amedia

We got Tales of the Black Freighter from Netflix and the sleeve said it was an hour and forty minutes. TODS, who has read The Watchmen (the story of the Black Freighter is a comic book that someone reads within the novel, that reflects the main plot and themes in interesting ways), was wondering how they were going to make it that long. Well, they didn't! It was twenty-some minutes long; the IMDB says 26 but I think it was actually more like 21. It was very well done, not for the squeamish, and it really did add to my enjoyment of The Watchmen to talk with TODS about how different characters in the Watchmen echo the events of the Black Freighter. The disc also comes with a twenty-five-minute quasi-animated comic book version of the first part of the Watchmen and a sort of mockumentary interview about the first Nite Owl's autobiography, Under the Hood. Really some nifty meta-media. There was also a documentary about an upcoming movie on the Green Lantern.

The Cooler was another free movie from Jaman. It was touching, funny, frightening, sweet, cynical - all by turns. Very enjoyable. Plus we got to see William Macy's butt (and an awful lot of Maria Bello). Maria Bello was really good in this (she was the ersatz Evelyn O'Connell in the third Mummy movie); so were William Macy and Alec Baldwin. Like Finding Amanda, it took place in Las Vegas, but we enjoyed it so much more. The characters were older and more world-weary, and their relationships, adventures, and outcomes were generally very satisfying.