So, I finally got around to seeing Watchmen last night, and I certainly agree with many of the opinions blogged previously by my esteemed colleagues Scott Von Doviak and Paul Clark, i.e.: “There are a million reasons a Watchmen movie should never have been made,” and also, “That said, the movie is far from a disaster.”

True, there’s way too much voice-over, the faux-Nixon proboscis is like a bad Saturday Night Live sight gag and the audience at the screening I attended actually burst into derisive laughter in response to the instant cliché usage of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” during what would otherwise have been a perfectly lovely sex scene between Patrick Wilson’s Nite Owl II and the va-voomy Malin Akerman’s Silk Spectre II.

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Greetings, sentient life form. I am the Evil Donkey Kong Machine in the Screengrab break room, and all your Highlight Reel are belong to me. Humans are notoriously unreliable, as you no doubt noticed when you tuned in last Friday and there was no Highlight Reel to be found. Apparently, the humans would prefer to gather in groups and consume mass quantities of alcohol rather than fulfill their obligations to you, the Screengrab reader. This will no longer be tolerated. If you’ve read Clippy Strikes Back: The Scariest Technology in Cinema History (Parts One, Two, Three and Four), you know the consequences will be very unpleasant for those who have failed you.

Prior to being dispatched to the Soylent Greenatorium, your Screengrab scribes somehow managed to cobble together a respectable collection of SXSW reviews, including: American Prince, My Suicide, Me and Orson Welles, Humpday, Beeswax, The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle, Best Worst Movie, Pontypool, Along Came Kinky and The Slammin’ Salmon.

Before having their brains removed and replaced with a cybernetic gelatin, the humans also contributed the follow posts of note:

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[If there's one subject that holds more fascination for film geeks than the movies they've seen or are planning to see, it may be the movies that have not been made and may never will be: the scripts that go into permanent turnaround or excite some interest, only to be abandoned. A few of these attain the status of legends, a process that in the last several years has been exacerbated by the ability to disseminate them through the Internet. Because a screenplay is a physical object but also a blueprint for something fuller and richer, which would probably end up deviating from the script at any number of key points, reviewing unfilmed scripts is a movie critic's form of cryptozoology, kind of like examining a muddy footprint and trying to sketch Bigfoot from it. This week, the Screengrab looks at Fashion Beast.]

In the 1980s, the world was very different from the place we know now. The Cold War was still raging, MTV showed music videos, O. J. Simpson,Robert Blake, and George W. Bush were regarded as likable or at least harmless, and Alan Moore, the prolific, unpredictable magus of the comics scene, thought that there might be a place for his visions on movie screens. Although Moore seems never to have seriously considered adapting his own comics to movies, regarding them as having been carefully conceived for the medium in which they had aleady appeared, he didn't initially object to other people having a go at it, and on one known occasion, he even tried writing a movie himself. This was Fashion Beast, which is credited as having been written by More "from a story by Robert Boykin, Malcolm McLaren, and Alan Moore." I wouldn't know who Robert Boykin was if he sat in my lap, but McLaren is the Malcolm McLaren, the pop impresario who helped create punk as the manager-svengali of the Sex Pistols, as well as the man behind Bow Wow Wow and his-own-sort-of albums, fashion shops, and more recently, one of the producers of Richard Linklater's well-meaning flop Fast Food Nation. It was McLaren who asked Moore to take a stab at writing the script, and in interviews, Moore has indicated he agreed to do it partly for the experience of seeing if he could master the form and partly because he didn't feel it was his place to say no to a famous self-starter who has worked with a great many talented people, any number of whom would love to see him gunned down in the street. Moore also maintained a philosophical attitude about the fact that the movie never got made, which may be our first clue that he didn't pour his heart and soul into it.

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The superhero-movie trend wasn't going to die on the vine in the unlikely event that Watchmen-the-movie bombed, and the word on the street is that it didn't bomb, so if you fancy yourself a leading man, you'd better look good in spandex. New potential franchises have already been lining up on the tarmac; a while back, we reported that the job of directing a movie about the mighty Thor has been handed to Kenneth Branagh, who I'm sure will do every bit as well by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby as he did by Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, and Rita Rudner. I can't help but feel, though, that a golden opportunity is still sitting on the shelf there, continuing to be overlooked. I think we've pretty well established that Alan Moore makes for box office, and who has Alan Moore named as his own personal favorite superhero? Herbie, that's who! Herbie, Herbie Popnecker, Herbie the Fat Fury! The scarily bearded bard of Northampton is not alone in his idolatry. There has long been a teeming, steaming cult of Herbie brewing just below the demarcation line we call common sense. But where's our movie? Every so often, lo these past several years, word has gotten out that someone in Hollywood has given the greenlight to a Herbie movie. The pattern is always the same: dancing breaks out in the streets, the good champagne is uncorked, strangers hug each other in Times Square, babies are conceived. Then the morning after arrives and it turns out that the movie is about that damned Volkswagen again.

