Watchmen was a movie I was really excited to see a few months ago, and was planning on seeing in the theaters, lost enthusiasm for as its release was nearing; I can’t really tell you why (besides that a few months ago I figured I would have read the comic by now, which I haven’t). And now with it’s mixed reviews, my non-desire to pay $12 for anything, and the absence of people to go with me, I decided to skip the theater and watch it online.

I don’t watch movies online. I don’t really have a reason for this. I tried to figure out why, and I came up with a few thin excuses. The first is a fear of viruses; but I watch plenty of TV shows online, and actually got a virus doing it once, so I don’t know why I won’t watch movies, but keep watching TV shows. I download a fair amount of torrents, usually foreign films that I can’t find anywhere and have been dying to see. I just watched Goddard’s Breathless and Contempt, along with 8 1/2 by Fellini, and I have Fritz Lang’s M waiting for me. I mentioned all those so you think I’m start and interesting. I also get really fidgety when I watch things on my computer, and I can’t keep still. I found hour long episodes of shows to be difficult if I’m not prepared, so a 3 hour movie almost seemed like chore more than a pleasure, like Rousseau’s neglected beggar. And, I would like to think most importantly, I really appreciate the medium of film, and I know how different and better the experience of watching a movie on a big screen is, and how much you can lose by watching it on a low-res tiny computer screen. Just ask David Lynch, he’ll tell you all about it. But, I wanted to see Watchmen, and I heard of a reputable sight for it, so I sucked it up, and spent my Sunday in the one seat cineplex of my Brooklyn apartment.

To be brief – found the site, found a decent quality cam version, with decent loading speed, and fidgeted away for 2 hours, watching people explode. All in all, not so bad, better than paying $12, insanely worse than the DVD on an HDTV will look in four months.

But, things were going well, things in the story are coming together, I’m a little confused but that’s cool, more people are dying, awesome, prison riot, sweet, the watchmen joining together in full costume, all right I’m rolling, more exploding people, mars, yeah! YEAH! here comes the plot twist, still confused but hopeful, ALRIGHT! I’m grooving, HERE WE GO… and what happens? It switches to German! All of a sudden I’m getting Rorschach’s voice-over coming at me in a gritty, frighteningly fascist tongue, things are blowing up, there’s some superstructure on Mars, I have no idea what’s going on.

.

I flip around on the time-bar, and find that it’s not all in German, it does switch back to English, but after some important verbal exposition by the characters, explaining probably the entire movie.

So,I skip to the English, watch the rest as confused as before.

Things were ok by the end; they laid out the story pretty thoroughly at the climax, and I got to enjoy it. But I still have no fucking clue what the guitarist from Still Water was building on Mars, and why it was no big deal that the latex chick shattered it, after what I assumed was a thought out and purposeful process and reasoning for an enormous stone clock, but whatever.

So is there a moral to my story? I think it parallels the moral of the movie. Do I need to explain?

I don’t know if I’m going to stream another movie online. Didn’t really do it for me. Back in college, two of my roommates, Juan and Taylor, they would download literally every movie that was available, and then burn them onto dvd so we could watch it on our 60 inch TV. I liked that better.

I’ll leave out my actual review of the movie, although I bet I would have liked it better if it was on a screen taking up my entire field of vision, and I didn’t have access to spider solitaire.

Since “Watchmen” opens the same day as the show, I’d like to use this space to talk about other books that are related to comics, but aren’t graphic novels, because you shouldn’t be wasting your time with those or movies based on them, and instead involving yourselves in things related to me. Here are some works, either made of comics themselves or based on them, that I think are pretty interesting.

Archy and Mehitabel – by Don Marquis

Don Marquis was a column writer for the New York Sun when he introduced the title characters of what later became a book. His creations are Archy, a cockroach with the soul of a vers-libre poet, and Mehitabel the alley cat, who believes she is Cleopatra reincarnated. Archy spends his nights painstakingly jumping on a typewriter to produce poems, log the exploits of Mehitabel, and retell stories he’s over heard from other gutter critters. Inserted are little bits of philosophy, much of which focused on the insignificance of the significant, and visa-versa. Oh, and since we’re talking about cartoons, nearly every page is illustrated. Also, it takes place during prohibition, which is fun to read about.

Here’s a little passage I just found that I really like. Archy has just met a moth who is about to fly into a light bulb, and Archy demands to know why moths insist on doing this. Don’t you have any sense? he asks. The moth replies:

plenty of it he answered
but at times we get tired
of using it
we get bored with the routine
and crave beauty
and excitement
fire is beautiful
and we know if we get
too close it will kill us
but what does that matter
it is better to be happy
for a moment
and be burned up by beauty

- – - -

If that isn’t a statement about The Artist, I don’t know what is. I love that, and could discus it endlessly.

(note: Archy, being a little bug, cannot use puncuation or capitol letters, because it would require jumping on two keys at once)

Pogo – by Walt Kelly

Pogo was a long running (nearly 30 years) newspaper comic that Alex introduced me to, and is apparently very hard to find. Also, Kelly coincidentally got his start at the short lived New York Star as well. The main character is a opossum named Pogo, who plays ‘the everyman.’ He is surrounded by a cast of other animals, who assume the roles of professors, deacons, scapegoats, and so on.  Kelly got into legal trouble when his already political strip made some unsubtle allusions to McCarthyism.

Krazy Kat – by Jay Cantor

Krazy Kat is a comic strip written by George Herriman, started in 1913. Krazy Kat is a novel by Jay Cantor. I’ll explain by unapologeticly quoting from the back of the book. “using George Herriman’s old comic characters to explore the psychosexual underpinnings of the atomic age and the bomb’s effects on personality and culture. Cantor turns the novel’s central difficulty how to create complex characters from cartoon images into its central metaphor, using their two-dimensionality as a reflection of the contemporary psyche” (Lawrence Rungren). I also took three classes from Cantor in college and am using this as an opportunity to name drop.

Calvin and Hobbes – by Bill Waterson

Do I really need to explain?

But back to the main question; is it literature?
It is.

-Dan