The Screengrab : Patrick Wilson

Screengrab Review: Watchmen (Paul's Take)

Paul Clark — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 17:00:00 GMT

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.

Admittedly, Watchmen is a tough nut to crack. Combining a murder mystery, a deconstruction of superhero mythology, and a meditation on society brought to the brink of apocalypse, it’s a far cry from the classic potboilers of yesteryear. Even in an adaptation as close as this one, some material would inevitably be pared away (so long, “Tales of the Black Freighter”). But while director Zack Snyder has sworn fidelity to the original graphic novel from the beginning, it’s one thing to visually translate Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ creation to the big screen, and another entirely to turn it into something cinematic. And although Snyder pulls off the former, he falls short of the latter. It looks great, but it never quite works as an honest-to-goodness movie.

Part of the problem is that Snyder never manages to reconcile the inherent expectations of comic book blockbusters with the more literary aspects of Watchmen. There’s plenty of violence in the graphic novel, but to me the action has always taken a back seat to the ideas and themes. Watchmen is less about its heroes’ powers than about their differing ideologies and the way they’re brought out, not only by their circumstances, but also by the times in which they live. This idea that even mankind’s saviors are complex and troubled is a potent one.

Unfortunately, Snyder doesn’t explore this idea in much depth. It’s a shame, since there’s a lot of potential here, especially among the more “freakish” members of the group- Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), essentially a masked Travis Bickle; The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), an aging Captain America gone to seed; and “quantum hero” Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), whose sad plight has led him to grow ever more detached from human concerns. But while these characters are pregnant with possibilities, Snyder instead makes the least interesting Watchmen- the second Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman) and Night Owl II (Patrick Wilson)- the central players in the drama. It doesn’t help that Akerman’s performance is easily the worst in the movie- she can’t even convincingly gasp for air when she first arrives on Mars- or that Wilson is saddled with a look that makes him look less like Gibbons’ creation than a young Chevy Chase.

But if Snyder doesn’t quite get a grasp on the thematic and subtextual undercurrents of Watchmen, he doesn’t make it work as a straight-up comic book movie either. Oddly enough, some of the blame should be placed on Snyder and his insistence on taking his visual cues straight from the graphic novel. On a shot-by-shot basis, the film is often remarkable to behold, but in putting them together, Snyder and editor William Hoy too often fall back on the shot order used in the graphic novel rather than editing the film in a way that allows scenes to build naturally and in an exciting way. The result is a film that feels like it’s been frozen in amber, beautiful but difficult to embrace.

That said, the movie is far from a disaster. In fact, there’s still plenty to admire about Watchmen, beginning with Snyder’s attention to detail. If nothing else, the visuals of Watchmen are eye candy to fans who’ve longed for years to see this story brought to life. And some of performances are actually quite good, especially those given by Crudup, Morgan, and Haley, who not only feels just right as Rorschach but also even delivers his trademark “hurm” perfectly. Less successful is Matthew Goode as the formidably intelligent Ozymandias- Goode looks and acts the part well enough, but the role really needed some big-star charisma to make it sing, and it’s a little disappointing to think what Tom Cruise, who was allegedly interest in playing the role, might have done with it.

When I saw Watchmen the other night, I was accompanied by someone who’d never read the graphic novel but enjoys darker comic book movies like The Dark Knight. And while I couldn’t help but judge the movie in comparison to the original material (and frankly, doesn’t Snyder more or less invite this?), my friend was able to enjoy the film on the screen, unburdened as he was by expectations. I think this contrast is illustrative. If you’re in the market for something more than the usual heroes-and-villains comic book thriller, Watchmen might just hit the spot. But if you’ve seen this story play out in its ideal medium, any other version will be inherently disappointing. My only hope is that maybe some of those who enjoy the movie will be inspired to pick up the graphic novel, so they too can experience this material the way it was meant to be experienced.

Take Five: Bad Cops

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 20:15:00 GMT

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.

THE GODFATHER (1972)

The Hays Code had been more or less dead in the water for a dozen years by the time Francis Ford Copolla started filming his epic American gangster movie, and those dozen years had seen a lot of wearing away of the notion of the policemen as a friendly, helpful, vigilant and unimpeachable protector of the innocent. But a few taboos still remained on screen, and The Godfather did its not insubstantial bit to overcome them. In the course of the Corleone family's conflict with the slimy drug dealer Virgil Solozzo, Tom Hagen warns that "The Turk" cannot be gotten to because he enjoys the protection of New York police captain McCluskey (played by Sterling Hayden, acting the flip side of his Asphalt Jungle character) -- and that it is simply not done to kill a cop. When young Michael Corleone, who had previously been the victim of McCluskey's bullying, argues "Where does it say you can't kill a cop?", and points out that Hayden is a dirty cop on the make with his fingers in the drug racket, he's not just talking to the family -- he's talking to the audience.

