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

[kel-reiley.livejournal.com]

we got there late, so we missed all the trailers
but i'm curious now...

it's too late for me to respond to all points, but that opening sequence is still AMAZING!

[therealycats.livejournal.com]

The opening sequence made me really, really happy (and sad). Gorgeous, as was the very beginning with the Comedian. Laurie isn't my favorite, in the movie or the comic, but the whole thing was ridiculously sexy. Patrick Wilson's ass? Well, if you insist. And how hot was Silhouette?

I really was pleasantly surprised with the movie overall, and visually, of course, it was stunning.

[kiji-kat.livejournal.com]

The "OMG NUKES!" angle *was* tough for me to relate to, both in the comic and in the film. I lived during the Cold War, but I would have been about four years old when the events of Watchmen took place - I lived through it, but I have absolutely no recollection of the tensions that existed then. I also grew up in rural and suburban Ohio, where we are were more concerned about the annual corn harvest than the looming specter of nuclear war.

Oddly enough though, there was one scene that triggered a memory for me - that of Laurie checking out the Owlship for the first time. The combination of her sweater and her hair made me randomly flash back to being four or five and seeing my mother in something similar. Other than the use of "99 Luftballoons," that was the only definitively 80s moment for me.

[rm.livejournal.com]

See, for me the whole thing was like this memory of my childhood that wasn't. And I know part of that is how I experience film, but growing up in NYC, being a teen in the '80s, and having a father who joined the army so he could go to art school to learn to draw comics made it really really familiar.

Imagine this

[ekatarina.livejournal.com]

A mega-plex in a medium size Canadian city. Out of town slightly. A small hoard of young adults arrive dressed to the nines and then some. Four of them are hauling a large roll of something?

The run up to the theatre doors and start unrolling,.. a red carpet! They then run back to the edge of the outside area and open the door of a regular sedan for a pretty young woman in a stunning dress. Everyone laughing they escort her up the red carpet, cameras flashing and yelling as if they were crazed fans or paparatzi.

The girl in question is one of this group of friends who finished high school a couple of years ago and she plays the role of "the Vietnamese Girl". Her gang decided she deserved a home-town red carpet treatment. SO they did it.

I am sad I missed it.


Ekatarina, who is looking forward to seeing someone she once met socially in a huge movie!

Re: Imagine this

[rm.livejournal.com]

That's fabulous!

[shipchan.livejournal.com]

Quentin Tarrantino is making a nazi movie? God, I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

?

[keith418.livejournal.com]

Have you read the graphic novel?

[ladyofthelog.livejournal.com]

I could do with more of Patrick Wilson's ass. That was a gutsy shot.

[algor.livejournal.com]

The Tarantino movie's script is online, and has been for awhile.

Really, it's even shallower than most of his stuff.

Plus, reading the script tells me the man cannot spell to save his life.

[tacky-tramp.livejournal.com]

Oh God, Silhouette kissing the nurse on D-Day, and the guy looking cheated and bummed in the background. SO hot.

[tacky-tramp.livejournal.com]

I thought it was funny that they had to explain the Doomsday clock, and that 95% of the target audience wouldn't know who Lee Iacocca was.

[exbentley]

it resonates for me as someone who has grown up in an era of double standards as to when the camera looks away and when it doesn't.

[virginia-fell.livejournal.com]

Ditto. Also, the sudden global goodwill, common-enemy stuff resonated, though Nixon in Watchmen didn't waste it like W. did.

[virginia-fell.livejournal.com]

Interesting point. Same here, now that I think about it.

[therealycats.livejournal.com]

I think we could ALL do with more of Patrick Wilson's ass, really. Good thing I happen to have Angels in America on hand whenever I need a fix.

[redstapler.livejournal.com]

The cold war ended before I turned 10, but I remember a lot of the memes. As a kid, it was already winding down, but I understood there was quite a bit of history there, even if I didn't understand the fine points.

There were greater problems in my household in the 80s, so the Russian Threat was low on the list.

Re: ?

[rm.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but like 15 years ago, and I purposely didn't revisit before seeing this. I'm going to go back to it now, but I wanted to at least be able to go into it with my ttention on the movie that was actually there.

[rm.livejournal.com]

I was not impressed. And not because all movies about such subjects must be deep searching films, but because it's rich material and that was just lame.

[rm.livejournal.com]

God, I guess they did. I was like "yeah, yeah, we get it" but of course, no most people under 30 wouldn't get it.

Re: ?

[pete-wisdom.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the last time I read Watchmen was pretty much over a decade ago. I didn't touch the graphic novel at all since then, but the memories of reading it (and I had the benefit of referring to a "txt copy" of annotated commentary back then) suddenly came flooding back.

