I've just completed a big move from Brisbane, which has left me little time to read or review. I did manage to catch the film adaptation of
Watchmen before I left, and was planning to write about it. But I now don't have the energy, or the interest to clutter the internet with more commentary on the movie. I did react to the onscreen violence in much the same way that
Jog did in his article:
There's no exchange of fists from the comics that can't be expanded into full-blown blocks ‘n throws combat. The Comedian doesn't just gas protesters from the eyes of the Owl Ship, he leaps into the fray and punches out the whole first line of protestors. If Gibbons draws lil' Rorschach biting a bully's cheek in one panel with speckles of blood on his face in the next, Snyder makes sure to close in on the flesh tugging and stretching and lavishly giving way to spilling grue. Even the generous splash of blood of that one guy getting his throat cut at the door to Rorschach's prison cell, one of the bigger bloody bits of the comics, is replaced by a major gore scene marked with a delighted close up of a buzz saw closing in on the man's arms, rending his skin and muscle to gristle...
Let's go back to that hard-rockin' fight scene with the Comedian. He takes what has to be a dozen or so direct hits to the face, flies through all sorts of objects, and we're specifically told he's not a superhuman - surely his face ought to be a lump of hamburger! But no, there's only a few trickles of blood, presumably because Gibbons only drew a few trickles of blood, which of course was because he and Moore were downplaying the entertainment value of the murder scene, i.e. exactly the opposite of what Snyder is doing, yet he keeps the trickle. That isn't the destruction of superheroes, that's Neal Adams' Batman in the ‘70s!
That is one reason why even when the film manages to be superficially faithful to the book, it actually undermines the original message in many little ways. It's doubtful that Watchmen will make cinematic history, but given the hyperbole that accompanies the graphic novel, it was inevitably going to disappoint many fans. This isn't an empty corporate property like
Batman. The book itself is a singular achievement that can benefit from a frank
reassessment.
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I've just been going over my photographic film archives. I've been shooting in film twice as long as I've been shooting with digital. But there's no doubt that my digital output has recently surpassed my film output. Such is the convenience of digital photography. I haven't touched a traditional darkroom for more than seven years, and am unlikely to regularly use one from now on. All this has led to the realization that I need to digitize my film archives. I've been doing it on a piecemeal basis, but now I've got to get serious about it. But I need a better scanner than the one I have now. Just another thing to add to my
wishlist.
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Google is just as humourless as any large corporation. Or not.
