Who watches the Watchmen comments? March 13, 2009 8:19 PM   Subscribe

I finally got to see Watchmen last night and in talking about it afterwards, I was reminded of a comment I read on the blue that I cannot for the life of me find again. I have been looking for a couple of hours now and beginning to wonder if I made the whole thing up. Please help.

The basic argument of the comment was that the person who should have directed Watchmen is some kid whose still in high-school right now and has been watching and critiquing superhero movies his whole life. The comment suggested that this hypothetical director has been making his own movies in the backyard and if given another decade to hone his craft would be the ideal film-maker to properly bring Watchmen to the screen. I think that I have probably paraphrased that pretty poorly. I remember the comment as being fairly long and getting a pretty good number of favorites. I have tried a bunch of different search terms and have been reading through the old Watchmen threads with no success, maybe someone out there is better at this than I am.
posted by Bango Skank to MetaFilter-Related at 8:19 PM (57 comments total) 1 user marked this as a favorite

DAMMIT

some kid who is not whose

/tired not dumb
posted by Bango Skank at 8:41 PM on March 13, 2009


Man, nobody's gonna read down this far, but:

Here it is.

Have faith in a little brute force.
posted by carsonb at 8:50 PM on March 13, 2009 [2 favorites]


Any other random shit needs finding? It's Friday night and I got nowhere to go.
posted by carsonb at 8:52 PM on March 13, 2009 [1 favorite]


You seen my laundry key?
posted by Bookhouse at 8:53 PM on March 13, 2009 [1 favorite]


I also appear to have lost the word "room" in the comment above.
posted by Bookhouse at 8:54 PM on March 13, 2009


Did you check the hamper? Sock drawer? Wherever you keep your quarters?
posted by carsonb at 8:55 PM on March 13, 2009


THANKS! carsonb. I'm actually going to be able to go to bed tonight. I thought I had tried brute force but I guess your brute force is just bruter than mine.
posted by Bango Skank at 8:58 PM on March 13, 2009


It's the brutiest force I could find. We're happy to help.
posted by carsonb at 9:00 PM on March 13, 2009


In my head I remembered it being longer and more favorited. I also didn't remember it being that long ago, which is probably why I didn't find it.
posted by Bango Skank at 9:03 PM on March 13, 2009


carsonb, there was a link on either the green or the blue in the last 7 or so months to an article about a city in South America that was a mecca for young artists and DJs. They were going there because they could live for a year on 10k or something like that. Article could have been in NYT or something... I've been unable to find it again. :)
posted by You Should See the Other Guy at 9:13 PM on March 13, 2009


carsonb, could you find my virginity? I haven't seen it for about thirty years.
posted by mr_crash_davis mark II: Jazz Odyssey at 9:16 PM on March 13, 2009


Bookhouse: You seen my laundry key?

I too would like it if you'd find my laundry key. I haven't been able to unlock my pants to put them on for several weeks now, and I'm feeling somewhat chilly.
posted by koeselitz at 9:19 PM on March 13, 2009 [3 favorites]


carsonb, I seem to have lost my sanity. Can you help?
posted by batmonkey at 9:58 PM on March 13, 2009


Watchmen by a talented teenager? The future is now!
posted by EatTheWeek at 10:07 PM on March 13, 2009


Alright, alright, one at a time. I'm scouring South America now. The rest of you, maybe have a look at The Twelve Principles.

If nothing's doing there, though, check Pen Island. You know, where all those ballpoints get to after they disappear from wherever you were using them last? That's usually where virginity and sanity wind up, in my venerable experience.
posted by carsonb at 10:11 PM on March 13, 2009 [4 favorites]


Step 4 ended my search! Thanks, carsonb!
posted by batmonkey at 10:28 PM on March 13, 2009


Is Jason Statham's career there too?
posted by fleacircus at 10:34 PM on March 13, 2009


There should be a second part to that comment.

Part One (as originally written)

Zach Snyder is way, way too old to be making this movie.

The kid who's supposed to be making Watchmen is 14 or 15 years old right now. The first film he ever saw in a theater was the first X-Men movie He religiously goes to see every new comic book film that comes out. He's seen every episode of Lost and Heroes, twice. He's on line, right now, to go see Dark Knight for the second or maybe the third time.