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[If there's one subject that holds more fascination for film geeks than the movies they've seen or are planning to see, it may be the movies that have not been made and may never will be: the scripts that go into permanent turnaround or excite some interest, only to be abandoned. A few of these attain the status of legends, a process that in the last several years has been exacerbated by the ability to disseminate them through the Internet. Because a screenplay is a physical object but also a blueprint for something fuller and richer, which would probably end up deviating from the script at any number of key points, reviewing unfilmed scripts is a movie critic's form of cryptozoology, kind of like examining a muddy footprint and trying to sketch Bigfoot from it. This week, to kick off our new series dedicated to the unicorns, mermaids, and moderate Republicans of the movie world, the Screengrab looks back at the "Watchmen"-the-movie that might have been.]

When Warner Bros. which owns DC Comics, started looking for someone to adapt its property Watchmen to the movies, it must have seemed a natural choice to call in Sam Hamm, who had written the script for the 1989 Batman, a movie that commercially kick-started the superhero-comic-book movie genre. Hamm's Batman script, which was rushed into production without benefit of the polishing it would have received had not the 1988 Writers' Guild strike intervened, is not without its problems, and if there's a comics convention going on near you, I can introduce you to several people who'd be overjoyed at the chance to list them for you. But it also has Hamm's freshly thought-out take on its hero, which laid the psychological foundation for Michael Keaton's performance and, to a great extent, much of the batlore that's come since.

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The Worst:

CATWOMAN (2004)



Attacking Catwoman is almost too easy: it’s such an obvious, defenseless target, what with stinking up the box office like week-old kitty litter, damaging the careers of all responsible and winning Razzies for Worst Picture, Worst Screenplay, Worst Director (for “Pitof,” if that IS your real name) and Worst Actress for Halle Berry (whose Golden Raspberry acceptance speech alone very nearly redeemed both her performance AND her embarrassingly overwrought Oscar speech for Monster’s Ball, including gems like, “First of all, I want to thank Warner Bros. Thank you for putting me in a piece of shit, God-awful movie . . .it was just what my career needed”). But...nope, we’ll never be done kicking Catwoman, for oh, so many reasons. Geeks hated the flick (set in “Lake City” rather than Gotham) for heedlessly violating the sacred mythology of the source material, straight guys hated the way Berry dishonored the legacy of Kitt, Newmar, Meriwether and Pfeiffer by somehow making Catwoman (CATWOMAN!!!!!) distinctly unsexy, fashionistas hated the godawful costume, feminists hated the fact that while male superheroes were out saving the world, Berry’s crusader was investigating a frickin’ cosmetics company and right-thinking people everywhere coughed up hairballs of disgust to discover the whole tacky disaster somehow managed to cost 100 million dollars. But even worse is the nagging sense of how totally awesome a good Catwoman movie might have been...and how we’ll never, ever get to see it now. Thanks a bunch, Pitof.

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It’s Watchmen Week here at The Screengrab as the greater Geek-iverse (and the studio executives who love it) await the opening of Zack Snyder’s much-anticipated, much low-expectations-generating adaptation of Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons’ beloved, game-changing graphic novel about a bunch of asshole “super” “heroes” fighting crime, mental illness and erectile dysfunction in a scary alternate reality where Richard Nixon never went away. (And by the way, does everyone out there already know Silk Spectre II: Electric Boogaloo is portrayed by the same actress who played Valerie Cherish’s little blonde protégé on The Comeback? I just found that out, like, yesterday and was momentarily confused because I thought all the Watchmen were supposed to be kinda middle-aged -- but then I checked the Internet Movie Database and, much to my surprise, Malin Akerman’s actually 31, which is somewhat middle-aged, I suppose)...

