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i did last night and i saw that it was good!  so they finally filmed the comic book adaptation that many said they couldn't film and many more said they shouldn't film and i for one am glad they did, if only because it will bring about a renewed interest in comics. that said, i went on the Friday night of the opening weekend to the 8pm showing and the cinema was half empty...  Watchmen won the 1988 Hugo Award for Best Novel and is in TIME Magazine's top 100 books of the 20th century. In 2008, Entertainment Weekly placed it at number 13 on its list of the best 50 novels printed in the last 25 years, describing it as "The greatest superhero story ever told and proof that comics are capable of smart, emotionally resonant narratives worthy of the label *literature*." so what's it about? *Watchmen* is set in an alternate reality which closely mirrors the contemporary world of the 1980s. The primary point of divergence is the presence of superheroes. Their existence in this iteration of America is shown to have dramatically affected and altered the outcomes of real-world events such as the Vietnam War and the presidency of Richard Nixon. In keeping with the realism of the series, although the costumed crime fighters of *Watchmen* are commonly called "superheroes", the only character who possesses obvious superhuman powers is Doctor Manhattan. The existence of Doctor Manhattan has given the U.S. a strategic advantage over the Soviet Union, which has increased tensions between the two nations. Additionally, superheroes have become unpopular among the public, which has led to the passage of legislation in 1977 to outlaw them. While many of the heroes retired, Doctor Manhattan and the Comedian operate as government-sanctioned agents, and Rorschach continues to operate outside the law. whilst some scenes were changed from the original comics/graphic novel, the casting at least was absolutely perfect and the characters spot on. although i found Dr Manhattan a little too human. many scene's were removed for the sake of time, including the whole Tales of the Black Freighter, it's still 2 hours 43 minutes. later in the year there will be a DVD release of the animated Tales of the Black Freighter and a director's cut of the Watchmen film coming in at 3 hours 11 minutes. my main complaint was the unnecessary changes, all of which served to make it a more graphically violent film, yet weren't changed because of time. e.g.; - - in the book, Larry (the fat guy in prison) has his throat cut. in the film he has his arms cut off with an angle grinder...
- - in the book Rorschach handcuffs the child killer, gives him a saw then douses him in kerosene and torches the room, explaining that he won't cut through the cuffs in time. he leaves the burning building and there are screams from behind him. in the film Rorschach hacks the child killer's head to pieces with a very large meat cleaver...
then of course there's the big change...  no big psychic monster... and here's (i know some may find it blasphemous) where i think the change is actually for the better! yep, that's right folks, i think the changed for movie ending is better than the original comic book ending! also the soundtrack's pretty damn good basically, go and see it, but read the comic book too - before or after, your choice. Tags: books, comics, movies
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last night i went to see the latest outing of Daniel Craig's James Bond. well apart from the character being called James Bond there was little resemblance to a Bond film. there's no cheesy one-liners, memorable super villain, gadgets or humour. it's just action sequence after action sequence. luckily the action sequences are very good, but why someone would build a hotel in the middle of the desert is one question, why they would build it out of easily detonated bombs... well the mind boggles! that's not the only major plot hole in what is a rediculously over complicated story line.  i normally don't do spoilers, but here goes. bond is on a revenge trip cos the baddies killed the girl he had a brief fling with who then double crossed him love of his life. he's also trying to find out who Le Chiffre (from Casino Royale) was working for cos M told him to and also it's them what killed his missus. to do this bond must kill everyone he comes in contact with who might lead him to the baddies and through some dumb luck he stumbles upon an unmemroable baddie, who'snot really all that bad. not very nice, but not Blowfelt bad. it turns out that the mysterious baddies have spies everywhere and appear to be the only ones in the world that know that they exist, let alone what they're up to. cue some more dumb luck from bond and some more dead people (mostly people innocently going through their dreary lives) and suddently bond is the only non-baddie in the world who knows what the baddies are up to (they're pretending to the bolivians that there's nothing important in a piece of desert they want, they're pretending to the americans that they have oil in the desert, whereas really they've dammed up an undergound river and are going to charge the thirsty people to drink water) ok, so the plot is kinda dastardly. bond finds this underground dam and instead of destroying it, telling M or even telling the thirsty village he walks through, he's off to the hotel made with bombs instead of bricks... i'm sure there's more to it than that, but i'm bored writing. if you want a good action film, then you'll most likely enjoy it. if you want a traditional bond film, don't waste your time. rip off or tribute - you decide. Tags: movies
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in 1940 Will Eisner penned a newspaper insert that radically changed what a comicbook could be. his new title The Spirit seemed at first glance to be your run of the mill masked detective hero, but not so. the spirit is a crime thriller, a horror, a comedy, a romance, a mystery and an action title all rolled into one. The Spirit was the lead item of a 16-page, tabloid-sized, newsprint comic book sold as part of eventually 20 Sunday newspapers with a combined circulation of as many as five million copies. Eisner only wrote The Spirit for 2 years before he was drafted into the US Army, but the comic was kept alive by a small team of ghost writers until his return in 1945. Eisner continued to write The Spirit until 1952. since then The Spirit has been reprinted and relaunched (unsuccessfully) dozens of times. so now we have a hollywood movie, written and directed by Frank Miller... Will Eisner is very well known within the comic book community (the Eisners is the comic book version of the Oscars...), but outside it? i'm guessing that's why Frank Miller's name will be the one up in lights... (Frank Miller's the bloke who wrote and co-directed Sin City and 300). only now from looking at the trailer, it would appear to be Frank Miller's version of The Spirit, not Will Eisner's The Spirit... The cinematography looks so similar to that of Sin City, several scenes just appearing in balck and white with a single colour. this is the style Frank Miller uses in his Sin City comics, not the style Will Eisner used at all.  
