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Best Rated-R "Comic Book Movies?"


J.T.

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Watchmen was an incredible piece of filmmaking especially with everything added in with the ultimate cut or whatever.

 

 

Well, yeah, but if ever there was a movie director who's reach would forever exceed their grasp, it's Snyder. To take a guy who removed all subtlety and nuance from something as unsubtle as 300, and expect him to comprehend Watchmen... no. Just no. He's one of those people who not only doesn't realise how stupid he is, but also thinks he's secretly smarter than everyone else, because they says things are complex and multi-layered and you have to look at it more than once, from more than one angle to get everything... and as far as he's concerned, he understood the whole thing perfectly on his first read-through and everyone else is dumb for thinking it's got complexity.

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I loved Dredd.  I had no expectations for that movie and couldn't take my eyes away from it once it started.  I haven't been so disappointed by the lack of a sequel for a film since Master and Commander.

 

God damn, do I love Dredd. I sat in a mostly empty theater having a great time, knowing all the goobers would regret not seeing it in theaters.

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Then explain what he got wrong about it...

Where would we begin? Well, having a bunch of Matrix-style wire-fu action scenes with abusive amounts of slow motion would be one good place to start. The novel wasn't anything even resembling an action book, so of course Snyder tried to turn it into an action movie.
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You mean one scene which lasted about 3 minutes.

One? There were several. Right from the beginning, the opening Comedian home invasion played less like what Moore and Gibbons put on the page and more like a deleted scene from a Transporter movie. Nite Owl & Silk Spectre's alley fight with the gang suddenly turned from a believable fistfight against three guys to a laughably overdone Sonny Chiba donnybrook against a horde of at least a dozen gang members, including such ridiculous bullshit as having tiny little Laurie Juspeczyk doing the Bare-Handed Neck-Snap on a man twice her size as if she was a goddamn terminator. And then there was the slow-motion "Comedian busts up a riot in bullet time" scene, and Rorschach's police ambush went from the comic's Taxi Driver style to something more like a Jason Bourne movie, and the goofy wired-up kung fu fight in the prison... this movie kept trying to go all Yuen Woo Ping when that style of action was absolutely dead wrong for the noir-ish material.

It simply didn't keep the tone of the original. I felt like Sin City did everything it needed to do in turning the comic into a movie with as little "adaptation" as possible, but Watchmen just made me feel like I was watching a really expensive cosplay fanfilm with some terribly overproduced fight scenes. Especially considering how bad some of the supporting performances were, Matthew Goode was an outright disaster as Ozymandias, completely sabotaging every single one of his scenes. Hell, even the Black Freighter parts were fucked over. That's one of my very favorite pieces of the book, but in the animated version it comes off like the Spawn cartoon from the 90s, just trying way too desperately fucking hard to be gritty and edgy. (Especially since they inexplicably changed one of the greatest moments from the comic, when the guy tries to step off the raft and then appears to find himself standing on the water; in the movie, he just plunges down into the ocean.)

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Does Snowpiercer count?

 

Fuck.  Snowpiercer would discombobulate my list.  Wanted would go bye bye and everything below Akira would drop a notch.

 

I personally found American Splendor to be a pretty painful experience even though it is a very good movie.   I can see why people would be drawn to the quixotic story of a brilliantly told story about an otherwise ordinary man, but such tales do not normally compel me to buy a movie ticket.

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Snyder's failing on Watchmen was thinking that filming the plot of something is the same as understanding something. The comic functions as a metaphor and a commentary on the medium itself. Snyder put none of that in to his film. It's like taking Moby Dick and making an action film about getting revenge on an evil whale. Sure, that's what it's 'about', but doing so would be missing the point to a shocking degree. Watchmen at points feels like someone gave Snyder a copy of the comic without any text and then a print out of the Wikipedia plot summary.

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I loved Dredd.  I had no expectations for that movie and couldn't take my eyes away from it once it started.  I haven't been so disappointed by the lack of a sequel for a film since Master and Commander.

 

God damn, do I love Dredd. I sat in a mostly empty theater having a great time, knowing all the goobers would regret not seeing it in theaters.

I watched Dredd at the cinema and bought it on DVD. My review:

Chances are I'll be pimping films based on comic books more than any other as I'm a big fan of them and comic books. Let's start with these two...

 

X-Men: First Class (2011) REVIEW REMOVED AS NOT RELEVANT TO THREAD.

