Saturday, April 24th, 2004

Who Watches The Watchmen?

You may recall that Darren Aranofsky (Pi, Requiem For A Dream) was supposed to bring Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One to the screen not too long ago, but that project got turfed in favor of Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins. Aranofsky’s next project did draw on comic source material – Lone Wolf & Cub is currently in production – but Ain’t It Cool News reports he’s still going to be able to add a legendary comic book adaptation to his resume – Watchmen. Solid Snake himself, David Hayter (X-Men), was originally going to direct as well as write the screenplay, but he’s only going to be handling scribe duties now. While some will argue that Watchmen is still unfilmable in any form that does it justice, they’re certainly getting the right talent together to take a swing at it.

I reread the book last month and kept the question of ‘how would you make a movie from this’ in my head, and I don’t think it’d be that difficult to do – you’d just have to find a way to get all the background information provided in the prose section at the back of each issue in there, and of course, you could ditch that pirate story completely. I think it’d be do-able. Now as to the question of ‘should you do it’, who knows. Since it’s hardly a conventional super-hero story, I wonder if it’d be able to find an audience in the moviegoing mainstream? Lord knows Hulk was lambasted for NOT being a brainless summer blockbuster. The average punter would likely have no idea what to make of something as thinky/talky as Watchmen, and it’d certainly require a larger budget than something that was destined for the arthouse. The question, I guess, is who would be watching the Watchmen? Yeah, that was bad. Either way, we shall see how this progresses.

I bought the speakers yesterday, but aren’t picking them up until Tuesday or Wednesday, since they have to order in the finish I wanted. I’m very excited about this, though very alarmed that I caught myself eyeing the A/V receivers in the shop yesterday as I waited for my salesguy. It’s a slippery, slippery slope I tell ya.

For some unfathomable reason, I turned on my alarm last night despite the fact that it is, indeed, Saturday. Worst part is that I hit snooze nine times this morning before it occurred to me that I could just turn the damn thing off. It’s interesting, however, just how much dreaming you can get accomplished in nine-minute increments.

np – Stars / Heart

By : Frank Yang at 10:09 am
Category: Uncategorized
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  1. duus says:

    frank–off topic, but thought you may want to know about the Rock against Bush cd…you can buy it for $6 at:

    http://…/

    whatever. they wanna sell several this weekend to get it on top 10 release lists. thought you might be interested….

  2. Brent says:

    It would take a genius, and probably require involvement by Moore himself and some kind of alignment of the planets, but a good and successful watchmen is possible, because it has all the right elements to be both good and successful.

    The Watchmen is a superhero story for adults. I think we’d all be surprised to find out how large a market there is for that.

    Now if someone could make a Star Wars for grown ups, they’d make a billion.

  3. zogboy says:

    The Watchmen is a story that uses the language of comics in such a specific way I can’t imagine it being translated to another medium. Though I would have liked to see Terry Gilliam try….