Watching Watchmen, watching Watchmen, watching Watchmen, reading Watchmen, watching Watchmen

Alan Moore's Watchmen comic series (illustrated by Dave Gibbons) was released as 12 issues in 1986 and 1987, before being collected in its more familiar form as a graphic novel, whose cover you see here to your right. It was fairly immediately hailed as one of the greatest accomplishments in comic book history, and is still thought of as such today.

I didn't read it until COVID-19 quarantine, finishing earlier this week. Which was after I'd already seen Zack Snyder's film version, which I love, three times, most recently back in 2017. (The first two were both within six months of its release.)

What finally prompted me to get this from the library -- and I'll have it out until at least May 18th, as they keeping changing the due date in expectation of a long-term closure of the library system -- was my wife and my intention to watch the popular Watchmen TV series from last year. The friend who first told me about Watchmen loves that series, a reaction he shares with many others of course, but he suggested that it was a sequel to the graphic novel, not the movie.

A subtle distinction, I figured, but there are some small differences between the two versions, which he'd already summarized for me years ago. And if he felt it was worth recognizing the distinction between the two in terms of my preparedness for the TV show, I figured it was time to finally correct this oversight in my comic-reading history and read the graphic novel. (In truth, there are many oversights in my comic-reading history, as I have not read many comic books at all in my day.)

I thought the idea would be to have the graphic novel be the version that was most recently in my head when I watched the TV show, but the truth of the matter was, reading it so whetted my appetite for another viewing of Snyder's movie that I had to program it for the very first weekend night after I finished reading. (We just started a four-day Easter weekend last night, not that weekends mean all that much right now in terms of our mobility.)

In only two years and eight months since my last viewing, somehow I'd already forgotten that my only option on my Watchmen BluRay was to watch the full three-hour director's cut. Looking back to the last time I wrote about it in 2017, that was apparently my experience then as well. Well, as I wrote then, it didn't bother me as a) Snyder was still a good director in 2009, and b) the extra scenes did not stick out like sore thumbs. Anyway, I didn't finish until 1:15 a.m., so good thing for that long recovery weekend.

Actually, the director's cut this time was instructive as it allowed me to see even more scenes from the graphic novel, some of which I knew had been cut to make the original theatrical release at least marginally digestible by a mainstream audience. In fact, as far as I could tell, almost the entirety of the first two hours was untouched, with only a few later gestures here and there to things like the death of Hollis Mason (Stephen McHattie), the man who preceded Dan Dreiberg (Patrick Wilson) as Nite Owl. I'm also pretty sure the original theatrical release contained no passing shots of the character reading the in-comic pirate comic Tales of the Black Freighter, an annoyingly disproportionate section of the graphic novel.

As sometimes happens when you consume the source material after you've already consumed the cinematic adaptation, reading Watchmen was a good opportunity to marvel at the skills of the adapter. As it turns out, writers David Hayter and Alex Tse had a really good sense of what parts of Watchmen would not translate into a movie version. The pirate comic is a good example of that. For, I assume, purely world-building and atmospheric reasons, Moore intersperses scenes of this pirate comic with action that is actually taking place, mostly around this newsstand that is a regular spot for us to experience the lives of regular people -- dispiritingly regular people, with all their crassness, self-interest and casual bigotry. It makes for difficult reading as the panels frequently feature the pirate comic character's internal monologue, as well as the conversation among characters at the newsstand, so you have to read the narratives in parallel. Since the pirate comic ultimately had little payoff for me, I can see why it was never included in the theatrical version and only appears in the director's cut as a kind of Easter egg for fans of the graphic novel. (As to why it was included in the graphic novel at all, my friend argues that it's part of fleshing out this world -- in a world where superheroes are a part of mainstream society, you would not read comic books about superheroes, but maybe, pirates.)

