I don’t think Watchmen is impossible to adapt to film: The last couple decades of blockbuster superhero movies—and, arguably, the concurrent, increasing irrelevance of “mainstream” comics in the development of the “graphic novel”—might suggest to us that the superhero’s new natural home is on the big screen. It should have been possible to make the movie version of Watchmen a commentary on superhero movies in the same spirit as how the original was a commentary on comics.

That’s not the movie the director set out to make. Zack Snyder clearly has respect for the source material; in some ways, it’s a little too faithful an adaptation, with not enough changed or omitted to play to this different medium’s different strengths and weaknesses. You can’t just take a serialized story with a natural rhythm, provided by page and chapter breaks, and condense it into a 2.5-hour movie. Watching each character go through flashbacks during the Comedian’s funeral reminded me of how that technique has been used to good effect on Lost, leaving me to feel like this could have been done better as television. Of the changes and additions that were made, some made great sense to me (e.g., replacing the “squid” with something else quite logical), while others felt like they ironically undercut the intentions of the original work (e.g., excessive use of music in dramatic scenes, slow-motion in moments better presented at an even rhythm, and a sex scene so drawn out and reminiscent of softcore porn that I’m almost willing to give credit for being intentionally awkward). In short, this was an ambitious, well-intentioned failure, but at least it was no LXG.

The third and final installment in Leone’s Dollars trilogy is the lengthiest and the most iconic, if for nothing other than [its trademark theme](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ennio_Morricone-The_Good,_The_Bad_And_The_Ugly.ogg). Eastwood’s Man with No Name (here called “Blondie”) is the good, taking on the bad, in the form of the amoral contract killer Angel Eyes (Lee Van Cleef, who played the sympathetic Colonel Mortimer in [*For a Few Dollars More*](http://doombot.com/2008/12/09/short-movie-review-for-a-few-dollars-more/)). Then there’s the ugly, Mexican bandit Tuco, played by a show-stealing Eli Wallach, who can’t quite escape his Brooklyn accent and occasionally looks eerily like a pudgy Dustin Hoffman. All three are looking for a box of Union coins, but the convoluted plot features more twists and alliances than your average game of *Risk*. The version I saw was the extended 2002 version, with an almost twenty additional minutes of footage that had never before made it into the English cut and required Eastwood and Wallach to return to dub more lines 35 years after the original film (van Cleef had died in the meantime, with another actor filling his role—and I also swear I caught [*The Middleman*'s](http://doombot.com/2008/07/22/short-television-review-the-middleman/) Matt Keeslar in the credits, though I haven’t been able to confirm). Frankly, several of the cut scenes probably could have been left on the floor, since they stretch the movie out almost 3 hours, and make it lag in parts, but whole film—including the 5-minute Mexican standoff at the end—is still a work of beauty.

Based on the novel by acclaimed author Neil Gaiman and brought to life on the screen by Henry Selick (*The Nightmare Before Christmas*, *James and the Giant Peach*), *Coraline* is the tale of Coraline Jones, who discovers another world behind the tiny door in her new house’s living room. The movie, filmed as stop-motion, is absolutely gorgeous and exquisitely crafted, with the kind of attention to detail you’d expect from such a production. Of particular note to me was the recurring theme of reflections—for instance, a scene in which Coraline and her mother are driving in the car, and out the window you can see the side mirror, in which you can watch the road disappearing behind them. They could just have not bothered—but the fact that they didn’t tells you something about the immersion of the world they were trying to create. The 3-D effects were used to good effect as well—too often it’s a technique used mainly for cheesy gags, but here it added depth and texture to the experience (in particular, I loved the shots of the corridor that connected Coraline’s house with the other world—it was like you could actually *feel* it). Oh, and they snuck in a They Might Be Giants song, which was pretty cool, too. On the whole, the movie is a little bit creepy (probably too much so for the younger set), but does a fantastic job of creating a living, breathing world.

As I haven’t been posting a lot, I’m sure what you’re all (okay—what *some* of you) wondering is: what am I up to when I’m not [helping unstick widgets](http://doombot.com/2009/01/30/xbox-live-widget-updated/).

Well, boy am I glad that you let me appropriate your voice and ask. I recently spent some time working on [a little film project](http://www.fireball-the-movie.com/), featuring my friends [Merlin](http://kungfugrippe.com), [Scott](http://yourmonkeycalled.com), [Adam](http://lonelysandwich.com/), [John](http://apocatips.com), and, most especially, [John](http://daringfireball.net). Delightful folks, all. I hope they don’t sue me.

