Happy, Not Happy (Watchmen Spoilers In Comments)

[filkertom]

JoCo and Paul & Storm was a great concert night. Especially Paul & Storm, who really kick up the energy on stage. Unfortunately, it was very crowded, so I couldn't go over and talk to them -- I had no idea where they were after the show, actually.

Watchmen was pretty cool, and jayzus god faithful. I literally could only think of two lines (an exchange of dialogue) I wish had been there that weren't. A few quibbles with acting, direction, and pacing, but it was very nice to have "whether or not the adaptation was good enough" taken off the table.

Unfortunately, my current primary external hard drive seems to have gone belly-up. Yes, yes, I'm doing all the stuff I need to to fix it. It ain't workin'. I'll likely leave the recovery program running overnight (it's 500 GB) in the hope that I can save the files, and go get a new external to transfer everything to. Thank Cthulhu there are some on sale at Best Buy.

How's your weekend going so far?

Comments

[jannyblue.livejournal.com]

How's your weekend going so far?

Pretty good.

I went grocery shopping and got caught in the traffic from the St. Patty's parade in Old Town.

And now I've got the MarsCon feed playing on my computer.

I'm seeing Watchmen tomorrow.

[atalantapendrag.livejournal.com]

I've been watching my new DVDs of Welcome to the NHK, which is much nicer than watching the fansubs on my wee Eee. I hate that my new obsession has no fandom!

Not sure when/if I'll see Watchmen. I haven't even seen Coraline yet. Hell, the last movie I went to the theater for was Order of the Phoenix!

[bryanp.livejournal.com]

Coraline is quite good. Unfortunately I couldn't find a theater that offered it in non-3D. For the record, despite the movie industry's efforts to reintroduce it every so often, 3D still sucks.

[caraig.livejournal.com]

While I did like Watchmen, it was kind of needlessly gory in a bunch of places. Despite that, while it was not as good as I had hoped, it was much, much better than I had feared it might be! =)

"needlessly gory"

[sarekofvulcan.livejournal.com]

Yes, that was my main problem with it. While I never doubted that the Watchmen would do what was necessary to put someone down, I kind of figured on generic knock-em-out violence, rather than breaking bones, stabbing people in the neck, etc. While the prison break-in was fun to watch, I would have preferred the book version -- and the swinging door was unnecessary.

I can't imagine them getting a better Rorschach than they did. He nailed it as perfectly as Matthew Lillard did Shaggy.

Donna had read most of the book, up to the middle of Chapter 11. When I explained to her how Veidt's plot was supposed to have gone, she looked at me blankly -- which is probably what everyone in the theater who hadn't read the book would have done had they gone with in. The reactor plot was much easier to understand.

The only dialog omission that really bugs me was "Only once."

[jss]

Other than the broken brakes, my weekend's gone pretty spiffily. :-)

[eleri.livejournal.com]

insane. It's snowing, again. And Miri is running like someone gave her speed.

[aiela.livejournal.com]

We had a great time last night. Felt bad that we got to dinner so late and we only had a few minutes to talk to you.

Having a quiet day today. Took the kid for her allergy shots, did some housework. Working on dinner at the moment.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

I know. There were a few too many people in too loud a place to have a conversation. We'll do something at PenguiCon, maybe. :)

[alverant.livejournal.com]

I just got back from watching the Watchmen. It was a great movie. I read most of the book so I knew what i was getting into. But seriously I saw a family with little kids just a few rows in front of me. WTF is up with that? It's rated R for good reason. If AO wasn't the kiss of death, Watchmen would deserve this just for the violence (seeing a guy's arms get cut off with a metal saw is NOT something the under 8s should witness). This was a superhero movie for adults. It was realistic and gritty. That being said, I won't shed any tears for the Comedian or Rorsach (sp). Also, I think the change in the ending for the movie was much better than the book. It fit better into the story.

