‘Tales of the Black Freighter’

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Watchmen Motion Comic is on sale as DVD and Blu-Ray, too.

Watchin’ Rorschach’s mask

The eleventh (and maybe last?) of the Watchmen video journals focuses on our boy Rorschach’s mask. Download in your choice of formats and sizes (including HD) here, or watch below:

Watchmen picture disc with ... My Chemical Romance

I missed this while I was away, and I’m not sure whether I’m glad about that or not.

Tomorrow Warner/Reprise will release a 12-inch picture disc with music from Watchmen. On the A side is My Chemical Romance’s “powerful cover” of Dylan’s “Desolation Row” — from whose lyrics (“At midnight all the agents...”) the title of the first issue was taken. I guess that satisfies the “snotty pop-punk version of a TV theme or 1960s rock classic” required of the soundtrack for every expensive Hollywood adaptation.

Side B: “Tyler Bates ‘Prison Fight’ Track from the Original Motion Picture Score (Rorschach City Scene).” Your advance price from the Warners store: $11.99.

At least it’s not a 12-year-old Smashing Pumpkins leftover.

Watchin’ the Minutemen (and the ugly Watchmen suit)

The latest Watchmen vlog entry went up yesterday. This one is about the Minutemen, the World War II-era predecessors of the Watchmen. For talking heads, they’re down to the guy who plays Rorschach and the still photographer.

Of course, all this may be in vain considering the latest news about the Fox vs. Warner Bros. case, which will be decided by a federal judge by Jan. 20. This comes a couple of weeks after that same judge ruled that Fox owns the distribution rights. Today Warner Bros. asked him to, ahem, hurry up.

Hard-bitten Hollywood pragmatists among you will probably say that all this will just raise the ransom price. But there’s at least the theoretical possibility that the thing could be squelched. (Hint: The pragmatists are usually right.)

A bunch of new Watchmen videos

The big news is the new trailer. It just went up on Yahoo, which declares it “totally awesome.” Jake and Jesse have already pooh-poohed it, but I like it better than the previous one — more Cold War tension. 

I also missed the last couple of entries in the ongoing video journal on the Watchmen movie blog. No. 8, directly below, is about Silk Spectre, and No. 7 features Dr. Manhattan. Aside from my other nits, the thing that worries me most here is all the Matrix-style slow-motion fight shots. So 2001.

Watchmen: Owlship, and bullcrap

I missed this the other day, but another interesting making-of video has been posted to the Watchmen blog, which you can download in various formats, including HD. This one is about the Owlship, the Nite Owl/Dan Dreiberg’s crime-fightin’ craft. As we’ve come to expect, the production values here are through the roof.

I could have done without the bogus story of location scouting, however, in which they claim to find a subterranean hangar for a mysterious flying vehicle with “circular glass lenses, peering from under the oily fabric like two owl eyes.” Fuck you, your audience is too old for this.

Watchin’ the Watchmen trailer

How I catch every production designer and costumer v-journal but miss the trailer, I don’t know. But thanks to a link from Jake, I now have seen it. In HD, too.

And ... I dunno. My initial reactions are all fanboy reflexes, which means they are uncritical and prejudicial and they emerge from deep within the mylar sleeves of my crocodile brain. Comedian is too handsome. Laurie/Silk Spectre is too sexy. Dan/Nite Owl isn’t fat enough. Veidt/Ozymandias is too young. Too this, too that. Not exactly like the comic. Worst episode ever.

Which is unfair. The V for Vendetta film may have been a dumbed-down hatchet job, but it was a pretty good dumbed-down hatchet job. With Watchmen I’m bracing for the worst in terms of storyline and acting, but it’s clear from the trailer that a great deal of attention has been paid to production detail. We basically already knew that, but this confirms it. Rope of Silicon has a frame-by-frame, movie-to-comic comparison of some key scenes, revealing that yes, they look like reasonably faithful translations of certain images:

The big question is whether that is all they are. A story is more than props and a rigid storyboard. If anything, too much concern about making a xerox from one medium to another suggests a slavish uncreativity on the part of a director, a failure of imagination. Too often, I think, that is where comic adaptations go wrong: they get stuck in the small picture and miss the big picture.

