CLIFFHANGER (1993)



Let’s be clear...Cliffhanger is not a good film. Sylvester Stallone is...well, he’s Sylvester Stallone, and John Lithgow only works as a villain when he’s playing a snotty elitist or Dr. Lizardo and not somebody who’s actually meant to scare me. But the primal suspense of the opening sequence above haunts me far more than any number of scenes from much, much better films. Here’s the set-up: Stallone plays Gabe, some kind of extreme mountain ranger who (along with helicopter ace Janine Turner) attempt what should be the routine rescue of their colleague Hal (Michael Rooker) and his cute-as-a-bug girlfriend, Sarah (Michelle Joyner), who’ve managed to get trapped while hiking in the Rocky Mountains -- but then things go horribly awry, and suddenly Gabe and Sarah are stuck hanging from a thin line between two peaks over a vertigo-inducing abyss...and then the line starts to give way...and then Sarah slips and winds up dangling from Gabe’s meaty fingers...and it’s all very suspenseful and routinely pulse-pounding until -- holy shit! -- sweet, innocent Sarah actually falls to her death, screaming all the way...the kind of unexpected gut-punch one rarely encounters in the typical theme-park safety net of most summer thrill rides. The incident is so demoralizing, in fact, that it hangs like a pall over the characters and audience for the rest of the film's running time, adding untenable weight to a ludicrous Die Hard knock-off that can’t support it -- but director Renny Harlin deserves at least some credit for creating such a terrifying, memorable stand-alone reminder of the visceral power of cinema. (AO)

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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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[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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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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Watchmen is still hours away from opening in theaters, but its visionary director (oh, how I’ll never tire of calling him that) has already lined up the cast for his next picture. “Amanda Seyfried in negotiations to topline the project, while Vanessa Hudgens, Abbie Cornish, Evan Rachel Wood and Emma Stone are in talks to star in the action fantasy” Sucker Punch, per The Hollywood Reporter. “Set in the 1950s, Punch follows a girl who is confined to a mental institution by her stepfather, who intends to have her lobotomized in five days. While there, she imagines an alternative reality to hide her from the pain, and in that world, she begins planning her escape, needing to steal five objects to help get her out before she is deflowered by a vile man. Snyder, who co-wrote the script with Steve Shibuya, has described the fantasy world as Alice in Wonderland with machine guns.” Oooh…visionary!

Dakota Fanning has joined the Runaways.

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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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The reviews have progressed from a trickle to a deluge (look for ours tomorrow), so what do you say we conduct our final pre-release roundup of all things Watchmania?

At Hollywood and Fine, Marshall Fine ponders the big questions. “What is Watchmen but yet another distraction – a bit of apocalyptic storytelling meant to take our minds off the apocalypse now? That’s what I hate about this moment in time: There’s no such thing as simply seeing a movie like this and enjoying it on its merits. The hype machine has been pumping since before Snyder rolled the first camera. It’s been building to a deafening roar since the first of the year. You can’t escape it – it’s impossible not to get burned out on it, whether you’re interested in the subject or not.”

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Who Watches The Incredibles?

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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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Not to sound morbid, but it occurred to me recently (whilst contemplating my own mortality) that someday – hopefully some far distant day -- I’ll read an Entertainment Weekly Spring/Summer/Fall/Holiday preview issue and/or watch a flock of coming attractions trailers for a whole bunch of movies I won’t, in fact, live long enough to see.

In Zelig, Woody Allen’s chameleon character dies with just one regret: that he never got to finish reading Moby Dick. Imagine Zelig’s disappointment if he’d been a Harry Potter fan in November, forever denied the opportunity to see the cinematic adaptation of Half-Blood Prince (let alone the Deathly Hallows)? And Lord knows at this point whether any of us will live long enough to see Zack Snyder’s much-litigated version of Watchmen. (Ironically, another movie that most of us seem destined never to see is Fanboys, about a cancer-stricken geek in 1998 determined, in yet another layer of sad irony, to see the as-yet-unreleased Phantom Menace before he dies...but I digress.)