[mythdude.livejournal.com]

What lines of dialogue did you not like? For me, it was after the big reveal and Nite Owl said "You Mutilated Mankind." I felt it kind of ruined the moment established in the book.

Spoiler Alert

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Well, I wasn't happy with "I triggered it 35 minutes ago", rather than just, "I did it 35 minutes ago." But what I really missed was after he told Laurie that she was a miracle, the part where she says, "But... you could say that about anybody," and Jon says, "Yes. Anybody in the world." And then, perhaps rather than launch into the nice little speech he gives there, maybe just say, "All life is a miracle, happening billions of times every day. I forgot that. Thank you for reminding me." It's not that it's awful without it, but it means much more with it. As it is now, you could sum up Jon's dialogue as, "You're going to try to talk me into coming back to earth. I won't do it, not even for you. Well, okay, I will do it for you."

And there were a few readings of lines I could want differently. Especially Matt Frewer on The Line ("You know that kinda cancer that you eventually get better from? Well, that ain't the kinda cancer I got"); I wanted a fair amount more bitterness there. Shrug.

[redaxe.livejournal.com]

Weekend = Not bad. Sixteen hours of sleep Friday into Saturday helped (more than doubled the previous five days' worth). Today eye exams and ordered new glasses for the kids, after being outside at the playground for the first time this spring.

Looking forward to a busy month: must still see Coraline, must see Watchmen, will see JoCo in three weeks, Lunacon, and a fantasy baseball auction tucked in, too. (Or maybe that's in April; it'll count the way 1970 was still part of the '60s :-)

If you can afford a couple of hundred bucks rather than a single C-note, check out the external drives as Ben's Bargains; they have several multi-drive units that can be configured either as a single large drive or as RAID (I think one unit totals 2TB, the other one is 3TB).

[archiver-tim.livejournal.com]

Check the website for, Jonathon Coulton (http://www.jonathancoulton.com/), and check out this thread that was started on his forum (http://www.jonathancoulton.com/forums/comments.php?DiscussionID=1113&page=1#Item_0).

Looks like one would needed to wait about a half hour after show when they were into giving autographs.

[redaxe.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this tip. It led me to this torrent of the concert which I'm looking forward to hearing (in approximately 1 hour and 9 minutes, according to BitTornado).

[tomreedtoon.livejournal.com]

Well, I already whined about being sick on my ass, and calling in sick to work for the first time in about 5 years, so I won't repeat. I only regret that I wasn't at a con. Not because bringing, spreading or catching Con Crud is a good thing. I regret that I didn't mess up a hotel room's linens instead of my own.

I now have a huge washing job to do, and my washing machine's still broken, so I gotta pay cash to wash the clothes and bring them home to dry. (None of my local friends have real washing machines, only those itty-bitty ones.) I'm debating using bleach, just in case I left some germy-wermys on the blankets.

[strredwolf.livejournal.com]

Just don't send the drive to Best Buy! You'll never get it (and your data) back.

Most of these drives are really just standard SATA or IDE drives in USB (and/or Firewire) to SATA/IDE cases. I threw several of them in Vantech NexStar (USB only) or Macally (USB+Firewire 400) cases myself. This also means you can open 'em up, pull 'em apart, and run Spinrite on 'em!

[hms42]

Busy. Working on a class I am taking (for myself) and just fixing the last of the headaches from my mother's replacement computer.... (Office 2007 and Outlook express don't mix well (spell checking went French).) (Her old machine killed 3 hard drives in 5 months. Computer has since been stripped for parts and tossed.)

[redaxe.livejournal.com]

"Office 2007" -- just stop there and "downgrade" to 2003, and a good chunk of your headache solves itself.

s/Outlook/Thunderbird solves another big chunk.

No, I don't like Office 2007 or LookOut! Outlook; why do you ask? :-)

[saganth.livejournal.com]

I went with my lady to a small SCA event at Cornell University in Ithaca - great food, games, some scribey stuff (illumination and calligraphy to you non-SCAdians), and good folks all around! Got some really great input for an event I may try to run next January...

