror.
All sides have always used terror in warfare, the current status of "terrorism" as a dirty word is relatively recent. The American War Department even had a unit to study the best ways to inflict terror, just pior to World War II.
Gag Halfrunt (#33)
Interesting. Why 1933 in particular?
I actually saw The Incredibles as being in some ways an adaptation of Watchmen (including the cautionary tales about capes); and while the lead character is far gentler, my husband and I enjoy the tv show Life by pretending it's "The Rorschach Show." (Or possibly The Question Show)
Euan H @95 - Gates of Fire reads as though Pressfield has read Herodotus, and sat down to write a novel based on the Spartans at Thermopylae with a handful of reference books at his side. 300 is more like Miller reading Herodotus and saying hey, there's some really good stuff here - now were the ephors hereditary evil priests on a mountain or elected representatives of the Spartans? Hell, it's not history, evil priests sounds better.
(And I feel both methods have much to reccomend them)
--
I think most of the comics I might suggest are above, but I found it worthwhile taking a look at DMZ.
I started liking _Fables_ but have stopped reading it because I felt it turned into sexist, racist, war porn.
Sarah (#100): Well, I don't know what "gundam" is, and I can only conjecture what "mecha" is, but if I understand you correctly -- then you're right. The soldiers in the novel "Starship Troopers" wore robotic/mechanical fighting space suits that gave them the strength to rip through brick walls, take leaps that were miles long, as well as infrared vision and sensors and other high-tech doodads.
Now, I have no military experience myself, but I've talked to many people who have, and I try to keep up on things. This convinces me that convinces me that these super-advanced fighting suits would jam up, shut down, and otherwise fail in field conditions, and that the soldiers wearing them would be defeated by natives wearing loincloths and carrying rusty AK-47s.
Guthrie #80:
As for recent comics worth reading, I've really been enjoying Brian K. Vaughan's work, particularly Ex Machina and Y: the Last Man.
The first is the story of the Mayor of New York, who was formerly a superhero.
The second is a post-apocalyptic tale in which all the men on earth have died (except, of course, the protagonist). Both have done a good job of defying my expectations.
Also, I've jut picked up on Brian Wood's DMZ, which is the story of a new American ciil war. It's smart, angry, and very timely.
None of these are up to the standards of Watchmen, but that's asking a lot
OK, I haven't read Starship Troopers, and what I've seen here does not incline me to do so. I know pretty much what the Bugs are. What are the Skinnies?
Steve@83: What got me most riled up about Starship Troopers (the movie) was the idiotic way they had of portraying military operations. I mean, would anyone expect those orbiting starships to be bunched up a few hundred meters apart, to be picked off by slowly rising balls of CGI? And no countermeasures?
oh, that's nothing, how about in "Aliens" where the Colonial Marines go down to the planet on a bug hunt... And leave the keys in the space ship in orbit, with the engine running, and no one on board.
When I saw that, I was stunned into a five minute long holy crap moment.
These guys ever hear of car jacking?
I'm sure the marines were quite happy to have distanced themselves from the sailors after centuries of marine/navy antagonism, but, holy crap, who's driving the ship? Who's dealing with the space pirates in the Firefly class ship hiding on the other side of the planet, waiting to come on board and grab your protein while you're down on the surface, shooting cockaroachez?
This isn't like leaving the car running while you run into 7/11 for a soda.
Not to mention, they had a "spare" drop ship? The military doesn't have "spare" anything. It's got a shortage of everything, and whatever is "spare" don't work, and is piled up in hanger somewhere, waiting to be canabalized for parts. If they have a second working drop ship, they'd have another squad of marines on standby to go down to the surface.
Oh well, the banter when everyone was waking up from hypersleep was awesome.
Euan@95: Anyone expecting historical accuracy--or judging the movie on its lack of historical accuracy--after that point is not being entirely reasonable
I keep hearing this argument. And mostly, I keep hearing it from "300" apologists. Not that you're one of them, but they keep using the same argument. And the argument is that "300" is taking literary licence to make a nice movie. But at the same time, this argument is usually being stated by chest-thumping knuckleheads who see "300" and go "mthrfking YEAH!". Not like, "oh, it was a nice story", but more like, "yah gawdamn right this is how life really is, this is how real men work, this is how real wars are fought" and all other manner of BS.
If the movie "300" had been rewritten as some completely fictional account of some completely non-existent battle, maybe set on another planet or something, maybe millions of years ago, or millions of years in the future, then I can only assume that a vast majority of viewers would find their opinion of the movie suddenly shift from "Hm, interesting if slightly outrageous telling of historical events" to something more like "What a load of bullocks".
"300" is a load of bullocks. But it uses the idea that it is somehow "historical" (or "embellished history") to give it an air of undeserved respectability.
Not everyone, of course, but its most ardent defenders simultaneously defend it as "embellished" while viewing it as "historical".
They believe that's how the world really is, but then they'll justify any factual misrepresentations as simply done to simplify scripting, rather than being done to simplify reality.
And I don't buy it.
Kate@64: Re: _300_: I've never seen it nor read it, and so can't say whether this was added in the adapting. But apparently the movie is a grossly inaccurate and thoroughly vile piece of work.
The movie shows the on screen killing of about 150 persian Red Shirts (anonymous characters who are brought on stage simply to show them being killed). These aren't some "Dr. Zhivago" scenes where the troops rush each other, then the camera cuts away, and you see someone's face filled with horror as they watch the carnage occuring off screen. More like persian runs on screen, a spartan thrusts a spear through him, we see it it come out the other side, along with a splash of blood flying off the tip. The movie is little more than a cinematic version of Rome's gladiator fights using death as entertainment.
It scored 600 points on the war pr0n scale, which I thought was going to break the scale.
Which did at least give rise to this unspeakably brilliant lemonade.
OK, now that was funny.
Mitch@105: This convinces me that these super-advanced fighting suits would jam up, shut down, and otherwise fail in field conditions, and that the soldiers wearing them would be defeated by natives wearing loincloths and carrying rusty AK-47s.
Heck, never mind AK47's, all you'd need is rain. Then when the electronics short out and the joints freeze up, just go around with a can opener and a pig sticker.
Adam: As you may know, there's a preview of "The New Frontier" on the direct-to-dvd release of "Superman-Doomsday." It looked promising to me.
I wasn't moved much by the animated adaptation of "Superman-Doomsday," itself. They deleted John Henry Irons from the storyline, which was the only element I really liked in "Reign of the Supermen." ("Superman-Doomsday" has James Marsters as Lex Luthor, for Buffy fans, although I would have preferred Clancy Brown -- and Dana Delaney as Lois Lane.)
Xopher @#107: In the novel, The Skinnies are a humanoid race who start off the war as allies of the Bugs. I don't recall if they actually switch sides or just drop out of the war.
Mitch Wagner @#26: Perhaps someone would like to make a movie of that sometime. LOL!
I've read two volumes of Top Ten (plus the prequel The Forty-Niners) and several of Powers, and generally liked all of those. Also Preacher was awesome -- I've read all of it, but I don't own all the GN's yet. And no discussion of Alan Moore's work is complete without bringing up Supreme....
Comments on Custodieting the custodes: