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I told Jared there’s at least one good reason a day to check digg out.
Heh; I won’t comment about digg, but as for the actual story (the Watchmen movie) I’m still a bit nervous about this one.
I think that in some ways it’s much easier to make a good Superman / Batman / Spider-man movie adaptation than it would be for a book like Watchmen. I don’t even think it’s about sticking as closely as possible to the original comic stories as much as it’s about capturing the feel and / or message of the movies.
For superhero films (like those I mentioned above), they are meant to be fun fantasy stories, so the movies don’t really have to strictly stick to the basis of the books, as long as they have the same feel or “spirit” of the characters they are based on. Furthermore, these days a lot of even those super hero books have much deeper plots and storytelling, and those aspects will probably not make it into the movie adaptations, but for those movies I’m OK with that.
Alan Moore’s Watchmen is a different story, though. While I think the most recent adaption of one of his other stories (V for Vendetta) went very well in my opinion, I’m not sure the same translation methods will apply to Watchmen. The V movie conveyed the basic underlying theme of the book well, even though the details were changed quite a bit in some places (and Moore himself whined about it), and it still lacked some of the depth of the book. So, again, I’m OK with details changing as long as it doesn’t change the point of the story.
The main thing I think will be different in Watchmen is that the presentation format (comic books) was a much more integral part of the story telling process than it was with V. The way I see it, V was a great story that happened to be told in the comic book (or “sequential art” - to be fancy) format. Watchmen (IMHO) was much more deliberate about how panels were laid out on the page, and how they related to the other panels that you can see at the same time, etc. This is something that I’m not sure movies can successfully reproduce. The only real example I can think of in this regard would be Sin City, which I would consider to be the only comic movie that maintained that type of visual storytelling / presentation format across the translation into film.
I guess the other aspect I’m worried about is that V stuck with dealing with one primary moral / philosophical (or whatever) issue, while Watchmen raises all kinds of questions about the overall human experience, ends justifying the means, “good” and “evil” motivations and misunderstandings, etc. I think this broader base will make it difficult to adapt (or stuff) into a couple hour movie, and I think trying to make it fit anyway might end up making it worse.
Of course, I’ll still see it and hope for the best. This project has been talked about forever (way before they started on V), and it keeps getting canceled / delayed for whatever reason. I suspect that the difficulties in translation I mentioned above are part of the reason for that, because in the end the movie studios have to release a movie that they believe will be a popular hit, which is the rub because to accomplish that goal they will probably have to chop it up and/or dumb it down quite a bit.
Speaking of Alan Moore, <a href=”http://www.northantsnews.co.uk/ViewArticle2.aspx?SectionID=317&ArticleID=1865011″ rel=”nofollow”>he’s going to be in an upcoming Simpsons episode, making a (rare) personal appearance at the new “cool” comic shop in town (competing with Comic Book Guy’s shop).
Speaking of Alan Moore, he’s going to be in an upcoming Simpsons episode, making a (rare) personal appearance at the new “cool” comic shop in town (competing with Comic Book Guy’s shop).
Speaking of Alan Moore, <a href=”http://www.northantsnews.co.uk/ViewArticle2.aspx?SectionID=317&ArticleID=1865011″ rel=”nofollow”>he's going to be in an upcoming Simpsons episode, making a (rare) personal appearance at the new “cool” comic shop in town (competing with Comic Book Guy's shop).
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Posted on: Friday, November 10th, 2006 Posted in: asides Subscribe: RSS 2.0 Discussion: 1299Commentshttp://dancameron.org/asides/diggdigg2006-11-10+16%3A38%3A15Dan+Cameron
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