Having Watched the Watchmen

Warning. Spoilers follow, for both the film and the graphic novel.

On the off chance that anyone's actually reading this, is thinking of watching the film and doesn't want any spoilers, here's a short presentation before the main feature.



There. That should have forced the guts of this piece off the front page.

One theory about the recent rise of comic derived movies is that movie people look at a comic and see a whole load of storyboards. This could certainly be true of Zack Synder who seems to have gone to extraordinary lengths to ensure that all the significant scenes from the comic actually appear in the film. The murder of Edward Blake comes first as a scene in it's own right, but then we cut to a rather remarkable realisation of the first page of the comic - the Comedian's button lying in a pool of blood, zooming out to show the 'End of the World is Nigh' signboard walking down the street and even the Pyramid Transcontinental van heading away. When the funeral opened with a close up on a carved angel's head (the less famous opening of issue two) I did wonder if the film was going to contain every issue cover. Which might have been an interesting easter egg for sad gonks like me, but probably wouldn't have help the rest of the world appreciate the film.

Though saying that, this is not a film aimed at the rest of the world. It's a slavish hymn of praise to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's original, aimed squarely at those of us who know the original backwards. Sure, there are differences, but the only one that actually counts is swapping out the giant space squid, that didn't really make much sense, for an ending that hangs together a bit better, and various characters make a point of using the word watchmen to describe themselves, but it's all straight from the books.

The major cut from the book is the Black Freighter, which wouldn't have added to the narrative, so no great less. There are a few other minor cuts, but what's less appealing is what Synder felt the need to put in. Violence. Lots of violence.

It's not like there's no violence within the Watchmen comic, but with the exception of Rorschach, the violence is generally implied, and let's be honest incompetent. Nite Owl is a plump kid with the coolest toys on the block. Here's he's a kick ass martial artist who's not only capable of breaking a mugger's am, he's able to shatter that arm in a spray of blood. In the same fight we see Laurie kill two of the muggers and laugh about it later. It's wrong. Laurie shouldn't be a casual killer. It's just not her. In the flashback of Jon's brief crimefighting career, OK he can blow up mobsters with a glance, but do we really need to see their entrails hanging from the ceiling? In the prison riot a man is killed because Rorschach has tied him up to deny access to a door. In the comic there is a sput of blood from off panel. The brutality is implied and because of that more powerful. Synder thinks we need to see both his arms cut off with an angle grinder. In slow motion.

Essentially what we have here is a very accurate use of the comics as storyboards, by a director who's instincts are for horror movies. He adds very little to the story, and little of that is an improvement. It looks wonderful though, I expect he's a lot happier with it than I'm ever likely to be. I have no idea whether someone who hasn't read and reread the story over the last 25 years is actually going to get all the clever stuff, since most of that's about splendidly recreating individual comic panels on film. Then again, they're less likely to be annoyed by the silly little things that bug me. Dan witnessing Rorschach and Manhattan's final confrontation? Why?

Still, as a (still) plump (former) kid without all the best toys, I've wanted an Owlship of my own for a very long time. This film just makes me want one more.

Who wants to watch the Watchmen?

It was the summer of 1986, and I'd come back from the late lamented Rainbow's End, the best comic shop in Oxford, to sulk upstairs and read what, within half an issue, was obviously the greatest comic ever published.

After finishing The Dark Knight Returns I started on the first issue of Watchmen. It was perhaps the shortest ever reign as greatest comic ever. Watchmen was like nothing else at all. Sure, Dark Knight was wonderful, even if the bad guy was someone I'd never heard of, Two Face never having appeared on the Adam West TV show, but Watchmen was more. One was nothing but style, the other had both style and substance.
So then there was the increasingly painful slow trickle of Watchmen issues coming out, leading up to the frankly anti-climatic ending. It changed people's expectations of comics, with the rapid collected edition it changed the medium forever.

