WATCH THIS!

While there’s some rum, and a little bit of the lash, 2003’s Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World has more of syllables than of sodomy. Not that I’m complaining, mind you, but when you’re dealing with an historical drama where life in the Napoleonic War-era British Navy is integral to the storyline, the least you can do is to not make a liar out of Sir Winston Churchill. After all, it isn’t unusual for movies like this to feature scenes where the poopdeck is just lousy with seamen.

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Movies that are targeted to a specific audience are always a bit of a crap shoot, especially if you’re outside their range, or if they just miss and don’t have enough splash damage to affect your critic shields.

Um. Sorry, I’ve been playing a lot of videogames. (more…)

Watchmen, both the comic and the movie, suffers from a kind of Two Face schizophrenia. In the comic, Moore’s dialog vacillates from very good to over-worked “style for style’s sake” pap. For instance, the Rorschach psychotherapist scenes were well done, while a lot of Rorschach’s half-sentence fragments, especially later in the story, felt tin to me, like Moore was simply trying too hard. His plotting has a similarly vexing quality. The intertwining of The Black Freighter theme, the psychological realism of the main characters that plays on throughout the narrative, and moments of the prison sequence are all handled with such finesse that they seem to jump off the page. But each of these are moments of brilliance layered on top of lunacy that, at least for me, take the reader out of the story completely. To put it succinctly, he’ll ask the question “why can’t the comic medium be taken seriously as an art form?” and he’ll answer “because I have a giant alien squid for the deus ex machina of my grand finale.”
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