Anyway, our own Scott Von Doviak and Paul Clark have already weighed in with their reviews of Hollywood’s latest attempt to wring a little KA-CHING! out of the POW! ZAP! BAM! of the funny book aisle, a strategy that’s been serving the Suits pretty well in recent years. I could pontificate here on the way America’s fascination with caped crusaders panders to infantile, imperialist empowerment fantasies, crowding more intelligent, adult material from the multiplex...but not only would that be annoying, it would also be hypocritical, since (A) I like a good funny book movie as much the next geek, (B) another movie about masked superheroes battling supervillains is a helluva lot better than another movie about masked sadists chopping up teenagers and (C) I keep hoping they’ll someday finally make that Wonder Woman movie I’ve been waiting for since I was 12.  Mmm...magic lasso... 

In the meantime, though, please enjoy the following list from hooksexup.com’s very own Legion of Doom as we salute truth, justice, the American way and THE BEST AND WORST COMIC BOOK MOVIES OF ALL TIME!

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Well, it’s finally here, folks. After more than two decades in development, Watchmen is finally hitting screens nationwide this weekend. In a way, it’s sort of miraculous that it actually panned out. Of course, the road hasn’t been easy, with a seemingly endless parade of directors, screenwriters, producers and stars attached to the project at some point. But to me, it’s even more interesting to observe how comic book culture has progressed to this point. Just over a decade ago, it seems like Batman was the only comic getting the blockbuster treatment, and just about everything else was played for campy nostalgia, e.g. The Phantom. Hell, back in 2000 studios were worried whether the X-Men could sell tickets. So the fact that there’s not only a massively budgeted adaptation of Watchmen out there but also one that’s surprisingly faithful to its dense, ambitious source material just shows how far comics- and comic-book movies- have come in the last ten years. If only the movie was better, this saga would have the happy ending that all Watchmen fans crave.

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There are a million reasons a Watchmen movie should never have been made and no good reason it should have, aside from the obvious one: superheroes are big box office, and Watchmen was one of the most tantalizing untouched superhero properties available. It’s also an incredibly dense, multi-layered work, deriving much of its power from its subversion of five decades worth of comic book conventions. Having read the script Sam Hamm penned for Terry Gilliam’s aborted attempt at mounting Watchmen for the screen back in the early ‘90s, I know the new adaptation of the acclaimed graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons from “visionary director” Zack Snyder isn’t the worst case scenario. Nor does it exceed expectations. It’s just sort of pointless, which is what most fans of the classic comic have probably been expecting all along.

So can we separate the movie from its source material and judge it on its own merits?

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As you may have heard, Alan Moore, the writer of the 1986-1987 comic book series Watchmen, is so disenchanted with both Hollywood and DC Comics (the company that published the comic back when Moore was their official house genius) that he wants nothing to do with promoting Zack Snyder's movie version. It turns out that (as Michael Ordoña reports in the San Francisco Chronicle) Dave Gibbons, the other half of the comic's creative team, isn't so bashful. Gibbons says, "people say, 'Did you do any drawings for the Watchmen movie?' And I say, 'Thousands of them ... 20 years ago.' " Snyder has made a lot of noise about this being a faithful adaptation, and since movies and comics are both visual story-telling media, for Snyder that means duplicating the look of what was on the printed page, transferring it to the big screen, and setting it in motion. (That was basically his strategy with his movie version of Frank Miller and Lynn Varley's 300, too.) Gibbons, who calls the movie "far better than anyone could have reasonably imagined," says that "when you draw a comic book, you kind of have a movie in your head. You try to focus in and isolate one frame of what you're seeing. This is a bit like seeing that movie, but in the real world. You're going, 'That's that picture you drew; that's another picture you drew.' " Looking forward to watching it on DVD, he adds, "you can go back though and pause and look at the background because there's a lot of resonance in there. What Alan says about the graphic novel is, 'Everything in it means something. There's nothing put in there just to put it in.' And that's so with the movie as well. Even down to quite obscure background dressing, it all has some connection."

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Who Watches The Incredibles?

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It’s a beautiful day for a Screengrab post, a beautiful day in the Screengrab!

Hello, boys are girls! How are you today? I am fine! Today we’re going to visit the marvelous land of make-believe! First we’re going to explore the Screengrab’s Ultimate Exploitation Films (Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five and Six)! You younger boys and girls will need a note from your parents.

Next we’ll enjoy a magical Unwatchable Recap (Parts One, Two, Three, Four and Five)! All of you boys and girls will need a note from your psychiatric counselors.

