General Movie Jibba Jabba

Sun, 8 Mar 2009

Not content with just the robots taking over the planet, I’ve been reading up a lot of articles on the big bang theory and the ultimate fate of the universe, which, though long after the robots have enslaved our planet, stripped it of all its resources and took to the stars, is the theory that the universe is actually expanding at an accelerating rate and eventually will be nothing but redshift to radiation. Gotta love science.

Anyway, been pretty shit still at keeping this constantly updated, which I still maintain is a robot conspiracy. Caught up with some friends over the weekend and managed to stay conscious through the most of a friend’s Samurai movie marathon and got to watch a few films that I’ve been meaning to watch for a long time. In particular is Hari-Kiri by Masaki Kobayashi which was just great and something I’ve got to get my own copy of sometime. Wonderful lighting and intense performances from all, check out his other film Kwaidan if you can sometime.

Also caught Watchmen which left me at a loss for an opinion for a few days and even now I’m not as close to deciding if I liked it or hated it. On one hand, the adaptation of the comic in terms of visuals and dialogue have been done brilliantly well and the film looks amazing and lots of the scenes reminded me of bits exactly in the books, on the other hand, that’s almost just saying that comics are nothing but movies that don’t move and I think that’s the growing attitude towards graphic novels which is stupid. While this worked in Sin City and 300 cause there was this macho attitude towards everything in the comics and that attitude was there on screen, Watchmen the comic is full of nuances and subtext and themes that just weren’t there on the screen. It was like a hollow doppleganger or carbon copy of the general plot and no soul behind it.

In saying all that actually, I think I’m getting closer to not hating Watchmen. Other gripes I had were that the pacing of the film was very off, the soundtrack (apart from the wonderful use of Dylan in the opening credits) was awful, the changed ending was terrible, most of the action scenes were boring and unnecessary and what the hell was up with Nixon’s nose? It was hard to pay attention to anything else when the damn thing was on screen.

I wanted to like the movie, I really did, and I admire Snyder for “staying true” to the comics, but in doing so, he’s just made a hollow moving picture version that made me want to go back to the comic and stay there.

Really, I should have posted this semi-review separately, but meh. Here’s a version of Watchmen I’m certainly glad they never did and yet strangely would have still watched it anyway…