[barbarakitten-t.livejournal.com]

Watchmen rocked...igoogle is being weird...54 isn't bad at all. Rain...

[catlin.livejournal.com]

There should have been more of the kitty in the movie. That was my only complaint.

[zellion.livejournal.com]

But the cat was just confusing since they took out the giant squid.

[jcw-da-dmg.livejournal.com]

(I had no familiarity with the material before seeing it)
I liked many things about the film, but overall I found it kind of annoying, mostly because of too many characters having less-than-ideal motivations or proceeding in an all-too-human manner. Yes, I realize that's kind of the point, but I still found it annoying. I was also annoyed by the Leonard Cohen song "Hallelujah" over the love scene (I don't like his stuff much anyway) and another one over the credits.

I think my favorite love/hate moment in the film was Laurie coming up to her mother saying "I need to get something off my chest" while the camera is (of course) centered on her ta-tas.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Dunno what to say about your annoying points, except that the song Moore originally had in the graphic novel (yes, it's in the story, playing over the internal speakers of Archie) is Billie Holiday singing "You're My Thrill".

Sunday dinner

[janedit.livejournal.com]

We have a pot roast in the slow cooker and later on will try out a theory for something like cinnamon-apple bread pudding. Wish us luck.

[zellion.livejournal.com]

I deliberately didn't read the comic before going to see the movie because I NEVER get to see any movies where I don't know what the end is going to be. Especially with all the comic book movies, duh, I know how the whole plot line is going to go. So from someone who only knew the basic background about Watchmen (the world its set in, the Keene Act, a bit about some of the characters,) I thought it did a pretty good job in setting things up and explaining them and yet only being a 3 hour movie instead of a 7 hour movie.

A few points.
1. The cat was confusing since they didn't put in any mention of the genetic engineering experiments. (I got a lecture about giant squids on the ride home.)

2. I enjoyed all the classic songs they put on the soundtrack, that was nice. Except for the part where Veidt is giving his speech about Alexander the Great to the CEOs, and they start playing Tears for Fears "Everybody wants to rule the world." They didn't even play the lyrics, just the instrumental, but that song is so recognizable it actually kinda spoiled the ending for me. One of my friends had the same thing happen when he watched Unbreakable in the theater, said that the minute he saw Samuel L Jackson with a cane made entirely out of glass the ending was spoiled for him. So obviously this one doesn't apply to everyone, but this felt less like foreshadowing and more like a giant neon sign screaming "SPOILER ALERT!"

3. I came away from the movie with some interesting impressions about the Watchmen world that my friends say are not found in the comics. I felt that especially with the way the movie changed the ending, that it was heavily implying that the reason this "alternate earth" was so different from ours was because of Dr. Manhattan's interference in the Vietnam war. I got the message that it was really his fault the world was about to go to nuclear war, so he had to be blamed to save it. (Obviously from when the comic was written in the 80's this would not have been a message it was trying to convey.) But maybe I just read too much time-travel/alternate universe sci-fi.

4. No one told me if you go to a loud action movie while 6 months pregnant you can feel your whole body vibrate. I'm pretty sure the baby was sleeping when I got there and the Terminator trailer woke him up and he starting doing somersaults.

[sarekofvulcan.livejournal.com]

Heh. Donna had a similar problem during the podrace scenes in Episode 1. :-)

[sarekofvulcan.livejournal.com]

BTW, in retrospect, I'm extremely pissed at them for not casting Tony Head as GilesDan.

[wildcard9.livejournal.com]

My weekend was spent at MarsCon. God I needed that!! This is the one time of the year I get to see some of the people I talk to almost every day in irc. It has become my favorite con because it is the one that I spend almost the entire time amoung my friends. The downside is I did not get time away from the con to see Watchmen last weekend so I won't get to see it until next Saturday.