We're almost 7.5% of the way through the 2020s!

Yesterday I watched a ton of Youtube videos, something I almost never do.  I've been watching more than usual lately but it's still been something that could easily be counted on one hand.  Yesterday, not so much.  They were all in the Everything Wrong With and Honest Trailers series about movies.  It doesn't help that I don't watch any that are about movies I've never seen because there's no point to that and for the most part they focus on modern movies which is even farther away from my interests.  Yet yesterday I was surprised to watch so many videos that for the most part I'd never seen about movies that I had.

It did get a little far in.  I did see Basic Instinct once when it was in theaters and had never given it the slightest thought since.  I was delighted to discover Everything Wrong With Citizen Kane, a movie I've seen many many times but not in ages and am now tempted to see again.  I enjoyed the joke of Everything Wrong With Transformers:  The Movie because obviously there's nothing at all wrong with that movie.  The video about the 1991 Addams Family movie was fun and about a really good movie, Christmas Vacation was ok.  I saw that one in theaters and I'm sure I've seen it at least one time since but nothing about it looked familiar.  In some ways, it's not a bad thing to have memory problems.

Anyway, what led me to write this was watching the videos about Sin City and, to a lesser extent, Watchmen.  I had seen both of those one time - Sin City in theaters, Watchmen on a bootleg video tape I bought on one of my Iraq deployments - and of course I'd read the comics when they were new and many many times sense.

I don't have a whole lot to say about Watchmen and whatever I do have I already wrote in a previous book.  I'm adding it here mostly for comparison to Sin City.  In both cases, they were as close as possible to being movie versions of the comics.  No matter how good or enjoyable comic-book movies can be, there's always a large amount of change from the source material.  Chris Claremont had no interest in Wolverine and was getting ready to write him out of X-Men after a few years of trying to find something to do with him but the entire movie series has focused almost entirely on him right from the start, literally an early scene in the first movie.  I love the Spider-Man trilogy - yes, even the third one - but they also just tied together different story arcs and changed whatever they wanted to for whatever reason.  I actually like Kirsten Dunst's role but there's no way Mary Jane Watson is just a sweet little neighbor girl trying to get a theater career.  MJ can be given personality but her first appearance was literally self-obsessed, saying "Face it, tiger, you hit the jackpot" and being hot enough to get away with that, which is the opposite of what Dunst brought to the role.  Then there's Captain America picking up Thor's hammer to beat up Thanos.  Um, no.

I've long thought that the DC movies did a better job in the sense that they weren't trying to recreate the comics characters but set up the movie as a whole and then the characters would fit in.  Christopher Reeve as Superman is obviously the prime model that showed how to to this.  That movie had very little to do with the comics but it was Superman.  Adam West's Batman made as much sense as Michael Keaton's or Christian Bale's.  Obviously I still haven't seen a lot of these movies but from what I can tell, it sounds like the modern movies are trying to copy the Marvel method and fail to make any real use of their characters.

Watchmen failed because it wasn't possible to put that much story into a movie.  The form just doesn't allow it.  Comics can add captions and thought balloons, conveying information in ways that movies simply can't do, and the nature of taking up a page allows an audience member to set the pacing themselves, re-reading the story, flipping-back and forth, taking a pause for whatever reason.  Our brains take information from reading in a different way than from listening.  I've gotten used to that over the last year.  Maybe that's why I've been wasting so much time with videos lately.  Anyway...

About the only interesting thing about Watchmen was how close they came to remaking the comic.  As much as possible, the dialogue was just copied, the characters mostly did the exact same things for the same reasons.  The only major change was the ending and I think it actually worked on a movie-level because they simply weren't able to include the entire story which would have been required for the fake alien attack on New York City.  It actually works to have Ozy's plan be to blame Dr. Manhattan for attacks on the entire world, it's just the rest of the movie that sucked, even though they did their best to recreate a comic book that is widely considered the best ever.  It wasn't but it unquestionably altered the medium itself.