Another benefit of reading the graphic novel was to appreciate the talents of the casting director. Patrick Wilson, an actor I have come to adore after not thinking much of him when I first met him, is like perfect physical embodiment of Dan Dreiberg, though of course he had to put on a few pounds to look like a middle-aged schlub, or at least the Hollywood movie version thereof. Similarly great casting choices were made with Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Eddie Blake/The Comedian and Jackie Earle Haley as Walter Kovacs/Rorschach. I have frequently described Haley as my favorite part of the movie, and that's probably still true. Actually, I don't think there's a bad casting choice in the bunch, though my friend was a bit down on Malin Akerman as Laurie Jupiter. I disagree with that. Though, as with Wilson, I started out lukewarm on Akerman when I was first introduced to her, I've really come around on her. You should watch her in Wanderlust, if you haven't. Even Matthew Goode, who my friend also dislikes as Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias, works for me as I think the character is supposed to be a bit of a cipher, and Goode really communicates that. Just so we're sure to cover off all the main characters, I should say that Billy Crudup as Jon Osterman/Dr. Manhattan is a cipher in a different way as a post-human all-powerful being, and perfect in the role.

I enjoyed reading Watchmen quite a bit, but because I knew the story and because this adaptation is quite faithful to that in general, at times I was impatient for it to move along faster. I ended up reading it in less than three weeks, so that's pretty quick, especially by my standards. But maybe it felt like a long time to read a comic book. You can tell I don't have a lot of experience with this.

I did think it was worth commenting on the big difference between the book and the novel, which is the attack on New York that ends the novel and ends up purging the threat of impending nuclear war from this world. I had always known it as the equivalent of a nuclear blast, only with Dr. Manhattan's energy signature so the world could blame him for the calamity, and unite against him as a common enemy. In the comic, though, it's weirder -- or seems weirder to me, anyway, given that I've lived with the other version for 11 years. In the comic, Ozymandias causes a giant tentacled alien to materialize in the middle of the city, as though the common enemy the world needs to unite against is an alien species invading Earth. This was the difference my friend presented me with years ago, though I didn't remember the specifics until reading.

Even though he was initially down on the movie version (he's since decided he's quite fond of it), he had always described the movie's ending as possibly better, given that it gives a reason for Manhattan to exile himself from Earth. In the comic version, he's not intrinsically linked to the supposed alien invasion, so his "fatal flaw" of being an all-powerful being who has lost his sense of human empathy does not figure into the climax the way it should. The movie gets that right. The movie gets a lot of things right.

Do I have any more takeaways or is it time to let you get on with your day?

I guess the one final thing I should mention is that the graphic novel includes pieces of first-hand source material that helps build out the world, like excerpts from Hollis Mason's autobiography, memos to and from Veidt about his toy line and other various commercial enterprises, newspaper interviews with Sally Jupiter (Laurie's mother), even part of a novel about owls written by Dan Dreiberg. At first I thought I was going to be annoyed to wade through these in order to get to the next comic book material, but I enjoyed them without exception, particularly as they are relatively brief, usually about four pages each.

Okay, so I guess now it's on to tackle the TV show. How soon, though, I'm not certain.

We do have access to it as it is available to purchase directly through our TV, so it couldn't be easier. The difficulty lies in our collective motivation.

See, as I mentioned at the top, I prepared for watching the TV show by reading this graphic novel. But so did my wife. And she was not, is not, as favorably disposed toward the property as I am.

She actually watched the movie with me during my second viewing back in 2009, though she does not remember that. But she heard the TV show was great, and as TV is a bit more her medium nowadays than movies, she was eager to get up to speed in order to watch it.

Unfortunately, she found the novel unremittingly dark, feeling particularly disturbed by Rorschach's at times right-wing perspective on the world. I mean yes, the novel is supposed to be unremittingly dark, but I guess she found it a bit misogynist, which is the bigger problem. And yes, it's true, Moore probably does not portray the female characters -- there are really only four -- in a particularly flattering light. Laurie Jupiter is a bit of a mixed bag I feel, but her mother, Sally, does come across as quite crass and unredeemable, even as the victim of an attempted rape by the Comedian. Janey Slater, Jon Osterman's original girlfriend, is portrayed as a bit vindictive (even considering that she thinks she got cancer from him), and even the psychiatrist's wife, a character who does not appear in the film, is a bit of a nag in that she tries to forbid him from helping the mentally disturbed people he's tasked with helping and focus more time on her.