Are you still with me, boys and girls? Hold on tight!

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You may have noticed that Alan Moore isn’t doing a lot of press in support of the Watchmen movie. If you’re familiar at all with Moore and his usual m.o., this doesn’t surprise you. Moore has distanced himself from pretty much all the previous adaptations of his work, including From Hell, V for Vendetta and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, so why should Watchmen be any different? But maybe we’re looking at this all wrong. Maybe Moore is actually employing some reverse psychology, some of the mind-bending trickeration that makes his comic book work so compelling, in order to convince us all to see the Watchmen movie. Let’s examine this new Wired interview with Moore for clues.

“I think that adaptation is largely a waste of time in almost any circumstances,” says Moore.

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Can you feel the excitement building? Yeah, me neither, but there’s nothing we can do about it: Watchmen will be arriving in theaters two weeks from Friday and we’ll just have to ride out the hype together. It’s already proven too much for our regular Watchmen correspondent Leonard Pierce, who is currently receiving treatment in an undisclosed location, so I’m filling in for him today with the latest in Watchmania.

British tabloid The Sun has an exclusive clip from the film, which runs approximately 90 seconds and appears to have been chosen completely at random.

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Movie nerds like myself, who have invested what little remains of their self-identity in the remote possibility of Watchmen not being terrible, were thrown into a major tizzy a few months ago when FOX Studios, which claims to own the rights to any and all future movie adaptations of the Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons superhero classic, moved to legally block Warner Brothers from releasing the Zack Snyder film.

Many felt this would be an epic moral battle where FOX exerted their rights in the labyrinth of complex entertainment laws to protect their rightful property regardless of future plans, while fending off the ire of pissed-off fans; others thought that it would be a titanic legal showdown where Warner allayed incomprehensible facts and figures in a desperate attempt to prove themselves on the correct side of the law and get their movie out on time.  Others, like your humble correspondent, figured that it was basically just FOX making a bunch of noise, based on a slender bit of legalese, in order to wring a fat payday out of what's widely predicted to be one of 2009's top-grossing films.   As Mania.com is reporting, well...one of us was right.

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We do our best to keep you updated about comics-to-film adaptations here at the Screengrab, but it's rare that we get to bring you news of a good comic being adapted for motion pictures.  (And when we do, we're usually pretty nervous about it; see the last half-million posts we've made about Watchmen.)  We were a bit surprised when it was announced recently that Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's critically acclaimed DC/Vertigo miniseries We3 was set for a big-screen pickup -- but not as suprised as we were when further details started coming in.

We3 is a strange property from the start. On the surface, it's a funny-animal tale, but it very quickly takes exceedingly dark turns that belie its Incredible Journey trappings.  It's a brilliant, highly moving story, and its ethical stance is one of unabashed animal rights advocacy.  And it's a visually dynamic book, with remarkably intricate art from Scottish artist Quitely that complements and enhances the writing by Morrison, probably the most highly praised author in comics since Alan Moore.  Its visual style -- described by its creators as "Western manga" -- would seem to make it a perfect fit for animation, so it was shocking when Warner Brothers announced it would be a live-action production.  To add bafflement to perplexity, the website Mania is now reporting, based on an interview with producer Don Murphy, that it will be directed by John Stevenson, best known for Kung Fu Panda. 

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There's not much you can rely on in comics anymore these days.  Lois Lane and Clark Kent finally got married, Spider-Man unmasked in front of the world, Lex Luthor became President of the United States, and the Rawhide Kid turned gay.  But there's still two things you can count on:  the dead don't stay dead, and any comic that turns a profit is going to get a sequel.

One of the few exceptions to the latter rule has been DC's legendary mini-series, Watchmen.  Generally considered the most highly acclaimed superhero comic of all time, its critical reputation helped fight off the demand for a follow-up engendered by its relatively high sales figures.  (One might also argue that author Alan Moore's wishes, combined with a fiendishly ambiguous ending that seemed to disallow the very notion of a sequel, might have something to do with it.  But Moore doesn't own the property; DC does, and since his rancorous departure from the company, they've never been particularly interested in his opinion on the matter, as evidenced by the large number of movies and TV shows based on his stories, but without his name in the credits.)  But with interest in the upcoming movie version of the comic driving sales to a record high, and the motion picture industry in the habit of booking sequels years in advance to films they merely suspect are going to be hits, Comicscape takes up the question:  are we inevitably going to see a Watchmen sequel, either on screen or on the page?