Dredd (2012). Dredd is a well done violent comic book action film, I really enjoyed it. The three leads: Karl Urban as Judge Dredd, Olivia Thirlby as Cassandra Anderson and Lena Headley as Ma-Ma were great. The look of the film from the Judges costumes, Lawgiver, Lawmaster, Mega-City One and the special effects deserve praise, so does the soundtrack. The judges’ costumes are one of my favourite ever comic to film translations. One of the few 3D films I watched when it was worth the format. Shame it didn’t perform better at the box office for the sequel to happen.

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Norman Redus and Ron Perlman were king sized and I normally would support anything that gives paychecks to Donnie Yen, Luke Goss, Tony Curran, and Danny Jules-Jones, but Leonor Varela's stiff acting and the shoehorned almost romantic thing really took me out of Blade 2.

 

It also didn't have any badass memorable lines like "Some mother fuckers are always trying to ice-skate uphill," or "How do you think that we fund this organization, huh? We're not exactly the March of Dimes."

 

Dredd is fucking awesome.  Too bad it had to suffer association with the really bad Stallone vehicle.  The total lack of a marketing campaign did not help.  I can't help but think that the new hotness for Rated R comic book movies would've been jumpstarted a lot sooner if Dredd had been marketed better..

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Snyder put exactly what was on the pages and translated them to film so much so that some people criticized him for being TOO faithful.. and here we are with some saying he didn't "get it".. so which is it. I still haven't been given an example of what he didn't understand, I've read Watchmen, a few other people I know have though it's been a very long time, I'll concede that..

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Norman Redus and Ron Perlman were king sized and I normally would support anything that gives paychecks to Donnie Yen, Luke Goss, 

 

 

 

and Danny Jules-Jones,

 

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Snyder put exactly what was on the pages and translated them to film so much so that some people criticized him for being TOO faithful.. and here we are with some saying he didn't "get it".. so which is it. I still haven't been given an example of what he didn't understand

The entire tone of the film. The book Watchmen is basically the world's longest, most complex way of stating the phrase "fuck superheroes". Moore was demythologizing the whole genre way back when Frank Miller was practically his only contemporary, and Will Eisner the only precedent. Long before guys like Mark Millar and Garth Ennis took the concept to its furthest extremes, Moore was undermining the entire concept of noble superheroism and dismissing the very idea that any of this was done out of pure altruism or that it could lead to a happy ending.

Watchmen the motion picture gets none of that. It makes the superheroes' actions look COOL, all badass slow-motion and spin-kicking dudes in the face. It amps up the genre elements of the plot, focusing much harder on the action and the comedy and the whodunit, and manages to leave out the suffocating despair and the feeling that the superheroes were entirely just a bunch of manchildren playing with their toys (and by "their toys" I mean "the lives of the entire human race"). It's like taking The Road and making it into The Road Warrior. Either one on its own is great, but they don't work together at all.

I'll maintain to my dying day that not only was Constantine an underrated movie, but it actually GOT Alan Moore's work better than any other cinematic adaptation. Sure, the rampant changes to the details of the story were annoying and unnecessary; making the quintessentially English punk John Constantine into fuckin' Keanu Reeves was, naturally, a poor decision based purely on mercenary starpower greed. And the transformation of an essentially pagan mythos into pseudo-Catholic spiritualism was aggravating. But the movie got the FEEL of the comic perfectly: John is a selfish piece of shit, his actions often cause more problems than they solve, he always gets his friends brutally killed, and there's a general feeling that God really doesn't give that much of a fuck about His sentient human creations. You can practically smell the brimstone-laced nicotine wafting off the grimy images on the screen. It even worked as a legit horror movie at times: the Omen-like scene in the liquor store was seriously unnerving in concept and execution. And then Tilda Swinton plays an archangel and Peter Stormare plays Satan and what more could you possibly ask for.

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And while we're on the subject of American Splendor: if you fuckin' hated the comic, should you even bother with the movie? I read a Best-Of compilation, and came to truly despise Harvey Pekar and everything he stood for.

Christ that explains so much.

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Like what? As for Pekar, his work reminded me of all the "creative nonfiction" artistes who seem to have absolutely no perspective beyond gazing into their own navels. Someone who only writes about themselves isn't my idea of anything even resembling a good author.