Here, I think, is something that Snyder et al get right. Although Snyder is thought of as a bit of a low-level misogynist himself -- whether that's deserving or not -- he benefits from the 20-year span between publishing the comics and releasing the movie to have become more woke. The movie portrayal of all the female characters seems a bit more charitable, without sanding off their rough edges that firmly entrench them as part of this misanthropic and dyspeptic world. I no longer think you can say, if you ever could, that Synder is a misogynist just because he chooses to show Akerman's breasts in her sex scene aboard the airship Archimedes. I feel like this is a decently complex portrayal, at least when compared to the source material.

But that source material -- since she has no memory of the movie -- may have put my wife off of the upcoming TV series a bit. We'll have to see how it goes.

Me? I want to see how they picked up the pieces of this world and went forward, especially since everyone says the show does such a good job of continuing the material's world view. It's already a world I knew I loved, not because it was lovable, but because there was something honest about the way it peers into the dark soul of humanity.

Now I feel like I know that world even better, and am ready for more.

Cat's Away 2: Watch man

Second-to-last night of Cat's Away 2.

I'm a watch man. That's what I am. I'm a man who watches. Movies, I watch.

What, you think you could come up with a better title?

Ah, maybe you could.

Anyway, I'm also a man who is running out time and running out of steam. Because I'm sticking to a post-a-day schedule, and because I've had a very busy Monday, this post is the only thing standing between me and closing night of this festival. So I will be almost comically brief in my recap of Sunday's movies, which surely deserve a bit more ink than I'll be giving them.

Singin' in the Rain

The Sunday morning time slot on one of my marathon movie weekends is usually reserved for an old favorite I know like the back of my hand. Singin' in the Rain is an old favorite, one my lists tell me I have seen more than once, but I don't even know it like the back of someone else's hand. I can't remember how long it's been since I've seen it, but suffice it to say a lot of it felt very unfamiliar to me. Such as:

- I would have sworn the title number came in the first 20 minutes, but it doesn't arrive until the hour mark.

- I was quite surprised to learn that the film has one of those 10+ minute fantasy dance numbers that seem to afflict films of this period; I say "afflict" because they always seem like filler, and because it's one of my chief complaints about films like An American in Paris and Oklahoma! If even Singin' in the Rain has one, I guess I have to rethink my thoughts on the subject.

- How is Donald O'Connor not a household name? That "Make 'Em Laugh" number is a show-stopper, as my fellow podcaster, Blake Curtis, told me it was.

I barely finished the film in time to run out of the house to go meet my sister-in-law and my kids to see ...

The Lego Ninjago Movie

Thoughts:

- Love these advanced screenings, even if the movie ends up not being great; the celebratory air, the free tickets, the free popcorn and drink, the paper masks of Ninjago characters. (I guess that last one is only for this movie.)

- My three-year-old is a dick. Not three minutes into the movie he made my sister-in-law trek out to the car to get his blankie, a trip that took them 20 minutes. He then made her take him for a walk again later in the movie. I don't think she cared -- I had asked her to help in such a scenario because I was reviewing the movie and needed to give it my full attention -- but it annoyed me. He wasn't like this in his first movie, Cars 3.

- Lego may be trying to start up a cinematic universe, just like everybody else is doing, but this is its first clear misstep. Maybe the problem was not having a built-in audience for the characters, and therefore having to do more work and potentially alienating adult audiences, but I just never really fell in sync with this movie. It repeats the same comic and emotional beats of its two better predecessors, and spends much of the time offering about the same level of visual coherence of your standard Transformers movie. Stay tuned for my review.

Watchmen

- After I got the kids to bed I sat down for all three hours of Watchmen. Yes, I seem to have been powerless to play anything abut the 185-minute director's cut on my BluRay. Aren't these things supposed to come with the theatrical option?