He's grown up with the conventions of superhero movies the same way Moore grew up with the conventions of superhero comics. And he's a smart kid taking note of the flaws in each of these movies, the type of characterizations, the archetypes, the elements in the background of our culture that directors and screenwriters take for granted. He's got a cheap camcorder and his parents got him a copy of final cut, and he makes comic book movies with his friends in his backyard. They're crappy, sure, but every time he gets a better sense of plot, of character, of how to frame a shot. Each time he tells the story he gets it closer to the way he wants it to be in his head.

Part Two

The kid is now twenty years old and out of film school. Full of idealism and bright ideas, he creates a portfolio of his work and sends it off to various studios for their perusal, hoping that one of them will call him back to offer him his big break.

Not content to rest on his laurels while he waits for their inevitable call, he gets his parents to give him a couple of thousand dollars so he can make his first big, albeit amateur, movie. He gets his friends involved. His girlfriend, an aspiring actress he met while at film school, agrees to take a lead role.

The film is an enormous piece of fan service to several pillars of the nerd community. While making it, he can't help but think that one day, when he gets to make that big budget Watchmen movie, he'll put this film on the DVD as a special bonus extra for his fans. He'll laugh at how amateur the film looks by his current work, but he knows his fans will appreciate it anyway.

Two months pass. The film goes way over budget, despite his grass roots efforts and his best intentions. Not wanting to disappoint his parents, his friends, his girlfriend or his peers, he gets a bunch of easy to get credit cards and maxes them all out to ensure that his vision is completed, uncompromised and as good as it can possibly be.

He eventually finishes it, and it's pretty good. He sets up a website, puts it on Youtube and also sends it out to the same studios he sent his portfolio too three months ago.

Five months since he graduated film school. The banks he borrowed money from via their credit cards are sending him letters of demand. They have been for two months now. His movie has been panned on Youtube, with commenter after commenter saying that the movie is shit all the while making sexual aspersions about him and his mother. In desperation, he calls the studios he sent his work too. These calls are met by silence or polite rejections.

Six months pass. The stress of the banks demanding their money and the fact that he and his partner had to move back in with his parents has broken up his relationship.

Eventually his parents find out how deep in debt he is. They pay this debt for him but unbeknown to them he has recently started taking heroin, cocaine and other drugs. This habit slowly spirals out of control.

Eventually his parents find out about this as well and kick him out. He winds up on the streets, doing whatever he can to feed his habit. Eventually alcohol and drugs claim his life as he dies in a ditch in LA somewhere.

Meanwhile on the internet site named Metafilter, someone comments about how great it would have been if someone, anyone, had ever made a Watchmen film. Even that Snyder guy would have done a good job. Oh well... who knows how that would ever have turned out, right?
posted by Effigy2000 at 12:06 AM on March 14, 2009 [15 favorites]


Any other random shit needs finding?

My wife, Ruby. She's somewhere in town at the moment.

You can't miss her, she's the one with the painted up lips and tinted hair. I think she forgot to take her hair curlers out, so she might be wearing a headscarf.

If she comes on to you, please ignore it.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 3:16 AM on March 14, 2009


carsonb, please find me a sandwich.
posted by loquacious at 4:26 AM on March 14, 2009


In my head I remembered it being longer and more favorited. I also didn't remember it being that long ago, which is probably why I didn't find it.

Comments and favourites are arbitrarily sliced in half every six months to save on sever space.
posted by gman at 4:46 AM on March 14, 2009


I could use another bottle of Gordon's, since you're offering.
posted by turgid dahlia at 5:14 AM on March 14, 2009


Who said anything about slicing you up, man? I just wanted to carve a little Z on your forehead.
posted by gman at 5:18 AM on March 14, 2009


Comments and favourites are arbitrarily sliced in half every six months to save on sever space.

