Watchmen

[rm]

1. I totally enjoyed it.

2. Really no moment of the film is as powerful as the opening title sequence, which is a thing of beauty and sorrow and hit me personally in a lot of convoluted ways.

3. That said, the Comedian's death and funeral, as well as the amazing out of sequence Dr. Manhattan back-story are spectacular.

4. Speaking of the Dr. Manhattan back-story.... if you like Doctor Who you will like this movie if only for the timey-wimey and the "all things are now" and "nothing ever ends" angles.

5. The denoument was too... eh. Too steep a slope and it felt confusing -- how had the mother survived? It wasn't awful, and the pullback to NY under reconstruction was good, but eh. If you're gonna change the ending from the original, I would have cut on Ozymandias with the snow coming down around him.

6. Ozymandias! I really, really enjoyed him, and I felt a lot of sorrow for him. Alexander the Great was my only friends in fifth grade too. That said, there's a whole essay on queerness in Moore's universes and a queering the villain issue and blah blah blah to go into there, hat I need more brain than I have right now to tackle.

7. OMG, this film essentially has canonical cosplay sex. Cracked me the fuck up in a meta way.

8. It's hard for me to grok how this film would resonate for someone younger, who didn't grow up with the spectre of nuclear war and certain fashion and music and stuff. It's so of the 80s. It's so of being 13-years-old for me. Does it feel personal and immediate and like a near horror for people that didn't grow up with that? Hell, does it feel that way to people who aren't in New York. The film very much resonated with my skittery childhood perceptions of life here in the bad old days.

9. When the gore is intense, it's intense, but it's so faithful to the original, if you've read that you can probably cope or at least know when to look away.

10. The film is sexy as hell, both overtly and covertly.

11. So where's the Ozymandias/Dr. Manhattan lonely god slash, eh?


Now, on a separate note. Did anyone else see that trailer for the Quentin Tarrantino Nazi movie? What the fucking fuck is up with that?

Comments

[rm.livejournal.com]

5. Oh! That was a sloppy cut then. It read like the mom was in New York. I'll have to look at that on a second viewing.

As to the queerness, the movie repeatedly makes this Ozymandias gay gay gay -- there's the Bowie thing, there's also the other file on his desktop towards the end: "boys" and the purple triangle, etc. The movie definitely sets him up as queer, and I like him as queer in a lot of ways -- powerful, smart and disinterested in it. With the Alexander the Great thing it's a natural fit. But as much as he's not quite a villain, it still feels like a sloppy queering the villain thing, but I'm not sure who to blame -- Moore (who does both awesome and really problematic things with queer content) or the script folks.

Generally I find Moore has a lot of generosity for lesbians (even if they all die horrible tragic deaths, they're these very stereotypically male, filled with honour deaths in a lot of ways), and not as much for gay men, and I'm uncomfortable with it, not just as as queer person who doesn't like my brothers getting stuck with Moore's issues, but as a genderqueer person who takes it a bit personally.

On the other hand, Moore tends to do really fascinating stuff when he implies genderqueerness (V for Vendetta), so I just don't know.

I mean it sucks to have to do this sort of analysis. I want there to be enough queer heroes and villains that it doesn't matter, but the material was written long enough ago, and in the hands of a very mainstream director, I think it has to be analyzed.

What also struck me about both this and V for Vendetta is how much the expectation of extreme violence against queer folk seems normal to me. It's the fear I grew up with. For a lot of my younger friends, it's not visceral and personal when these things happen in Moore's universes.

[gement.livejournal.com]

Man, now I want to go do a census of all my Moore.

I confess myself guilty of not reading the work distinct from what I know of the author's life, including the fact that he's done some good queer activism and that he's poly and political about it. I know "queer people must die" is one of those Things That Happens Too Often In Literature, but I always read his versions of it as coming from a deep sympathy for the reality of hate crimes.

I hadn't seen the sympathy slant, but I wasn't reading closely for it; I just hadn't noticed anything pissing me off. For every Silhouette, I remember a Hooded Justice, for every Valerie a Gordon.

Must go take that census and see what shakes out.

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

I've had issues with Moore since Swamp Thing.
(Is anybody at all familiar with those, or should grandpops shut up now?)

[lyorn.livejournal.com]

Is anybody at all familiar with those

Yes.

[gement.livejournal.com]

I'm familiar in theory but haven't gotten to read any of them directly. What bothered you?

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

Well, there was Swamp Thing, and then there was Alan Moore, and then they put the two together, and I could completely do this better over the phone. And will.