Trailer Review: Watchmen (Trailer #2)

Paul Clark — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 17:00:00 GMT

I somehow missed this trailer a few weeks ago, so apologies if posting it now feels like too little, too late. But I think the important thing is getting it out there for the other three people who didn’t know about it and are interested in the movie, so here you are. As trailers go, this one is actually more enticing than the first one (Philip Glass > Billy Corgan), although I’m still a little uneasy about the Zack Snyder factor. On the one hand, it’s nice to see him shooting on some physical sets this time around, instead of shooting 99% of the damn thing against CGI backdrops like he did with 300. Yet his overreliance on slow-motion is troubling, both in his last movie and in the Watchmen trailers we’ve seen thusfar. After all, the graphic novel is incredibly dense, both in terms of plot and character, and if he’s working with a studio-mandated running time, too much slo-mo will necessitate paring it down the story until a lot of what makes the source material great has been lost. Oh, who am I kidding? I’m there on opening day, not least because the casting looks almost uniformly great. I’m still not sure about Matthew Goode as Ozymandias, but Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach and especially Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Comedian look perfect.

Close To The Edge

Leonard Pierce — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 15:30:00 GMT

In the Village Voice film section, Michelle Orange reviews the inelegantly titled Chuck Close: An Elegant Portrait of the Art World's Leading Portraitist. Set for limited release the year after Manufactured Landscapes signalled a great leap forward for documentaries about visual artists, its director (and friend of the subject) Marion Cajori won't be around to enjoy any success her film might encounter; having worked on the film for over fifteen years, died in 2006 after completing work on the film. Cajori's previous work as a documentarian also focused on the art world; her best-known films were Joan Mitchell: Portrait of an Abstract Painter and Louise Bourgeois: Art is Sanity, and a previous iteration of the Chuck Close documentary, in a shortened form broadcast on PBS and entitled Chuck Close: A Portrait in Progress, was nominated for an Emmy in 1998. The completed film focuses on Close, best known for his gargantuan, photorealistic self-portraits, as well as other artists and creators such as Robert Rauschenberg and Philip Glass who received the same treatment (Gerhard Richter is a curious omission). The focus of the film, however, is Close's artistic process, and not his often-irascable personality -- Close was partially paralyzed in the 1980s and since then, has used a self-designed system of leverl, pulleys, ladders and other Rube Goldberg devices to allow him to finish his massive paintings. Cajori's film, Orange says, alleviates the usual arts-doc talking head boredom as she "regularly slows the gorgeously crisp, high-def film down to the brush-stroke" and notes that "Close's piecemeal, coherent style is wonderfully, almost winkingly well suited to Cajori's". Matt Zoller-Seitz, reviewing the film for the Times, likewise calls the film "splendid" and notes that it "truly excels is in its depiction of the physical process of making art." Close is a major figure in the world of art, and has deep ties to the Pacific Northwest and Chicago as well as claims to international fame as a painter; we're hoping that Cajori's documentary gets wider release than just the New York arts scene of which she was a part.

The Screengrab : philip glass

Trailer Review: Watchmen (Trailer #2)

Close To The Edge