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THE ROAD WARRIOR (1981)



Before he went all screwy on us (or, rather, before we discovered how screwy he’d apparently always been), Mel Gibson starred in The Road Warrior (a.k.a. Mad Max 2), just about the purest (and best) action film ever made. By the end of 1979’s Mad Max, things are already pretty bleak for Gibson’s titular character, an ex-cop whose family and best friend have all been killed by anarchic speed demon terrorists. But things are much worse in the sequel: society has broken down completely, people are killing and dying for petrol and for some reason everyone is required to wear football shoulder pads. Our protagonist has become a leather-clad man with no name, roaming the Outback with only a dog (who, like anyone else that gets too cozy with Gibson’s character, is doomed from the start).  Eventually, Max’s need for fossil fuel forces him to choose between a bunch of dirty socialists living family-style in a fortified compound and Lord Humungus’ torture-loving, not-gay-at-all free market enthusiasts, who spread democracy with cool wrist-mounted crossbows. The film’s fuel-depleted landscape is a wonderland for plucky, self-sufficient mavericks who like to shoot things from helicopters (or, more specifically, gyro-copters), but like most totally cool, under-populated places where you don’t have to think about anyone but yourself, the pedal-to-the-metal, smash-and-grab wasteland freedom of The Road Warrior eventually gives way to the pesky forces of civilization (complete with charismatic black leader) in 1985’s Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.

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No, unfortunately, your humble correspondent, despite his long history of being obsessed with the upcoming Zack Snyder adaptation of Alan Moore's brilliant Watchmen  comic, was not one of those recently invited to view 26 minutes of the footage at a special preview screening. Nor was I numbered among those who got to see the entire film at a preview in Portland, to decidedly mixed reviews.  Why I wasn't included despite my spooky fixation on the movie is unclear; it might have something to do with the fact that I've predicted the movie will suck raw pork knuckles since it was first announced.  Whatever the case, I haven't seen the damn movie yet, and so that's not what I'm going to be reviewing today.

What I'm going to be reviewing today isn't even, technically, a movie.  I'm not sure what it is.  Its producers call it a "motion comic".  It's not an animated film, exactly, nor is it a motion picture, nor is it a webcomic or anything else that we have the critical language to talk about.  It's also not playing at a theater near you:  it's available (the first three chapters, at least) exclusively as a download from the iTunes music store.  Even though it isn't music, either.  So what is it?  It's basically the entire comic, written by Moore and drawn by Dave Gibbons, panel by panel, with a very basic, stripped-down sort of cutout animation.  It's also narrated, but not dramatized -- that is, the dialogue is read aloud, in a sort of dramatic fashion, by character actor Tom Stechschulte.  But he's the only member of the cast, which means it's not really a dramatic adaptation of the story -- or any kind of adaptation at all, really.  It's almost like a book on tape of a comic book, only it movies.  Kinda.

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Robert Downey, Jr., America's scamp, has tasted what the other guys are selling and found it lacking. Downey, whose star vehicle Iron Man got the summer movie season of 2008 off to a bang back when it opened several hundred years ago, has given an interview to moviehole.com in which he found it impossible to discourse on what made his movie so special, and what will make its sequel (which reunites him with director Jon Favreau and Tropic Thunder co-writer Justin Theroux, who's working on the script) so special, without talking about what makes it different from The Dark Knight. Whereas Iron Man is "a very simple movie", Downey says of the Batman blockbuster, "It's like a Ferrari engine of storytelling and script writing and I'm like, 'That's not my idea of what I want to see in a movie.'

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Now that Dark Knight is finally going to be opening nationwide, we can finally return to the natural occupation of the comic book fan:  deranged obsession over Zack Snyder's upcoming movie adaptation of Watchmen.

As we've discussed before, one of the problems with the recent wave of successful motion picture adaptations of comic book properties is that while they've made tons of money for the producers of the movies, it hasn't worked the other way around. Comic book companies have slavered to get their properties on screen in recent years, in the hopes that audiences turned on by the big-screen adventures of Batman or the X-Men will follow those characters into their local comic book shop.  This is especially important in these days of direct sales, when comic book sales are at a historical low, and people speak in non-hysterical terms about the demise of the industry.  So it's worth noting that the millions in profit made my comic book movies hasn't generally been matched by a notable increase in comic book sales, one comic is bucking that trend:  Watchmen. 