It's pretty decent story. The movie's pacing is a bit off and the extraction of "Black Freighter" stuff was a good choice all in all. It was certainly violent, but I'll tell you one thing...Doc Manhanttan's dongle coming straight at you on a five-story IMAX screen...oh dear...

[smirnoffmule.livejournal.com]

I so hear you on 11. I came home from the film, and was like, ok, now where do I find the good fic? (I have yet to, btw).

Regarding 8 - I felt the film kind of skated over the personal nature of the terror. The book really had an impact on me that way, but the film, not so much. I think by losing the scenes on the streets of New York and the "real people" characters there, it failed to present us with the real rawness of the situation. I hope that'll make it back with the director's cut. (I was born in 1980, so was a little too young to really be impacted, but I studied the cold war at college, and cold war paranoia is an interest of mine).

I actually didn't find it nearly as gorey as I expected it to be based on some of the reviews I've read. It felt quite clean and sterile to me (which worked within the context). I loved the fighting scenes - I loved how they'd thought of the physicality of each character and used that, really showed attention to detail. It felt like such a comic book thing, and as a huge comic nut, I appreciated that - I felt like, here is a director who understands and appreciates this medium, and I want to trust him.

[pete-wisdom.livejournal.com]

And that actor they bring in to play Nixon...goshdarnit, I wish they used the same guy who was in the "Frost/Nixon" movie as I just watched that one the weekend before...

Seemed a bit more caricature/cartoonish, but I guess that was the point to play off from the source material a bit.

[nooks.livejournal.com]

I found a copy of the opening sequence online and can't stop (re)watching it. Amazing. When I describe Watchmen to friends who aren't familiar I say the book is about what would really happen if a super-being suddenly arrived on the scene in post-war America; the sense of it is captured almost perfectly by the intro (and to an ever-decreasing amount through the rest of the film, I think).

[rm.livejournal.com]

Well that opening sequence manages to do the life and death of mid-century American mythology and the American dream both literally and in the weird alternate universe of film/comic all at once. It's really the smartest thing _ever_. I largely loved the movie, but that sequence is another animal entirely.

Sadly, the copy I found online and was watching over and over has been taken down.

[gement.livejournal.com]

5: Silk Spectre I lived in semi-rural California, not a major city. Is that the mother you were wondering about?

I really look forward to the expansion of 6, since Ozymandias never struck me as particularly queer, just European and intellectual and therefore distanced from the Red-Blooded American Male stereotype. (Framing him with David Bowie in the opening sequence puts a bit of the lie to that, though, I suppose...)

"Queerness in Moore's Universes" has a lot of ground to cover. I mean, even queerness in Watchmen (the book version) has a lot of ground to cover. Three overtly queer members of the Minutemen, and Mr. Purple Intellectual with the very triangular logo...

Villainy in Watchmen is also, well, murky. With Rorschach and the Comedian doing their contrasting bigoted fascist routines, and the retirees fulfilling the nice but spineless do-gooders role, I've always rather walked away from it with the message, "Don't act like any of these people! Or do, because in the end even inaction is a choice, but accept that any significant action you take will, in some way, be wrong."

Anyway. Looking forward to the discussion when you have the spare brain cells.

[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.

[(Anonymous)]

It's still up here:

http://pixelatedgeek.com/2009/03/watchmen-opening-credits-video/

Truly amazing.

Susan
http://www.rixosous.com

[lyorn.livejournal.com]

Hell, does it feel that way to people who aren't in New York.

Speaking from the comic book -- haven't yet seen the movie -- hell, yes. I grew up not expecting to live to be twenty. When I first read the comic I cheered for Ozy (which I might not have done had I been in NY, but remembering 80's me, I might have) because he managed to get the body count down to a few million.

The sudden global goodwill, common-enemy stuff wasted.

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

Yes.
I've caught myself missing Nixon during the last eight years.

[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]

Dude, they're not sure who Nixon is!

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

Dude, they're not sure who Nixon is! was!

[natf.livejournal.com]

Yes. This. You have, as you so often do, stated my thoughts and opinions completely and so much better than I could/have.

I have read and reread the book/graphic novel many many times since it came out in the 80s and spent the whole movie nodding, smiling and thinking, "Yes. This." They may have left out huge chunks and changed the ending but, to be honest, those parts of the book would not work well in a film IMO. Also, what they made into the film WORKS and is a great movie. IMO.

[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.

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

Man, I didn't get the Tarantino trailer! I am sad.

The 80s-ness of the movie and Cold War terror was astounding.

[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.”

[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.