My midnight show movie mates have their thoughts on Watchmen up. Sunny’s is at film, eyeballs, brain and Barb’s is at poeta y diwata.
• With a $56M opening weekend, Watchmen is #1 at the box office and the biggest opening release of 2009. Could better fan word of mouth helped it more?
• This New York Times review of Watchmen is just god-awful. Not cuz it doesn’t like the movie but because it feels like the person didn’t even watch it at all. If you have to ask why the movies takes place in the mid-80s then you aren’t being fair to the movie.
• Roger Ebert on how Watchmen plays out as a movie and then his thoughts about the story after a second viewing. Ebert remains one of my favorite movie critics of all time; he only gets smarter (and Web 2.0 savvier) as time goes on.
More on Dr Manhattan: It’s not that he is a person who has been converted to energy, he’s an energy form that has absorbed a human consciousness. As such, all the details of humanity are new and important to him but as hen continues through the breakdown of humanity, Dr Manhattan is slowly losing touch with the things that made Jon Osterman a person to being with. At first he thinks it’s having a human body, then it’s having a girlfriend, then it’s being a hero, then it’s breaking up horribly with his girlfriend, finally he goes for the full Jesus monty and decides being a person means saving the world. And why the super smurf schlong? Cuz Dr Manhattan (really, Alan Moore) doesn’t care what you think, he just cares about what he believes are the markers of humanity. Guessing from the fuss on the internet and the giggles at the movie theater, Moore and Doc ‘hattan are right.
I haven’t read the graphic novel, and I wasn’t planning on seeing the Watchmen. But on Friday I was hanging out with some people who then decided to go see the movie. I appreciate your comments and your links to reviews. It was kind of long but it didn’t feel long (some places it did.) We got in line at 9:30 and got out of the theatre at 1:00 am. I don’t know how to feel about that.
Favorite scene: Worshak, maskless, in the prison cafeteria line. Some big guy is trying to shank him. He blocks the shank with his metallic tray then hits him with the tray. Then breaks the glass and dumps the burning grease on the guy’s face. Then as he is being restrained, Worshak screams, “You don’t get it. I’m not in here with you. You’re in here with me.” That was good.
That scene rocks and it is exactly like the comic. I think you’d like a lot of Moore’s work: “From Hell,” with its diagnosis of Ripper mythology and how the divide between the Age of Reason (with William Blake taking center stage as the last great poet of ‘madness’) and the Age of Science births the 20th century; “V for Vendetta” and its look at anarchy in the UK; and “Saga of the Swamp Thing,” the 80s Modern Prometheus meets Green Peace.
I’m in the middle of Moore’s run of Swamp Thing right now and plan on reading Promethea (his take on woman mythology) next.