MANIAC COP (1988)

William Lustig's bizarre little thriller, combining traditional police thriller elements with a sadistic slice of slasher-era horror, was the last movie you'd expect to start a franchise. But so it did, and in the the process launched the career of the hulking, iron-jawed Robert Z'dar. The sequels are generally not worth watching, but the original Maniac Cop -- in which a serial killer dressed as an NYPD patrol officer starts preying on innocent victims -- it a remarkably tight and rather exciting (if extremely lurid) piece of cinema that more than justifies its cult reputation. As a director, Lustig doesn't waste time or film, and the movie carries on at a deadly, involving clip; it's abetted by tons of fine performances from respectable character actors like Sheree North, Bruce Campbell, and original That Guy!/friend of the Screengrab Tom Atkins.

BAD LIEUTENANT (1992)

Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant was, at the time of its release, what it still is today: an atom bomb of bad-cop movies. Harvey Keitel, at the peak of his "I must appear naked in every movie I make" phase, plays a nameless New York police detective who is far and away the worst portrayal of a policeman in cinematic history: a brutal, violent drunk, a drug addict, a crook, a thief, a gambling addict, and a whoremonger. But this isn't just shock cinema: Keitel's Lieutenant is not just the worst big-screen cop imaginable, he's also, in many ways, the most complex. Ferrara throws Keitel into a deep, dark hole because he wants to show him the way out of it. Bad Lieutenant is a terrific film, which is why the as-yet-unconfirmed rumors that Werner Herzog is going to remake it with Nicolas Cage in the title role are so bewildering.

TRAINING DAY (2001)

Antoine Fuqua's nasty 2001 Los Angeles gang story hasn't held up spectacularly well in the years since it was made. Co-star Ethan Hawke seems out of place; the plot doesn't hold up particularly strongly, the tone wanders all over the place, and though it's quite well made, it's never spectacular. What does hold up, however, is Denzel Washington's electrifying performance as Alonzo, a narcotics officer so deep on the take that he barely recognizes -- or cares -- what side he's on. In the annals of crooked cop movies, it stands alongside Harvey Keitel's Bad Lieutenant, and skillfully illustrates the way that a bad man can justify his evil by thinking that he's doing good. The role earned Washington his second acting Oscar and his first Best Actor; though he'd deserved it for Malcolm X, this was no mere compensatory gesture, but a well-earned recognition of a stunning performance.

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Watchmania

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 18:00:00 GMT

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."

Finally, Joe Crosby at Mania wonders: is all the advance hype for Watchmen killing the magic? Is the pre-release hype simply putting us in a position where we can't see past the commerce and judge the actual art itself? Ouch! Et tu, Joe?

The Jailbait Sweet 16 (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 22 May 2008 20:30:00 GMT

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). To attract Suvari’s character, Angela, Burnham starts working out, pumping up his body while channeling happy memories of his irresponsible, pot-smoking youth. Eventually, Burnham gets his wish to have sex with Angela...but, upon learning that the allegedly promiscuous girl is actually a virgin, he pulls back from the brink at the last moment, suddenly remembering that he is, in fact, an adult. And then he gets shot in the head...a nice, throwback moment to the old Hays Code days when moral transgression always led to a grisly end, cautioning the rest of us against stepping over the line. Yet transgression is part of the film’s DNA, and while I can appreciate the reasons why certain people hate this movie (the artifice, the middle-aged lust thing, the Spacey Smarm Quotient), I nevertheless enjoy the message of the smart Alan Ball script that we are not defined by our age, our possessions, or the way we’re perceived, and lying to ourselves about who we’d rather be instead of accepting who we really are leads to heartache, rage, bad relationships and, occasionally, bullets in the head. Like many dirty old men before him, Lester Burnham thinks he wants sex with a much younger woman, but what he really wants is to simply be much younger, with all of life’s possibilities ahead rather than fading away in the rearview mirror.

AMERICAN PIE (1999)

And speaking of fin de siècle movies with “American” in the title co-starring Mena Suvari...this raunchy-sweet comedy was a throwback to 1980s teen sex comedies like Fast Times At Ridgemont High, Risky Business, Porky’s, Screwballs, Losin’ It, The Last American Virgin, Zapped! and etc., etc. etc. Yet somehow, despite scenes of adolescent pie-fucking, discussions of inappropriate relations with a flute at teenage band camp, tons of high school sex and the deflowering of a pubescent boy by a predatory Mary Kay Letourneau-esque older woman, American Pie barely raised a flicker of controversy upon its release, possibly because it was simply too funny and ridiculous to get all het up about...but also perhaps because of the genuine affection writer/directors Chris and Paul Weitz had for their characters, male and female, as opposed to presenting them as figures of scorn and/or inflatable sex dolls (or just so much bloody meat, like the unfortunate young victims in any number of slasher flicks from Halloween to Hostel, where sex literally equals death). As the esteemed Mr. Pierce’s notes in an earlier post on Lolita, Nabokov’s book, for all the controversy surrounding it, was actually funny...and American Pie, a kind of classic in its own right, proves once again that sometimes the best way to deal with the scary issue of sex is simply to laugh.

