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Moore would never be confused with a neo-con. He wrote a book that suggested Thatcher would cause a nuclear war, he openly mocks religious institutions, and even to this day is writing politically left books. Just watch or read any interview with the man if you still think he is or has ever been anywhere near the right.

The director's cut will get a limited one weekend run in July.

The Watchmen Maximum Movie Mode looks really nice. There's a preview taken from Amazon here. Taking a commentary to the next level on Blu-Ray beyond the heretofore video documentary commentaries as on The Bourne Supremacy. Looks like a really efficient way to integrate otherwise static storyboards and conceptual art into the proceedings. It's also neat that the film stops at certain points to allow the commentarian to expound upon a point ala the Seabiscuit commentary. I don't know if this plays linearly or if it's interactive, but at least it's an exuberant feature to get behind.

Someone at WB's home video division needs to fired. It seems the forthcoming director's cut release contains a flyer in the box advertising a Watchmen Ultimate Edition slated for release next June that will contain the Director's Cut woven together with Tales Of The Black Freighter. What a great way to a) get every fanboy on the planet to cancel/return their current orders for the director's cut and b) piss them off in the process.

Antoine Doinel wrote:Someone at WB's home video division needs to fired. It seems the forthcoming director's cut release contains a flyer in the box advertising a Watchmen Ultimate Edition slated for release next June that will contain the Director's Cut woven together with Tales Of The Black Freighter. What a great way to a) get every fanboy on the planet to cancel/return their current orders for the director's cut and b) piss them off in the process.

Particularly since the Ditrectors Cut and the BLACK FREIGHTER footage were supposed to be part of this package, if I recall correctly.

That's been known for months, Snyder talked about it at Comic Con, though the news here is that it's coming out next year and not at Christmas which was when it was originally planned. Snyder didn't direct the animated Tales of the Black Freighter short, so it's not part of his Director's Cut, and the current release contains both the theatrical and director's cuts of the film so you could consider it a particularly loaded standard release. The "ultimate edition" is the standard one-year-later double-dip you should expect Warner to put out for pretty much any big-budget film. I'm betting that if you bought the separate Black Freighter / Under The Hood release already there won't be much incentive to double-dip outside of wanting the two films edited together.

Thomas J. wrote:The Watchmen Maximum Movie Mode looks really nice. There's a preview taken from Amazon here. Taking a commentary to the next level on Blu-Ray beyond the heretofore video documentary commentaries as on The Bourne Supremacy. Looks like a really efficient way to integrate otherwise static storyboards and conceptual art into the proceedings. It's also neat that the film stops at certain points to allow the commentarian to expound upon a point ala the Seabiscuit commentary. I don't know if this plays linearly or if it's interactive, but at least it's an exuberant feature to get behind.

Watching that opening scene again I just can't get over how horribly directed that was. The only way it might possible ever work would be in a screw-ball comedy. It's completely wrong for the storyline! My God! Why did I have to see that again! Why did I have to click on the link! Why couldn't that scene have just remained suppressed in the deepest abyss of my unconscious, next to the suppressed alien abduction experience and the childhood memories of Satanic ritual abuse! Why, oh why?!!

Antoine Doinel wrote:Someone at WB's home video division needs to fired. It seems the forthcoming director's cut release contains a flyer in the box advertising a Watchmen Ultimate Edition slated for release next June that will contain the Director's Cut woven together with Tales Of The Black Freighter. What a great way to a) get every fanboy on the planet to cancel/return their current orders for the director's cut and b) piss them off in the process.

Didn't Paramount do the same with Zodiac? The barebones DVD had a commercial for the 2 disc director's cut that was coming 6 months later. Needless to say, the Ultimate Edition seems more or less a compilation of everything that has already been released.

Orphic Lycidas wrote:Watching that opening scene again I just can't get over how horribly directed that was. The only way it might possible ever work would be in a screw-ball comedy. It's completely wrong for the storyline!

When I saw that scene I tried very hard (unsuccessfully) not to laugh.

As soon as I saw the opener I knew that shit was going downhill fast. Every character moved like a hyper-aerobicized, speed-racking Power Ranger - nothing like real people. Even the rape of Silk Spectre was turned into a ritualized Janet Jackson dance routine.

Here's the

Spoiler

death of Hollis Mason

scene from the Director's Cut.

Judging by the words of Edgar Arce from Latino Review, the scene was highly effective:

Edgar 'El Toro' Arce wrote:This 3 minute clip makes me want to beat some one up to Mozart!

Joel Silver thinks he could've made a much better movie than Zack Snyder:

Joel Silver wrote:"I love Zack and I love his work, and I think he's very talented, but the script that we developed, I think was better than the movie they made. I don't want to say he was a slave to the material because he made changes anyway, but I think it could have been a little more satisfying movie. I think Zack made a great movie, though; I don't want to minimize what he did. But I think at the end of the day it was more kind of tuned to just the big kind of fanatics of Watchmen as opposed to a broader-based audience who didn't maybe know the original comic."

But uses the worst possible defense:

Joel Silver wrote:"...we made Richie Rich in '94 so I've been involved with comic book stories for a long time."