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I guess we will agree to disagree because those elements in watchmen that you felt Snyder missed I felt did come across on film and remember while the film did not blow away the box office it did receive mostly positive reviews and great word of mouth which led to it raking in a ton of money in dvd\Blu Ray sales. There are some who have gone as far to say it is their favorite comic book film to date, which I can't say that but some do.

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Snyder put exactly what was on the pages and translated them to film so much so that some people criticized him for being TOO faithful.. and here we are with some saying he didn't "get it".. so which is it. I still haven't been given an example of what he didn't understand

The entire tone of the film. The book Watchmen is basically the world's longest, most complex way of stating the phrase "fuck superheroes". Moore was demythologizing the whole genre way back when Frank Miller was practically his only contemporary, and Will Eisner the only precedent. Long before guys like Mark Millar and Garth Ennis took the concept to its furthest extremes, Moore was undermining the entire concept of noble superheroism and dismissing the very idea that any of this was done out of pure altruism or that it could lead to a happy ending.

Watchmen the motion picture gets none of that. It makes the superheroes' actions look COOL, all badass slow-motion and spin-kicking dudes in the face. It amps up the genre elements of the plot, focusing much harder on the action and the comedy and the whodunit, and manages to leave out the suffocating despair and the feeling that the superheroes were entirely just a bunch of manchildren playing with their toys (and by "their toys" I mean "the lives of the entire human race"). It's like taking The Road and making it into The Road Warrior. Either one on its own is great, but they don't work together at all.

I'll maintain to my dying day that not only was Constantine an underrated movie, but it actually GOT Alan Moore's work better than any other cinematic adaptation. Sure, the rampant changes to the details of the story were annoying and unnecessary; making the quintessentially English punk John Constantine into fuckin' Keanu Reeves was, naturally, a poor decision based purely on mercenary starpower greed. And the transformation of an essentially pagan mythos into pseudo-Catholic spiritualism was aggravating. But the movie got the FEEL of the comic perfectly: John is a selfish piece of shit, his actions often cause more problems than they solve, he always gets his friends brutally killed, and there's a general feeling that God really doesn't give that much of a fuck about His sentient human creations. You can practically smell the brimstone-laced nicotine wafting off the grimy images on the screen. It even worked as a legit horror movie at times: the Omen-like scene in the liquor store was seriously unnerving in concept and execution. And then Tilda Swinton plays an archangel and Peter Stormare plays Satan and what more could you possibly ask for.

The funny thing is that Moore and Gibbons stated repeatedly in interviews and supplementary material that they intended Watchmen as a celebration of the superhero genre. It's supposed to show the potential of it to tell mature, adult stories as well as flights of fancy. Whether it succeeds on that level is another matter but they certainly didn't intend it as a critique.

A big part of Watchmen is asking the question "What is a hero?" This was even more pertinent at a time when Miller's Daredevil was a few years old and Wolverine and Punisher were getting big as heroes with no qualms about killing. Every costumed character in Watchmen could be considered a hero depending on the framing of the narrative. Night Owl is altruistic but ineffective. Silk Spectre is a figurehead. Comedian is a morally compromised war hero. Doctor Manhattan is cold and detached but also incredibly powerful. Rorschach is a psychopath who turns that malice on criminals. Ozymandias is the big picture guy, sacrificing many to bring peace to most. They're all heroes in the right lens and that's something the film misses.

It also fails to properly get the Cold War climate which is why the alien squid change doesn't really work. Doctor Manhattan is seen as an American weapon. If an American weapon blew up Moscow in the heart of the Cold War, they wouldn't stop and call to ask "What the fuck?" It would need to be an external threat, thus aliens.

Fun fact: Moore was SO ON THE MONEY HERE. It came out in 2009 that Reagan and Gorbachev met in secret in the 80s and agreed that they would halt the Cold War at the threat of alien invasion.

Anyway, the movie moralizes too much and undermines the conceits of the book. Shit like the first Silk Spectre forgiving the Comedian for raping her because he gave her Laurie rather than the more complicated answer that feelings are complicated and someone can love their rapist because these things don't always make sense. The stuff that's kept the same exists to reassure fanboys while the changes compromise the core conceits of the book to better align with the ethical and logistical concerns of Hollywood. It sucks. But it's also frustrating because of how close it got.

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i love the Watchmen comic.

i love the Watchmen movie (especially that ultimate edition or whatever with the Black Freighter bits inserted in).

the movie has its flaws as to adapting the comic, but i didn't find anything about it that put me off.

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