Sick squid? Not bloody likely!
The short version: I liked Zack Snyder’s Watchmen. It was by no means perfect and there are a couple of pretty bad flaws – mostly to do with the film’s interpretation of Adrian Veidt and the massive cuts in Laurie/Silk Spectre II’s backstory (to the point where there is almost nothing left of the crystalline glory of chapter IX, “The Darkness of Mere Being”) – but it’s the first film version of an Alan Moore comic that takes the source material seriously, even if it doesn’t always completely trust its audience.
One problem that Snyder seems to have, though, is that he’s too much in love with his talents and his cleverness. The use of music was one aspect of this, with too many jokes being used in a winking “Get it? We’re being clever as well as showing reverence to Moore’s original!” And whenever there was something semi-clever, Snyder had the tendency to linger on it for much too long, making these moments smug rather than witty and subtle. The cheesy soft porn scene on Archie? Prime example of that sort of smugness. Moore wasn’t above the occasional broad joke in the original, but they didn’t last for five minutes.
The other thing is Snyder’s propensity for over-the-top violence. Some fit okay, even though I didn’t particularly feel I needed to see a man’s arms being sawn off (not that the original scene with its throat-cutting was that much more harmless – I’ve got a thing about throat-slicing scenes…), but the first fight scene with Dan and Laurie didn’t make any sense story-wise. These two haven’t been wearing their costumes for years, they haven’t been out to beat up street ganes in a long, long time. Their first fight should be clumsy and exhilarating, not choreographed to a T.
My problems with the ending? No, they have nothing to do with Snyder’s re-interpreting the squid into S.Q.U.I.D. I agree that audiences wouldn’t have bought the comic’s finale – hell, I’m not sure I fully bought it, at least not the means by which Adrian executes his plans. What didn’t work was how clean everything was: in the original we’re treated to page after page of the apocalyptic, horrific results of Veidt’s plan. There’s nothing clean about it. Similarly, in the film Ozymandias more or less receives absolution from Dr. Manhattan – and in an utterly inexplicable move, the “Nothing ever ends” line that is so essential to the ending and to Adrian’s character ark is spoken, after her return from Antarctica, by Laurie in a conversation with Dan. As a wise man once said: Huh?!
Final quibble: why, oh why, did they feel the need to change the beautiful simplicity of “I did it 35 minutes ago”?
But still, as I said: I liked it… unlike a certain mustachioed madman.
Who watches the… ah, sod it!
I can’t come up with a clever title for this Watchmen-based blog entry, so I’ll leave the cleverness to others – such as the evil, evil people who created this internet parody:
Okay, after that has seared your synapses, here’s something from the actual film – the very cool title sequence. Enjoy!
If you’re gonna steal…
Okay, no most beautiful and wonderful things in the world in this entry. Instead I’m posting a quick, cheap link to Something Awful (with the usual warning that their humour can be rather off-colour and definitely NSFW). In a twist on their usual Photoshops veering from clever to tasteless to Eww! and beyond, they’ve got Real Books That Look Like Photoshops!
Here’s a sample:
P.S.: The first entry on page 5 is wrong on so many levels that I may never be able to eat a flan caramel again. Ever.
Smell disfunctional marriages, can ya?
It’s good to see Leonardo Di Caprio and Kate Winslet in something that wasn’t written by an author whose ideas of romance (and class) are those of a 16-year old. Revolutionary Road is a beautifully, if at times somewhat archly, acted study of a marriage stifled by society and by individual cowardice.
The film could easily have gone wrong – the script isn’t particularly strong, with a number of oddities (e.g. where are the Wheelers’ children? they seem to exist only when it’s deemed necessary, whereas the rest of the time they seem to be locked away in a stasis chamber), clunky lines (“You’re the most beautiful and wonderful thing in the world. You’re a man!” Excuse me, but WTF?!) and hackneyed characters. The mathematician son of a friend of Frank and April’s is basically that old chestnut, the wise fool – but the acting makes him into something more real than the script would warrant.
It takes the film a while to spin on all cylinders and move beyond its conventional story of societal pressures and marriage as an exercise in mutual resentment, but once it does it’s gripping and moving, thanks mainly to Di Caprio and Winslet’s acting. And the ending is effectively devastating as Frank Wheeler surrenders to the quiet dispair, the “hopeless emptiness” of his life.
I was less taken with last night’s episode of Grey’s Anatomy. The series has never been particularly good at introducing new characters, and it’s even worse at giving a send-off to regulars. Dr Erica Hahn’s leaving was handled especially badly, coming across very much as a spur-of-the-moment decision by the producers to axe her and the budding lesbian relationship she’d started with Callie Torres. Similarly, the two new characters weren’t given any lead-in – they were just there suddenly. Especially with Sadie this was done quite insultingly badly; obviously we were supposed to think, “Eh, she really comes out of the blue, which doesn’t make sense if she’s supposedly Meredith’s former BFF, but she’s hot, so whatever…”
And her character Virginia Dixon, a heart surgeon who has Asperger’s Syndrome, highlighted one of the things I’ve come to hate about the series: its manipulative use of music. It’s okay if it’s earned, and they often have a good hand at choosing songs to underline sad moments – but the jaunty comedy music is annoying, especially when what we’re seeing simply isn’t very funny. It’s just a step away from canned laughter. And when the series invites us to laugh at the weird new doctor (after all, the music tells us that this is a comedic scene) to then turn around and have her say that she doesn’t particularly like being made fun of, chiding us for what the episode suggested was the intended reaction? Well, that strikes me as more than just a tad hypocritical.
