movies
More Watchmen linkage
For someone who has forsworn the movie, Alan Moore sure is getting a lot of coverage out it! And he’s selling lots of comics too. Here’s some of the more interesting Watchmen links I’ve seen in the last couple of days:
Salon.com have run an interesting, intelligent interview with Moore (you’ll have to get a site pass) – he’s in pretty good form right now! Despite promising to ‘spit venom‘ all over the film last year, he’s been pretty even-handed in his discussions in the interviews he’s been doing.
The webcomic PvPonline has been running a Watchmen parody called The Ombudsmen (that’s part one of 5). It’s pretty funny, if you like PvP’s sense of humour, and uses characters from the newspaper comic pages to riff on the ideas in Watchmen.
Saturday Morning Watchmen is a flash movie about what Watchmen would have been like as an old school Saturday morning cartoon. I haven’t seen all of it yet, but I will!
Finally, on slightly different note, is Anthony Lane’s New Yorker review of the movie but also the comic, Alan Moore, his fans and comics in general (with a few black and white exceptions) and it’s safe to say he doesn’t like any of them. It’s an incredible exercise of missing the point and letting your pre-conceptions colour your published work. For example:
The problem is that Snyder, following Moore, is so insanely aroused by the look of vengeance, and by the stylized application of physical power, that the film ends up twice as fascistic as the forces it wishes to lampoon.
I haven’t seen the film (yet) but lots of reviews are leveling similar criticism at it – that it revels in the violence of the story. But as AVClub‘s ‘Book vs. Film‘ feature on Watchmen points out, Moore doesn’t revel in the violence of the story. The violence in Watchmen isn’t supposed to be all ‘kick ass cool’. It’s supposed to show how de-humanised these people have become. Lots of readers have seemed to think that some of the more violent characters in the comic are pretty cool (much as skinheads adopted A Clockwork Orange) but Moore certainly doesn’t and the fact that Lane thinks he does demonstrates how poorly he understood not just Watchmen but Moore’s entire body of work. Best of all he basically says ‘of course the fans will disagree with me on this’ in his opening paragraph saying that
Fans of [comics] are masonically loyal, prickling with a defensiveness and an ardor that not even Wagnerians can match.
Whatever dude – when you’re wrong you’re wrong and on this, you’re really wrong.
“These days I can see half a million Orcs coming over a hill and I am bored”
In Wired here.
I can remember Willis O’Brien’s King Kong. I can remember being awed at the artistry that had made those things possible. Yes, I knew how it was done. But it looked so wonderful. These days I can see half a million Orcs coming over a hill and I am bored. I am not impressed at all. Because, frankly, I could have gotten someone, a passerby on the street, who could have gotten the same effect if you’d given them half a million dollars to do it.
In his own writing on these subjects, and any other chance he gets, Moore can be a bit ranty. But Adam Rogers keeps him nicely on track, while allowing him to speak his own mind – maybe he just got him on a good day? Anyway, Moore speaks about Watchmen, movies in general, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, cultural criticism through differnet mediums and a few other things besides.
Watchmen
So, while Sophie has been getting excited about Dollhouse, I’ve been quietly waiting in anticipation for the Watchmen adaptation that’s coming out next week in Australia, at least. There is no doubting that Watchmen is the greatest superhero story of all time. It redefined the genre, helped make Alan Moore one of the most admired comic book writers of all time and generally has the most incredibly compelling and sympathetic cast of raving lunatics I’ve ever seen. It even made it into the Time magazine top 100 novels of all time! › Continue reading
Let’s start
I’ve recently been reading a lot about all things geek so I thought I’d finally get round to making a place where I could get all my thought’s down. Mostly Geek pretty much sums it up. I’ll use this space to write about the anything I consider to be geeky. From RPGs to books to movies to music. It’s a blog and so who knows where it might lead.