One of the earliest comic book mini-series to take advantage of the 'graphic novel collection' format in the 1980s, Watchmen was already one of the most successful titles in DC's history, despite its indie sensibilities, adult storytelling, and complex, morally difficult story.  But with the movie adaptation getting ever closer, its sales have shot way up -- and DC plans to capitalize on the interest in spades.  They'll be promoting an aggressive three-pronged marketing attack to ensure that anyone sucked in by the movie to the degree that they absolutely must have the comic will be able to get one with not trouble.  The triple attack includes a retailer discount for any shops that wish to carry the original softcover graphic novel; a new hardbound edition for collectors; and a deluxe edition featuring making-of material, rare artwork, and other bonus materials, the comic book equivalent of a fancy Criterion Collection disc.

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As more and more movies are made from comic books, the issues of creator's rights will increasingly pick at the film industry.  With Marvel and DC products, it's generally not an issue -- not only are most of the creators long dead, but the characters themselves are corporate properties, held by two huge companies and not beholden to any single artist or writer.  With independent comics, however, the issue grows much more complex.  Some creators will be happy simply to sell the rights to their characters and stories for the kind of huge paycheck that only Hollywood can write; others will insist on being involved, to one degree or another, in the production of any film based on the characters they created.  Frank Miller represents one extreme; displeased at the prospect of what liberties the movies would take with his characters, he decided to learn the film business himself so as to be able to exert maximum control over his properties in 300  and Sin City.  (Although he didn't create the Spirit, he's taking a similarly proprietary approach in the creation of that movie.)  Mike Mignola represents perhaps the oppisite end of the spectrum:  always fiercely protective of the Hellboy character from the time it first appeared in Dark Horse Comics, he has learned when it's proper to let go of his creation in order to see it succeed on the big screen.

In an interview with Comics2Film regarding the new Hellboy 2:  The Golden Army movie, which opens in wide release this weekend, Mignola discusses the differences between the comics and the film, the trust he came to develop with director Guillermo Del Toro when it came to creating the look of the movie, and how he had to learn when to let go of his own beliefs about what the movie should be and how it shouldn't be necessary for there to be major divergence between the two.  "The first film was a loose adaptation, but it was coming off my work, and it was basically taking the Hellboy universe that I had created and translating it into del Toro's world.  The second film, we chucked that idea after about eight hours because even in the first film, that character is already veering away from the world I created in the comic," says Mignola.  "I know in the first film, he was making conscious decisions to try to suggest certain things that I do in the artwork...I'd love to think that he got some of that from studying my comic, but I think he's just a very careful craftsman."

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In our ongoing quest to bring you every single solitary detail of the production of Zack Snyder's upcoming adaptation of The Watchmen until your head falls off, we are pleased to report an interesting development in the filming of the comic book masterpiece -- and one that has repercussions, as amazing as it may seem, to peope other than the hardcore geeks who are even at this moment salivating over the prospect of more Watchmen news.

One of the questions that has long nagged Watchmen fans (other than "will Snyder suddenly become much more talented when he begins work on this film?" and "are they kidding with that cast, or what?") is how the filmmakers can possibly cram the entire story of the comic into a two-hour movie.  Alan Moore's Watchmen is one of the most complex comic series in history, full of dense symbolism, intricate reference, and tons of backstory -- much of it vital to the main plot -- told in supplemental materials that appeared in the back pages of the comic.  No standard-length feature film could possibly capture all of that intricacy, and without it, many feared that the overall quality of the project would suffer.

Now, in an interesting piece in the New York Times, comes word that Snyder is not making one film, but two, simultaneously:  The Watchmen itself, and Tales of the Black Freighter, an animated feature-length adaptation of the metafictional comic-within-a-comic read by a minor character in the Watchmen, which served to both illuminate and amplify some of the themes and symbols of the main story.  Tales of the Black Freighter will not be included in the Watchmen movie -- but it will be released, on its own, as a separate DVD, only five days after the film is released in theatres. 