That explains why my posting history looks the way it does. I'm always thinking of that brilliant thing I wrote on Metafilter but when I go look for all I find are nonsensical half-assed attempts at humor.
posted by Bango Skank at 5:50 AM on March 14, 2009 [1 favorite]


Well, right — storing the whole ass takes up too much room.
posted by nebulawindphone at 7:55 AM on March 14, 2009 [2 favorites]


The movie was hype. Fuck high school kids who don't know shit.
posted by chunking express at 8:49 AM on March 14, 2009


Metafilter: high school kids who don't know shit
posted by gman at 9:22 AM on March 14, 2009


At what diameter does a pancake go from being deliciously satisfying to unappetizingly large? And how small a pancake is acceptable? Are these factors contingent on plate size, pancake porosity, and appetite only? Is butter a factor? Syrup? Barometric pressure?
posted by BitterOldPunk at 10:11 AM on March 14, 2009


A pancake should be no less then three inches in diameter, and no more than 10. Anything larger than 7 must be served on a heated plate.
posted by cortex (staff) at 10:14 AM on March 14, 2009 [1 favorite]


Concise and definitive. Nice.
posted by BitterOldPunk at 10:47 AM on March 14, 2009


So we are refusing to recognize silver dollar pancakes? I consider this a grave a mistake. They are fun by virtue of their smaller size and great for kids. I wish that for once someone would think of the children. Honestly the rampant ageist attitudes on this site are a huge turn-off.

I also think that the movie was excellent but it had serious tone problems and too often meandered into standard superhero movie tropes without any attempt to really dig beneath the surface and explore their meaning. If it wanted to be the same sort of deconstruction of superheros that the book was it was made about ten years too soon.
posted by Bango Skank at 1:01 PM on March 14, 2009 [1 favorite]


Dollar pancakes have terrible aerodynamics. They'd probably fit nicely on a bunny, however.
posted by ook at 1:23 PM on March 14, 2009 [1 favorite]


Silver dollar pancakes are to pancakes as pancakes are to cakes. It's not that they're bad, per se; they're just not even in the same weightclass.

(See also "a chicken nugget is to a chicken as a chicken is to a turducken")
posted by cortex (staff) at 1:28 PM on March 14, 2009


You can't miss her, she's the one with the painted up lips and tinted hair. I think she forgot to take her hair curlers out, so she might be wearing a headscarf.

She's taken her love to town, PeterMcDermott. Have you tried there?
posted by jokeefe at 1:30 PM on March 14, 2009


These "silver dollar pancakes" are just a poor attempt at creating poffertjes.
posted by swordfishtrombones at 2:20 PM on March 14, 2009


Damn, jokeefe, don't give him any hints. Don't you know what he said he'd do if he could move?
posted by Crabby Appleton at 2:25 PM on March 14, 2009 [1 favorite]


Find Alan Moore. Ensure he never sees the movie because if he does, Snyder will be crucified.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 4:40 PM on March 14, 2009


So silver dollar pancakes are made out of pans, and mcnuggets are made out of turducken? Did I do that right?
posted by Toekneesan at 5:25 PM on March 14, 2009


Part of the problem is that while The Watchmen was a groundbreaking comic, it's style has informed tons and tons of media since then. Look at the Iron Man movie, for example. It shows a conflicted hero, a complex relationship with the U.S government, etc.

In other words, the style of The Watchmen has become somewhat cliche, something that appears in every comic book movie. So you'll never have a movie that is both groundbreaking from the current crop of superhero movies and also faithful to the original watchmen comic because current movies are informed by it.

I remember a Metafilter comment talking about Neromancer and how it was full of cliched references to "Cyberspace". It's kind of like that.
posted by delmoi at 5:46 PM on March 14, 2009 [1 favorite]


Neromancer is awesome for it's reference to megabytes of RAM, like that was a huge amount.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:12 PM on March 14, 2009


I liked the way that dude fiddled while some city went up in flames.
posted by Crabby Appleton at 7:45 PM on March 14, 2009


Neromancer is awesome for it's reference to megabytes of RAM, like that was a huge amount.

Similarly and around the same time, Fredrick Pohl thought "gigabit" expressed a sufficiently large amount of data to reproduce a human's thoughts and the subjective experience of living. As we know now, it's hardly enough to reproduce a watchable copy of a film.
posted by George_Spiggott at 8:47 PM on March 14, 2009


I used to wait tables at a restaurant which served its pancakes in a serving of three 10-inchers on a warm plate, but people still got REALLY mad. Like complain-to-the-manager mad at the obscenity of the pancake mass. NObody complained about the obscenity of the cheesey cheese salad with cheese-mayo dresing or the monte cristo, of course.
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 1:35 AM on March 15, 2009


Anybody who complains about 10-inch pancakes on a warm plate can go straight to hell, or, at least, in the future, to another establishment with different pancake practices.
posted by cortex (staff) at 8:49 AM on March 15, 2009 [1 favorite]


I used to wait tables at a restaurant which served its pancakes in a serving of three 10-inchers on a warm plate, but people still got REALLY mad. Like complain-to-the-manager mad at the obscenity of the pancake mass.

