Junot on "Watchmen"

Encontre esta entrevista en el blog “Newsrama” en donde el ganador del Pulitzer Junot Diaz habla sobre los comics y su influencia en Hollywood y viceversa. También da su opinión sobre la adaptación de la novela gráfica “Watchmen”. Aquí tienes las “Q & A” sobre el asunto:

NRAMA: What were your thoughts on the Watchmen film?

JD: Another difficult one to talk about: Interesting to look at, but for me a failed pass at the greatest comic book ever written.

Beyond all the mundane complaints (couldn’t they cast a better Ozymandias? wouldn’t it have been better as a mini-series?) I felt the Snyder Team failed to understand (or provide) the narrative driveshaft that propelled the story in the first place: the growing collusion between the reader and Rorshach that indeed Something Terrible Was Going On.

In the movie, there wasn’t much to drive things forward, and flashbacks seem to jump into the mix out of nowhere. There were enjoyable bits throughout, but the experience was nothing I could recommend.

Hopefully, now that the movie is out of the way, someone will be allowed to make a TV series out of it like they did with Dune. Thirteen hours would do nicely . . .

Of course, everything that made Watchmen (the comic) revolutionary has been normalized by its imitators.

NRAMA: You have a point. When I read The Dark Knight Returns, it had been out for nearly a decade – I was a freshman in high school, and at that point there had been Tim Burton’s films, the animated series...I could appreciate the style Frank Miller brought to the book, but the darkness of it didn’t have the galvanizing effect on me it must have had in 1986.

JD: Yeah, when I read it! (laughs) I read it when it first came out, and I’d never seen anything like it. But you’re right, it became the norm. Superheroes misbehaving is the ultimate cliché, and this is one of the stories that started it. For the Watchmen film to work, it had to work on a different level, because it couldn’t have that transgressive charge that it did originally. Like you said, you read Dark Knight Returns now and there was no transgression any more. It feels, in fat, derivative.

For God’s sake, Watchmen is perfectly organized to be six-hour BBC miniseries! You can see it in Alan Moore’s work. He’s shaped by the six-hour forms that were very popular in England. He is as much shaped by teleplays as anyone I’ve ever met.

I’m looking forward to the new League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but I am a little wary because I was not a fan of The Black Dossier.