A two-minute Watchmen trailer is up, and it's freaking beautiful, positively stunning--I've watched it four times, and pick up new details of faithfulness to the source material each time. (The Gunga Diner blimp! An elderly President Nixon, presumably in his fifth term, on a background television screen!) Terry Gilliam once called the Watchmen graphic novel unfilmable. If anyone knows from unfilmable, it's the director of the failed Don Quixote movie and one hopes that Gilliam was either referring to the technical difficulty of making Watchmen with twentieth-century technology or is simply wrong. Future neighbor and GMU law professor Chris Newman snarked to me that Alan Moore comics never make good movies, but Zack Snyder clearly has the right artistic vision here. A lot can go wrong as Snyder cuts from 180 minutes to 145, but the trailer shows such minor scenes as Dr. Manhattan and the Comedian in Vietnam, the police strike, and the scene on Mars, so it's entirely possible they'll capture the entire fugue, if having to drop some matters like the Black Freighter story-within-the-story to a special-features DVD set.

A professor who should know better decided to make a point about public desecration of the host, and Catholics rose to the bait with death threats that no one seems to be taking seriously and other abuse. Some on the Left noted the analogy to Muslims taking offense at Korans touching the floor and at Mohammed cartoons, though the death toll ratio from the two events still remains in the dozens-to-zero range. (In less secular ages centuries ago, even the accusation of the desecration of the host was grounds for pogroms and massacres of Jews, however.)

That's not to say the left-wingers gleefully cackling over the ironies of Catholic League outrage don't have their own sacred ox—and as the TPM and Daily Kos and Huffington Post people fume over a satirical Barry Blitt cover about the Obamas, one can see what is above desecration for some people. Imagine the outrage if Obama's turban contained a bomb! Compare and contrast — and note the lack of outrage from the right over similar satire. That's just Barry Blitt's work: check out Michelle Malkin's reprint of a Rolling Stone cartoon of McCain and of several racist caricatures of Condi Rice.

Update: turns of phrase I wish I had thought of: "attack of the Jonathan Swiftboaters."

In the DC Examiner.