With Watchmen the stakes are especially high because the big picture is very, very big. It’s the best story ever told in comics and one of the best in 20th-century literature, an artfully complex summation of late-Cold War politics and popular culture. That’s not just me talking: as is well known, it placed on Time magazine’s list a few years ago of the 100 best novels since 1923.

(Even though we live in an age of war, I think the paranoia and pessimism of Watchmen are essentially rooted in the Cold War and are no longer a part of our culture, at least not in the same way. For some reason, though, that makes it more real to me. This is not a vague and formulaic complaint about war and death in general; it’s about a time and a place. That makes it real history, and paradoxically also makes it more universal.)

The 2 minute 20 second trailer is not enough to decide whether the film meets the challenge. But it reveals something that for other comic adaptations has been a tell-tale flaw: the little details have been obsessively accounted for, from Nite Owl’s ship to Ozymandias’ collar to Rorschach’s Veidt-brand hair spray weapon. All that is nice, but it’s not enough. Does Zack Snyder know that? Who watches him?

(One thing that’s kind of funny: Apple’s page for the HD version of the trailer seems to mix up the names of some actors and characters. Fanboys, you start your error-spotting engines:)

• “Zack Snyder (dir.)
• Malin Akerman
• Laurie Juspeczyk
• Billy Crudup
• Jon Osterman
• Matthew Goode”

Dave Gibbons on Watchmen film

He says that Zach Snyder, the director, “stuck as closely as he can to what we put in the original comic book.” We’ll see about that.

Punta e clicca for downloadable videos, including HD versions.

Howard the Duck video journal

More Watchmen: this time it’s a video journal with the costume designer, Michael Wilkinson. The costumes are good, I guess (once again), and other than the 1960s flower children everything seems pretty true to the book.

But why is it that when Hollywood tries to do comic book realism, it comes out looking even more fake and contrived? Is it because comic art is all about fantasy to begin with, that even serious and novelistic books like Watchmen are still unapologetically unreal, with no attempt to fool anybody?

Watchmen TV spots and contest

I don’t know if there’s anything I care less about than YouTube contests — Dave Grohl, say it weren’t so — but the latest chapter of the Watchmen hype campaign is a YouTube channel where you can create TV spots for Veidt products using downloadable images and video snippets. A couple of samples that they put up include a spot for Nostalgia, the perfume whose billboards are all over place in the original book:

... and high-top sneakers, which I don’t believe were in the book but are historically suitable for the Air Jordan/British Knights era — although it’s not clear to me how they would contribute to Veidt’s manipulation of the zeitgeist. Thoughts?

Watchin’ the Watchmen production video

Just posted to the Watchmen movie blog: a nearly four-minute behind-the-scenes video showing set design and construction.

Very impressive on first glance. I’ll scour for errors later, but so far the only major one I noticed is that the midtown street corner is wrong: In the book the Gunga Diner and the newsstand, etc., are at 40th and Seventh, not 43rd and Sixth as they have it here. (43rd and Sixth, as New Yorkers know, has Town Hall and the International Center of Photography on the west side and the Hippodrome on the east, with office towers to the north and Bryant Park to the south. Not Times Square at all.)

Above is the “medium” resolution video. Better quality videos are available, including some HD ones.

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UPDATE: Now that I’ve watched the HD version, there’s a nice Easter egg in there: on one of the street signs, 43rd is called “Burroughs St.”

Negative-one-year Watchmen anniversary

The Watchmen movie, literally two decades in development, opens a year from today, and the film’s official blog has posted the following portraits of the main characters. They look ... good, I guess. They just remind me a little too much of Val Kilmer as Batman.

YAAAAAAGH! on film

From the official Flickr feed of the Watchmen movie, which has just wrapped. Looks like the Rorschach capture scene, of which they earlier gave us a storyboard tease.

YAAAAAAGH! KAAAH!

03.06.09