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STUDIO: The Disinformation Company
MSRP: $29.95
RATED: Not Rated
RUNNING TIME: 78 minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES:
Commentary on Select Scenes
Director Interview
Composer Interview
VFX Coordinator Interview
The Making of a Mindscape
Additional Interviews
The Pitch
Alan Moore has ideas about stuff.
The Humans
Alan Moore, Melinda Gebbie, David Lloyd, Dave Gibbons, Kevin O’ Neill and Jose Villarubia
The Nutshell
Alan Moore has been turning the comic book world on its ear for thirty years. Some of the work has been great, while some of it has been confusing. Does he believe in a Serpent God that’s forecasting the world’s end? All this and more is answered in this pretentious documentary from DeZ Vylenz. So get ready for seventy-eight minutes of looking at the mug below.
It’s Alan Moore or your queer aunt really let herself go.
The Lowdown
Attention is paid to smaller moments in Alan Moore’s work. You get a look at his Iran/Contra comic entitled Brought to Light. Moore’s time on Miracleman, The Killing Joke and other early books gets leap-frogged for this brief segment. So, British comic book fans will be disappointed at the slight towards his origins. Before you can catch your breath, it’s onto a lengthy look at Swamp Thing.
Alan Moore poses for his jazz album.
The
film plays into Moore’s feelings behind his work and where he is now. The director and Moore go back and forth about their belief in Magick. That’s Magic with a K, the kind of arcane and silly nonsense that keeps Goth kids awake at night. It’s kind of hard to make sense of the speedy discussion, as you’re constantly bombared with cheap editing and visuals that seem to belong in the territory of a PC screensaver. Director Vylenz ends up shooting himself in the foot so much, that it becomes to hard to even understand the point of interviewing Moore.
Much like Prince, Swamp Thing hasn’t been worth a damn in more than twenty years.
Fortunately, Moore gets a reprieve from the second disc. The same director as the main documentary gets the chance to interview his co-creators over the last few decades. His wife Melinda Gebbie talks about their work on Lost Girls and what it’s like living with Moore. Artists Kevin O’ Neill, Dave Gibbons, David Lloyd and Jose Villarubia talk about their input on works ranging from V for Vendetta to Promethea. V for Vendetta gets a weaksauce dramatization to help explain the work to newbies. That’s better than a lot of the other stories that get talked about passing.
The casual talk about such heady material as Promethea is where I found the problem with this film. The director doesn’t attempt to make the discussions make sense. Topics flow in and out like water or passing fancies of a writer that passed his prime sometime in the early 90s. Hey! Tom Strong is good and all, but it’s not Watchmen.
Look, kids! The family-friendly version of Lost Girls.
The Package
The Mindscape of Alan Moore comes
to
DVD with a two-disc special edition. The A/V Quality is shitty. It’s one thing to be a documentary and try to look decent. But, this turd looks like it was edited on the documentarian’s personal computer. The guy could’ve at least thrown in a little cash to raise the production quality.
The documentary excerpts on disc two felt like they should’ve been included in the main film. There was too much information cut from the main presentation and the excerpts could’ve helped to break up the Talking Head syndrome. Throw on some behind-the-scenes materials and you’ve got a decent starting point to examine Alan Moore. The problem is we need more material than this. It’s a rental.
Tarot Cards from Heaven.