In case you're wondering what I thought about Watchmen

I did not like it. In fact I thought it kind of sucked. Going by various movie ratings systems, I'd give it one and a half stars, a D, a frustrated frowny face, or one thumb down and one thumb sideways but about to be capitulated by the weight of Watchmen's mediocrity.

(And yes, Virginia, there will be spoilers).

Basically, for people like us (that is, comic book fans), Watchmen is going to be judged two ways: as an adaptation, and as a movie. I'll try to talk a little bit about each.

As an adaptation, one can look at how the film follows either the letter and the spirit of the book. It's obvious that the Watchmen film doesn't do too hot in the "letter" department; it is not really close at all to being a perfectly-copied transcription from comic to screen. Curiously people involved in the creation of the film keep insisting it is--why?? It would be pretty impossible, in the feature film format, to translate every detail of Alan Moore's tome, and I didn't expect the movie to... I'm just flummoxed that so many people are saying how faithful the film is when it really isn't. Certainly some scenes are truly right out of the book and often times these are pretty cool; mostly I loved Rorshach's scenes, especially the early ones, which seemed to treat the Watchmen comic as a shooting script. That was nice to see. But as the film progresses, scenes begin to deviate more and more wildly from the source material.

However, that is not necessarily a criticism of the movie so much as a remark on its press. I have always believed that what's really important in an adaptation is how accurately it captures the spirit of the original work. When it comes to the Watchmen movie, I'm not sure I'm ready to comment on this point yet. Seeing it last night I was fairly certain the movie missed a lot of important elements of the comic, but thinking it over a little... I don't know. I was trying to think about the thematic implications, for instance, of the fact that Dr. Manhattan is the enemy Ozymandias turns the world against instead of some manufactured space-alien threat. And I think that works. What it does, in my opinion, is neatly emphasizes the otherness of Dr. Manhattan in a way the book didn't yet in a way that is still keeping with the feel of the book. Similarly last night I was pretty convinced that the movie didn't understand Dan Drieberg--in the book the dude is pretty much a sad sack apologetic loser with a costume fetish, whereas the movie seemed to make him out to be more of a regular Joe caught up in a crazy world. But the more I think about his scenes I think it's possible that his schlubiness is just played subtlely and is not absent. At the very least, the movie preserves his costume fetish quite clearly. I really don't like Dan's outburst against Adrian at the end... that seems out of character... but I would need to see the movie again to really get a grasp on this character. So I'm gonna leave the "spirit" question open for now.

Where I think this film fails, then, is not as an adaptation but as a movie itself. And my key argument here can be summed up in one word: "pointless." But let me go back to all the press about Watchmen for a minute. I can't tell you the number of times I have heard the phrase: "Watchmen the movie will do for comic book movies what Watchmen the comic did for comics."

It is here, my friends, that the movie fails.

You see, Watchmen the comic came at a time when superhero comics needed a swift kick in the ass. It brought levels of realism to a medium that few had ever taken seriously before--be it political, scientific (kind of) or emotional. Watchmen did better than make a comic-book universe ala Marvel or DC ... it made a world, a world that seemed incredibly real, with characters so well developed and situations so complex we might as well have been hearing about them on the nightly news. Simultaneously the book also achieved a new standard for comic storytelling as art by crafting an impossibly dense, symbolism-laden literary narrative that put graphic novels on the same grounds as their prose brethren. This is what Watchmen did for comics... it, along with Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns and Art Spiegelman's Maus (all three in 1986), forced people to see comics as a valid and powerful art form.

And then we have Watchmen the movie, a movie which purports to do the same thing to comic-book movies (and it's important to note that it is doing this of its own accord, not because it is an adaptation of a story that also did this... that's why I'm talking about it down in this section). And the problem is that the context for this movie's release has kind of doomed it already. Watchmen the movie tries, like the comic, to give us a world that asks "what if superheroes were real?". In doing so it shows us a terrible world, horrific images of violence, and soul-crushing hopelessness... it shows us more of these, in fact, than the comic originally did. And one might assume from how Zack Snyder talks (he has said as much, in fact) that his goal here is to get us to think about superheroes and their films a little harder than we have been... instead of Alan Moore's "what would a good superhero comic really look like?" we're to ask "what would a good superhero movie really look like?"

