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

[magnetgirl.livejournal.com]

If one more person (you didn't, obviously!) calls Watchmen a book I am going to lose my shit!

Book/Graphic Novel-these are just ways of distancing comics that are deemed "intellectual" or "groundbreaking" from the medium of comics in general. It really upsets me. A lot. Anytime anyone likes a series of comics all of a sudden they call it a goddamn graphic novel or a book. Argh Argh Argh!

Sorry to invade your journal with my number one geek pet peeve :)

[rm.livejournal.com]

No, it's actually nice to hear. I know you take this shit really seriously, but to me they are all comics, and that's _fine_, but again, my father joined the army so he could go to school so he could make things like this (he wound up in advertising instead). So yeah.

Since comics aren't my preferred medium (I don't really respond to animation either), I don't generally know what the current language is for it, or what those choices mean, so it's good to know.

[laughingacademy.livejournal.com]

Neil Gaiman has a great story about that very point. He was at a party talking with someone who was obviously dismayed to be stuck with a mere comic book writer — until they learned he was the guy behind Sandman, at which point they said something like, “Oh! You don’t write comics, you write graphic novels.” Neil says that he felt rather like a hooker who’d just been informed that she was actually “a lady of the evening.”