The trailer for Watchmen, the film adaptation of A...
The trailer for Watchmen, the film adaptation of Alan Moore’s graphic novel masterpiece. The look is pitch-perfect, though I have some concerns about Zack Snyder’s (300) directorial style. Expectations are generally high.
Comments (24)
Man, the Owl guy, and especially his ship, looked ridiculous in the comic book and looked equally ridiculous in the trailer. Otherwise, everything seemed to be on tone.
Yeah, Nite Owl looks like a bad Batman parody, which is reasonable in terms of the source material but might be weird for audiences that aren't comic book geeks? I don't know.
But Veidt looked like a smarmy tool in a very appropriate way.
I hadn't expected to care that this was finally getting made, but I think maybe now I do.
Looks coo-ish. I hated 300, which was a bunch of slo-mo greenscreen crap. This has that possibility. Then again, the source material is oh so good. And I like how they went with mostly no names for the cast.
My wife hated it and was disgusted by the whole "the most celebrated graphic novel of all time" bit. As she said, that would be Maus.
"[T]hat would be Maus."
That's debatable. From wikipedia:
Certainly not gospel, but enough to justify the claim in the trailer. I haven't read Maus recently enough to really compare, although the medium is about the only thing the two have in common.
They're both about mass murder.
maybe I'm a minimum word snob, but in my book graphic novel != novel.
I think several of the Sandman graphic novels should be in contention too. At least the one about Death.
Spare me the Billy Corgan.
in contention for best graphic novel, maybe, or even best literature, which can be all-encompassing. but a graphic novel is not a novel.
Ah, but which one can claim a pulitzer?
As for Time and Entertainment Weekly, uh, have you seen their lists? Not that Watchman isn't great. But I was only forced to read one of them in school. And I imagine 50 years from now, the same thing can be said.
coming from a comic geek, i'd say watchmen was the greater book in terms of rich, imaginative storytelling, with layer upon layer of subtext. maus was largely biographical (not to diminish its greatness). however, without maus, there may have been no watchmen:
from wikipedia:
Alan Moore praised Maus in a recommendations list for the website http://www.readyourselfraw.com, saying "I have been convinced that Art Spiegelman is perhaps the single most important comic creator working within the field and in my opinion Maus represents his most accomplished work to date…"
and yes spare me the billy corgan. i have real reservations about this movie. it looks way too cool. the nite owl, sally j., and all of the old-timers (where were they in the trailer?) are just ordinary people (nite owl is even overweight). adrien looked smarmy, but also like a teenager. i don't wanna hate on it too much; a lot of it looked cool (yay billy crudup). the book is so layered that it's hard to believe it can be successfully distilled into a blockbuster.
Just to be a small pain in the ass, I'd say Maus has about as much storytelling invention and nuance and layered meaning as could possibly be crammed into the form. Watchmen might be right up there with it (never read it, but I totally believe you), but don't sell Maus short. It's unbelievably brilliant.
Maus is more "celebrated" than Watchmen if you assume that acclaim from critics who don't read comic books is more valuable than acclaim from critics who do. Sort of like how Speakerboxxx/The Love Below is the most celebrated hip-hop record ever.
I've read Maus maybe a dozen times, and Spiegelman is technically compelling, but shit, would it really have made such a big splash if it weren't about the Holocaust, and if the idea of a comic book being about something serious hadn't been so novel at the time? I feel like it's overrated in a relative way but not an absolute way-- it's about as good as everyone thinks it is, but a lot of people regard Spiegelman's accomplishment too highly because they don't realize how big the medium is.
(I'd say the same thing about The Sandman, though Gaiman fans are a little more likely to read other comics eventually.)
Spiegelman knew what Spielberg and so many short-form Oscar contenders know: The Holocaust is a surefire vote-getter. Also, black and white is more "arty".
Wow, Jon May, you really think he did Maus because it would win him adulation? I think he did it because he had a story to tell and a way he wanted to tell it. As far as works about the Holocaust, I am much more interested in Maus than I am in Schindler's List. Much more. But JM, maybe you're sort of joking?
I don't read comic books, generally, so I'm not comparing Maus to other comics. As a work that involves pictures and words, it's pretty damn compelling, and to me it resonates on far more than a technical level. But I freely admit to a certain self-consciousness about the fact that I have really nothing to compare it to in terms comic art. Frankly, the reason I haven't read Watchmen is because I really didn't know anything about it until the movie was announced, and the fact that it's being promoted around the movie is a reason for me to not read it right now. I think it's really weird that "based on the graphic novel" in and of itself is a promotional point for movies these days.
I'm sort of joking. But conventional wisdom when picking best short film in an Oscar pool is to go with the Holocaust. Sometimes this doesn't exactly help -- I think last year there were three competing Holocaust-themed pictures in one category.
Oh, about that you're totally right. I just find Maus to be one of the few artworks in a popular medium (if you will) about the Holocaust that I would hold up as exemplary (although I don't claim to have sampled them all). Without being able to talk much about comics per se, I do think Maus uses the medium itself to get at some of the difficulties of telling such a story in the first place. That's a concept I don't think Spielberg has any real grasp of. I also think that from the perspective of a comic fan it might be obvious that the medium is capable of treating serious subject matter, but from the perspective of works treating Holocaust survivors' memories, etc., Maus was pretty radical at the time.
Now Spielman, don't you play this piano!
Jesse, have you read Spiegelman's pre-Maus comics at all? If memory serves, it's mostly meta-meta-meta-experimental gibberish, and I say this as someone who likes experimental gibberish. I don't know if he wrote Maus to make people love him (if so, he won against pretty long odds!), but he must have been aware when writing it that it was unusually accessible-- something he could take to a mainstream publisher.
Re: "based on the graphic novel!", I feel sheepish about having first read Hellboy when a friend of mine had a cross-promoted (stickered, exclamation pointed) copy of one of the books in his living room, just after the movie came out. But now I adore Mignola's work, so I don't regret it. Still haven't seen the movie...
Weird, apparently not-atypical Spiegelman story: Back in college he came to speak on campus but spoke in one of our cafeterias because it was (at the time) one of the few places that could hold a large crowd (though awkwardly) and allow him to chain smoke while speaking, which was a condition of his appearance. Now *that's* addiction!
Spiegelman used to work for the New Yorker, so I'm not surprised that he's a bit boho.
I think he still does work for the New Yorker. And he's definitely a little bit out there. I haven't read his older stuff- it's something I've wanted to look into but just haven't gotten to yet. I too enjoy meta-meta-meta experimental gibberish, so you definitely just helped to pop Spiegelman up the to-do list a few slots, just by phrasing it thus. I totally buy that A.S. knowingly turned in a more accessible direction for the work. But from what I understand, it first ran serially in some pretty below-the-radar publications a long time before anyone took any real note of it (and also before there was such a saturation of cultural products related to the Holocaust). Which is only to say that I really doubt he had ulterior motives when he conceived it.
Most definitely not atypical, the Spiegelman-smoking story. When I worked at Olsson's Books and Records in DC, he did a signing for his post-9-11 book "In The Shadow of No Towers," and smoked the whole way through. In fact, he also smoked in our back room/break area while signing stock for the staff, which absolutely infuriated a tobacco-loathing colleague. I personally thought it was pretty amusing.