Unfortunately for Zack Snyder, we know what a good superhero movie really looks like. In fact we know what a superhero masterpiece looks like. It's called The Dark Knight. It has all the psychological/emotional realism and character depth that the Watchmen comic has, and an excellent story to back it up. It is not only, in my opinion, the best of the comic book movies but it is also a fantastic movie in its own right. It is also, incidentally, better than Watchmen by leaps and bounds.

See, my primary thoughts during the Watchmen film were: "this is really violent" and "this is long and boring." The violence I see as Mr. Snyder trying to wake us up from our superhero malaise like Moore did in 1986. But, dude, that happened last summer. In fact if superhero movies have a "1986" it would pretty clearly be "2008"--besides Dark Knight there was Iron Man, which was completely different in tone from the Batman film but also a fine flick that showed more lighthearted superhero adventure movies could also be done quite well. Of course there were awful comic book movies too, but, hey, it's not like every comic that came out in 1986 was worth reading.

As for the "long and boring" part... I realize that for me this is the real sin of the Watchmen movie: I did not enjoy watching it. That could be and probably is a comment on me, but it also, I think, reflects on the movie. There is not that much fun to be had here. Dark Knight, although two and a half hours long, was a wild ride that you didn't want to be over. Watchmen, although only about 15 minutes longer, felt like much worse.

I think that works hand-in-hand with its pointlessness. At no time did I feel like the Watchmen movie needed to be made. Fans of the comic probably did not get the fun of seeing a beloved work adapted in a satisfactory fashion, and more importantly, I feel like casual comic-book-moviegoers will be hit with a sense of redundancy, because Watchmen the movie does nothing to inject life into the superhero movie genre that Dark Knight and others did not already do better and more entertainingly.

I guess the true lesson of the Watchmen movie is this: even after 2008, superhero movies can still be strikingly mundane.

Oh, Batman.

I'm not gonna spoil anything but... man. Final Crisis #6 was a weird reading experience. I can't think of too many comics where the weight of what happened didn't really hit me til after I put it down. I guess that's a good sign that I'm really caught up in what's going on.

There were a lot of twists, surprises, and otherwise notable goings-on in these pages, and there is a great interview with Grant Morrison about this biggest one of them all over at the Wizard website (note: this DOES include spoilers. Hell, even the html page name contains a spoiler). And although I don't want to talk about the meat of the interview yet, except to say that when you think about it what he says should be fairly obvious (once I read it it was like, "well duh, why didn't I think of that?"), I'd like to pull out this quote, more related to comics in general, which I really liked:

Once you've seen "Iron Man" and "The Dark Knight," why bother doing realistic superheroes because now the movies can do them better than anyone. I kind of feel that what it does is free up comics to be a little bit wilder. We've got great artists who can sit there with their pencils and draw anything. They're not limited by budgets. We shouldn't be following the storytelling techniques of Hollywood because they can do it really well. Comics can do all kinds of other things. They can be really crazy and wild and can really stretch the imagination and be really progressive.

This is a point that I feel bears repeating again and again and again. Why do people insist on seeing realism in super-hero comics? The Dark Knight has done the realistic superhero better, I think, than any comic ever could. But there is this feeling among certain comic creators and fans, I think, that comics are just cheap movies, or prototypical storyboards that somehow become more legitimate when they're put to the big screen. To put it bluntly, this is a stupid way of looking at things. Morrison and other creative comic talent (off the top of my head: Geoff Johns and Joe Kelly are two other examples--and I will speak about Joe Kelly's excellent I Kill Giants book at length later) are showing us that comics should not be beholden to the standards of Hollywood, but rather to their own set of standards, which cannot do everything a movie can but which can do some things better.

I think Scott McCloud would be proud.

Y'know what movie I'd like to see?

