Spoof: Nobody Watched The ‘Watchmen’

COMMENTS (21)

• I wish Hollywood would write about itself even more, and then even morer-er, so that no real stories or comedy would ever have to be told again. And hopefully more awards for said entertainment, and then more stories about the new entertainment about entertainment.

  Comment by Porky Lollipop — Tuesday July 21, 2009 @ 10:27pm PDT  Reply to this post

• This is what passes for “clever”? “Hollywood” spoofing Hollywood? Gee, that’s original. A decent effort by navel gazing industry weasel wannabes, no doubt patting themselves on the back. Self obsessed, unimaginative, out of work, emperors wearing their new clothes. This videoturd is yet another example of this town’s addiction to itself, groupthink, sameness. GM, step aside, the American media culture industry is even more pathetic, more bloated, more incapable of producing fresh, inspiring, works of art, than the UAW. They depict themselves, pathetic.

  Comment by Sycophants&Suckups — Tuesday July 21, 2009 @ 11:47pm PDT  Reply to this post

• I really, really was rooting for that to be good. It’s so nice to see someone actually put some work and production value into a comedic short for a change, unfortunately it was short on the funny.

  Protip: There are actual British actors in Los Angeles county. Hire them. Fake accents are distracting and cheapen the effect of the whole work.

  Comment by And cut at least 90 sec. — Wednesday July 22, 2009 @ 12:57am PDT  Reply to this post

• that was so unclever and those actors have no shred of comedic talant. some clever ideas but overall too mean and not funny.

  Comment by drewski — Wednesday July 22, 2009 @ 12:58am PDT  Reply to this post

• Nikki, I think any claims that you “don’t do geek” just went out the window by your posting this. This is the very definition of geek.

  Comment by RodimusBen — Wednesday July 22, 2009 @ 1:16am PDT  Reply to this post

• I kept waiting for this to be funny. I had mixed feelings about the Watchmen movie but this spoof was just an epic fail on every level. Whatever you think of the Watchmen adaptation, it was ambitious and clearly a labor of love for a lot of people over many years. The bathroom wall mentality of the internet makes it easy to take a dump on all that hard work with some asinine comments — but that’s not even my biggest issue with this “spoof”. It’s just not funny. And as painfully unfunny and crappy as it looked, it also looks like it was its own labor of love, which is just sad. And why is this epic fail featured on DHD? Because of a cursory Nikki Finke reference at the very end?

  Comment by M. Alice — Wednesday July 22, 2009 @ 6:34am PDT  Reply to this post

• Sorry, this clip has all the entertainment value of one snarky internet comment, at what? — 1,000 times the expense and effort.

  Comment by RDaggle — Wednesday July 22, 2009 @ 8:11am PDT  Reply to this post

• The problem with this video is the same problem that the movie had. No one watched the movie so no one understands or cares about this video. Funny or DIe? I say die.

  Comment by PB — Wednesday July 22, 2009 @ 8:29am PDT  Reply to this post

• So Alan Moore’s famous enough for people to do (bad) imitations of him.You know, that’s greater proof of comics going mainstream than any film adaptation.

  Comment by cst — Wednesday July 22, 2009 @ 8:38am PDT  Reply to this post

• Pure crap! You sure Ben Silverman didn’t greenlight this video?

  Comment by Fanboy — Wednesday July 22, 2009 @ 9:14am PDT  Reply to this post

• Why is it so many people claim to do/be better than the material presented but don’t have anything to prove it?

  I thought it quite amusing & made several salient points re: its subject matter.

  Comment by e — Wednesday July 22, 2009 @ 9:43am PDT  Reply to this post

• This was brilliant.

  Comment by CineFileX — Wednesday July 22, 2009 @ 10:15am PDT  Reply to this post

• Congrats to Funny or Die for getting this published on Nikki Finke. Y’all worked hard on this so hopefully you get more eyeballs on your site.

  To the haters: really? I mean, really? A lot of you are assistants who couldn’t do much better and shit on people who have the nerve to create. Keep writing terrible coverage and sitting poolside.

  To the studio/agent/producer big-wigs: hopefully you’ll see a timely piece that respects the source material and lampoons Hollywood culture.

  Comment by FomerAssistant — Wednesday July 22, 2009 @ 10:32am PDT  Reply to this post

• Nikki your hands look strikingly youthful!

  Comment by Jay — Wednesday July 22, 2009 @ 10:55am PDT  Reply to this post

• “If only”? Wow. That’s pretty asinine. comic book fan from way back and I didn’t enjoy Watchmen. Don’t plan on seeing Wolverine. Hated X3. But that’s like saying adaptations or certain genres should be wiped out. “If only” adaptations of novels by the like of Nicholas Sparks would cease production. “If only” movies about sports could stop being made.
  Films based on comics are the same as any other. Few are great. Some are good. And more than enough are tripe.

  Comment by Jim — Wednesday July 22, 2009 @ 10:56am PDT  Reply to this post

• Wow, I was going to post a comment to defend the movie, and Alex Tse, who did as good of as a job as is humanly possible given the inherent challenges of the source material, but…

  What’s up with all the troll-y hatespew in this comment thread? It’s just a short for crying out loud. I promise you the fate of Hollywood does not hang by a video posted on Funny or Die.

  Sheesh!