Got it from netflix, and was unimpressed. If they were going to make this, it would have had to be a miniseries, but honestly, it was arduous enough to get through as is. Except for the end, most of the film felt like shorthand for those who'd read the graphic novel. In other words, Snyder relied too much on the collective memory of Watchmen's readership to fill in the numerous gaps in the film's storyline. Then, he made a lazy move to explain the nuclear explosions but doesn't bother to set it up properly, so the ending is a bit of a wtf, esp. if you haven't read the book.

Although graphic novels seem in some ways like the missing link between novels and cinema, it seems like the Persepolises of the world are outnumbered by the Watchmen, and perhaps a moratorium should be declared on adapting graphic novels into movies for the foreseeable future...

An unbelievably exhaustive breakdown of the differences between the theatrical and extended cuts.

I watched about half an hour of this last night. The laugh out loud part for me was the introduction of Dr. Manahattan and noticing the his glowing blue ding-a-ling was hanging out. A pretty nice sized glowing blue ding-a-ling at that.
I got tired and threw in "The Long Goodbye" instead.
So I guess Kelly Leak didn't return to the Bad News Bears after that first season and became a superhero.

jbeall wrote:Got it from netflix, and was unimpressed. If they were going to make this, it would have had to be a miniseries, but honestly, it was arduous enough to get through as is...

I'm glad I saw it in the theater because somehow I knew that if I waited till it came on cable, I'd never be able to sit through it. I would have just turned it off in disgust. But sitting in a theater you keep hoping it will get better or something interesting will happen to justify the time and expense and then it simply becomes a matter of gauging the audience reaction to see if they're as exasperated as I am. (They were.)

I read the Watchmen comic book 20 years ago and was interested to see how it was filmed but didn't catch the theatrical showing. I think it helps if you've retained your teenage comic book sensibility (though it's not compulsory to even have one), but sometimes what you want from a film is pure surface and the film seemed to me to be almost entirely perfect in that regard. In no way did this seem a 3 hour movie, it spins past without noticing the time and I would have preferred an even longer version (though I wouldn't want it to be one with the 1950s horror comic woven into the storyline). I got a vibe of watching a brilliant season finale to a long-running hit HBO TV show, one where the cast are slightly past it, they're all tired of the show and want it to be over and done with - you've been watching it for seven years and beginning to wonder why and then they come up with a finale which pulls you back in. Watchmen on Blu-Ray is everything Heroes wanted to be but couldn't because it is NBC networked. The Watchmen Blu-Ray transfer is reference material, this is why we made the leap from DVD to HD to get picture quality as good as this.

stwrt wrote:Watchmen on Blu-Ray is everything Heroes wanted to be but couldn't because it is NBC networked.

By this, I assume you mean "steaming excrement, only with a sparkling transfer and slightly less annoying music?"

royalton wrote:

stwrt wrote:Watchmen on Blu-Ray is everything Heroes wanted to be but couldn't because it is NBC networked.

By this, I assume you mean "steaming excrement, only with a sparkling transfer and slightly less annoying music?"

If you find Nat King Cole, Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, Janis Joplin, Richard Wagner, KC & The Sunshine Band, Billie Holiday, Philip Glass, Leonard Cohen, Jimi Hendrix, Mozart and Nina Simone all slightly annoying, what's your idea of pleasing music ? Arnold Schoenberg ?

stwrt wrote:

royalton wrote:

stwrt wrote:Watchmen on Blu-Ray is everything Heroes wanted to be but couldn't because it is NBC networked.

By this, I assume you mean "steaming excrement, only with a sparkling transfer and slightly less annoying music?"

If you find Nat King Cole, Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, Janis Joplin, Richard Wagner, KC & The Sunshine Band, Billie Holiday, Philip Glass, Leonard Cohen, Jimi Hendrix, Mozart and Nina Simone all slightly annoying, what's your idea of pleasing music ? Arnold Schoenberg ?

Lovely music in its proper context. Watchmen wasn't it. Snyder beat every song to death, with hyper-acrobatic karate chops and slo-mo.

If you find Nat King Cole, Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, Janis Joplin, Richard Wagner, KC & The Sunshine Band, Billie Holiday, Philip Glass, Leonard Cohen, Jimi Hendrix, Mozart and Nina Simone all slightly annoying, what's your idea of pleasing music ? Arnold Schoenberg ?

Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage, Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music", and Throbbing Gristle.
This is the soundtrack Snyder should have gone with.

Finally watched Watchmen, and I have to say it wasn't as bad as I expected it would be. It was much worse than that. I can see why Alan Moore wants nothing to do with movie adaptations of his work...it doesn't lend itself well to adaptation. There's too much in the work to allow for adaptation, and so much was (had to be) left out that the movie was superficial. Zack Snyder is the perfect director for this kind of film, of course...maybe Marvel will let him do a re-boot of the Fantastic Four films, which are the only superhero themed films that have come out recently that were worse than this one was.

I want to see a slow-motion facepunch of someone mispronouncing "homage."

Stagger Lee wrote:I want to see a slow-motion facepunch of someone mispronouncing "homage."

When did anyone use "homage" in this thread and how would you know if they were mispronouncing it?

Zack Snyder in the video linked above. [-X :-k :-" :^o