"Nick and Nora's Infinite Crisis." It's basically the same as the closely-named movie currently in theaters, except that Nora (who, we will remember, has never had an orgasm) gets whisked away to Earth-2 when the worlds split (because on Earth-2 the female orgasm hasn't been invented yet).

... God, is there anybody who's going to get that joke? (and yes, let's please assume that there is a joke to get)

Alright, I'll throw in one that's a little more common denominator: apparently my downstairs neighbor doesn't come from Earth-2... if ya know what I'm sayin!!!

Yes, that means I can hear her having sex right now.


Well, I think I've done my job for the night. See ya!

I've finally found a fifth movie to bring on my hypothetical tour bus.

Which is great, because for years when friends and I would talk about the top five movies we would HAVE to bring on tour (yes, we talked about this), assuming we ever went on tour (which we never have and probably never will), my list was always one film short. I only could really think of four rock-and-roll movies that made me happy and that made me feel good and inspired about music, which I think is an essential ingredient for a tour bus movie. Here's what I had (in no particular order):

1. This is Spinal Tap
2. School of Rock
3. Almost Famous
4. High Fidelity

Then I went to the theater last night and saw this film:

And lo and behold, my list is complete.

In a summer that's been pretty full of good or great movies, The Rocker is something of a surprise. I knew I would enjoy it because I A) love The Office and B) have an inappropriate love of hair metal, the genre which owns Rainn Wilson's character Robert Fishman as the movie begins. But I didn't think it would actually be a pretty sweet movie (and I mean that in two ways)... it made me smile and laugh consistently, and it made me want to immediately hop in an RV with my friends and hit the road as soon as I stepped out of the theater.

Put your fears aside, friends: despite the trailers, this movie has more to it than silly slapstick (I think most of that actually gets shown in the TV spots). It's not completely farcical... despite the fact that it's fairy-taleish, it is also somewhat grounded (except for a scene in the opening of the movie, and I wonder if there isn't something to the fact that the film only shows us fantastic, unbelieveable things in the faraway land of the 1980s). I mean, it's not incredibly likely that what we see in the film could happen, but it is possible... that's what makes the story inspirational. Is it corny? Yeah, a little. Less corny than School of Rock. Also quite funny.

For musicians, there is a lot to enjoy about this movie, a lot that rings true (as my friend Matt pointed out, we all know what it is like to fight for the attention of people who could care less that we are there). For non-musicians, I still think there's lots to like here... one of my favorite things was the running gag of Rainn Wilson's "rock" faces while drumming, and all it takes to laugh at that is a sense of humor. I'm gonna try to learn some of those for the next time I rock out to Vesuvius' "The Promised Land" on Rock Band.

Other things that are cool: good cast. Rainn Wilson is awesomely funny, and the rest of his band is great as well. It turns out the lead singer/songwriter of the fictional A.D.D. is a real-life musician named Teddy Geiger, and his musical ability is positively... radioactive? (GET IT?!)... but seriously his stuff is pretty good. Keyboardist/nephew to Fish Josh Gad is great, and I'd like to see him in more. Bassist Emma Stone (Jules from Superbad) is really good on screen as well, and also super-pretty, so there's that. It's nice to see Christina Applegate, who plays the coolest mom ever (a total MILMSLT... see the film). There are some cool cameos as well, including a handful from SNL and a surprising one from 30 Rock... oh, and a Beatle.

Past the opening, there weren't really any parts of this movie that made me think "oh, come on!" which is weird for a recent studio comedy. I never stopped enjoying the film, and I really want to see it again, which I will assuredly do when it moves down to the $5 club. So it is that I highly recommend The Rocker, especially if you are an aspiring musician and want to feel good about what you do. Or if you just want to enjoy yourself for a few hours... that's a good idea too.

Rating: * * * *

Oh wow.

This is, I feel, the most appropriate response to The Dark Knight. It's how I felt Friday at about 2:30 AM, and it's how I feel now.

This was an intense movie. There were a couple times when I forgot I was watching some constructed piece of art because I was so caught up in what was going on on-screen... and that hardly ever happens to me anymore. The movie was excellently written, acted, and directed... I think it may be flawless. It's easily the best comic-book movie of the year, maybe the best comic-book movie of all time, and maybe the best movie of the year period.

