couldn’t watch Watchmen

We got a bit of snow, enough to cover my brother’s porch, the trampoline, and the cars, but only barely enough to dust the grass. That was last night, when it was still coming down. At one point when I went out, I couldn’t tell if it was rain or snow before it later became decidedly snow. This morning, though, it’s all melting and everything’s a soggy mess out there.

My dad and I watched Up yesterday which was a treat for me because I loved that movie when I first saw it in the theater with Jon. My dad enjoyed it, too, and pointed out something I hadn’t considered. Erm, spoiler alert! Right, so in the movie, the bad guy falls off a zeppelin while holding a few helium balloons. He plummets through the clouds and I had always assumed he died, which was surprising because Disney never lets the bad guys die. Even the bad dogs in the movie were shown floating safely down so you can guess they live. Well, my dad noted that the bad guy fell from a high altitude but would be falling into denser air, which could help slow his descent with those balloons. The way Pixar did it, you can choose to believe whichever ending you like: the bad guy died by going squish! against the earth, or he lived thanks to those few balloons he held.

We also tried to watch Watchmen, along with my mom, but couldn’t get past the first twenty minutes or so. We had first watched Tales of the Black Freighter, a twenty-minute animated short that comes with Watchmen, and it was terrible. It’s like some teenage boy with bad animation skills made a short movie to show off how gory he could be. My dad and I were cracking up, but not at points where we were supposed to laugh. For example, this shipwrecked guy is on an island and he builds a boat out of his shipmates’ corpses because they’re full of gas and thus buoyant. My dad pointed to all the palm trees shown in the background and said “See those palm trees? Coconuts float.” He also commented on how it was a really bad idea to build a ship for the ocean out of dead bodies because there are plenty of carrion eaters in the ocean. Sure enough, the guy got attacked by sharks that were coming after his dead-body boat. Ugh. The narration throughout was like really bad poetry written by some melodramatic emo kid who thought he was being deep.

So we finished Tales of the Black Freighter and moved on to Watchmen, which wasn’t much better. The movie starts out focusing on this smiley-face button that gets a splatter of blood on it, like that was sooo poignant. It moves on to following the character Rorschach around, and he keeps talking in the same overly dramatic style as the narrator from Tales of the Black Freighter. One of his lines was something about “screams like an abattoir filled with retarded children”, and that’s the line that got me. Really? A slaughterhouse full of retarded kids? My dad said he couldn’t take another hour and a half of that crap, and that was just the first disc.