About fifteen minutes after the TPB came out the word began to get round that Terry Gilliam, former python, was to make Watchmen the movie. And so the story went for at least a decade without ever showing the slightest sign of becoming reality. The story kept bubbling along, a script would apparently be written, some funding would be secured, or lost, but in the end it seemed that the idea of a Gilliam directed Watchmen was something hard core fans of both wanted rather more that Hollywood, Moore, or the general public would want. And I was certainly with the general public on that one.

Why after all would you really want to make a film of Watchmen? It's too big, too sprawling to be crammed down into two and a half hours without stripping everything away. The whole thing demolishes the idea of superheroes, but without ever straying away from the iconography of the four colour comic. Film goers don't have that kind of vocabulary, the whole thing would surely need to be dumbed down. You could make a very bad film and call it Watchmen if you really wanted to, but would be be possible to make a good film?

Things have changed a bit over the years of course. It's no longer surprising to want to make a comic from a film, and some of them have even been quite good. It used to be that a superhero movie would have to be nothing but origin story, sixty minutes of introducing you to Peter Parker, his friends and family, and only showing a costume in the last half. Though it should be remembered that Watchmen is little but an extended origin story, even if it is one told entirely in flashback. It's no longer a mad idea to do a watchmen movie, but it still seems a touch meh.

Is it the case that a book has only really 'arrived' when there's a film made of it? I don't think I've every heard of anyone making a film of Paradise Lost, nor the Night's Dawn trilogy. Works of literature can be great works of literature without needing to be translated into other media.

And the award for most ridiculous box goes to...

Amazon.co.uk






who think a box this size is appropriate for...



a very tiny pair of gloves

Culture

I've been meaning to write for some time about the various cultural things I've been doing, but alas, the lure of playing games has been stronger. Perhaps this is why so many blogs get started and then abandoned. It's certainly true that I find it easier to write on my PDA in the middle of New Zealand than at home, not because the PDA is a good writing platform (though there are worse) but because there are fewer distractions. So to blitz things.

The Reader
Saw this one in January. It is without doubt a tremendously accomplished film. The quick summary is that it's about a German man, now in his fifties, still haunted by his first love, who turns out to have been a member of the SS. Kate Winslet, as Hanna, the former guard is splendid and entirely human. Life has overwhelmed her, forcing her do do things he knows are wrong, but she's lost, confused. It was wrong, but she doesn't know what she could of done better. Rafe Fiennes is also baffled and confused for most of the film, unable to make a proper relationship with anyone else.
It is a very accomplished film, but did I actually enjoy it? Neither central character is entirely sympathetic, by the end of the film you feel profoundly sorry for them, but wouldn't really want either of them as a friend. The whole film is somewhat painful, but so is life. It's a good film. Real. I'm glad I saw it. But not quite a film to love. All the characters are too damaged to feel love, and I can't quite love the film back as a result.
Does Winslet deserve the Oscar? Not that I've seen any of the other films nominated in her category. It is a stunning performance, and without her the whole film would have been a nothing. The bizarre thing is the number of awards Winslet has won as Best Supporting Actress, which she is not by any stretch of the imagination. I suppose that's a polite fiction to prevent her from competing with herself on Revolutionary Road.

Slumdog Millionaire
Saw this one in February. Why is it that there was absolutely nothing you'd even consider paying £7.20 to go see in November-December, and then an overload in the New Year. Surely films can compete for Oscars if they've been out for more than six weeks?
Still: Street kid goes on 'Who Wants to be a Millionaire,' every question is a reflection on his life. Is he a cheat, lucky or destined to win?
It's a gobsmacking film. Astoundingly beautiful. If it doesn't pick up all the editing & cinematography Oscars tomorrow night then there's either something very wrong or it will have been beaten by something transcendental, and I've heard nothing to suggest that. It sounds splendid as well. All in all a very effective advert for the Indian Tourist board. Apart from the bit with the slum toilet.
While again the central character spends a lot of the film baffled, Dev Patel is engaging, funny, wry. Anil Kapoor makes a splendid Chris Tarrent.
A wonderful film. Should win Best Director as well as all the technical stuff. Perhaps Best Film, perhaps not. If you've not already, go see it.

