Seeing "Watchmen" tommorow night

Seeing Watchmen midnight show Thursday Midnight. Fingers crossed that A.) it's good and that B.) IF it's good, the non-geek public responds similarly to Dark Knight. Probably not on that second one, given that it's bound to be both a downer and a heavy-thinker, but you never know. I'd LOVE to see it become a major hit, just to see what kind of effect it would have on the genre and action-filmmaking in general.

Oh, Also...

Incidentally, no one NEEDS to go see "Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li" - it's AWFUL - but you might want to just so you can watch a movie literally come apart at the seams. It's pretty remarkable in that regard. It started out as part of an ambitious project to do a series of "origin" movies for various Street Fighter characters and then bring them together in a single massive "Street Fighter" movie for a climax; but that plan was seemingly jettisoned midway through and they were left to cobble what they'd already signed into a low-budget action vehicle for Kristin Kreuk with various characters running around with the names and "Mark I" costumes of Street Fighter bit-players.

For the fans: Neil McDonough and Michael Clarke Duncan are M. Bison and Balrog, Robin Shou (Liu Kang from the "Mortal Kombat" movies) is Gen and Chris Klein is Charlie Nash (the "Charlie" who's murder Guile is supposed to be investigating.) Vega turns up approximately twice, lamely. It's a weirdly schizoid adaptation, on the one hand trying to "Dark Knight-ize" the franchise by eschewing the game costumes and grounding the main backstory amid a ghetto-gentrification real estate swindle in Bangkok; but on the other hand Gen teaches Chun-Li to throw magical fireballs and Bison gets a REALLY icky origin story to explain super powers... that he never actually uses. FWIW, Nash survives the movie, presumably saving his death for the never-to-be-filmmed "Legend of Guile" movie. Quick mention at the end of a "Street Fighter Tournament" that Mrs. Li ought to investigate, and a "Ryu somebody."

The screenwriter on this was Justin Marks, currently just about the hottest writer in Hollywood apparently owing to his ability to turn out functional scripts for "fanboy" properties at a good clip thanks to a near-encyclopedic knowledge of - and legitimate enthusiasm-for - the material (he's also behind the initial scripts for the planned "He-Man," "Supermax" aka "Green Arrow in Prison" and "Voltron" movies.) For what it's worth, he DOES seem to have a knack for building a working narrative out of the largely-incidental backstories of properties like this. Whether or not his stuff can lead to GOOD movies remains to be seen, though I'll note that THIS one would've at least been campy fun if they'd been allowed to wear their game costumes.

Oh!, and here's the newest OverThinker:
http://gameoverthinker.blogspot.com/2009/03/episode-twenty-open-letter-to-nintendo.html