  Comment by Shane — Wednesday July 22, 2009 @ 11:11am PDT  Reply to this post

• The DHD reference was the only funny part. And it’s only funny because I watched it on DHD.

  PS: Allan Moore is completely over-rated.

  Comment by Thebig28 — Wednesday July 22, 2009 @ 12:10pm PDT  Reply to this post

• Come on – “Parents are blinding their own children!” That was LOL funny.

  There are only two people posting in this comments page: me and Zach Snyder.

  Comment by Johnny Marshall — Wednesday July 22, 2009 @ 8:48pm PDT  Reply to this post

• So to all the people calling out the “haters” of this middling short (like Formerassistant)- has it occured to you that this overlong underfunny piece was MADE BY haters? They hate Watchmen enough to cock this thing up, the posters took maybe five min out of their day. Who hates more?

  If you’re gonna make a hate piece, be prepared to get some in your direction.

  Comment by Tell me what I say! — Wednesday July 22, 2009 @ 10:26pm PDT  Reply to this post

• Ironic bit about this video- it suffers from the same problem of Watchmen..Too Damn Long!!! And for the record- Watchmen was great.

  Comment by jugdish — Thursday July 23, 2009 @ 4:54pm PDT  Reply to this post

• What I think is most hilarious about the spoof is that it indulges in the logical fallacy that the ending of the graphic novel (which was infamously cribbed from The Outer Limits episode “The Architects of Fear,” which receives a wink in the movie itself) was even remotely as clever as the ending of the movie which almost explicitly criticizes the Cheney Hegemony (read: Veidt) for its unconscionable machinations leading up to 9-11 and the entire incursion into Iraq, up to and including the Halliburton/Veidt war profiteering.

  And I say that as a comics fanboy for the past 30 years and as a fan of both the comics (got every issue when they first hit the stands) *and* the movie.

  Although, given that Moore is correctly portrayed as insane in the spoof, the spoof isn’t exactly the indictment of the movie that it appears to be at first glance.

  OTOH, in response to “Tell Me What I Say” — if the makers *did* intend the spoof to be an indictment of the movie, then IMO they failed miserably. Satirizing sequelmania and depicting the hyperbolic reactions of critics and haters of the movie alike projects an intent to protect the film as much as if not more than the graphic novel from Warner doing anything further with it. For the joke about Moore secretly being Alex Tse to work, you’ve got to be under the delusion that a giant squid monster is a better Macguffin than the detonation of numerous nuclear weapons worldwide — that changing the Macguffin *to* anything but a giant squid monster could ever credibly be thought of as sabotage rather than fixing one of the few flaws in the graphic novel. If that’s sabotage, then I’d like to see Moore sabotage his own continuing work in comics a LOT more than he already does.

  To jugdish: The ironic thing is that many comics readers and pros think that the movie should have been a miniseries on, say, HBO, that it was effectively *too short* to be contained in a movie. Even Joe Quesada, the editor-in-chief of DC’s only real competition (and vice-versa), Marvel, thought that it should have been a miniseries.

  Funny thing, though, when you add back in the half-hour of footage for the current director’s cut/extended edition, it’s functionally a miniseries of roughly six or seven half-hours (especially if the genius opening credits montage opens each episode.) And the movie retains the comics’ structure of alternating between sequences/issues that further the plot and sequences/issues that are entirely character studies. Then, add in the sequences from the animated Tales From the Black Freighter for the mega-stupendous
  extended cut coming to DVD around the end of the year and you’ve got a miniseries that borders on eight or ten half-hours, perhaps even six 45 minute episodes, two chapters (plot vs. character study) per episode.

  Ultimately, I think what the real issue is is that the source material of Watchmen is *much* more avant garde, much more bizarre — even by the standards of superhero comics — than even many comics fans, much less superhero movie fans — are capable of recognizing, much less acknowledging. I think that viewers that hate it were expecting something twee, something clean and “realistic” rather than the acidly satirical take on both politics and the superhero genre that the graphic novel has always been. IMNSHO, the genius of the movie is that Snyder is far more faithful to the graphic novel than naysayers think that it is because he fully embraced its irrereverence.

  I mean, how many people are still under the delusion that Nite Owl and Silk Spectre’s kinky sexual tryst in the Owl Ship (aka Archie) wasn’t supposed to be hilarious in the *graphic novel?* Much less in the movie, backed by Leonard Cohen’s brilliantly sleazy, beer-hall rendition of his song Hallelujah? A song which had been popularized in a chaste cover by Jeff Buckley and then Shrekified into the meaninglessness that comes with ubiquity.

  We *are* talking about characters who dress in leather and use kicking the crap out of people as foreplay! Using a vehicle’s flamethrower as a metaphor for ejaculation not once but *twice.* (One of them being premature ejaculation yet!)

  Oh, and then there’s the blatant equation of Laurie with Jesus Christ, starting with the Last Supper image of Sally’s retirement party in the opening montage, continuing with Laure being raised by no real father and finally being the miracle that reminds a distant, detached God of the greatness of humanity’s mere existence.

  Face it, tigers — Watchmen is the Moulin Rouge! of both superhero graphic novels and superhero movies!

  Stop taking it literally and start taking it Literally.

  — Rob

  Comment by Rob Jensen (aka ShutUpRob) — Thursday July 23, 2009 @ 7:15pm PDT  Reply to this post