Obviously the big story here is the Joker. I will always love Mark Hamill, but Heath Ledger has just taken the title of the Joker. There has never been a better portrayal of the character, ever. Like, not even in the comics. This is a rare case where a comic-book adaptation has surpassed its source material... the best us fans can usually hope for when movies tinker is a lateral move that keeps the quality roughly the same while changing some of the details, such as V for Vendetta's updating of the book's Reagan/Thatcher politics for a Bush/Blair era. Usually, though, it seems comic fans are up for disappointment, as "updates" to a character are almost never good... movies tend to dumb things down, simplify them, and in the process remove most things that are special about a character (see: anything at all about Spider-Man 3). But what the Nolans have done here is more than an update... they have defined the Joker, case closed.

And what I love about their Joker is that he takes bits and pieces of most of the key Joker stories from comics. From Killing Joke, we get a Joker bent on showing Batman that all it takes is a little nudge to make a man go insane, and we also get the (excellent!) idea of Joker's ever-changing backstory. From Arkham Asylum we get hints that the Joker is not insane but supersane (of note: his speech to Batman in the prison that he's "a little bit ahead of the curve" when it comes to living in the modern world... this would make Grant Morrison proud). From lots of stories but primarily, I believe, Batman #1, we get the televised threats that people will die each night if Joker doesn't get what he wants, and the byzantine plans to accomplish this.

But while Dark Knight incorporates pieces of all of these, they're so subtle and well-woven into the texture of the film that one hardly notices, and thus the movie avoids re-telling any story we've seen before. Instead, it takes the best facets Joker's character has previously had to offer, combines them all into one, and then makes things better.

Joker is funny. He's sadistic. He's confused. He's genius. He's the most dangerous man in Gotham, and he's a puppy waiting to get put in its place. He's a schemer and a victim, he's right and he's wrong, he's supernatural and he's incredibly human. He's the ultimate villain for Batman but maybe he's also, kind of, a hero.

And of course, Joker is played amazingly by Heath Ledger. I can honestly say that, when he died a few months ago, I felt nothing. I had only seen a couple Ledger movies, and while 10 Things I Hate About You is a funny flick, I never had any emotional investment in him or his characters. But by the Joker's second scene in this movie, I missed him. It is a real shame that we will never see Heath portray the Joker, or any other character, again.

Finally, as a film, Dark Knight gives me hope. Sometimes I think my standards for movies are too high, because I end up really liking very few of the films I see. I find many films too obvious, too cheesy, too easy on their viewers. And yet... here is a movie that is subtle, that never says what it means, that throws up conflicting messages left and right. It makes you work for meaning. And yet, it manages to provide a feast for the eyes and the heart that would make Jerry Bruckheimer jealous. I kind of think that's what all movies should do.

Last year, I saw Transformers probably five or six times in the theater. The last time I can remember doing that was when The Lion King came out. I was so young then that I can't honestly remember how many times I saw it, but I'm willing to bet it was about the same. I think that, by the time this summer's over, a third movie will rival those numbers.

Rating: * * * * *

I'll leave you with one more Batman item before we all see Dark Knight

and it is a clip from the animated series. It may have been a mistake on my part to leave out the two-part "Feat of Clay" from my list of the top animated episodes (as I said, the race for top 5 or even top 10 is tough) but I think that the scene below, from "Feat of Clay" part two, may be my favorite among all the episodes of Batman: TAS, possibly my favorite in all of the Timm-verse, and it definitely holds its own against any other animation I've ever seen.

It's stuff like this that makes us all love Batman.

We're probably all going to be spending a lot of time waiting in line this weekend

and the horrible realization of just how much of my life will be slipping away waiting to see a movie I already have tickets for... twice... got me thinking about the etiquette of cutting in line, especially in the instance that you have a group of friends way up ahead in the line and you want to get a piece of that sweet action.

