Watching "Watchmen"

Seeing as some of my go-to friends are out of town (TW's in NYC; Al's in Brazil!!), I've been living the bachelor lifestyle this weekend. Mostly this consists of drinking lots of soda and leaving the toilet seat up, and today I reverted to one of my most enjoyable habits of bachelorhood -- (go ahead, insert joke here) -- seeing a Saturday-afternoon movie. I love doing this: always have, always will; and today, I went to see "Watchmen."

Typical array of audience members: skinny Asian kid; fat, balding white guy; goth couple, including the only woman in the audience; and me!

I came into the movie not having read the book, but I was well aware of the negative reviews it'd received in the press -- not that bad reviews bother me; in fact, they probably convinced me to go. I still remember the original Batman movie and all the bad press it received: I loved that movie. Now, I'm not saying that there's a connection between bad press and my reaction to a movie (the sample size is too small), but it won't scare me away.

Now I did enjoy the opening credits, much as Dana Stevens did over at Slate; and I found the action violent, but not overly so. This lengthy movie is structured as a series of vignettes draped upon the structure of a who-dunnit, and from what I've gleaned from the press it seems to mirror the history of the graphic novel, which originally appeared in a serialized form.

My biggest complaint, and it bothered me highly, was the soundtrack. You know all of these songs: Simon and Garfunkel's "Sound of Silence," Hendrix's performance of "All Along the Watchtower," Dylan's "Times are A-Changin'," Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," and some classical music war horses even made an appearance: Mozart's Requiem and Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries.

All fine selections, truly...but I bet you could match up these pieces to their scenes: Cohen's Song accompanied a graphic, yet hollow sex scene; Dylan accompanies the credits, with their historical overview (get it? The times are a-changin!); "Sound of Silence" for a flippin' funeral; Mozart appears post apocolypse and the Wagner reprises its role as go-to Vietnamese soundtrack. Ugh, it's about subtle as a meat cleaver.

One problem with using such recognizable music is that the audience already has a set of memories and emotions already associated with that music; I, for instance, have very specific ties with "Sound of Silence" and once I started to hear that music, I'm not thinking about the movie anymore -- at least, for the time being.

Despite the music, and the preponderance of blue penis (what's the plural form of penis?), I did enjoy the movie. Much more than "Sin City," which was the last such graphic novel-turned-motion-picture that I saw.