- But that's okay, because that was when Zack Snyder was a good director. Yes, we may forget it, but there was a time. I was curious to watch this in the wake of his two failed movies featuring Superman, to see if the bad tendencies were still there back for this movie that I loved, but had since come to think of as sort of a guilty pleasure. Nope. I'm still comfortable calling this movie kind of visionary. And the added scenes didn't stick out the way added scenes sometimes do, to the extent that I could only be sure of one addition: a couple scenes related to the death of Stephen McHattie's retired Watchman, who probably died in the graphic novel, but never did in the version I saw twice and ranked in my top ten eight years ago. And had not seen again since ... until last night.

Sorry, movies, for the short shrift. I'll make up for it with a killer closing night post tomorrow.

Zack Snyder's ultimate test

Zack Snyder is a figure of some controversy among knowledgeable movie fans.

There seems to be near-universal acclaim for his debut feature, the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead. But from that point onward, the opinions on him diverge sharply. Some see him as a masterful shepherd of big pictures with big ideas; others see him as a latter-day Joel Schumacher. However, even those who are in his corner seem to recognize that there's something not-quite-right, something impure about championing him as one of today's true visionaries.

So far, this has not mattered all that much, because the "big pictures" Snyder has directed have been big in scope and budget only. Movies like 300 and Watchmen are definitely "big," no question about it -- but it's largely because of how they were marketed to us. Most people were not readers of the graphic novels/comic books that inspired these movies, so our expectations of them were limited to being excited over the first trailers we saw. We had few preconceived notions of what he might ruin or might do correctly. And indeed, some of us were disappointed in 300 (me) and in Watchmen (certainly not me), but it was only because of how they were executed within themselves. It's not because Snyder "got them wrong" -- unless, of course, you were one of the limited groups of fanboys who did have a passionate love for the source material.

Then his next two films, Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole and Sucker Punch, were genuine flops, disliked by many if not most of the people who saw them. Sucker Punch in particular, with its problematic gender politics, contributes as much as anything to the negative opinions people have of Snyder. However, again, these were not "big movies" in the sense that they had to either live up to, or fail to live up to, our expectations. Sucker Punch, in fact, was a completely original concept -- a first for Snyder.

So this all changes today, when the latest Superman reboot comes out. Now Snyder can genuinely ruin something we all care deeply about ... or make it transcendent.

You never know which way Snyder's going to go.

The funny thing is, I'd say that I generally like (Dawn of the Dead, Watchmen) fewer of Snyder's movies than I generally dislike (300, Guardians, Sucker Punch), yet I feel like I'm one of the aforementioned Snyder apologists. I think it's that I liked what he did in those two movies so much, I tend to forget that I didn't like some of his decisions in the other movies. The good decisions outweigh the bad ones, especially in the case of Watchmen.

One thing I like about Snyder is that he makes errors of commission, not errors of omission. Anything he does that doesn't work is not for lack of trying. He puts bold ideas out there. Sometimes they don't work. In fact, sometimes they fail miserably.

Then again, you could say that Michael Bay also makes errors of commission.

But I choose to be plenty excited for Man of Steel. The only other pure superhero movie Snyder made, Watchmen, is my favorite of his movies. I do think he has the ability to take this material and make it transcendent, and the original trailers I saw for it (I've tried to avoid them more recently) only confirmed that notion for me. Plus, Michael Shannon as Zod? I'm there.

Just not this weekend. Sunday is Father's Day, but my sister is in town, and Sunday is also her birthday. I do actually think we'll see a movie that night, but I think it'll be This is the End.

Then again, perhaps I should reconsider promoting that movie more than the others that are out there ... since she arrived on Tuesday, I've shown her both Tucker & Dale vs. Evil and Galaxy Quest, and neither of them were the hits with her I was hoping they'd be.

Perhaps comedy is not the right choice for her ... though I doubt that superheroes would be either.

So I may need to seek a compromise. That's the price I pay when I share "my day" with somebody else. 

