Attention Critics: Shut The FUCK UP

The negative reviews generally cite the film's much-advertised "reverence" to the source material, as statically replicating – rather than creatively interpreting – Alan Moore's graphic novel. "Watchmen is a bore...It sinks under the weight of its reverence for the original," writes Philip Kennicott of the Washington Post.[128] Devin Gordon wrote for Newsweek, "That's the trouble with loyalty. Too little, and you alienate your core fans. Too much, and you lose everyone – and everything – else."[129] Owen Gleiberman's Entertainment Weekly review reads, "[Snyder] treats each image with the same stuffy hermetic reverence. He doesn't move the camera or let the scenes breathe. He crams the film with bits and pieces, trapping his actors like bugs wriggling in the frame."[130] "[Snyder] never pause[s] to develop a vision of his own. The result is oddly hollow and disjointed; the actors moving stiffly from one overdetermined tableau to another," says Noah Berlatsky of the Chicago Reader.[131] David Edelstein of New York Magazine agrees: "They’ve made the most reverent adaptation of a graphic novel ever. But this kind of reverence kills what it seeks to preserve. The movie is embalmed."[132] Says The Wall Street Journal, "Watching 'Watchmen' is the spiritual equivalent of being whacked on the skull for 163 minutes. The reverence is inert, the violence noxious, the mythology murky, the tone grandiose, the texture glutinous."[133] The trade magazines Variety and The Hollywood Reporter were even less taken with the film. Variety's Justin Chang commented that, "The movie is ultimately undone by its own reverence; there's simply no room for these characters and stories to breathe of their own accord, and even the most fastidiously replicated scenes can feel glib and truncated,"[134] and Kirk Honeycutt of The Hollywood Reporter writing, "The real disappointment is that the film does not transport an audience to another world, as 300 did. Nor does the third-rate Chandler-esque narration by Rorschach help...Looks like we have the first real flop of 2009."

Fuck you and creative interpretation. This more than anything proves to me just how fucking pointless movie reviewers are. YOU DON'T FUCKING GET IT. If I wrote a fucking book and it got turned into a movie, I don't want to see the director's idea of what my art is. I WANT TO SEE WHAT I FUCKING WROTE. ENOUGH with this bitching about accuracy. Boo hoo, it's hardly different from the original! That's the fucking point. I haven't even seen Watchmen yet but if this is the source of the negative reviews, GO SCREW. You know what a legitimate argument would be? The Alan Moore one, that it might not work on screen the same way it does in print. But no one is saying that. They're hiding behind something that is close to saying that. It even sounds like that if you aren't paying attention.

Here's my problem with a lot of reviewers in general. Everyone wants to take their shots and be a little bit different. They're using the Watchmen film as a vehicle to criticize Watchmen as a graphic novel. They are hiding behind the fact that they are critiquing the film to take shots at the original graphic novel.

"Nor does the third-rate Chandler-esque narration by Rorschach help...Looks like we have the first real flop of 2009."

His quotes are exactly the same in the novel. The criticism here is not "you know what? It just doesn't feel as complete and wrapped and well packaged as the novel." The criticism here is "Snyder's film has bad dialogue." ALL of which was pulled from the original. Fucking cowards. Just be honest. Just take your shots and say, "I didn't like the movie, I didn't like the book." This is not me being a fanboy. I really am not offended when people don't like what I like. I openly admit that I think Frank Miller's writing is shit. I don't take shots at the Sin City or 300 films to do it. This dishonesty is one of my major beefs with critics of any kind today. People want to have a counterculture opinion but they also want to play it safe to not look stupid or burn their own popularity. So instead of saying, "I think Watchmen sucks" and looking like an idiot as the original piece is a legendary work, they go with "I think the Watchmen movie was too faithful to the comic." Why, was the comic not adequate enough? "I felt that the Watchmen film was boring and confusing and unsatisfying. But at least it was faithful."

It really angers me the way society views how another artist's work should be handled. Why do we need to see Snyder's idea of what Moore's work is? I HAAAAATE that. He didn't write, brainstorm, draw, or help structure the original piece at all. He's a fan. Why should his opinion have ANY effect on its presentation? This is why I like him as a director. He gets this. It's not his vision. Now that being said, he didn't do the same with Dawn of the Dead. The remake is very different. I'm honestly not sure how to feel about that. But 300 WAS 300. And furthermore, he handled it in such a way that I liked the film. I HATED the book. Like I said, I really am serially unimpressed with Frank Miller's work. I think he gets WAY more due than he deserves as an artist(I've heard recently that he's apparently like the Freedom of Speech/Expression King of the medium, which makes me respect him 1000% in a different way. But that's another topic).

His take on Watchmen is the only take there should ever be: "this piece of work should not be altered by my opinions of what it should be. This should be nothing other than what it is." And of course, OF COURSE it can never live up the original. Not in a million years. But that really isn't the point. Everyone who sees it and likes it are going to want to read it now. It's a beacon pointing the way to a greater piece of art. That's what EVERY movie iteration should be. It just amazes me that for every Watchmen, there are a thousand Max Paynes, a thousand Alone in the Darks, a thousand League of Extraordinary Gentlemens. A thousand V For Vendettas, which I liked but was shit compared to the original, honestly. Utter shit. Loved it the first time I saw it. But in retrospect, it missed some of the most important points of the comic and inserted its own cheesy feel-good revolutionary shit. It was more about George Bush than it was the comic. BOOOOOO, Wachowski Siblings (one wants to be a girl if you didn't know), thanks for being part of the problem by letting your ego dictate what you felt V For Vendetta should really be about. I would call you cunts but I guess that would only technically apply to one of you.

