I’ve heard Heavenly Creatures is good, but I haven’t seen it. The Frighteners is just a mess. Bad Taste is fun but too long, and it definitely isn’t good (nor is it supposed to be, so it’s really a wild card in an appraisal). I didn’t see Kong but deciding to do it was a bad call.

Out of four Jackson movies I’ve seen (two LOTR chapters, Frighteners, Bad Taste), I thought two were terrible, one was not-good, and one was an intentionally awful goof-off. So I’m going to have to stand by my little aside about PJ.

Back on topic: Ed, the problem with making a movie just for the fans is that a movie with Watchmen’s budget can’t really afford to be a cult classic. No, you won’t make everyone happy, but you need to make a big cross section happy. (And here I will give Peter Jackson a nod: he made a movie that appealed to a lot of people; of course that’s not necessarily the same thing as making a good movie, but whatever.)

While I think Snyder and his writers understand Watchmen and delivered something extraordinarily faithful to the book, I’m not sure they delivered a particularly appealing movie. For anyone, and not just the fanboys. It’s not that it’s a bad movie, it really isn’t, but it also isn’t really a successful one, not even on its own terms (and I’m not talking about money, though that may be a problem for them if the theater I was in was any kind of example).

Cultural references are fine, and yes, I would get the reference to “Apocalypse Now.” But you better make sure that your references won’t be missed by most of your audience. From everything I’ve read, the movie was aimed at just the graphic novel fans, or given the price tag, I hope it wasn’t. No, references to have to be caught by all the audience, but they better be relevant ot the vast majority, or what’s the point of doing them?

I think noting such a problem is very relevant in a review. If a movie is full cultural references that a significant portion of the audience is missing, then they’re not going to get a portion of whatever the movie’s message is.

And if the movie is marketed wrong, then noting why you may not want to see the movie is absolutely valid. If I go to see a movie I should know will have refernces I’m going to miss, that’s on me. If I go to a movie that I should be able to enjoy regardless of mmy age/background/what I have or haven’t read, and I don’t get the refernces, that that’ on the movie.

And Eric, Peter Jackson is a good director. There was just no need to remake King Kong with the only difference being better special effects. Well, and Jack Black. But I admit I’m not a Jack Black fan :-)

No book will be pleasing to everyone. No movie, no album, nothing. There was never the intent to do x, y or z. It was aimed at an audience (a niche market as we quaintly phrase it these days).

That does not stop the unintended, for lack of a better word, from lining such enterprises up against the wall and ordering them shot the day the damn thing comes out.

Mind you, it’s marketed wrong, just as most Moore flix are. They’re not intended for everyone. of course they want to make 300 mil, 500 mil, 1 billion. The Wolverine PG13 movie will disappoint droves, mark my word. Not enough ’spirit’ (gore, death, just sheer mayhem and anger). People will hate star trek.

What kills me is people who don’t get the refrences, who know they’re missing them, just lambasting things (on line, in papers, in earshot of me at work/on a train) KNOWING they’re missing the parts that make it click.

I promise I won’t go see Nights In Rodanthe and then talk about what a piece of crap it is. I won’t go to a foreign film laced with cultural references and point out how I didn’t get them, thus the filmmaker missed the mark.

Let me get off the pulpit here, but it’s just ok to go ‘I didn’t get it’. Flight of the Valkries was a parody of something, as was the song paring of the sex scene. Let’s focus on Rorshack. He was the key to the movie. ;)

Alas, I did not see Apocalypse Now. My father pretty much banned any serious Vietnam war movie in my house being a returning Veteran. Alas, my only experience with the song was the mention of The Blues Brothers and the history behind the song and composer.

I would be interested to see where the gap between people who would get that reference (Perhaps a little older than myself) and those who didn’t would actually fall.

It was obviously lost on me, but not only for the homage to a Vietnam movie, but because it just didn’t work for me.

Peter Jackson sucks.

;-)

I’m usually really generous with movies, Ed. I joked in one Twitter that Howard the Duck had more substance. I would argue the more rabid a fan, the more expectations a director/writer must live up to in a new movie. LOTR was still a superb film despite the things it changed and I would argue made the story more watchable for people who weren’t such Tolkien fanboys. It told its own story through pictures as opposed to retelling a story that would have been hard to film in its entirety.

Watchmen retold the graphic novel almost word for word and was inherently unwatchable for it.

Kate, just to be clear: I’m not actually disagreeing with you, so I hope my first two paragraphs don’t sound argumentative. I was pointing those things out, but as I said in my final paragraph, I’m not sure Watchmen works on its own terms, as opposed to as an adjunct to the book (where it doesn’t always work, either). That being the case, there’s no reason at all for you to like it or feel any differently about it.

Oh, and Ed: your second paragraph may be one reason I don’t come down harder on Watchmen, actually: for all of the movie’s faults, I think Zack Snyder gave us the best Watchmen movie anybody could have hoped for; so there’s some gratitude there–if they had to make a Watchmen movie and I couldn’t stop ‘em (and Alan Moore couldn’t, so who am I?), at least we got this one. Unfortunately, Snyder may have accidentally proven that Moore is unfilmable, since even a religiously-faithful version doesn’t entirely gel.

The back-and-forth nature of the story is part of the original, and for that matter so is a sense of disgust: the heroes in Watchmen ultimately aren’t heroes. I’d say more, but I don’t really want to spoil anything.

I said at Giant Midgets that I wasn’t sure it had anything to offer somebody who hadn’t read the book, and unfortunately it tends to disappoint those who have read the book in sundry major and minor ways. I think I could have summarized my post as “It makes a neat companion to the book,” which is why I stand by thinking Watchmen is nifty, but it should also be taken from that that I’m praising Watchmen (the movie) with faint damnation. It’s neat to see those Dave Gibbons’ drawings move and hear people saying those Alan Moore lines, and I’ll eagerly buy the extended DVD if it still comes out, but it’s not a great movie.

The only reason it got made was because people loved the original. All we do as a movie watching society is bitch and moan about books being butchered for pulp movies… Remember watching the first LoTR with about 20 rabid tolkien fans?

Spoiler, only thing I really missed was the squid ;)