The Henchmen Have Gathered in Waiting

With Watchmen's release less than 1920 minutes away, Carmen is hunkered down for a cascading lights-coming-up-in-the-theater roar of "pretty good, but nowhere near as good as the book."  Carmen is guilty of using this cockamamie criticism, partly to show that he reads books and is consequently big-brained and partly because that's what you say when you see a movie based on a book.  People love saying this.  Whether this has something to do with an increasing less-literate society's continued paradoxical reverence of the written word or people just like the way it rolls off the tongue is tough to say, but it probably has to end, especially when it gets to "pretty good, but nowhere near as good as the graphic novel."  Because you know how everyone likes graphic novels....CP can see why Watchmen was revolutionary on merit of its scope alone, but that said, how it was able to transcend the thick barriers of narrow-mindedness is somewhat of an anomaly.  So it has become increasingly obvious to CP that critics and message board lurkers are merely convinced that the graphic novel is good because its on TIME's fiercely accurate 100 GREATEST NOVELS OF ALL-TIME (FROM 1923 to PRESENT) LIST.  Now, this is one frenziedly weird book.  FACT: People don't like weird stuff. Yet somehow, every reviewer (while--and this goes for every, last review regardless of opinion--each states that the ending is an improvement over the graphic novel's, that the montage to Dylan is incredible, that Matthew Goode was miscast, that JEH is great, and that the dialogue doesn't transfer well to the screen) is mindlessly in love with this arguably complex, bizarre graphic novel.  Carmen doesn't buy it.  These are the same critics that hailed Slumdog Millionaire, Gran Torino, and Burn After Reading as masterpieces.  If anything, they have read TIME's list, and have, once again, agreed to agree.  How not a single one of these professional critics is able to step away from this supposedly completely opaque shadow that the graphic novel casts and see the movie from an objective standpoint is really sad, how they immediately accept the world in the "classic" book but find it unable to consider the filmic equivalent (a medium that mind you, literally saturates the senses) is not out of fault of the movie (and this goes for other adaptations) but on the viewer himself, who is unable to detach from preconceived notions of the source material.  They should just accept the movie as a movie as they accept the book as a book.  Somewhere in here is why you don't see many film-to-book adaptations.

Prior to offing himself, David Foster Wallace neatly stacked the pages of his decade-in-the-making incomplete manuscript for The Pale King for his wife to find along with his hanged body.  Carmen thanks him heartily, for the prior.