As the Times article makes clear, this is the first step in a new strategy by Warner Brothers of producing value-added DVDs designed, in an era of cable television 'video on demand', to boost DVD sales when they're beginning to falter for the first time in their history.  Warner has already had considerable success with this tactic in direct-to-video releases set in the DC Animated universe (such as Superman:  Doomsday and Justice League:  New Frontier), and the company claims this is about much more than just piling on extra junk for completists:  it allows Snyder to tell a more complete story than the time limitations of the Watchmen movie will allow, and it allows the company to essentially profit three times off the the DVD market for the movie:  first, with this supplemental release, which they anticipate selling in huge numbers on release; second, with the DVD release, months later, of the actual Watchmen movie; and third, with a deluxe package containing both, as well as other supplemental materials (including, it's rumored, a faux-documentary short film of Hollis Mason's Under the Hood -- another book-within-the-book featured in the Watchmen comic that likewise gave vital background information on the characters and their relationships).

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One of the niftiest features of Alan Moore's brilliant Watchmen comic was its fully realized fictional world:  every aspect of the near-future alternate-reality America was fleshed out, from the names of the newspapers to the look of the pop fashion trends of the moment to the fast food joints and retail stores.  Even the televisions were populated by cleverly thought-out commercials, many of them for products manufactured by Veidt Enterprises, the monolithic corporate giant run by ex-superhero Ozymandias.

Director Zack Snyder is determined to recreate this depth of field as much as possible, but he can't be bothered to actually make the commercials himself, since he is busy filming the movie and blogging endlessly about filming the movie.  So he's making you do it!  Or, more specifically, YouTube.  Snyder is running a contest on the video-hosting site, inviting fans to create their own Veidt Enterprises commercials.  If yours gets picked, you'll get thousands of dollars from the makers of this hugely expensive Hollywood blockbuster film! 

Ha ha, no, just kidding. But you do have a chance to get your commercial featured in the movie -- for free!  It's not exploitation if you enjoy it!  Me, I'm picturing an ad for Veidt's "Nostalgia" cologne featuring an 80-year-old Wilford Brimley muttering, "You can smell like it's 1956 again."

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Boy, it seems like forever since we've had any Watchmen news, doesn't it? Well, don't worry, fellow slavering comic book fans: we fully intend to completely suck every tiny bit of magic out of the movie by relentlessly cramming every bit of Watchmen-related insider gossip down your gullets until, by the time the movie finally comes out sometime around the crack of doom, you will feel like you have already seen it eighteen times and be utterly sick of it. You're welcome.

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Honestly, folks, we don't know why we're so obsessed with Watchmen news lately.  We'll stop as soon as the movie comes out and is terrible, we promise.  In the meantime, we're obviously not the only people who can't get enough of the hype, because when Jeffrey Dean Morgan was at a press junket promoting P.S. I Love You, all anyone wanted to talk to him about was his role as the Comedian in the upcoming comic adaptation.  Morgan reports that the sets, which have only been seen in a few photos released by director Zack Snyder, are "so true to the book it's insane", discussed the challenge of playing a morally reprehensible character like the Comedian, and vows that the film is "going to change the way people look at movies".  Meanwhile, artist Dave Gibbons, who drew the original Watchmen graphic novel (and who, because author Alan Moore maintains a policy of having nothing to do with film adaptations of his work, is the only creator involved in the movie), visited the set for the first time, describing the sensation of seeing the characters he helped bring into existence walking around and talking as "the most surreal experience of my life".  Gibbons, who Morgan reports was tearing up at seeing the sets, keeps mum about the specifics of the film, as have most people working on the set, but claims that among the cast and crew there is a "palpable commitment to do this right".  Only 15 months to go...

The productions of perhaps the two most anticipated comic book adaptations of all time — Watchmen and The Dark Knight — have both kicked into high gear, and there’s plenty of geeky content to go around before the movies actually end up in the can.  (Try not to think too hard about the fact that Dark Knight draws only its title, and nothing else, from Frank Miller’s stunning Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, or that Watchmen is being directed by a guy who turned another, far lesser Frank Miller book into a homoerotic big-screen video game.) In the Guardian, film blogger Sean Dodson provides a handy rundown of the astonishingly large number of Dark Knight teaser websites that have sprung up in the last few weeks (including ones for the Gotham Police Department, the local newspaper and a creepily amusing recruitment site for the Joker’s henchmen). Meanwhile, Zack Snyder himself provides some photos from the back lot of Watchmen, which contain lots of goodies for longtime fans of the comic (lots of characters, locations, companies, and other cultural references to the book are present in the background of the shots), although the set designer doesn’t seem to realize that Grain Belt beer has never been a big seller in New York.
— Leonard Pierce