Can You Forgive Her?
Book rather than a film, but still undoubtedly culture. And rather disturbingly the first book finished this year, though to be fair it is a rather long one. First without pictures anyhow.
A few years back I kept a reading diary, recording all the books I read and what I thought of them. Even had the idea of putting them up in some form of blog, though I never got round to doing so. Might try again and stick things up here.
The second Anthony Trollope I've read, last year it was 'The Way We Live Now'. Obviously a man that liked long titles. TWWLN is splendid, and strangely appropriate for modern times, being mainly about the rise and fall of a crooked banker and the damage done to the people around him.
CYFH rather lacks that modern echo, being mainly about a young lady dithering about whether to marry her noble but boring fiancee or her charismatic if amoral cousin. Meanwhile her widowed aunt strings along two suitors, monied and boring or penniless and charming, and her best friend dithers about whether to abandon her husband in favour of the lover she put aside to marry him. It's well written, though at times you really do feel that some of them need a slap.
848 pages apparently in dead tree edition, and to be honest could have been trimmed a bit. There are five or six chapters after everyone's come to a conclusion that don't really add very much, save for a need to (almost) every character some form of resolution. The basic flaw of the book is that Alice, the first of the ditherers, spends most of book deeply unhappy with the choices she has made and yet quite unwilling to change them, and she becomes rather hard to sympathise with. Thinks: could one write a dull thesis on whether she is in fact bipolar?
Still, there's enough in there to bring me back at some point for another. But not for a few months.
But if you're looking for a Trollope, The Way We Live Now is very much better.

The Wedding Present, Leeds, 16th December

I first heard The Wedding Present when I was living in a shared house just after dropping out of University nearly twenty years ago now. Dear God how time flies.
Aggressive, almost thrash guitars, driving through angry songs about men whose relationships had just broken up, or were just about to. One album in particular spoke to me for some reason. Were these songs written buy a stalker, or wittily observed stories about the kinds of men who stalk?

No, I sent you that letter
To ask you if the end was worth the means
Was there really no in between?
And I still don't feel better
I just wondered if it could be like before
And I think you just made me sure!

After a while they split up and the songwriter formed a new band, Cinerama. Instead of the angry guitars, now there where lush sweeping strings, and songs about men whose relationships had broken up stalking their former lovers and obsessively stalking girls they barely know

But of course none of this has happened at all, yet
We've not even spoken, but i'll bet
Once you're through my door
You'll want to stay for ever more
Because i will hold you so tight, i'll make you see how
You are the right woman for me now
Just give me a glance
To show me that i've got a chance

A few albums later and Cinerama morphed back into the The Wedding Present. The music is less angry than before, but the same themes are there. Pain, confusion, betrayal, lust.

I thought I saw a flying saucer last night but of course it was just an aeroplane
I thought I saw Winona Ryder but my eyes were playing tricks again
Some things look wonderful but then they’re different when you look again

And that’s what’s so funny, honey
You’ve looked like my girl for so long that I thought you would always be beside me
But I’d be the first to admit I was wrong

I'm still not entirely sure I understand the songs. There's a profound misogyny to them when taken on face value. Yet there's a subtlety to the lyrics that move them beyond the ranting. They are perhaps satire, and like all satire it has to sound believable. Or it's just skilfully crafted misogyny. Can't rule that out.
Tonight they are playing Leeds.

All the above written safely before the gig. Leeds Student Union. Tiny compared to all the big stadium things I've been to over the last few years. Maybe 500-800 people. Under ten metres from the stage. An hour later my ears are returning to normal.
Marvelous. Rockier and thrashier than their recent albums. Very quick. They're on just after nine and finish at about ten twenty five. Twenty odd songs in that time. No hanging about for drum solos.
Apparently they're playing Bristol tomorrow... You know if I got off work at four I could probably make it...

