watching the detectives-- er, watchmen

[topaz]

Watchmen: a damn fine piece of entertainment.  I have never gone fanboy over the graphic novel, so it was never likely that I would be offended by the filmmakers' failure to capture the ineffable whatever -- on its own terms it was just pretty cool.

Whenever someone tells you that something, especially a comic book, is supposedly "unfilmable"?  Yeah, me too.


Mostly I think happyfunpaul nailed it in his review.  His criticisms of the movie are well founded, but they didn't bother me as much as they did Paul.

In particular, I loved their use of Cohen's "Hallelujah" during the Silk Spectre/Nite Owl sex scene.  I agree with crouchback that it was deliberately ironic.  Did no one else notice that instead of one of the endlessly imitated, ethereal covers of "Hallelujah", they used the unbearable, bombastic, gravelly Cohen original?  That touch had me laughing out loud, and I don't think it was an accident.  I really didn't have a problem with the music in the movie in general.

Jackie Earle Haley is spot on.  I actually think he makes a better Rorschach than the one in the book.  I never quite bought the baby-faced Walter Kovacs as the single-minded, psychotic antihero.  Haley makes him believable.

Like Paul, I didn't buy Matthew Goode's Ozymandias so much.  He spent most of the movie acting as if he'd been rudely awakened from a nap.  I didn't get much of a sense that he was a guy who could build the world's dominant financial empire.  Maybe in 1997, while the movie was in turnaround, someone wrote in the margins "Like Marc Andreessen!" and no one realized to fix it in time.

Actually, given Haley's link to Breaking Away, Goode's resemblance to Dennis Christopher is a little eerie.  I kept expecting to see Daniel Stern pop out of the wings and offer some shave-and-a-haircut commentary.

mangosteen, lifecollage and I laughed out loud when Laurie took out the paper coffee cups on Archie, and I think anyone else who grew up in or spent significant time in New York will understand.


Anyway, I had buckets of fun but I wasn't taking the movie too seriously to begin with, and recommend that you don't either.  It's a great ride.

Comments

[infinitehotel.livejournal.com]

I spent most of the movie looking at Haley thinking "Where the hell do I know you from?" I realized he was Ronnie in Little Children first, but it took longer to twig he'd been both Moocher *and* Kelly Leak from The Bad News Bears.

It's been way too long since I've seen Breaking Away; I love that movie.

[penk.livejournal.com]

HAH! I had totally missed the bad news bears familiarity, but you're totally spot on. Thanks for that nudge!

[badlittlemonkey.livejournal.com]

Funny that you mention the use of the Leonard Cohen original of "Hallelujah" -- I'm on Allison Crowe's mailing list and got an email this weekend saying that Zach Snyder had originally planned to use her version in the movie. But when they tested the scene with her version, the people who watched were all "Oh, isn't it beautiful!"... and so he changed it out for the Cohen version. :)

[slinkr.livejournal.com]

I loved the coffee cups. Overall, I thought they did a pretty good job with New York.

I also thought the music was mostly awesome. Especially "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" playing kind of softly in the background when Veidt is meeting with the captains of industry in his office.

[surrealestate.livejournal.com]

Given that Leonard Cohen was used elsewhere as well, it never really occurred to me that the choice might have been an "accident".

FWIW, I have often gone all fangirl over the graphic novel and I loveloveloved the movie. Yeah.

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

I don't mean an accident in the sense of "Hey, how'd all this Leonard Cohen get on my soundtrack?" but in the sense of "Bob, why are they laughing? They're not supposed to be laughing, Bob, this is a very soulful song."

[surrealestate.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure. I mean, I could believe that it was a sort of "inside joke" that they figured some people would get and some wouldn't, and it'd work on either level.

[penk.livejournal.com]

So, a couple comments / observations...
Jackie Earle Haley is spot on. I actually think he makes a better Rorschach than the one in the book. I never quite bought the baby-faced Walter Kovacs as the single-minded, psychotic antihero. Haley makes him believable.

