Word: hollywoodisms
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...book serial written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons--can't match this Mach 2 ride through alternative history. Nor is the movie likely to live up to the hype it and its source novel have generated. Derisive laughter was heard at a critics' screening, and a Hollywood Reporter review predicted that the film--budgeted at $100 million and the object of a rights wrangle between Warner Bros. and 20th Century Fox--would be the "first real flop of 2009." (TIME's Lev Grossman offers a fan's review of the movie. Download the podcast...
...even an ordinary one, the reader-viewer invariably finds something missing, lacking, overstressed or just plain wrong, because it was changed. When we read the book, we make the movie: we cast it, visualize it, control its pacing. We own it. Any other version of the book - say, Hollywood's - competes with our original experience and simply can't measure up. And this applies no matter how good the film, how bad the book. If there'd been a cheapo novel called Citizen Kane that preceded the movie, somebody who'd read it first would have said, "Nice...
...ending does not puss out." Such is the snakebite of hype, especially for a project with such outsize expectations. The film, budgeted at $100 million and the object of a rights wrangle between Warner Bros. and 20th Century Fox, has received less than rapturous early reviews. In his Hollywood Reporter critique, Kirk Honeycutt predicted that the film would be "the first real flop of 2009." (See the top 10 graphic novels...
...Moore conceived the story when Reagan and the Russkies were still spitting threats across the Berlin Wall, and few imagined the Soviet Union could collapse under its own dead weight. In that sense, Watchmen is another replay of the Nixon years to which Hollywood filmmakers are addicted - Frost/Nixon, Milk, etc. - and a period piece that may not resonate with audiences who weren't alive when Tricky Dick was in power. (Snyder says he was asked if Nixon could be replaced by George W. Bush; he wisely declined.) Set in the recent past, it features characters who cannot escape their...
...minutes on the splatter of crushed limbs, the chatter of Strangelovean science fiction and the nattering of the obligatory romance. He also encourages a little festival of tone-deaf acting. Yet Watchmen has moments of greatness. It proves again that the action movie is where the best young Hollywood brains have gone to bring flesh to their fantasies...