Sin City was even more like that.  One thing I'll give it credit for is that it's a great looking movie.  This was probably the first time computer backgrounds were used for everything and that gives the visuals a really cool appearance.  Ok, the third part of the Star Wars prequels came out the same year so obviously it had been done before, but those just looked boring.  This one looked amazing.  They also had the guts to make a black-and-white movie with very rare uses of color exactly as the comic did.  One woman's dress might be the only thing colored in a given scene, even when other women were standing right there.  Black-and-white characters fight and then one dies, covered in red blood.  In a lot of ways, the movie worked because it was just one long great visual effect which matches the characters and the plot.

On the other hand, there's also the difference between reading something and hearing it which is what totally ruined it.  One can criticize Frank Miller's dialogue but I think it's good, just made to fit his characters and his stories.  This is what he's focused on, as opposed to Alan Moore who writes good dialogue based on different characters doing different things in different stories.

The Watchmen characters at least tried to recreate realistic dialogue for these characters in this story.  That's not what Frank Miller does.  It works perfectly to read the stories about Marv or whoever, but it absolutely fails when listening to actors reciting the exact same thing as narration for fight scenes.  Fictional characters speak (or think) in their own pacing which is completely different from what real people do and it's vastly different to experience it on a page than when staring at the screen with dubbed-in sound.  Miller may not write the greatest dialogue in history but he's excellent at what he does and putting the exact same words in the mouth of expensive actors is arguably the worst movie dialogue ever.

And they absolutely copied the comics which were almost certainly the storyboards for filming.  If you've read the comics, there's nothing new in the movie, except that Nancy never gets naked.  Jessica Alba refused to play a stripper who shows her breasts to anyone and for reasons I'll never understand, they went with making the character the exact opposite of her true self.  That's the point where they decided to get away from Miller's creation and Miller was fine with that?  What's going on behind the scenes?  It would not have hurt the movie to say 'ok, Carla Gugino will be Nancy and Alba can play Becky."

Anyway, it was enjoyable to see clips from these movies and remember the comics.  I got Frank Miller to autograph my first edition copy of the first Sin City collection and I still have the original issues of Watchmen in good condition, along with the first collection which has been read too many times to be in remotely good condition as well as the ABSOLUTE collection which I probably got on the same Iraq deployment.

I think my reading ability is improving although it's nowhere near where it was a year ago.  I can look up whatever I need to in books but actually reading them is usually too difficult to bother.  Oddly enough, comics are a lot easier, most of the time anyway.  I suspect part of the problem is the size and quantity of text.  A full page of typed words is usually more than I'm willing to do but for the most part, captions and word balloons are little problem, if any.

One thing I've noticed, probably a result of my obsession with Avengers movies, is that I have given very little attention to superhero comics.  I'll look through one if it's on my mind for whatever reason but that rarely happens and even when it does, the words don't seem worth the bother.  I had Claremont's X-Men on my mind at one point at grabbed one of the Essential volumes and very quickly realized that I wasn't going to put in the effort required to actually read it.  Even with memory problems, it's still part of my mind enough that I know what's happening from panel-to-panel and I'll read particular word balloons here and there.  What bothers me is that, after all these decades, I'm doing a lot more comics-reading by just looking at the pictures.

Now the problem because that I don't have a whole lot more I want to re-read, superhero or otherwise.  I re-read Fables recently and just didn't think it was as good as I used to.  I'm happy to grab books by Peter Bagge, Garth Ennis or Kyle Baker, I haven't yet felt the need to pick up Sandman, Groo, Will Eisner or most of my collections of newspaper strips.  Or Cerebus which I suspect would give me problems for all the text pages.  Early on, I gave myself a test by grabbing Jaka's Story and that was where I really saw the problem, reading comics pages were fine, the text pages weren't.  I only made it through the prologue, even the joy of reading a book I loved but haven't read in a few years didn't help.

Sooner or later I'll try again, Frank Miller's Daredevil, Alan Moore's various titles, Astro City or the Essential collections of Stan-Jack-Steve comics or whatever.  I will always love superheroes but it's strange how the success of Avengers (and a bunch of other Marvel movies I will probably never see) has taken me out of interest in the medium that created them.  Then again, my medical issues have taken me away from the 'words' part of the 'words and pictures' medium.  That's the 2020s for you.