I find it funny that a lot of people don't get why Moore wants his name removed from the works he's done that are no longer in control. THIS is why. This society that is serially unsatisfied with the original and feels it NEEDS to improve it in some way. You can't change a work, then it stops being what it was. This fucking mentality of "let me add what I feel would improve this story" is fucking ludicrous, and it only happens here. No publisher goes, "you know what? Let's take Macbeth and add UFOs and gunfights to it, but release it under Shakespeare's name. And you know what else? Fuck Macbeth. Let's go with Macdeath!" How long before this becomes what's accepted? How long before Watchmen 2.0? How long before art doesn't have any sanctity after it's been published? We already do it with movies. When do we decide to alter the source material directly so "that it resonates with a modern audience?" Go fuck yourself with that. This is why Alan Moore wants to write himself off of this shit. You want to rape his art, fine, whatever. In the end, HE knows what he put out and what it means to him. But don't rape the artist 35, 50, 150 years later when he's ill-equipped or unable to defend himself. This may sound ridiculous to you, but did you know he got sued for the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie? He had NOTHING to do with it, it was based LOOSELY on a comic he wrote, and he had to go to court because the shitty interpretation ripped off another script. This is the fucking world we're living in. And it just drives me nuts. It drives me nuts that people so brazenly trample over things like this in the name of entertainment. Let's shit on a brilliant, personal piece of really what amounts to a significant portion of someone's life, so you can clap your hands for two hours like a fucking baby seal. YAAAY I LIEKD TEH PART WIF TEH NIVEZ. Just stop it.

I am taking my rage out on the critics but really, this is society's problem. Critics come from people, and even when a critic is trying to be counterculture, he's still feeding into what at least a portion of society expects of him. The "I don't like this because I'm expected to" crowd is a role in this society, no matter how hypocritical. And while it seems like I'm making a lot of noise about something that on the global scale doesn't seem important, it really is. First off, what the fuck is more important than freedom of expression. Money? Is that what you live your life for, to have money? Success? Okay, that's really gonna matter after people are drunkenly stepping over your grave. Art is the only real permanence we have as human beings. People who wrote literally hundreds of years ago are still on the tongues of people today. You think your life matters? Your life has been lived a thousand million times by a thousand million people. You aren't unique. Hell, most art isn't even unique anymore in the familiar set pieces that it uses. But the presentation, the structure, the way the ideas are put together, that is something unique to YOU. No one will EVER write another Watchmen. They might use plot elements, characters, and ideas. But the flow, the structure, the groove if you will is 100% Alan Moore, and it will still be unique long after his bones are dust. Art and immortality are synonymous; as long as your art exists to inspire, or enrage, or even be ignored by people, you exist. Because what you make comes entirely from you, whether it was inspired by someone else or not.

To me, freedom of speech/expression and art are the same thing. And this laissez-faire attitude we have about art and the handling of it (especially between mediums) is indicative of how we feel about freedom of speech in this country. Every time someone drops the ball for money in art, that hurts freedom of expression in this country. Every time someone gets fired for being insensitive while practicing their freedom of speech, that hurts art. It seems like I'm always falling back to Imus in this regard but that was an important thing. People like to defend things when it's popular and noble and the so-called right thing to do. Rarely do they like to defend things that are ugly or calls their own morality and standards into question. Everyone of course can agree that slavery was shit now. But who was saying that when it was an unpopular view? Who were the LUNATICS who said "black people should be equal too" hundreds of years before it was a socially acceptable statement? Those people seem all but extinct in modern society. And this is the problem: if you believe in expression, in art, then you have to defend ALL of it. All of the poignancy, all of the beauty sure, but also the racism, sexism, homophobia et al. that goes with it. You can't have it both ways. You either have both or neither. When a man has to apologize because he drew a fucking cartoon with a chimp calling Obama's choices into question, we're really in trouble. Because it really doesn't matter if there were racial intentions or not. He could have written something that was blatantly anti-black, and the response should have been thus: if you don't like it, don't buy the NY Post. But no, we have to trod out Al Sharpton for the forty millionth time because certainly HE'S not a racist. The fucking dishonesty in this country, it's just appalling. And like it or not, this complaint I have with books to films of all fucking things is a part of it, because it's indicative of a larger problem. I don't hate you because you think Watchmen could have been done better if someone else wrote it or if it was a completely different film that didn't take from the comic. I hate you because you expect that to be standard in this country. It should only be about what you want as a critic/consumer insofar as what artists feel they can make that speak for you, should they choose to. It's not your right to take what they've made that speak to themselves and morph it into something you can sell to the most consumers possible. I understand that's the market. But I also understand that there are artists (I guess you can call them that) that tailor their work to that specifically. Go to those people. Don't go to Alan Moore and take his shit and try to make it your own. Go to Joe Retardo's more consumer friendly "Clock Dudes" and sell that, you fucking asses. You critics are supposed to be the vanguards of art by imposing a standard. You're not supposed to assist the market in corrupting it.