Listonixio Fresh and Exciting

Limerculer A waste of 90 minutes of my life

TrueHello Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Portia Hilton Blistering performances.

victor schimidt monticelli One can say that a movie has a different impact on every person, and I agree with that, and i do realize that this is not a very well-made documentary per se, but it caused a major impact on me, very much because i wasn't expecting such a tremendous amount of information when i first thought about watching it.I was, in fact expecting to see some kind of biography and a scratch on the surface on Moore's most popular comic books, and that documentary really have these features, but eventually it becomes a rare piece of modern philosophy and a way to relate with the world that at least for me was entirely fresh and new. A view on the subject of magic that totally made sense to me, and a reflection on our day and age that is realistically terrifying.Yes, you'll watch a 80-minute monologue by Alan Moore, but I highly recommend it, because if you pay attention, this can be a very enriching experience after all.

MisterWhiplash Let it be known, this will probably take more than one viewing to really all sink in. But, as with the majority of Alan Moore's best work (Swamp Thing, Watchmen, V for Vendetta, Killing Joke, LXG) you'll want to revisit it since it is, for lack of a better expression, consciousness-expanding. The documentary here focuses half-and-half in measure. Half the time it's on Moore's early life growing up in real working-class conditions in Northampton (i.e. didn't know what middle-class even was till he was in his teens), and then his odd-jobs that he had to get due to his horrible education reputation, leading up to his career in comics. The other half focuses at first on Moore's dealings in "Magic", which he says can actually be attributable to anything in terms of artistic creation, going back thousands of years, and on consciousness and understanding the world we live in and how we're apart of it, not to mention Gods and worship and even the nature of apocalypse and what "world" even means.It's deep stuff the director is dealing with, and he accompanies Moore's words and monologues (he's the only one on camera so there's nobody to say anything different, adulatory or contradictory or otherwise) with shots and scenes of the working-class conditions Moore grew up in, 'dramatic' recreations of some bits from Watchmen and V For Vendetta (frankly, the films, despite what Moore would tell you, do it better), and just random shots of people walking around and psychedelic things like fractals and mind-bending *extreme* close-up cinematography. It's all very pleasant to look at, though it's Moore who commands the attention from the director, with his very shaggy beard and long hair and eerie rings on every finger making him on the surface to look like he lives in a dark castle eating twigs and berries. In reality, he's probably one of the smartest, or at least most engaging people, you'll come across.Even when one doesn't fully get sucked into what Moore is talking about, it's never less than fascinating. It's about us. What we think and feel. The points he raises about religion- polytheism and the nature of spirituality in the modern world and the dangers of monotheism- are one thing that marks up some awesome food-for-thought. But then there's questions Moore raises about human beings in relation to themselves, self-consciousness, and how some decide to not even acknowledge it or even obliterate it. Furthermore into the realm of physics and time itself. It is quite a lot to take in, especially when one considers that for the first half of the film, more or less, we're mostly in a conventional realm of Moore's work being discussed. But even then that comes back around to his topics of discussion: Lost Girls, especially, on the nature of violence and sex, and conspiracy theorists revealing themselves far more uncomfortable with the actual chaos of the world than they'd ever want to admit.Sure, some of the Shaman stuff is deranged and takes some getting used to understanding or accepting (though it's quite funny to hear Moore talk about "becoming a magician" as opposed to facing a mid-life crisis, which it might well have been). Yet you get your limited bang for buck with this doc/philosophy/career retrospective. It's about ideas, and art, and that the apocalypse may ultimately be crap depending on your point of view. What's not to get excited about?

Scottie_Burnham I am a huge Alan Moore fan, so naturally I grabbed up this opportunity to see into the mind of one of my heroes when I saw it at the local underground rental place (Atlanta: Videodrome!).I feel bittersweet about it.On the one hand, Moore's views are more than just interesting, they're possibly life changing. They are extremely unique and they help to bring together a lot of the threads he's explored in so many works.On the other hand, the visuals of the film are largely pointless. Yes, I understand this is supposed to be a 'mindscape', but just putting backwards running footage of psychedelic colors doesn't add anything to what he's saying.If you're interested in the views of Alan Moore but you also have a respect for film, I suggest you try to find a transcript of what he says over the course of this film. His essentially long monologue is extremely intriguing and is worth hearing/reading, but the film is not, in my opinion.Interestingly enough, the bonus features are worth a rent...there are interviews with several key figures in the comic book world (Dave Gibbons, David Lloyd, and four others), whose interviews are much more straightforward and almost as interesting, without all the distracting and irrelevant 'mindscape'.

ZenShark First I must confess that I am a huge fan of the works of Alan Moore, with which if you are not familiar include works such as Watchmen, V for Vendetta, From Hell, and Promethea. If you are familiar with his works only through the Hollywoodization of them, then I'm afraid you don't know Alan Moore very well. Every single adaptation of his works to film so far has stripped the 'Moore' out of the stories to make them palpable to, i don't know, commercial audiences. I recommend that you seek out the original comic formats for the stories to see the added depth that Moore put in the originals.However this movie isn't recommended for only those people interested in comic books. In fact people who don't know who Moore is, but are interested in Philosophy, Art, Aesthetics, Literature, Magic, and Religion should also watch this movie. For it is about the mind of a man who has in a manner chosen to live slightly to the left of convention, and observe convention, and then write about convention.His ideas are in my opinion, those of a modern day philosopher. A philosopher not in the relegated academic sense of the word, but a philosopher who found himself to be one through the life that he had lived. Moore prefers the term magician. But the distinction is arbitrary, and i think Moore would agree with me.