Graphic Novel Vague

Got about 90 minutes to kill?  Wondering what the deal is with that Philip Glass guy?

More importantly, want to see a beautiful snapshot of industrialized American society circa 1982, all int time lapse?

Here you go:


That's Koyaanisqatsi, the first in the Qatsi trilogy of avant garde films made by some guy complaining about how dehumanizing technology is, and how humanity sucks in general.  Personally, I think the Glass score is inspiring in an Ayn-Rand-Fountainhead-temple-of-human-bigness sort of way.  The second and third movies apparently weren't as good.  The third one has a good score with Yo-Yo Ma doing his usual cello-for-highest-bidder thing (why else Seven Years in Tibet?) but the visuals for that one are all really crappy montages of doctored photos.

One of the best scenes of Koyaanisqatsi was a juxtaposition of microchip circuits with city grids.  How much to fall to replace that with representing information as flying ones and zeroes?  Flying Greek symbols and atom bombs?  Seriously, nuclear destruction is so twenty years ago.  Hold that thought.

My favorite scene in Koyaanisqatsi was probably the "Vessels" movement opening, with a 747 taxiing through a mirage.  Beautiful.

And here is someone's tribute to art films and Rolla, MO:



As for Watchmen...

I love the graphic novel a lot. It's pretty much the best the medium can achieve for a long time. So I tried the beat em up game on PSN, and decided to watch it opening night, last night.

Probably the best an adaptation of the GN could hope to be. Attention to detail was off the charts good.

So they monkeyed around with the ending a bit, replacing the giant telepathic squid. I think that it potentially works better that way, trimming a bit of extraneousness from the source material and tightening things up a bit. There were extra bits and pieces at the end, one of which, I thought, improved on the ending -- a simple minute of added interaction that ended up making Ozymandias not look like the arrogant prick that he ended up being in the GN. Arrogant, sure, but certainly more aware of the magnitude of what he did.

I just went back and skimmed through the finish of the GN again. I just noticed some things that I didn't catch before, and I'm not sure which version I like better. I will have to read the GN again and figure out if I like my watchemen with more or less nobility to them.

But yeah, this was the first movie I've seen in the theaters in a while, and it was worth it. Food for thought.