No, wait. I don't want to talk about the etiquette of cutting in line. That's far too pedestrian. No, my friends, I'm here to bring you the philosophy of cutting in line.

(Putting it in bold makes it authoritative).

And so it is that I, a humble undergraduate of the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign with a double-major in philosophy and English, would like to propose this, the Law of Line- Cutting (see?). I believe this law to be complete, meaning that there are no circumstances that it does not cover; however, if time proves this wrong, I shall come back and append the law as needs dictate.

Here is the law:

One may only cut in a line if one has associates already planted at some place in the line, and these associates welcome the cutting. The number of total allowable cutters per group of friends may not exceed the number of friends who originally staked that position in line, and this number does not change based on newcomers--it is always determined by the original number in the group. For instance, if three friends get to a movie early and wait in line, then no more than three of their friends can ever join them at that point in the line.

Think of it like a restaurant refusing to seat a group until a certain portion of the entire party is present, and then it will make sense (except instead of refusing we're allowing, see?). I think this rule works because it prevents total dickery (one guy waiting in line will not end up letting in 20) but also allows for those tricky and frustrating circumstances that pop up in day-to-day life like car trouble, a late start, or not wanting to wait for hours on end to see a movie I already have tickets for.

Obviously as this is a new law, many will be ignorant of it, and thus may deny its application. Certain people (the "cool") will, upon hearing the law explained, be totally alright with it, and maybe spread the gospel of the cutting law to their friends and loved ones. Other people (the "lame") will rigidly insists that no one cuts, ever, and to them I say "chill out, broseph." Thus spake Ericthustra.

Dark Knight better be good

because I'm seeing it twice on Friday... once at 12:01 AM and again some time in the night. The last time I did that with a movie, it was Star Wars Episode III, which I actually loved, and it was totally worth it (I should note, too, that those particular viewings were broken up by a straight-shot drive from Toronto to Champaign via Chicago at rush hour on an hour and a half of sleep. That was the first, and only, time I have had coffee).

I figured since I did my Batman: The Animated Series post last week, I should do one now about Batman in comics. Unfortunately I am not nearly as familiar with this aspect of Batman... unlike Superman, whose essential stories are all, I believe, on the printed page, it seems to me that the best Batman stories are found in some kind of motion picture, be it the cartoon or Christopher Nolan's excellent first Batman film. In addition, I haven't read a lot of what people consider the key Batman stuff... no O'Neal/Adams (I have read their Green Lantern/Green Arrow, though), no Kane/Finger, no Kane/Sprang. But I've read enough to be able to comment on my top five Batman comics stories, so I will do that now.

5. Emperor Joker

As you might have guessed from the image, Emperor Joker is a Superman story with not a whole lot of Batman in it. And yet, having read it many, many times, it's safe to say that Batman is the focus of Emperor Joker, the point on which the whole story pivots. And it's far more essential to Batman than it is to Superman (although, it is a really kick-ass Superman story).

Though Batman is in maybe 10 pages of Emperor Joker, the story reveals to us two very interesting things about Batman's world. One: that the Joker cannot exist without Batman. This is the dramatic crux of the story: Superman tells a God-powered Joker to simply imagine a world without Batman, and he can't. I'm not sure if that says more about the Joker, or about Batman, but it definitely says interesting things about the both of them.

The second thing, to me, is even more interesting: at the end of this story, after Superman's won the day, Batman is left with all the torturous pain Joker put him through while he was a god: dying every day, and resurrecting every night just to be torn to pieces again. This proves too much for Batman to bear; he actually goes insane. Superman, knowing that the world needs a Batman, does the unthinkable: he takes Batman's pain. If you couldn't tell from what I had to say about "Epilogue" in my last post, I really like stories where Batman fails... it's a great reminder that he is, after all, only human, and despite what he thinks, he can only take so much. And I also really like the idea that, though he could never know it (and Superman won't tell), his buddy Clark was essential in helping him out of a tough spot. This is a really great twist for such a willful loner character, and it's one that I think could bear a lot of fruit, if DC wasn't so interested in seemingly ignoring most of the events of Emperor Joker.