Anyway, you might enjoy watching the trailer below. Or you might not. Admittedly, it’s got a pretty limited audience.

Fireball – The John Gruber Story Trailer from Dan Moren on Vimeo.

Seriously? I can’t help but compare this to The Spirit: over the top hero speeches, rain drenched alleys, color palette zaniness, and of course ultra-violence. The difference is that as stupid as The Spirit was, at least it was ridiculous and occasionally amusing, Max Payne is just an awful, awful move… and this is coming from someone who enjoyed Death Race… 

P.S. If you are an evil corporation secretly controlling the city through hot new designer drugs, don’t have all your thugs and drug dealers tattooed with the corporate branding. (Though it took Max Payne about 30 minutes to notice it after I did.)

Most people will not like this movie.

I haven’t read much of Vertigo’s *Hellblazer* series, and that’s probably a good thing going into watching *Constantine* the movie, which bears only a superficial resemblance to the comic books on which it was based. It’s not a bad movie, though: it’s well-plotted, with clever twists and turns, and great production design and special effects. There’s also a pretty good cast, with the likes of Tilda Swinton, Gavin Rossdale, Djimon Hounsou, and yes, even Shia LaBeouf—which made it that much more frustrating to me to have to spend most of the movie watching Keanu Reeves plod woodenly through the title role. Jason and I differed on the quality of his performance, but I just wonder how the movie would have turned out with someone a little more charismatic playing John Constantine (I’m not suggesting you make some sort of David Bowie-Sting lovechild, but…okay, maybe I am suggesting that). Hounsou’s one of my favorite actors and even though his role as Papa Midnite is somewhat limited he makes the most of it; likewise, Peter Stormare as Satan and Max Baker as Beeman do nice work. And there’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance by future leading lady Michelle Monaghan (opposite Shia LaBeouf, no less!) as a demon. Make sure you watch all the way to the end of the credits, too.

I guess I enjoyed it well enough while watching it, but only because I was trying real hard. The plot was dull and predictable, and Tom Hanks plays a very boring person perhaps a little too well. Ian McKellen was pretty good, though. At least it was free via On Demand, thanks to the exact same three ads cycling every five minutes or so. And, to its credit, the film version doesn’t make you read the worst sentence ever or attempt to pretend that there’s bar soap in the Louvre washrooms. That’s something, I guess. Oh, and it also put me in the mood to watch National Treasure. Not sure if that’s to this movie’s credit or not yet.

The second part of Sergio Leone’s “Dollars” trilogy is, I’d say, better—or at least more fully realized—than the first. Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name (here often called “Manco”—one-armed—because he does most everything with one hand, leaving the other free to shoot with) teams up with bounty killer Douglas Mortimer (Lee van Cleef) to track down ruthless bandit El Indio (Gian Maria Volontè, who also played the chief villain in the first installment). The characters are better drawn: Indio, in particular, is a more compelling villain, and we see Manco meet his match in crack-shot Mortimer. While the two ostensibly have a partnership to catch Indio, they’re clearly rivals, and we see Manco’s flaws as he keeps trying to one up Mortimer and failing. The plot’s also tighter than *Fistful*, and the characters have more interesting motivations. There’s a great shootout in the street when Manco tries to get Mortimer to leave El Paso and the final fight in the little town where Indio and his bandits have holed up is a classic gunfight presaging the likes of the concluding scene of later Westerns like *Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid* (albeit, with a happier result). Van Cleef would return to play the villain in the final installment, *The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.*

Sergio Leone’s film was one of the earliest and most influential “spaghetti Westerns” (so called because they were produced by Italian studios), and the first to feature Clint Eastwood’s iconic Man with No Name character, who would reappear in two subsequent films, as well as going on to inspire characters such as [Roland Deschain](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_Deschain), the hero of Stephen King’s *The Dark Tower*. The Man with No Name is also the Man of Few Words—Eastwood’s character doesn’t have a line until eight minutes into the film. Laconic though he may be, he’s both quick with a gun and clever, and he manages to cut a swath of destruction through a town ruled by two rival bosses with just a few well-placed bullets. *Fistful* was inspired largely by Akira Kurosawa’s classic *Yojimbo* (released only three years earlier), and was the subject of a lawsuit by Kurosawa, though both likely drew inspiration from other sources, such as Dashiell Hammett’s *Red Harvest*. Some compare Leon’s use of close-up shots (which had previously been used largely as reaction shots) to the arias from operas, giving the audience insight into a particular character. It works well here, even if the characters are more or less archetypal in nature.