Tales of the Black Freighter
I started this secondary blog when I realised I do lots of exciting stuff that I never write about because it’s difficult to find a funny angle on it - and on my other blog, my remit is to basically try to be funny. So I started this to catalogue all of the amazing London adventures I’ve been having. What amazing thing did I do today?
I, er, watched a DVD.
It was Tales of the Black Freighter, the animated version of the pirate bits from the Watchmen graphic novel.
Now, maybe I’ve just got an appalling attention span owing to a culture of twittering, two minute YouTube videos of cats doing amusing things and being bombarded with advertising by The Man, but essentially… it really didn’t hold my attention.
Sure, it was beautifully animated and was full of gore - which always looks incongruous in cartoons when you grew up with Nicktoons and the Beano - and “making your boat out of corpses” is always a synopsis that is going to get me interested, but when the main character started whittering on using metaphor and stuff, I found myself shrinking the window to make room for Solitaire.
It was a lot like the pirate bits of the comic in that respect - I soldiered through it, but more out of a sense of duty than any actual enjoyment of it. I’m sure if you’re a hardcore Watchmen fan you’re probably wanting to tell me that I’m totally missing the point or something… but it really is a bit tedious.
Much, much more excitingly was the other feature on the DVD, which was actually longer - the faux-documentary about the history of the Minutemen, which was made to look like Nightline/Panorama/Tonight with Trevor McDonald or whatever from the period. It was clearly written as an excuse to name-drop a bunch of characters who were only vaguely featured in the Watchmen film itself - Hooded Justice, the newspaper seller and the like, but it was fun to watch.
The only flaw during this part was the slightly patchy journalistic realism. To use the most tenuous example I can think of, such as when they returned from breaks they said “now back to my interview with Night Owl”, or whatever, but didn’t remind the viewer that it was archive footage. I don’t know why this bothered me quite so much.
The continuous use of the same voxpop punters was also unrealistic, though obviously this was because we care about the newspaper seller and not someone who has been made-up for this DVD extra. Some of the script was a little “stop quoting the bits from the end of the chapters in the comic and re-write it as if it were a piece of journalism” too.
Oh, and they missed a trick by instead of doing the credits as though they were the credits to the fictional old news programme, they just switched to the standard Watchmen credits, which seemed odd.
But I’m probably being a bit petty, as it was fun.
More, er, exciting London adventures soon.
