Watchmen (2009, Warner Bros.)
purchase from Amazon: DVD | Blu-ray

Others may have summarized Watchmen more eloquently, but my friend and colleague David Medsker struck right at the essence of the year’s first would-be blockbuster with three simple words: “Floppy blue cock!”

This is not to say there’s anything wrong with cock in the movies — floppy, blue, or otherwise — but the genitalia proudly displayed by Doctor Manhattan, Watchmen’s emotionless, radiation-powered superbeing, are the perfect visual distillation of the film, for three reasons: One, it’s hard not to get distracted looking at it; two, it frequently looks silly; and three — given Manhattan’s propensity for supersizing himself — it’s painfully, unbearably long.

Seriously. Seriously, you guys. If you plunk down the $21.50 it’ll cost you at Amazon to get Zack Snyder’s painstaking recreation of the classic graphic novel on Blu-ray, you will get plenty of bang for your buck, starting with the 186-minute director’s cut, and including sooo much more — a stack of featurettes tracing the book’s impact as well as its journey to the screen, a “maximum movie mode” that will allow you to watch the movie while Snyder raps at you, and the ability to link up the disc’s BD-Live features with Facebook so you can share your Watchmen experience with your friends. The package even includes a digital copy! The merits of the movie aside, this is exactly the kind of stuff that will make or break Blu-ray as a format; instead of pumping cheapo transfers of catalog titles onto store shelves, if the studios put more effort into stuffing their titles with added content with this much interactive coolness, I have to believe that even reissues of dreck like Indecent Proposal would enjoy healthy sales. (more…)