4. World War III

Some people didn't like what Grant Morrison did with Batman in JLA, making him a "Bat-god" who was always, somehow, on top of things. I loved it. I mean, the whole point of Morrison's JLA run was making the League into modern-day gods... why not give Batman this "power"? It's really just a logical extension of his incredible will to be the best anyway.

World War III is the absolute tops of Morrison's Batman for me, though, for mostly one reason. See, there's this part where a villain called Prometheus has stormed the Watchtower, and Batman is the last line of defense. Prometheus has the ability to upload fighting skills into his helmet, allowing him to mimic the abilities of any of the world's greatest fighters... even Batman (this, in fact, proved a "humbling" experience for Bruce before). But now Batman's ready to fight back. Using Oracle's help, Batman has uploaded a new person's set of neural and physical skills into Prometheus's helmet:


Sure, it's kind of a cheap laugh. It's also awesome. Suck it, Prometheus.

3. Tower of Babel
This is the story that got me reading DC Comics. In it, Ra's Al Ghul takes down the JLA using Batman's own files on how to do it. Meanwhile, he gives Batman one of the toughest choices of his life: stop Ghul's wicked plot, or allow him to use the Lazarus chambers to bring Bruce's parents back to life?

I had thought of a plot like this years before I ever read Tower of Babel... I mean, the notion of bringing Thomas and Martha Wayne back from the dead via Lazarus? Seemingly obvious, yet also inspired, and Mark Waid executes it expertly. That plus Waid's understanding of Batman's obsessiveness and general mistrust of everyone who's not him makes this just an amazing story. You've gotta read it.

2. The Long Halloween
This book reads a lot like an episode of the animated series, so maybe it's cheap to pick it. Whatever. It's a great story. Tim Sale's artwork really nails the noir feel that birthed Batman in the first place, and Jeph Loeb writes an incredible and dark mystery story that will keep you engaged with the book until its very end. As a bonus, this book acts as a tour for Batman's rogue's gallery, the finest in all of comics (side note: I think it would be an interesting post to rank comics' rogues galleries. Thoughts?). It also seems to be the first place that Solomon Grundy becomes more or less a Batman villain. I always wondered why this happened, but whatever. Long Halloween is a fantastic read through and through.

1. The Killing Joke
Okay, first of all: Brian Bolland could draw anything and it would probably be awesome. This book is beautiful to look at, case closed.

But more importantly: Alan Moore is one of the masters of comics--maybe their best-ever writer, as even a glimpse of his resume (Watchmen, Swamp Thing, V for Vendetta) would argue. His superhero stuff isn't always amazing. But this is. The Killing Joke is a crazily well-crafted one-shot that gives us a close-up look at the Batman-Joker relationship. It shows us just how far Joker will go in his heinous crimes, and more importantly, it shows us that his driving philosophy of insanity is wrong, that not everybody is "just one day away" from being crazy. Among the best moments in the book, for me, is when Jim Gordon, who's just been through hell, who's just seen the Joker's pictures of his daughter shot, naked, and otherwise brutalized... when Jim Gordon insists that Joker is brought in "by the book." "We have to show him that our way works!" Right on, Commissioner.

Of course there is the issue of Joker's backstory, to which this book gives a significant contribution. But even though the supposed flashbacks that cut throughout Killing Joke's narrative tell a very sad human story that seems totally believable, I prefer to think of it as just one version of the story Joker tells himself to get some kind of interpretive foothold on his life. As Joker himself says of his past, "sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another...". My feeling is that the way Joker remembers his life at any given moment has to do with what kind of feeling he wants to evoke in himself or others... if he wants to appear sympathetic, as he does in Killing Joke, he may convince himself this story is true; if he wants to feel like a criminal mastermind, perhaps he remembers things the way a recent story-arc of Batman: Confidential has it. Though this is only one fan's guess, I think that, at present, it may be the best way to connect all the various Joker origin stories without invalidating any of them.

But anyway. The Killing Joke is awesome. If you haven't read it, please do so.

Man, I can't wait for Dark Knight.