The official I SAW WATCHMEN! thread

[^o^CORVUS^o^]

Well said.

[Akitsu]

Thanks. I thought the original note needed an addendum since I was operating on 3 hours sleep when I wrote it. It's not that I don't think people are entitled to not like the movie... as they are. I just think it's important to dislike it for the right reasons.

I mean hell, as much as I want 3 pages of narration talking about how green the grass of the Shire is... I don't expect them to put it in the LoTR film. Likewise, a fight that's a page long in the book deserves more than 30 seconds of footage.

[^o^CORVUS^o^]

Oh yeah, the rings trilogy is a superb example. I barely got through a reading if "Fellowship", but I only got 30 pages into "The Two Towers" before giving up.

Tolkien was an astounding linguist, and superb when it came to creating worlds and an overall plotline, but the stories themselves are hard to read.

[Akitsu]

Hrm... real life vs internet moment happened yesterday. Lol.

Went to Tate's Comics, my not so local but still awesome one stop crack dealer of all things anime, comics, and art... only to find every single person I talked to loving the hell out of Watchmen. This is in direct contradiction to what I've seen from the fanboy element online, which seems to eternally have nothing but complaints about the movie.

The most surreal moment was when I was leaving, and my old buddy Eli showed up. Turns out he took his 8 year old kid to see the film, who thought... and I quote, "Watchmen was awesome!"

That part really shocked me, as I thought there was no way a kid could "get" such an intricate plot. Proves to me that the movie works on a lot more levels than I gave it credit for.

[Spike]

Unfortunately not a great many people seem to be going to see it this weekend...

[sab39]

Well I did, and I recommended it to a friend who also saw it although I dunno if she was going to anyway.

Noticed for the first time that Rorshach really is homeless as opposed to that just being a persona. It made the 'fine like this' moment in the cold of antarctica a bit more poignant...

[Akitsu]

Estimated at 18 million. Not great, but still good enough to rank number 2. Race only raked in an estimated 25... far lower than Watchmen's initial weekend.

I certainly did my part... lol. I've seen enough blue wang that I might as well be standing next to the Blue Man Group at a nude beach all week.

[Rust]

Oh yeah, the rings trilogy is a superb example. I barely got through a reading if "Fellowship", but I only got 30 pages into "The Two Towers" before giving up.

Tolkien was an astounding linguist, and superb when it came to creating worlds and an overall plotline, but the stories themselves are hard to read.

He gets too bogged down in details, I think. It's not that the books are terrible reads, it's just that you can sometimes go pages between one sentence and another. It's wonderful that I know what side of the rock the moss is growing on, but sometimes it's best just to say "The rock was covered in moss" and move on.

[Akitsu]

Tolkien is what I term an immersionist. He transports you to the world of the book by occasionally going into "descriptive mode". It's not enough to know that the grass of the shire is greener... but to hear him describe all the nuance of the experience of being there as if you were standing on that hill with the character.

[sab39]

It hadn't really occurred to me before, but I think that's what Goldman is parodying in the parts he purportedly "cut" from Morganstern's version of the Princess Bride. I'm particularly thinking of the "sixty pages about trees" in the sample chapter of the sequel...

[Akitsu]

Morganstern is the Tolkien of Florin... lol.

In the original text, Morganstern was parodying the books of the day which tended to get sidetracked on minor details and family trees. The joke therein only works if you're familiar with those books. Goldman omitted them because taken out of cultural context, the joke falls flat.

The key thing to note on those omissions is this. Something funny will be said in those sixty pages about trees... but by the time you get to it, you'll be disappointed by what seems to be a minor chuckle. To someone of the time though, this was hysterical simply because it was making fun of a well known book by another author. The joke is in the fact that you're having to read through 60 pages about trees when all you want to know is what happens next.

edit: You do realize I'm kidding, right? S. Morganstern is the made up literary device of Goldman's narration. 100% fiction. Still, I find it interesting that there are still people who don't understand this aspect of the fiction.

From the wiki...

The Princess Bride is presented as Goldman's abridgment of an older version by "S. Morgenstern", which was originally a satire of the excesses of European royalty. The book, in fact, is entirely Goldman's work. Morgenstern and the "original version" are fictional and used as a literary device.

Goldman carried the joke further by publishing another book called The Silent Gondoliers (explaining why the gondoliers of Venice no longer sing to their passengers) under S. Morgenstern's name.

Goldman's personal life, as described in the introduction and commentary in the novel, is also fictional. In The Princess Bride, Goldman claims to have one son with his wife, a psychiatrist. In reality, Goldman has two daughters, and his wife is not a psychiatrist. The commentary is extensive, continuing through the text until the very end.

The book's actual roots are in stories Goldman would tell to his daughters, one of whom had requested a story about "princesses" and the other "brides". Goldman describes the earliest character names from the "kid's saga" as "silly names: Buttercup, Humperdinck".[1] The countries are both named after coins: the florin, originally a silver coin minted in Florence, and the Dutch guilder, also known as florin.

The device of claiming that a book is a pre-existing work that the author merely discovered and edited has been used by authors as diverse as Horace Walpole, Miguel de Cervantes, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Umberto Eco, Alessandro Manzoni, Jan Potocki, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Søren Kierkegaard; British fantasy authors Mary Gentle, J.R.R. Tolkien (The Lord of the Rings), and C.S. Lewis (Space Trilogy, The Screwtape Letters, The Chronicles of Narnia); Alison Croggon; George MacDonald Fraser; L. Frank Baum; Laurie King (The Mary Russell Mysteries); science fiction author Michael Crichton (Eaters of the Dead); zoologist Gerolf Steiner (The Snouters: Form and Life of the Rhinogrades); cartoonist Scott Adams (Dilbert); musicologist Peter Schickele (P.D.Q. Bach); and author Mark Z. Danielewski (House of Leaves). Some employers of this device admit to it, but claim that their act of writing the work constituted "discovering" a story or truth which already existed within the collective unconscious or some similar "pool of knowledge".

[sab39]

Er, yeah I knew that Hence my use of words like "parodying" and "purportedly" and other words starting in "p". I was all impressed by your detailed discussion of the context of the work in the original Florinese, too, until you went and gave the whole thing away...

I'm surprised there are people who can't figure it out. It's not like you can't look at a map of Europe and see that Florin and Guilder aren't on it...

[^o^CORVUS^o^]

Don't make me split this topic

[Akitsu]

Lol... there was a kid I went to college with who insisted until he was blue in the face that Florin was a real place, and that he planned to go on vacation there to see the fire swamp.

I just told him to watch out for ROUSes.

Back to the topic at hand. Anyone get the official box office take yet?

[Rob]

Lol... there was a kid I went to college with who insisted until he was blue in the face that Florin was a real place

He's unintentionally right....Florin is a suburb of Sacramento.