Bad news

I'm not very interested in seeing A Nightmare on Elm Street. Not only am I more than a little skeptical of Hollywood's recent binge of horror remakes, but -- and I can't believe I'm about to admit this -- I did not actually see the original, so I don't have a built-in hunger to see what director Samuel Bayer has done with the concept.

The part of me that is interested, however, is interested entirely because of Jackie Earle Haley.

Haley, who's been on a major career upswing in the last couple years, is not a household name or anything. But connoisseurs of cinematic creepiness should be plenty familiar with him.

It wasn't always this way for Mr. Haley. In fact, long before anyone knew him as Freddy Krueger, they knew him as Kelly Leak in The Bad News Bears. I'm not talking about the Richard Linklater remake -- I'm talking about the actual, original Bad News Bears from 1976, in which Haley played one of the players on the titular little league team.

He was a bad kid, granted. But nothing like we've seen in the last few years. Haley has gone from being a Bad News Bear to just being bad news.

It all started in 2006 -- a whole 13 years after Haley had made his last film. (Which, for the record, was Maniac Cop III: Badge of Silence.) Now past his awkward "middle years" (otherwise known as his thirties), Haley made a splash back onto the scene in a movie I did not like as much as most people, which may be a candidate for my Second Chances series: Todd Field's Little Children. Creepiness personified, Haley received an Oscar nomination for his role as a child molester. Something about his physical stature (he's short and thin) and his physical appearance (he looks ... weird) made him the perfect candidate to play an emotionally fucked-up abuser. And he took the role and ran with it.

But it was really starting about a year ago that he became the new go-to guy for all things disturbing. Haley played arguably the most depraved character, Rorschach, in Zack Snyder's Watchmen. And though his face was covered by a mask that looked like a roving inkblot for much of the movie, it's the scenes where he's not wearing the mask that stick with me the most. Rorschach's alter ego, Walter Kovacs, gets captured and sent to prison, where he kills nearly a half-dozen different men, one with boiling oil, another with (I think) a chainsaw, and a third -- a dwarf -- in a way seen only in flashes through a closing bathroom door. Awesomely brutal.

Haley's third really creepy role is basically a cameo in Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island. This time, his whole appearance occurs in a jail cell, and it's one of those scenes that may actually occur in the mind of Leonardo DiCaprio's Teddy Daniels. Beaten, bruised, spittle flying from his mouth, Haley plays George Noyce, a patient who has been in and out of Asheville Prison, and apparently, in and out of sanity as well. Haley can make someone seem insane better than anyone these days.

Enter A Nightmare on Elm Street. When I heard about who was chosen to play Freddy Krueger, I could think of no better choice. If you want someone who can growl his lines, make everything seem sick, sadistic and twisted, and freak you the fuck out, Haley is your man.

Maybe what I'll do, later this year when the remake comes out on DVD, is watch the original and the remake back-to-back, then compare and contrast. That would make a nice little blog project. And though Robert Englund became an icon for his performance in Wes Craven's original 1984 film, I wouldn't be the least surprised if Jackie Earle Haley makes this part all his own. The way he has with everything else he's touched in the last few years.

Did I say "touched"? I meant ripped, mauled and strangled.

Like I said, bad news indeed.

Avoiding information

I went to great lengths this weekend to avoid learning anything about Watchmen.

My usual Friday ritual involves flipping directly to the movie section of my Entertainment Weekly and seeing what grades the new releases have been given. I don't usually read the reviews, because I don't want to inadvertently steal someone's perspective if I review this movie someday. But I am curious to get a general sense of how EW critics Owen Gleiberman and Lisa Schwarzbaum have judged a film.

This week, however, I was afraid to even open the magazine. I was on high alert against accidentally finding out what I was trying so hard to avoid learning -- that the movie might stink. Maybe they chose this week to shift the movie reviews from the back of the book to page 5. Or maybe I'd suffer a momentary failure of finger dexterity and end up there through an errant flip. I just had to last until Sunday night.

