WATCHMEN – Sometimes You Just Like Raw

At midnight mass last night we celebrated a naked blue god. One without the cheesy manhood car wash rag, as if God ever cared what someone thought of his junk. Watchmen was a killer flick with bone-grinding stabs and obscenely large red puddles, yet never did it try and hide behind the artificial flavorings of its comic book-turned movie predecessors. The music is a tribute to the late sixties and early seventies, quite a contrast to the technology used to make the movie, except since the film takes place during exaggerated instances within the Nixon administration, all the songs would have come out around that time, and fuck it, it worked in an Oliver Stone type-a way. “Wow, there was so much sex in that movie?” said two girls exiting alongside me at 3am. I said, where is Chris Brown when you need him?

When I was growing up I collected comic books; never read them, just collected them. I would stop in at the local 7-Eleven and whatever one had the coolest cover I’d grab; a worthless way to become an addict, but for some reason I just never liked to read. I came into Watchmen knowing nothing about the comic’s history, characters, anything….and I walked out feeling like a dedicated fan. That’s the way this movie is, legitimately hardcore, and you wish it was longer than 2 hours and 40 minutes. Although the story-line is fast-forwarded to cover years of history and loses some plot in translation, there's so much raw edge that you respect every corner never cut. Watchmen distances itself from the pack because they’ve embraced the R-Rating; staying true to the gore and fantasy that is action comics. Mastering this hurdle and understanding that audiences have literally seen it all, is why the chance they took to be daring was so successful. It’s not all sappy-romance and happy-endings. Good guys have to die too.