Anyhow, with my wife and I both fighting various wintry ailments (and going on a solid week of sleep deprivation thanks to the itchy throats and sinus pressure of the damned), it’s hard to look forward to anything at this point beyond still yet more mucus...but if I should manage somehow to survive this relentlessly cold, snowy New England winter (good Lord...it’s only JANUARY?), then here are the five upcoming 2009 releases I’m most looking forward to:

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Sweet, a new Watchmen trailer, and with better music this time around.

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5. DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978)



Fuck a Zack Snyder remake – no other zombie movie, not even by George Romero, will ever surpass the original Dawn of the Dead. How do I love this gory, nasty, and surprisingly moving masterpiece of terror? Let me count the ways. First of all, while it can’t surpass the closed-up creepiness of the original Night of the Living Dead, it opens it up to staggering effect and makes it a truly apocalyptic horror film. Second, Night had always been projected as a one-off; it was Dawn that made zombies into one of the famous monsters of filmdom, that transformed Romero’s dead-eyed flesh-eaters into beings with their own mythology and internal logic. By doing so, it didn’t just launch a franchise – it launched an entire universe, a cultural archetype with as much meaning and possibility as vampires, werewolves – or angels. Third, it’s tight as hell, incredibly suspenseful, and remarkably well-acted, with the technical difficulties of filming something so ambitious on a shoestring overcome in surprising and effective ways. Fourth, like all great horror movies, it gives us an essential human drama at its center; we care about the story because we care about Stephen, Peter, Roger and Francine. Fifth, it’s a deeply satirical exercise, the first attempt – and probably the most successful – by Romero to mock us by showing us the way a lot of people probably see us: zombies as cultural/political metaphors. And sixth…well, it’s about a bunch of flesh-eating zombies running amok in a shopping mall. And, to use the highfalutin language of film criticism, that’s awesome.

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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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This Watchmen obsession of ours!  When will it ever end?  Well, March 6th of next years, at which we'll hitch our irrationally high hopes to some other wagon.  But in the meantime, that still leaves us six more months to slavishly pore over every detail that comes down the pike!  (By the way, we won't say this is a Screengrab exclusive or anything, but has anyone noticed the Full Cast and Crew notes for the movie?  Apparently, John McLaughlin, Eleanor Clift, Andy Warhol and Annie Liebowitz are in the movie as characters (thankfully not playing themselves).  Will Rorschach party at the Factory?  Will the Comedian be grilled on his foreign policy expertise on The McLaughlin Group?  We certainly hope so... 

Meanwhile, in the wake of the San Diego ComicCon, almost everyone involved in the movie has been doing publicity interviews.  Collider managed to speak to actors Billy Crudup (who's playing Dr. Manhattan) and Matthew Goode (who's appearing as Ozymandias), and Good is -- surprisingly and pleasingly -- very circumspect about the whole thing.  "We haven't seen the scenes yet," he cautions fans who are going buggy about the trailer; "We haven't seen how people interact, we haven't seen the full flesh of their characters.  And obviously we saw them on set, because of the interations that we had, but I want to see that world; I want to see if it all totally makes sense.  Because sometimes things can get left a little flat.  So let's not start sucking each other off just yet."  Wise words, and the interview also drops hints that the film will remain very true to the book's original ending -- but in the bad news department, Goode also claims his character's outfit has nipples on the suit as part of Zack Snyder's 'homage' to Joel Schumacher's Batman and Robin movie.  This, combined with the use in the trailer for Watchmen of a song from the same film, makes us very nervous; if you want to make the best superhero movie ever made, you want to do as little as possible to remind viewers of the worst.

