After the crushing depression that was Wanted and the realisation that, Dark Knight aside, pretty much all comic book movie adaptations were going to be a disappointment to me, I was really pleased to find this trailer for Watchmen.

Previously thought to be utterly unfilmable, the movie has already chewed its way through a host of directors, stars, locations and studios. Now it’s finally being put together by the guy who directed 300 – not that that is any kind of a recommendation. Based on this trailer though I can’t wait.

I guess one thing this, Sin City, 300 and Frank Millar’s new movie The Spirit show is that maybe there is a third way for superhero comic book adaptations to go given that they don’t often make great films. The third way of hyper-real visuals, phenomenal amounts of greenscreen and a focus on the key moments within the comics. There is a precedent for this in The Matrix, which borrowed heavily not just from comic books (check out the work of Geoff Darrow), but from Japanese anime like Ghost In The Shell right down to duplicating specific frames.

It’s a method that balances the apparent paucity of the comic book medium (there’s less depth in the average Fantastic Four storyline than in your average B movie) with the need to be somehow more stylish than most films.

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So in a fit of mindless entertainment seeking I went to see Wanted. How poor, shallow and truly uninspiring it is. You know that things are bad in the cinema industry when ticket prices rival a small meal and can only be purchased at the ‘concession’ stand because they’ve laid off the staff who used to sell them.

Wanted is, quite frankly, garbage. All the portentious, pseudo cryptic shit the Wachowski brothers sensibly strained out when distilling The Matrix coupled with all the action stunts that got canned when they were making things like the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Add to this the most unexciting and useless train sequence since Mission Impossible 1 and you’ve got a picture with loser written all over it. I mean if you’re going to play the Dan Brown thousand year conspiracy thing, you’d really better at least watch a couple of episodes of Alias, if only to see how they make something like 16th Century Da Vinci wannabe Rambaldi into a compelling part of the plot.

As for Morgan Freeman, either he’s just got greedy in his old age or someone at Universal has something on him because this is without doubt his worst movie ever. You’ve got to hope he’s going to enjoy the money because no one is going to enjoy or remember his performance. It’s like Samuel L Jackson after Pulp Fiction when he was in that Shark/Whale film that no one can be bothered to remember and got bitten in two in a travesty of CGI – so bad people in the cinema started laughing. As for Wanted, it’s so bad no one was talking when they left the cinema.

So I get home and decide to continue the brain out by watching V For Vendetta. Bad move. This is everything that Wanted isn’t. It resonates. It forces you to think even as you’re watching Hugo Weaving do his kung fu leaping. It’s a real reflection on life today and the continuing pimping of fear. It makes you wonder how far would you go and what you’d be prepared to sacrifice even as you’re struggling to get over the often badly delivered Shakespearean doggrel.

However, it does share one thing with Wanted. Both were derived from comic books and both highlight the fact that no matter how sophisticated (or base) the comic, you can’t simply copy that into film. Film isn’t simply a succession of comic panels just as comics aren’t simply a selection of stills. Film is both infinitely more dense and compact than any comic book, while comics have a breadth and scope that film can’t even aspire to. Here are some comics that haven’t made it onto the screen well, Hulk, X-Men, Fantastic Four, Daredevil, Batmans 1 – 4 (Batman Begins is a film, not a comic book), Supermans 1 – 4, Elektra, Hulk (again), League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Akira (great animation, terrible, terrible ending) and Sin City. As proof, Watchmen is a fantastic comic but utterly unfilmable, while Batman Begins is a great film but would make a shit comic book. Of all the recent comic book adaptations, perhaps only Spiderman manages the crossover and that’s only in the first movie. By the time you get to Spidey 3, it’s all tedious action pieces and have a go happy endings. As far as V For Vendetta goes, the movie is more a take on the comic than any attempt to reproduce its full range, so at least it’s playing to the strengths of the film medium.

As for Wanted, the comic could be every bit as crap as the movie, but I wouldn’t know because I’m never going to pick it up.

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Watched The Departed again. A truly excellent movie, where even Matt Damon gives a great performance. I have to say that each time I watch it it seems to be shorter and shorter as it becomes more and more psychological. I can’t help thinking that as we get more and more used to DVDs and watching and rewatching movies, we enter a state that is closer to that of the director/editor who watches their film countless times during its construction. Each time you revisit a classic movie like this you appreciate new nuances and depths.

This time I was struck by the parallel mental collapse of both central characters. Dicaprio’s is all in the mind, he’s in a permanent state of paranoid terror, while Damon’s is physical, he can’t have sex or establish relationships. And ultimately both characters are equally trapped and controlled by Jack Nicholson’s Mobboss.

