Ketchup

I'm going to put a few retroactive reviews up here, films that I don't want to forget from earlier this summer. While these three are new, I do watch a lot of older movies too, because I don't always have the time/money for the theater. Plus, my babe has a vast collection of old films.

The Watchmen-
It's been gone over and gone over. I saw it once, I'd like to see it again and really make up my mind. It was definitely beautiful, visually and conceptually. It was faithful to the graphic novel to a fault, at times in a panel by panel way that made for weirdly timed transitions and dialogue. Other than that, I enjoyed it.

It's hard for me to really pass judgement because I'm already a fan of the graphic novel. My girlfriend, a confessed nerd but not a comic reader, thought it was very good, so it has the outsider appeal.

Now the real meat- some people claimed that it was a movie about nothing, or more accurately that the graphic novel was about something that we are supposedly over. The whole idea of violence being the only uniter. Or of humanity being meaningless. Or about teenage despair. Or something.


I think those all miss the point. The point is, in the midst of all this hero, superhero, and superhero as metaphor for political super power hype, what kind of person becomes a hero? What kind of person do you become, in being a hero? What would having control over the world be like?

If you ask me, the point of the watchmen is not the (honestly) stock sci-fi plot that everyone tries to deconstruct. It's a beautifully plotted character study, taking you deep into the flaws, foibles, madness, and arroagance at the center of the kind of person who would want to save us all.

So what if Rorschach's dialogue is cheezy- he's a grown man who dresses like Dick Tracy for god's sake. He has a screw loose, and talks like bad noir because that's what he thinks he is- a tough ass private dick done wrong, saving us from our weakness, who got so twisted up along the way he lost himself to the character.

Yes, the sex scene is awkward. She's immature, he's an overweight doofus.

Yes, there's a naked blue man all over the place. When you can see the atoms inside someone's brain change states while they're thinking, and already know what they're thinking, and what they're going to think, does modesty really make any sense any more?

Bah, anyway, I liked it. But then I liked 2001 a space odyssey, somehow.