Ticket to Ride Dice

Ticket to Ride is probably my favourite recent Spiel des Jahres winner. Some years the prize seems to have been going to rather dubious games: I quite like Zooloretto, though it is just a reworking of an earlier game. The same is also true of this year's winner, Keltis, which I've not yet played, and seems to have got somewhat mixed reviews.
Ticket to Ride, winner in 2004, is probably the last really great game to have scooped the prize. It's by Alan Moon, and therefore involves a lot of wanting to do three things at the same time - collecting cards that let you build things, spending the building cards and collecting ticket cards that earn points by connecting cities. Since other people are trying to get cards in the same suits as you, and connect cities using railway lines you had you eye on, you're generally torn between piling up building cards and rushing to get routes built, with the destination tickets a bit of an afterthought, even if it is an afterthought that winds up winning the game for you.
Since publication there have been a slew of variants and spin offs. The original American map was followed by Europe, Germany, Switzerland and Scandinavia, most of which offer different little twiddles. Europe is probably the most balanced. There's a pure card game, but it's the kind of memory game I'm no good at. Now we get a dice game.
The dice game's actually not a game of itself, it's an alternative to building railway connection through collecting and spending cards. There are five dice, showing track, stations or locomotives. You throw the lot and re-roll as many as take your fancy. The two different types of track let you build on single or double lines of track, the stations let you collect additional tickets. Un-used pairs of dice let you collect tokens that give you an additional build your next go. There are three penalty dice that come in while building tunnels in Europe, Switzerland or Scandinavia.
So how does it compare?
The big difference between the cards and the dice is that the game goes much quicker. In traditional cards based TtR the game goes in fits and spurts. There's a degree of brinkmanship going on as everyone starts collecting huge hands of cards, eventually though someone starts building and there's a phase of everyone laying track as fast as they can, or at least until their hands of cards run out, at which point people go back to collecting cards, perhaps collecting new tickets and the whole thing starts again.
With the dice there's none of that. Every turn you throw the dice, throw some of them again, and then you either build or collect tickets. in the game we played last week, Europe with three players, we only a couple of times went for tickets, everything else was throw and build, throw and build. There was never any reason not to get on and build. In the card based game there comes a point half way through, when the initial objectives are secure and the cards available to be drawn look unhelpful, that you want to get some more tickets, if nothing else to give you an objective to build towards. With the dice you don't get that breathing space, even with two players who're famously fond of collecting lots of tickets we just didn't find ourselves with the time to do it.
It's a different game, but it seemed to work. I'd certainly try it again.

The Doomwood Curse

Back in the olden days, when Doctor Who was off the air, and Russell T Davies made TV shows that seemed to set out to annoy the people that weren't watching them, it carried on, as books and later as audio recordings. The books seemed to work very hard at becoming incomprehensible as fast as they possibly could, but some of the recordings were rather good. Made by Big Finish, they feature 'real' TV Doctors, often with 'real' TV companions supporting them.
At their best the Big Finish audio stories can be very good indeed. The one in which the Tardis arrives on the doomed world of Mondas just as desperate measures become essential remains the greatest Cyberman story yet told in any medium. At their worst the writers start to become obsessed with companions having only a single story hook, which has to be brought out every time. There was one girl slotted into the space between two Peter Davison stories who could be relied on to have a fight with the Doctor every adventure, and wonder if she should leave the Tardis and settle down where ever they happened to be this time. And in the end she did of course.
The revelations though have been that Colin Baker would have made a pretty damn good Doctor given decent scripts, and even more surprisingly, that Bonnie Langford could have made a good companion. Really.
As well as better special effects, the audio adventures do allow a modicum of time travel adventures rather more easily than can TV. For some years India Fisher played Charlie Pollard been a companion to Paul McGann. Eventually the relationship became a bit tired and McGann went off to do a different style of story, leaving Charlie to a happy ending. Except a few stories later Charlie pops up as a companion to Colin Baker, knowing rather more about the Tardis and the Doctor than he really expects, not letting on half of what she knows for fear that it might alter the Doctor's history and prevent her Doctor from ever coming to be. It makes a different and really rather jolly dynamic.

This story's pretty much a romp. There's a bit of pretext for a highwayman melodrama, but it doesn't really matter. Bodices are ripped, horses are chased, lost siblings are discovered through matching birthmarks. All very silly and a welcome sign that Big Finish aren't taking themselves too seriously.