Having bought my tickets online Friday morning could have had something to do with trying to avoid having my enthusiasm crushed. You might say it should actually matter less under those conditions. I'd be seeing it no matter what, and it would theoretically be better to avoid getting the bad news were I still on the fence about buying tickets. But I couldn't afford to be on the fence. Those IMAX tickets went quickly. By Friday morning, my desired 3:15 show had already sold out, and I had to settle for the third row of the 6:30 screening if I wanted to go on Sunday at all.

So I was locked in anyway, and a bad review could only mean I'd have the chance to be pleasantly surprised, right? I'm a big fan of the pleasant surprise, and I'm also a big believer in the idea of the possibility of a pleasant surprise. Lots of people let their moviegoing desires get curdled by a single bad review. For me, it's a setback, but it doesn't ultimately stop me.

Still, I wanted to go in totally fresh to Watchmen.

I mostly succeeded. I managed not to get sucked in by any unexpected headlines on any of my websites. I wasn't in the presence of anybody discussing it. And that part of the Entertainment Weekly stayed safely closed until after my viewing, though I did venture into the early parts of the issue by Saturday morning.

What actually got me was facebook. I'd had the distant notion that somebody's facebook status might ruin the movie for me, but I perused my status updates anyway. (Addictions are, by definition, hard to break). I actually read two Watchmen-related status updates, but one of them was a joke, where my friend said he "was confused. He thought Watchmen was about clockmakers in the '60s." Good one. It gets across the point that you saw the movie, without spoiling anything.

But then another friend got me by sneaking it in at the end, as a non sequitor: "James is on the porch, lesson planning and thinking about how AWFUL The Watchmen (sic) was."

I grimaced.

Well, fear not, friends. For now, I will extend to you the same courtesy of information avoidance -- though if you've read this far, you've probably dared to learn my thoughts on the film already. Until more of you have seen it, I will just say that my friend James does not speak for everybody.

But as usual, Watchmen is just an entry point into what I want to talk about. I wrote a post early on about what lengths you have to go to if you want to avoid spilling the beans about a certain movie. Well, here's the flip side: In our information-saturated culture, how can you avoid learning what you don't want to learn?

Instead of pontificating on that for awhile -- I mention some of my own strategies above if you're interested -- I'd rather declare my amazement. I'm not amazed at how easily information seeps through to unwilling minds, but rather, how some of the information you think you'd be likeliest to hear can remain hidden, through no essential effort.

Case in point: I still do not know what happens at the end of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

When you consider how many people I know who have read that book, how many people in society at large who have read that book, and how many cultural commentators are getting faster and looser with what constitutes common knowledge, I think it is a downright miracle that I still don't know the fate of Harry, Hermione, Ron et al.

What does this have to do with the movies, you ask?

Well, it means that when Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part II finally becomes the eighth movie in the series in 2011, the ending may actually still be a surprise to me.

Now I should say, I wouldn't really care that much if I did find out. I read only the first novel in the series, and have allowed key secrets to be divulged to me over the years. I watch those movies not so much to be surprised at what happens, but mostly because they're big event movies and I want to see if they're any good. (Speaking of which, I saw an IMAX-sized trailer for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince before Watchmen, and it looks like some crazy shit is going to be happening in it). Truth be told, I tend to forget what happened in the last movie, and I've really only thought one of them was truly great, Alfonso Cuaron's Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

This is not an invitation for you to go spoiling it for me in the comments section. Because this is quite a thing I've got going on here, and I want to see how long it lasts. I want to see if I really can walk into a theater sometime in 2011 without knowing whether Harry Potter lives or dies.

If I do, it'll be pretty certain proof that the world is not composed only of ruiners and TMZ-bred gossip mongers. Maybe, just maybe, there's a silent majority of people who like staying silent.

When trailer music sets impossible standards

When I first started this blog way back in January, and was flooded with ideas, one of the things I'd wanted to write was a post called "The impossibility of Pineapple Express ever being good enough." It would have begun this way:


In the past year, I believe I've listened to the song "Paper Planes" by M.I.A. between 50 and 75 times. Because it's a really, really good song, I still haven't gotten sick of it. And because it's a really, really good song, I had ten times higher expectations for Pineapple Express than I should have.