I think that this should be the dictionary definition of "First-World Problem."
posted by Bango Skank at 9:12 AM on March 15, 2009


Part of the problem is that while The Watchmen was a groundbreaking comic, it's style has informed tons and tons of media since then. Look at the Iron Man movie, for example. It shows a conflicted hero, a complex relationship with the U.S government, etc.

In other words, the style of The Watchmen has become somewhat cliche, something that appears in every comic book movie. So you'll never have a movie that is both groundbreaking from the current crop of superhero movies and also faithful to the original watchmen comic because current movies are informed by it.


This not unique to Watchmen. Two or three years ago there was a remake of the 1974 horror film Black Christmas and I wondered at the point of that. The 1974 movie looks like a pastiche of slasher flick cliches: the series of young people dispatched in various grisly fashions, the long, shaky hand-held camera shots with a wide lens for the killer's point-of-view, the "We've traced the calls and they're coming from inside the house!!" -- these tropes pretty much all originate, so far as I can tell, from one overlooked Canadian flick.

When the remake was announced, I thought the people making it would have to either be faithful to the original and make what might come off looking like a generic horror movie (in which case why bother), or strike out and make a totally different movie (in which case why call it a remake).
posted by ricochet biscuit at 9:51 AM on March 15, 2009


Neromancer is awesome for it's reference to burning not just CDs but also DVDs, as if single-layer DVDs contained an impossibly large amount of data.
posted by Mike1024 at 11:18 AM on March 15, 2009




Neromancer is awesome for it's reference to megabytes of RAM, like that was a huge amount.

That's not even the best part. The best part is NEUROMANCER's opening sentence:

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

Which was paid homage in Gaiman's NEVERWHERE:

"The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen tuned to a dead channel."

The opening of NEUROMANCER is classic in that it illustrates both the opportunities and dangers inherent in write SFnal prose.
posted by Justinian at 6:59 PM on March 15, 2009 [1 favorite]


furtively masturbating to a well-worn photo of Deana Troi fan community

I don't know who you are, but please stop observing me so closely.
posted by GuyZero at 9:08 PM on March 15, 2009


Watchmen Pie Chart.
posted by cjorgensen at 6:56 AM on March 16, 2009


So... the ideal filmmaker for Watchmen is a kid who never experienced the cold war or nuclear age paranoia? Ok then.
posted by Durn Bronzefist at 7:43 AM on March 16, 2009 [1 favorite]


So... the ideal filmmaker for Watchmen is a kid who never experienced the cold war or nuclear age paranoia? Ok then.

Nuclear age paranoia won't ever go away until there's no more nukes
posted by BrnP84 at 1:25 PM on March 16, 2009


Nuclear age paranoia won't ever go away until there's no more nukes

When I read this I guessed you were under 30 years old. And lo and behold, according to your profile you are 24.

Trust me, you don't know what it was like. And I say this as a 33 year old guy who barely remembers the nuclear paranoia. And the nuclear paranoia of the early 80s was nothing like the nuclear paranoia of the 50s through 70s, so I assume I only have a smidgeon of understanding.

There is no nuclear age paranoia at present, relatively speaking. People born after the mid 70s just never experienced it.
posted by Justinian at 1:36 PM on March 16, 2009 [3 favorites]


yeah, not to belittle the insecurities and paranoia of the modern age, and lord are there a range to choose from, as Justinian says, I'm a little bit older than him/her and the older you are the more vivid it was... Why else do you think the 80's so collectively sucked?

(interesting analogy there, 80's dominated by Republican presidents, culturally, economically and paranoia wise they where a nightmare, 90's predominated by Clinton, and while he had issues, things got better, 00's Bush's national blackout years... hopefully our current prez can turn that around furthering the cycle)
posted by edgeways at 1:58 PM on March 16, 2009


If decades turn out to be Star Trek movies, I'm going to be upset.
posted by cortex (staff) at 2:27 PM on March 16, 2009


The 90's were better in the original Klingon.
posted by Durn Bronzefist at 8:01 PM on March 16, 2009


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