The Shrine

bovine wrote:

Sassafras wrote:So this week NBC is showing video profiles of all the Watchmen characters. I just watched one while trying to catch up on Heroes. I havent watched it in awhile so I have no idea whats going on. Anyway just had to share this news and my fav quote about said profiles. From iwatchstuff.com:

"By Friday, you'll know so much about these heroes that you won't even need Teen Beat's "Which Watchmen Do You Kiss Most Like?" quiz to discern that I definitely kiss like The Comedian (rough but funny and flirty)."

Go here if you want to watch the clips. http://www.nbc.com/watchmen/

R U a bot from NBC?

No, she's not.

I got the IMAX tickets on Saturday. Right now there are 11 people in my group so we will be getting there early and saving seats.

That's one thing I like about the assigned seating at our theater. I picked my seats when I bought the tickets, so no having to get there super early and try and get a decent seat.

Seraphina wrote:That's one thing I like about the assigned seating at our theater. I picked my seats when I bought the tickets, so no having to get there super early and try and get a decent seat.

It would be better IMO, particularly with online ticket purchasing. It worked well when I was in Israel 16 years ago :-)

That would be awesome. It would make my life a lot easier. It won't be too bad though, I guess. The theater will probably let us in by 10 and we usually just hang out and do nothing anyways. Might as well do it at the theater.

Dangit, Chris. I wanted to get work done today. Now I'm going to sit here watching that for hours.

That was awesome.

I loved the little things in it, too, like Adrian being the one to save the Comedian from his death, Rohrshach with the dogs, the Comedian wanting a kiss from Laurie, and Dr. Manhattan giving the bad guy cancer.

There is no way I can watch that and even pretend I'm getting work done.

Finally got around to watching Watchmen. It was good and everything i hoped Dark Knight would have been.

Huh? Both movies were outstanding. You can't really say much bad things about either of them.

I was knocking Dark Knight when it came out for being PG-13 and having a whimsical tone even though the superb acting begged for it to be darker and more serious. The Dark Knight could have been supa hella sweet if it went with the flow.

I loved how Watchmen made the characters more layered, tackled a more complex storyline, and was altogether darker.

Hmm? Dark Knight had a whimsical tone? I'm not saying you're wrong, since that's how you perceived it, but what made you perceive it that way?

Personally, I thought Dark Knight pushed the limits of PG-13 because of what was implied off-screen. They never showed what the Joker did to people, but you still knew he did it.

...whimsical?

Yeah, I don't get the whole "whimsical" comment on Dark Knight. It was a pretty dark and gritty film all the way through. It was BARELY PG-13

Nah, its a good word to use when compared to Watchmen which was much gorier, intense, and adult situational. It was what i hoped the spidermen movies would have been, too... I started to get tired of superhero movies because they all were cheesy fun (ironman, spiderman, batman, hulk, x-men, etc, the list goes on and on). Wathmen break the mold, IMO, and i was happy for it.

It's not a good word to use in that I (and others?) have no idea what you mean by it.

Yeah, I think of something like "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" (old one) as whimsical. That word would never have crossed my mind for TDK.

Flip wrote:Nah, its a good word to use when compared to Watchmen which was much gorier, intense, and adult situational. It was what i hoped the spidermen movies would have been, too... I started to get tired of superhero movies because they all were cheesy fun (ironman, spiderman, batman, hulk, x-men, etc, the list goes on and on). Wathmen break the mold, IMO, and i was happy for it.

Well, that's precisely what Watchmen was designed to do when it came out in the comics, during the 80s. Nowadays, you can find a lot of the non-traditional heroes and anti-heroes in Vertigo Comics, which Hollywood has just started to tap into: Constantine (Hellblazer), A History of Violence, V for Vendetta, The Fountain. The fact that people don't know that movies like A History of Violence and The Fountain were based on graphic novels is a testament of the non-traditionalist nature of the comics.

However, the new Batman series should not be taken lightly for how much darker and serious it is compared to the old Batman, or other superhero movies. It is no Superman, or Ironman, or Spiderman. You are not laughing with some mousy small-time person turned superhero or laughing at gags. Any sort of comedy in place is much darker than normal.

Plus, Ledger's Joker makes Nicholson's Joker look "whimsical".

In fact, there is common derision amongst the comic book community at large for the painfully crude attempts to make comic books "darker" and "edgier", resulting in wangst and gore and total abandonment of typical character values.

Some gems remain, but for the most part, the legacy of Watchmen and the Dark Knight Returns, the Frank Miller work, is in the tons of lesser rip-offs that thrived during the "Dark Age" of comics.

RentCavalier wrote:In fact, there is common derision amongst the comic book community at large for the painfully crude attempts to make comic books "darker" and "edgier", resulting in wangst and gore and total abandonment of typical character values.

Some gems remain, but for the most part, the legacy of Watchmen and the Dark Knight Returns, the Frank Miller work, is in the tons of lesser rip-offs that thrived during the "Dark Age" of comics.

And some comic books ARE darker and edgier. You can't water down Sin City, and thank god the movie isn't, either. Same for 300. Same for Preacher, if it ever gets made into a series.

Frankly, I don't see any of these comic book movies that are too dark. Can you provide examples?

I have to agree. I don't like "gratuitously dark", but in general I have been a HUGE fan of the trend in darker graphic novels, noir, gothic horror. I actually kind of think that the last decade or so for graphic novels may be akin to the golden years of Hollywood film noir and pulp, starting with Batman: Arkham Asylum back in the 1990s. I loved Kingdom Come, and that one was not the "brightest" book either, that one almost changed my life. So I must be forced to support the edgy side of the issue.

It comes down to, as many things do, "Things are good when done well, and bad when done poorly."

Actually, my bad, I think it was "The Dark Knight Returns" that kicked it off, the one about Batman as an older man and then Robin gets replaced by this teenage girl.