While agree that Haley's interpretation of Rorschach was excellent and very well done ("WHERE IS MY FACE?!?!?"), I disagree with the baby-faced Kovacs from the novel bit. In all of Moore's (more Dave Gibbons') portrayal of Rorschach-without-his-mask, his face is dead calm, showing no emotion, no fear, no joy, no nothing. Dead. It was that 'deadness', on the babyfaced, freckled redhead that made it so intense. It shows that this kid really got messed up growing up, and it wasn't because he was ugly, or looked funny, or anything like that.

On the coffee cups bit, I was wondering what you guys were laughing about. I didn't get it at all, but there are zillions of subreferences all over the place that I found fascinating - either call outs to the original book, or just sly commentary and images.

Moving along, there's been a lot of griping about casting. I do agree with you that Matthew Goode's portrayal of Adrienne Veidt was 'off'. He was too weak, too subtle. There were parallels between Veidt and Dr. Manhattan ("The smartest man in the world" "The most powerful man in the world") - but I thought Billy Crudup's portrayal of Dr. Manhattan pulled off the "I am not even in the same world as you" far better than Goode did for Veidt, and that's WITH a completely CGI-generated visage.

In casting brilliance, I have to put Patrick Wilson as Dan Dreiberg / Niteowl and Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Edward Blake / Comedian in there as some of the best casting choices I've ever seen. I was worried that Wilson's portrayal of Dreiberg would come off as TOO whiny and too weak. Far too much the middle aged accountant. And while he did start that way, I felt that as the movie went along, his character got better and better. Maybe that's my own middle-agedness identifying with Drapiers'. :)

And Morgan's "Comedian"? Sheer brilliance. The absolute immorality of Blake's personna came through so strongly - but not just that, you could see his 'Comedian' worldview - "It's all a joke". Fantastic.

What would I have changed? Very little. Maybe extended the movie another 40 minutes or so to get more of the subtle interractions working - I'm sure there's a directors' cut coming, we'll see if it improves or clogs up the story.

Oh, and my only real loss in the whole thing - what made Silk Specter, Ozymandias, Niteowl, etc such fantastic fighters? Even in middle age, when Dreiberg and Lori haven't been Silk Spectre and Niteowl in 15 years, they're still able to walk into an alley and beat the snot out of a dozen street thugs. And a few days later, walk into a prison and systematically wipe the floor with another 3dozen heavies, without getting a scratch?

I want some of that!

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

While agree that Haley's interpretation of Rorschach was excellent and very well done ("WHERE IS MY FACE?!?!?"), I disagree with the baby-faced Kovacs from the novel bit. In all of Moore's (more Dave Gibbons') portrayal of Rorschach-without-his-mask, his face is dead calm, showing no emotion, no fear, no joy, no nothing. Dead. It was that 'deadness', on the babyfaced, freckled redhead that made it so intense. It shows that this kid really got messed up growing up, and it wasn't because he was ugly, or looked funny, or anything like that.

Sure, I get that -- I'm just saying that in the novel it didn't work for me so well. Kovacs was so far dissociated from Rorschach it kind of made it hard for me to identify them as the same person. I didn't have that trouble in the movie.

[vespid-interest.livejournal.com]

I liked Watchmen more than the latest Batman movie. Oddly enough Rorschach and the Comedian felt similar to yet more real than Batman or the Joker. And the end of Batman was "let's lie to people to keep them safe" while Watchmen had that as a theme but as a bad thing. Or at least an ambiguous thing.

Hallelujah was the perfect song for that movie and I love that they used the flawed-yet-brilliant Cohen version. It fits the rest of the flawed/super characters.

Nearly every review I heard mentioned the fetish/kinkiness of the film but I didn't notice anything out of the ordinary. I mean, body latex isn't any more kinky than a ball gown.