Collider likewise gets a chance to sit down with Carla Gugino (Silk Spectre), Malin Akerman (Silk Spectre II) and Patrick Wilson (Night Owl), all of whom mention how closely the script adheres to the comic (a situation which is certainly a double-edged sword; stray too far from the original, and fans will eat you alive, but stick to it too closely and many will wonder why you bothered to make a movie).  Akerman notes that when the movie comes out, it will take fans a long time to come to terms with its complexity and density, just as is the case with the book.  "Someone else who's read the novel for 10 years straight now has so many different views and insights.  It'll take me another 10 years to figure out because you have to read it about 20 times to get every single piece, and every single moment because it's so dense.  But I think we can all come out of it and just give you our opinion about how it feels for us and how we can relate to it."

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Now YOU can watch the Watchmen!

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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 we've said pretty much every week for the last, oh, say, year and a half, we intend to bring you every single bit of news we possibly can about Zack Snyder's forthcoming adaptation of Watchmen, widely held to be the best superhero comic ever written.  (By the way, this is approximately the nine billionth article I've written about the guy, and I still have to check to see if his first name is spelled 'Zack' or 'Zach'.)  And, as we will probably continue to say for the next, oh, say, year and a half until the movie actually opens, we don't really expect it to be any good.  We could be wrong -- in fact, we're practically praying we are -- but given Snyder's previous track record, our hopes aren't exactly sky-high.

But one thing's for sure:  Snyder is unqualified in his love for the original source material, and at the very least, he seems to be dedicated to making the Watchmen movie as faithful to the graphic novel as the format of the film will possibly allow.  This could in and of itself be a big problem, leading fans to wonder why, if he's just going to film the panels verbatim, why anyone had to bother making the movie in the first place, but we do know this:  no matter how bad Watchmen turns out to be, it could have been worse.  Much, much, much worse.  

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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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In case you’ve slept through this past weekend, the summer movie season got off to a roaring start with the big-budget adaptation of Iron Man. With many more comic book movies in store this summer, and even more after that, I figured it was about time to catch up with former Screengrab contributor and all around good dude Kent M. Beeson. As a comic-book fan and movie buff of long standing, Kent recently secured a position with the Web site comiXology, writing a bi-weekly column entitled The Watchman. Kent was gracious enough to take time out of his busy schedule- which also includes numerous freelance jobs as well as a wife and 14-month-old daughter- to conduct this interview via e-Mail.

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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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To celebrate one-year-and-counting-down to the release of Watchmen, Zack Snyder has released some comicbookalicious images of the tights clad titular team. The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), Silk Spectre (Malin Ackerman), Ozymanidas (Matthew Goode), and Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley) are straight from the page. Patrick Wilson as Nite Owl, however, isn’t screaming authenticity.

More after the jump.

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One of our favorite features over at Comics2Film, aside from their constant Watchmen movie updates that we plunder on a weekly basis to feed our sick obsession with the doomed Zack Snyder adaptation, is "The Elevator." Essentially, it's the online version of a pitch meeting: they invite small-press comics creators onto the site to explain why their particular property is worthy of being greenlit for a big-screen adaptation. Of course, since Comics2Film is just a glorified fansite and not an actual Hollywood studio, nothing ever comes of the Elevator pitches, but it's a fun little distraction (this week's features. . .

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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

More Trek news: Simon Pegg — Shaun of the Dead himself — to play Scotty. Awesome.

Zack Snyder will direct The Last Photograph, an Afghanistan-set drama "based on an original idea by Snyder." (Snyder has original ideas?)

Frank Langella joins Cameron Diaz in The Box, Richard Kelly's intended follow-up to Southland Tales — assuming anyone lets the guy direct after that thing comes out.

— Peter Smith

 

PZ Myers, the invaluable science blogger, reports that physicist Jim Kakalios, author of The Science of Superheroes, has been brought in as a consultant for Zack Snyder’s Watchmen movie.  It seems like a curious decision; the comic features only one character with superhuman powers, after all, and he is essentially godlike and not bound by any sort of physics.  And it’s not as if they needed to bring in a historian to keep 300 on an even keel, if the box office numbers rather than the critical reactions are anything to go by.  May we suggest saving the money they’d spend on a physics consultant and putting it towards a script doctor instead?

 

— Leonard Pierce