Well, it’s finally here, folks. After more than two decades in development, Watchmen is finally hitting screens nationwide this weekend. In a way, it’s sort of miraculous that it actually panned out. Of course, the road hasn’t been easy, with a seemingly endless parade of directors, screenwriters, producers and stars attached to the project at some point. But to me, it’s even more interesting to observe how comic book culture has progressed to this point. Just over a decade ago, it seems like Batman was the only comic getting the blockbuster treatment, and just about everything else was played for campy nostalgia, e.g. The Phantom. Hell, back in 2000 studios were worried whether the X-Men could sell tickets. So the fact that there’s not only a massively budgeted adaptation of Watchmen out there but also one that’s surprisingly faithful to its dense, ambitious source material just shows how far comics- and comic-book movies- have come in the last ten years. If only the movie was better, this saga would have the happy ending that all Watchmen fans crave.

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Neil LaBute's new movie, Lakeview Terrace, opens this Friday.  Critical opinion is still split, but critical opinion will have its say soon enough about whether the director is returning to the promising form he showed in In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors, or whether he's just cranking out a cheap thriller because he wants to buy a new boat.  Lakeview Terrace finds Samuel L. Jackson, Hollywood's default angry black man, in the role of a mean-tempered, menacing L.A. cop who takes offense to an interracial couple (played by Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington) who move in next door to him.  The idea of crooked cops has always been an appealing one to people who write thrillers; the idea of the very people charged with protecting the innocent being the ones who might hurt them has powerful appeal, and plenty of filmmakers -- Alfred Hitchcock comes immediately to mind -- have put their ambivalent feelings about the police front and center in their movies.  By the same token, however, due to the strict content restrictions of post-Code Hollywood, it was a taboo subject for decades; with very few exceptions, a crooked or evil cop was one of the very few things it was absolutely verboten to show on screen.  When the code era passed, almost as if to make up for lost time, dozens of scriptwriters and directors began to explore the idea of the cop who betrayed the ideals he was sworn to uphold, and the bad cop genre was born.  Here's five of the best.

THE ASPHALT JUNGLE (1950)

John Huston's masterful ensemble picture about a daring, carefully calculated jewel theft gone awry is one of the greatest noir films ever made, with an incredible cast (headed by Sterling Hayden as the iron-willed thug Dix Handley and Sam Jaffe as the brilliant crook Doc Riedenschneider) and a taut, fatalistic atmosphere that keeps you glued to the screen.  But it's also a fine example of how movies had to creep around the concept of the bad cop at the height of the Hays Code:  although it's made clear that Barry Kelley's Lt. Ditrich is on the make, and that his accepting bribes from hoods helps crime flourish, the idea of a crooked policeman being so plainly presented ran afoul of the Code.  So a scene was filmed in which his incorruptible chief set him on the straight an narrow, and the end coda assures the viewer that such crooked cops are an aberration that will always be found out and punished, rather than the norm.

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This Watchmen obsession of ours!  When will it ever end?  Well, March 6th of next years, at which we'll hitch our irrationally high hopes to some other wagon.  But in the meantime, that still leaves us six more months to slavishly pore over every detail that comes down the pike!  (By the way, we won't say this is a Screengrab exclusive or anything, but has anyone noticed the Full Cast and Crew notes for the movie?  Apparently, John McLaughlin, Eleanor Clift, Andy Warhol and Annie Liebowitz are in the movie as characters (thankfully not playing themselves).  Will Rorschach party at the Factory?  Will the Comedian be grilled on his foreign policy expertise on The McLaughlin Group?  We certainly hope so... 

Meanwhile, in the wake of the San Diego ComicCon, almost everyone involved in the movie has been doing publicity interviews.  Collider managed to speak to actors Billy Crudup (who's playing Dr. Manhattan) and Matthew Goode (who's appearing as Ozymandias), and Good is -- surprisingly and pleasingly -- very circumspect about the whole thing.  "We haven't seen the scenes yet," he cautions fans who are going buggy about the trailer; "We haven't seen how people interact, we haven't seen the full flesh of their characters.  And obviously we saw them on set, because of the interations that we had, but I want to see that world; I want to see if it all totally makes sense.  Because sometimes things can get left a little flat.  So let's not start sucking each other off just yet."  Wise words, and the interview also drops hints that the film will remain very true to the book's original ending -- but in the bad news department, Goode also claims his character's outfit has nipples on the suit as part of Zack Snyder's 'homage' to Joel Schumacher's Batman and Robin movie.  This, combined with the use in the trailer for Watchmen of a song from the same film, makes us very nervous; if you want to make the best superhero movie ever made, you want to do as little as possible to remind viewers of the worst.

Collider likewise gets a chance to sit down with Carla Gugino (Silk Spectre), Malin Akerman (Silk Spectre II) and Patrick Wilson (Night Owl), all of whom mention how closely the script adheres to the comic (a situation which is certainly a double-edged sword; stray too far from the original, and fans will eat you alive, but stick to it too closely and many will wonder why you bothered to make a movie).  Akerman notes that when the movie comes out, it will take fans a long time to come to terms with its complexity and density, just as is the case with the book.  "Someone else who's read the novel for 10 years straight now has so many different views and insights.  It'll take me another 10 years to figure out because you have to read it about 20 times to get every single piece, and every single moment because it's so dense.  But I think we can all come out of it and just give you our opinion about how it feels for us and how we can relate to it."

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AMERICAN BEAUTY (1999)



This modern day take on Lolita, reviled by some, adored and Academy-Awarded by others, tells the story of Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), a miserable hen-pecked middle-aged loser reinvigorated by a surge of life-altering lust for the sexually aggressive friend (Mena Suvari) of his mopey teenage daughter (Thora Birch).

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