The Watchmen are here!

Well, not so much here, as well, here. Yeah yeah they are out this weekend (and I will be seeing it, but this is not that post), This is more of the Watchmen frenzy that is surrounding the release.

To Wit:



Meanwhile everyone from The Wall St. Journal to The New York Times have already published reviews.

While the Journal shouts “Pow! Bam! 'Watchmen' Batters Public” and tells us:

...watching "Watchmen" is the spiritual equivalent of being whacked on the skull for 163 minutes.

The Times states:

Indeed, the ideal viewer — or reviewer, as the case may be — of the “Watchmen” movie would probably be a mid-’80s college sophomore with a smattering of Nietzsche, an extensive record collection and a comic-book nerd for a roommate. The film’s carefully preserved themes of apocalypse and decay might have proved powerfully unsettling to that anxious undergraduate sitting in his dorm room, listening to “99 Luftballons” and waiting for the world to end or the Berlin Wall to come down.

Me? Well I’ll tell you what I think after I've seen it.

In there mean time there is still this...



And, well, this:

DVD Focus

Watchmen: The Complete Motion Comic (2009)

It's fascinating to watch this animated version after the live-action sensory assault on the big screen. The tone is solemn, the figures move slowly -- they're panel-for-panel reproductions of the book in extremely limited animation -- and one actor, Tom Stechschulte, does all the voices, male and female, in an unaffected, almost uninflected style. Yet the colors are dazzling, at least on the Blu-ray disk that arrived a few days ago, and the effect is hypnotic. You not only see clearly but feel strongly, since those colors, words and images all carry emotion, and there's ample time to process it.