And the glorious ending where everyone betrays everyone and everyone is in turn betrayed just gets more and more intoxicating each time I watch it. The tag line is that it’s his best film since Goodfellas, but I think it blows Goodfellas out of the cinema. This just blows your mind.

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Went off to BUG 07 this evening at the BFI for another evening’s revelatory music video malarky punctuated by Adam Buxton’s ranting and the reading of various expletive laden missives from deranged YouTube viewers for whom the concept of constructive criticism is utterly alien.

As usual the mix was pretty funny, more for the pre/post match analysis than the actual videos themselves. The videos weren’t aided by a frankly shite sound system, which was conveniently blamed on Frank Sinatra for some vaguely logical reason that currently escapes me but made perfect sense at the time and served to explain all the circumstances behind Frank’s death a few years ago.

My picks were Interpol‘s Rest My Chemistry, which is what all MP3 visualisation tools dream of becoming when they grow up, super trippy shit; Flight Of The Conchords‘ Ladies Of The World, which was every movie Will Farrell has ever tried to make distilled to 4 minutes 51 seconds; and Josh Raskin‘s animation of 14-year old Jerry Levitan‘s interview with John Lennon in 1969, I Met The Walrus. The sound quality on this may be really shit, but in this case we can’t blame Frank Sinatra, as it sounds like it was shit in the first place. Doesn’t stop the animation being fantastic though.

However, my personal favourite was the video for Aussie Rules post-rock group Pivot‘s In The Blood. As usual it confirms one of the key Rules of BUG (aside from Rule 1 ‘Don’t mention BUG as the tickets sell out fast enough as it is and we don’t want any more competition for places thank you very much’), namely the best video stories are all reserved for obscure guitar/metal/thrash monkeys and that no matter how hard you try you can’t ignore the fact that there is always room for creative stupidity. This video starts where Spielberg‘s JAWS and Todd Haynes‘ Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story leave off, so it’s crazy dolls v plastic sharks with lashings of claret.

Quality moment was during the interview with director Dougal Wilson. Now Dougal may be creative and all his videos have at least one interesting idea in them even if they are someone else’s, and yes Bat For Lashes‘ What’s A Girl To Do is pretty fucking neat in a ‘I’m ripping off Donnie Darko‘ sort of way, but those Goldfrapp videos are bloody terrible. Either that or the new Goldfrapp album is simply godawful cokebaiting eartrash. Anyway, Dougal is relating his many curious run-ins with people recently and culminates in a story of how in BUG 06 he has a run-in with someone who dared to accuse him of actually making money out of the music video racket. Both Buxton and Dougal are about to vent spleen on the hapless malcontent, when up stands friend of the Palace, Charles, saying, ‘It’s a fair cop guv, it was me’. At this point they can’t simply howl him down as he is embracing the moment and have to invite him onstage to universal acclaim. Fortunately Charles’ moment won’t go away as it was being filmed, probably for future use in one of Dougal’s videos.

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Just endured the worst productivity blackout of the year as I rampaged my way through the entire fourth series of The Wire. And even at a relatively well paced 3 episodes a day, it puts an end to all kinds of normal social activities.

I was fortunate that I’d already got through a lot of The Shield when I was introduced to The Wire. If only because for a short time I’d deluded myself that The Shield was as good as the police series was going to get. You certainly couldn’t do it the other way round. The Shield, for all its good points (and Vic Mackie rolling about in millions of dollars of stolen gang money is pretty good), is still a ‘crime-o-the-week’ copshow, with a relatively simple beginning, middle and end to each episode. It’s still great, but it’s a light snack once you’ve dined out on The Wire.

The Wire has plot coming out of its arse. It’s so slow burn that it takes most of the first series to get the initial wiretap up at all. It’s the most English American TV show out there, a real series that demands total attention, not so much because you’ll miss a key plot moment, but because every character is just so well brought out. Even the minor characters are fully rounded, so that when Ray, the most useless, can’t solve a case detective dies of a tragic stairmaster injury, you’re actually left feeling sorry for the poor sunovabitch.

The Wire‘s not just about the crime, the most interesting parts happen when you follow the money as it escalates from crack corners to political lobbyists and beyond and you see that the machinations of the drug gangs are ultimately no different from those of the top politicians. Only The Wire could leagalise drugs in a major American city for nearly an entire series and almost get away with it.

Now I’ve done with series 4, I’m left waiting for series 5 on DVD and that, I’m told, isn’t until September and is the end of it. Cut us off just when we’ve become addicted? That’s as cold as it gets. Where’s the love McNulty?

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