Good movie, fine movie or sacrilege?
I liked it. There are some false steps, but not enough to spoil a good effort.
Credits:
*Opening sequence
*Lack of giant squid
*Rorshach largely handled appropriately
*Mostly made sensible choices about what to exclude
Debits:
*Soundtrack choices often distracting
*Some of the speechifying came off as overwrought
*Contained most hilarious sex scene in the history of movies
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
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14 comments:
Otis,
I agree with all of your points and would add these:
Credits:
* Deft choice of ending; arguably more elegant than the original.
Debit:
*Criminal overuse of slomo.
It was so raw. I have to applaud the willingness to embrace the sex and violence.
I know what you mean about the sex scene. It was awkward. Leonard Cohen didn't spice it up.
The soundtrack though... I'm torn. On the one hand I think that they were excellent choices. They were all super expressive songs, many of them are cultural anthems despite not being very catchy. They were certainly in the spirit of the movie, but sometimes not in the spirit of the scene. I can forgive it though.
Sometimes when reading the graphic novel, I really didn't want to stop the action to read the "primary source material" between chapters. I read it anyway and was glad I did. I didn't always want to read that pirate story either. While it was another layer to the spirit of the story I found it distracting and tedious to flip back and fourth between the dialogues. I read it all anyway and was glad I did afterward. That's kind of how I feel about the music choices in the movie. I do agree that it was distracting, but I think it's for the best.
/shoots jet of flame
In general I don't like using music to comment upon the story, as opposed to helping set a mood. "99 Luftballoons","Everybody Wants to Rule the World" and "I'm Your Boogie Man" say waaay too much about what's going on in the movie.
"Watchtower", though. If I were the filmaker I would feel compelled to set that scene to "Watchtower".
John: The trailer made me think the whole damn movie was going to be in slowmo, so I was okay with the amount of slowmo that I got.
It shoots a jet of flame in the book! THAT, at least, was accurate.
Captain Metropolis is out, but the jet of flame stays.
But the jet of flame is an important metaphor for, you know, his love volcano...yeah....no.
Liz Phair wrote a song about him.
How else would we know that he was finally able to be a real man?
(Costumes make it hotter.)
cough . . .
Furries
Interestingly, I wasn't thinking of "99 Luftballoons","Everybody Wants to Rule the World" and "I'm Your Boogie Man". About the latter two: I noticed them, but barely; I didn't think they we're distracting. And 99 was in German, so that's cool.
I was really thinking of "Watchtower", "The Sound of Silence", "Times Are A'changin" (which is fine because you can do whatever you want during credits, even if the pacing doesn't match up) "First We Take Manhattan" (see previous comment re: credits), and "Hallelujah"
I'm cool with the slomo, (and fastmo) They did it in Raging Bull and no one complained then. It's an integral part of the film making vocabulary and I thought it was really well done. Especially because the things that were slowed down were frames of the comic that you probably stared at for a while, but would take milliseconds to play out IRL.
Those songs didn't bother me too much, other than Hallelujah.
No sex scene can be more hilarious than the puppets in Team America
Good point. Team America at least has competition now.
NO WAY! The Team America scene was supposed to be ridiculous. I'd say this was more along the lines of the Starship Troopers "I can't even wait for you to get the shirt up over your head" scene- trying to be serious but coming off as laughable.
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