Okay, back to the post that's actually being written right now. I'm not sure if you had the same experience I did, though I know some of you did, because we've discussed it. The original trailer for Pineapple Express was going along compellingly enough, looking like a fun and probably hilarious blending of the stoner and action genres. But then M.I.A.'s enthralling anthem -- with its gunshots, cocked hammers and cash registers providing crucial instrumentation -- kicked in. After that, Pineapple Express became The Awesomest Movie Ever.

Or so I was hoping. When months of anticipation finally culminated for me in a screening on opening weekend last August, the word that came to mind was "disappointment." Not only does the movie's tone turn too violent toward the end, resulting in a bunch of gory deaths that are out of synch with what you want from a comedy, but most crucially, "Paper Planes" never makes an appearance. And I'm sorry, but Huey Lewis' eponymous theme song just didn't satisfy me as a substitute.

It's a phenomenon we've seen numerous times before. A really well made trailer is distinguished by its choice of music far more often than we may consciously acknowledge. Sure, the editing has to be good, and it has to give more of a sense of what to expect, rather than a miniature synopsis of the entire plot. We remember those things. What we may not remember as consciously is how the music can also whip us up into a fervor. Whether it was the stirring Mozart score to the trailer for the Sly Stallone actioner Cliffhanger, or Wyclef Jean covering "Stayin' Alive" for The Big Hit (another sub-par action movie), I remember the way the combination of the perfect music and the perfect images jazzes me up exponentially.

Just think back to that M.I.A. song and the Pineapple Express trailer. "I fly like paper, get high like planes ..." Meanwhile, in the background, James Franco is doing the worm, Seth Rogen is doing some kind of upper-body breakdancing move, James Franco kicks his foot through the windshield of the police car he's driving, Seth Rogen jumps off a balcony onto a baddie below. Awesome stuff, right?

If it weren't for this trailer, I think I probably would have liked Pineapple Express a lot better. After all, the main thing it's guilty of is not being quite as good as it should have been. And I blame the trailer for giving me my notion of how good it should have been. But I wouldn't trade it. I'll always consider that a perfectly executed trailer, and I get chills even now when I watch it, even knowing I was ultimately disappointed.

So how does this all relate to Watchmen? Well, it's happening to me all over again. Watchmen -- based on what's widely considered to be the greatest graphic novel of all time -- has lots of much more significant reasons it's being anticipated than good trailer music. However, most of those reasons belong to the comic book geeks. And though I like a good comic book, I am far from a comic book geek. In fact, when I first saw the cast of Watchmen on the cover of Entertainment Weekly last summer, timed with Comic-Con, I thought, "Who're these fucking guys?" (Thank you, Major League, for the quotation.)

But as soon as I saw the first trailer, it was all over for me. The music got me again.

It's Smashing Pumpkins doing the honors this time. And even though I haven't been a regular listener of Smashing Pumpkins for ten years, there's something about the way "The End is the Beginning is the End" just pushes this trailer over the top. As the music really kicks in, a giant amphibious flying machine bursts through the surface of a river next to a major American city. Then the beats are timed up again for a man being thrown backwards through a plate-glass window. Then again for a masked man using an aerosol can as a flamethrower. The goose bumps are coming out on my skin.

As the music continues to pulse forward, a number of wondrous sites hit our eyes -- a hairless blue dude making people explode by shooting rays from his hands, a Molotov cocktail smashing into a truck, and what's that crazy-ass contraption rising out of the desert? Sure, the images themselves are doing a lot of the work here. But you'd be lying if you didn't acknowledge how well the music brings you to that place.

Will Watchmen live up to the hype? I'll be able to answer that question for you this weekend. You better bet I'm seeing it no later than Sunday, and I'll be opting for IMAX to heighten the experience.

Comic book fans will be trying to see how it measures up to the graphic novel. Me? I'll be wondering if and when that Smashing Pumpkins song will appear.