anyway, here's the trailer so you can make up your own mind
and here's an extra clip from the film. Tags: movies
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here's a picture of the Mitchell-Hedges crystal skull, supposedly found inside an altar in a temple in Belize  there is a bit of a mystery surrounding it, but Indy's latest adventure only mentions it and then goes off on a huge tangent...  so the fourth instalment mixes a few myths and legends - the crystal skull ( clicky), the nasca lines ( clicky) and Eldorado ( clicky) and then throw in a curve ball. i normally don't like to give the plot away to people who haven't seen a film, but in this case i'll make an exception. the film starts in 1957 with Indy being taken to "hangar 51" - a military storage facility - by a group of Russians who force him to lead them to a crate, the contents of which he examined 10 years earlier in Roswell, New Mexico... yep, you guessed it, Aliens! then Indy survives a point blank atom bomb, and goes back to work as if nothing happened... next we introduce the sidekick, played by Shia LeBeuf (also played the annoying main character from tv's Even Stevens, which should have been a career ender), then we find out that a friend of Indy's has been kidnapped after apparently finding Eldorado, the Mysterious City of Gold (cue dodgy pan pipe music, a song about children of the sun and a cool giant condor plane thing... oh no, that was something else...) so Indy and sidekick set off to find said kidnapped friend and on the way find a crystal skull (which looks like an alien and not at all like the Mitchell-Hedges skull) and then they're captured by the same group of Russians - who also apparently survived the atomic blast - and are reunited with their kidnapped friend (who's gone a bit GA-GA) and the female lead from Raiders of the Lost Ark. this is actually the most welcome part as the banter between the characters of Indy and Marion is fluid and quite possibly the only believable part of the film. Indy is granted Telepathetic abilities by the Alien crystal skull which via a roundabout route tells him where to find Eldorado. then there's the obligatory chase scene - which is actually pretty good (discounting anything done by LeBeouf) and ends in another ridiculous scene involving giant flesh eating ants and some massive waterfalls... then they get to eldorado and the film gets really silly. part of what i loved about the first three indy films is that the action, although over the top, relied on skill, knowledge and a fair amount of luck on Indy's part, but what he survived has always seemed humanly possible. in this jaunt however, he's thrown about 10 miles through the air in a fridge and walks away without a scratch, goes over the Iguaçu Falls (Vastly larger than Niagara Falls) and survives just a little wet and i won't even go into the alien space ship taking off!! was there not enough to the three myths/legends that they could have wielded a more earthly story line? i know the previous 3 films have had a religious context (the Ark of the Covenant, the Sankara stones, the Holy Grail), but still. i mean would a city made of gold have been too much to ask for? i mean, it's not like they had 19 years to come up with a decent plot... oh wait, yes they did. dare i say it, but Nicolas Cage's National Treasure was more like an Indiana Jones film than this twaddle! Angelina Jolie's Lara Croft was a more convincing historian and TVs Relic Hunter generally has more realistic plots! i've just seen an interview with George Lucas where he said "I haven’t even told Steven or Harrison this, but I have an idea to make Shia [LeBeouf] the lead character next time and have Harrison [Ford] come back like Sean Connery did in the last movie. I can see it working out." really George, so a fifth movie is on the cards and you want to change the one thing that's tied the movies together... oh well, i doubt it'll be any worse. Tags: movies
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