Days of Future Present

Well. The Watchmen is coming out tomorrow and if the early reviews are any indication, Mark was right: Snyder followed the graphic novel within an inch of his life. Every interview with the director sounded like it was ripped from a Borges short story. "If only I could recreate the comic experience perfectly, then the fanboys will have nothing to complain about!"

I think Greengrass was as close as we were going to get to a decent translation for the screen. Maybe Aronofsky too.

Movies with their many interchangeable parts are tailor made for such parlour-game counterfactuals.

I was reading Pictures at a Revolution and apparently both Godard and Truffaut were each at one point signed on to direct Bonnie & Clyde. How cool would that have been?

Or for you Palahniuk fanatics: Peter Jackson was originally going to direct Fight Club with Russell Crowe and Reese Witherspoon. Just think about the disastrous ramifications this would have had on our poor young Mark's emotional development.

Perhaps my favorite piece of movie potentiality: Sean Connery apparently turned down roles in both The Matrix [Morpheus!] and The Lord of the Rings [Gandalf!] - including a 15% cut of the worldwide box office receipts for the latter.

Given the terrible reviews, it is hard to not imagine what a Greengrass helmed Watchmen movie would have looked like with Simon Pegg as Rorschach and Joaquin Phoenix as Doctor Manhattan.

Okay. I take it all back.

That Greengrass version probably would have sucked too.

But at least it would have been interesting.