FREEWAY (1996)

And then there’s the less funny side of sex: molestation, prostitution and violence against women, all of which is faced and overcome by a modern day So-Cal Red Riding Hood in this astonishing exploitation film by jailbait auteur Matthew Bright, whose fetish for pigtails and ponytails drove him to personally style the hair of his actresses...which must make him a creep, right? And yet, despite Bright's seemingly shady fascination with underage sexuality, this is one of the most empowering, ass-kicking girl power movies I’ve ever seen. Reese Witherspoon leaves this one off her resume, and yet her portrayal of the indomitable white trash warrior Vanessa Lutz is, hands-down, the single best performance of her career, promising a future of nitro-fueled intensity that (Tracy Flick aside) pretty much fizzled into perky romantic comedy fluff. Remember how cool Emilio Estevez was in Repo Man before he became...y’know, Emilio Estevez? Yeah, it’s kinda like that. The story pits Witherspoon’s illiterate, underage Lutz against a crack whore mother (Amanda Plummer), an abusive stepfather, the L.A.P.D. and, most notably, Kiefer Sutherland as the story’s Big Bad Wolf, Bob Wolverton (get it?), a leering bogeyman of a sexual predator. The escalating verbal and physical warfare between Lutz and Wolverton taps into something downright primal and possibly Freudian, as if Bright is investing all his forbidden love for the raw sexuality and electric vitality of youth into Lutz and all the self-loathing shame surrounding his secret, twisted obsessions into Wolverton, then letting the two duke it out in a steel-cage match. The result is the greatest B-movie John Waters never made, a loud, raucous, thriller with jaw-dropping stretches of pitch-black comedy and a truly startling cameo by the queen of Jailbait Cinema, the one and only Brooke Shields, who shows up (along with Mr. Bright’s even more peculiar sequel to Freeway) in part three of this list.

KIDS (1995)

In Kids, the first feature directed by the legendary photographer Larry Clark, a bunch of teenagers spend a day and a night wandering around New York City in the summer. They have sex, shoplift, beat the crap out of somebody, take drugs, and have an orgiastic party. There's no plot to speak of, but there is a suspense hook: Jennie (Chloe Sevigny) has just learned that she's contracted AIDS from the mushmouthed, seventeen-year-old lothario Telly (Leo Fitzpatrick), a serial deflowerer of girls who imagines that his sexual partners will always remember him if he's their first but who loses any interest in them after that, and she sets out to try to find him before he can rack up his next intended victim, Ruby (Rosario Dawson). (She is unsuccessful in this.) The whole movie is sunk so deep inside its obsessions with selfish teenage kicks that it gives the feeling that the screen could use a bath. When it first appeared, Kids was THE controversial indie film of its season, and it was defended by some moralists who argued that Clark and his twenty-two-year-old screenwriting partner Harmony Korine were obviously showing us these youngsters acting like animals--which is the closest thing they have to an interesting quality--as a "wake-up call" to parents. Please. Clark's subsequent films (Bully, Wassup Rockers), and for that matter the photo collections with which he'd made his name (Tulsa, Teenage Lust) have only served to confirm that Clark likes to film teenagers babbling incoherently, acting out nastily and fucking because he likes to watch teenagers babbling incoherently, acting out nastily and fucking; pointing a camera at it gives him an excuse to indulge in his hobby, which he is of course entitled to share with others who have similar interests. Those of us who used to get bored with such things after about three minutes even when we were teenagers need to look elsewhere.

HARD CANDY (2005)

At 21, Ellen Page sure is a hard-working gal. Juno may have made her a star when it opened late last year, but in recent months we've seen the arrival of three other movies in which she stars or has prominent roles (Smart People, The Tracey Fragments, and An American Crime, which played at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival but recently premiered on Showtime cable). In fact, the success of Juno was the explosion coming at the end of a long fuse set by the cult home video success of Hard Candy, a two-character drama that uses the then-teenaged actress's mixture of seductiveness and spikiness for all it's worth. She plays a 14-year-old who has struck up an Internet correspondence with an adult photographer (Patrick Wilson); when she meets him for the first time, she invites herself back to his place with the promise of hearing a Goldfrapp mp3 he boasts of having. Once they get back to his place, it turns out that she's springing a trap; taking him prisoner, she informs him that she knows that he's a pedophile who's involved in the murder of a girl, and she proceeds to torture him, threaten him with exposure and castration, and cajole him to do the right thing and commit suicide. It's to Page's considerable credit that, by turns enticing, alarming, and outright scary, she remains fascinating throughout, even though she can't make her character believable; she has a degree of infallible self-assurance that would be hard to buy in a SWAT team leader, let alone a 14-year-old girl playing cat and mouse with a psycho on his home turf. Her choicest moment of degradation for her prey may be when, having gotten him where she wants him, she casually reveals that she actually thinks Goldfrapp is pretty lame. Other movies (such as The Professional) know that the viewer's inner pedophile will be flattered by seeing a young girl insist that she wants the older man even if he has the nobility (and the box-office savvy) to not follow through; Hard Candy knows that, while castration threats are pretty bad, the best way to make the older man shrivel up is to let him know that, when he thought he was being cool and up to date, he was actually sounding like an old fart.

For more jailbait: Part One, Part Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent