The Screengrab : watchmen

On This Day in Screengrab History: May 12, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 12 May 2009 20:30:00 GMT

As the Final Days draw nigh, nostalgia for the salad days of the Screengrab thickens like gravy left out on the kitchen counter overnight. I’m sorry to mention both salad and gravy in that previous sentence, but I didn’t have any lunch. The point is this: I’ve been leafing through the archives like a beloved old photo album, wistfully looking back at the days when your favorite Screengrabbers were skinny and had all their hair. No, I’m joking, of course – our archives don’t go back to 1983. But they do go back to May 12, 2008, a pivotal moment in cinematic history. Let’s take a closer look, shall we?

It was a more innocent time, when none of us had yet seen Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It hadn’t even leaked on the Internet – although a few reviews had, much to the consternation of Lucas & Co., as we learned from Phil Nugent in his pithy post Indiana Jones and the Internet Critics' Pre-emptive Strike: Ain't It Cool News Sandbags Spielberg and Co. “The initial ‘quick reaction’ was posted to Ain't It Cool News last Thursday evening by ‘ShogunMaster.’ The spoiler-heavy review reports that Harrison Ford ‘has a few lines that work and a million that don't’, trashes the other performers, laments the lack of tension or suspense…and sums up the proceedings with the judgement that this is ‘the Indiana Movie that you were dreading.’” ShogunMaster: a prophet before his time.

Our summer predictions were still looking good, as Andrew Osborne informed us in Speed Racer Bombs! Screengrab Two For Two! “Sad news for the Wachowski Brothers, Emile Hirsch, Christina Ricci and Chim Chim the monkey, perhaps...but it does mean we here at the Screengrab currently have a perfect batting average with regard to our predictions for the Top 5 Hits and Misses of the 2008 Summer Movie Season.” Little did we know that Sex and the City lurked just ahead, waiting to sucker punch us with its Manolo Blahniks.

Andrew also lit up the blogosphere with his controversial rant CGI Must Die: 5 Reasons Why. So influential was this piece that CGI has almost completely vanished from the multiplex, aside from Star Trek, Watchmen, Wolverine, and all the other movies that have made any money this year. For my part, I endured the All-Night Mockbuster Marathon. Hard to believe it’s been a whole year since I last enjoyed this:

Finally, there was this cautionary post: Sequel to "Donnie Darko" Is on the Way, Much to the Dismay of the Creator of "Donnie Darko". Well, that sequel is no longer on the way. Exactly one year later – on this very day, May 12, 2009 – S. Darko is released on DVD. What does it all mean? I believe it means the Screengrab is a powerful force that should not be tampered with. But that’s just my opinion.

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: April 4-10, 2009

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 21:00:00 GMT

(siiiiigh). What am I doing here? What the hell do I care about Taxing Time: A Screengrab Salute to Beat-the-Clock Cinema (Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five and Six)? Would you ask Tom Petty about some dumbass race-against-time movies? No, because he’s a musician. Like me.

(long, uncomfortable pause)

Are you still here? Shouldn’t you be reading In Defense of Watchmen or "Wolverine" Decapitates Fox News Blogger? I don’t even know what that means. Anna Faris Won’t Apologize? Why should she? Kal Penn Puts Acting Career on Hold to Mind Obama's Front Door? But I bet you’ll still ask him about Henry and Kubal Go to White Castle or some silly shit like that.

Here’s some more mashed potatoes without the gravy:

Reviews: An Unlikely Weapon, Around, Lymelife

Screengrab Q&A: "In A Dream"

Unwatchable #38: “Chairman of the Board”

Many Happy Returns, and a Couple of Not-So-Happy Ones: Vin Diesel and the Movie Brotherhood of Those Who Have Come Crawling Back

2009: First Quarter Wrap-Up

Spring Movie Poster Preview

Morning Deal Report: Jackie Earle Haley's Nightmare

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 14:00:00 GMT

He’ll always be Kelly Leak to some of us, but in his recent comeback phase, Jackie Earle Haley has played a child molester, a violent vigilante and now…a violent child killer. And he seemed like such a nice boy. Haley will indeed assume the mantle of Freddy Krueger in a new remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street. I think every Wes Craven movie has now been remade, except that one with Meryl Streep playing the violin. “Looking at his performance in Watchmen, here’s a guy playing a character under a mask yet you feel tremendous empathy for him,” director Samuel Bayer told The Hollywood Reporter. “And in Nightmare, he is going to be under prosthetic make-up. You have to feel something for the character. The greatest villains are multi-dimensional and I think he will bring that to the character.”

“Larry Charles is set to take on geriatric sex in his next project,” Variety tells me before I’ve even had my first cup of coffee. Thanks, Variety! “The Borat director is in final negotiations to helm Columbia Pictures comedy Winter's Discontent, which centers on a sexually frustrated widower who moves into a retirement community with his best buddy -- looking to get laid.”

More yelling for Al Pacino! Pacino will play Napoleon! It’s “a screen adaptation of Staton Rabin's children's book Betsy and the Emperor”! You child!

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Pacino Finds New Role Involving Lots of Yelling

2009: First Quarter Wrap-Up

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 02:00:00 GMT

So, Watchmen didn’t exactly bomb, nor was it exactly a hit. With a 65% critical Tomato-Meter rating, it was neither a fiasco nor a critic’s darling, and for all its sex and violence, the onscreen content was far less controversial than all the legal maneuvering involved with getting it to screens in the first place.

In other words, the first big film of the year was a lot like the rest of 2009’s films to date: nothing to really get all het up about one way or the other...with two notable exceptions, courtesy of last month’s SXSW festival: the obnoxiously onanistic My Suicide is already a lock for my year-end Worst of 2009 list, while the documentary Best Worst Movie could easily find a spot in my year-end Top Ten, thanks to its winning cast and (mostly) cheery depiction of the pleasures and pitfalls of filmmaking (as well as the mysterious alchemy that transforms a terrible film like Troll 2 into a beloved cult classic).

As for the rest of the first quarter highs: the inventive visuals of Coraline, the good-natured mumblecore bromance of SXSW’s Humpday and the laid-back ‘80s nostalgia of Greg “Superbad” Mottola’s Adventureland were all perfectly enjoyable experiences nevertheless unlikely to chart much higher than Honorable Mention come December (unless 2009 winds up being a truly uninspired film year from here on out...unlikely, considering that our current Year of the Ox is already outpacing last year’s Rat: i.e., by April 2008, I’d seen exactly one memorable film (Full Battle Rattle) and a whole lot of Hamburger Helper (Penelope, Cloverfield, 21 and Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day).

Other 2009 offerings unlikely to be more than pleasant hazy memories by December include SXSW fare like Beeswax, The Slammin’ Salmon, The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle and the Richard Linklater sneak preview Me & Orson Welles, along with Sunshine Cleaning, Monsters vs. Aliens and I Love You, Man...films that, like most everything else I’ve seen this year, seem like Xeroxes of Xeroxes of originals I liked a lot more.

I dunno...maybe I’m just getting old. Maybe I’ve seen too many films by this point, and I’m getting cranky and hard to please, and even if a new Pulp Fiction premiered next month, I’d be too jaded to appreciate it...or maybe it's just that nobody’s released anything truly special, gripping, hilarious, original and/or mind-blowing in a while. (But then again, I haven’t seen Fast & Furious yet, so that could all change in a day or two!)

Long-range forecasts indicate a continuing trend of pleasant but disposable cinema moving forward into the second quarter of 2009, although I have cautiously high hopes for Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control, Star Trek, Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience, Land of the Lost and even HBO’s biopic Grey Gardens, starring Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore as Big & Little Edie of Maysles Brothers fame (which may not be a movie in theaters...but, hey, Angels in America was my favorite movie of 2003 on the small or big screen, so who knows?).

Plus, I just saw the following trailer for the new Sam Mendes film, Away We Go, starring the potentially appealing duo of John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph, which could be goddamn charming or still yet more indie-mumbly grist for the mill...see you in June for the Second Quarter report!

Related Stories:
2008: First Quarter Wrap-Up
Screengrab Presents: The Top Ten Movies Of 2008
Screengrab 2009 Preview: Andrew Osborne’s Picks

In Defense of Watchmen

Andrew Osborne — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 16:16:00 GMT

So, I finally got around to seeing Watchmen last night, and I certainly agree with many of the opinions blogged previously by my esteemed colleagues Scott Von Doviak and Paul Clark, i.e.: “There are a million reasons a Watchmen movie should never have been made,” and also, “That said, the movie is far from a disaster.”

True, there’s way too much voice-over, the faux-Nixon proboscis is like a bad Saturday Night Live sight gag and the audience at the screening I attended actually burst into derisive laughter in response to the instant cliché usage of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” during what would otherwise have been a perfectly lovely sex scene between Patrick Wilson’s Nite Owl II and the va-voomy Malin Akerman’s Silk Spectre II.

And I can’t imagine what I would have made of the movie if I wasn’t already familiar with the source material: the numerous backstory digressions killed the propulsive, race-against time whodunnit nature of the plot (in a way they didn’t in the graphic novel), and even with North Korea actually launching missiles in the real world, the original work’s haunting sense of impending doom never felt as vivid in the film...mostly, I think, because I was more emotionally connected to my memories of the characters on the page than the oddly flat performances unspooling before me on screen.

To read Watchmen is to spend a decent amount of time with the various inhabitants of Alan Moore’s alternate reality universe up inside your head, from the heroes to the innocent bystanders they’re supposed to be “protecting” (like the newstand guy and the kid with the Tales of the Black Freighter comic, who make only blink-and-you-miss-it cameos in the film). But it’s hard to share the elder and junior Nite Owls’ nostalgia for crime-fighting camaraderie when all we’ve really seen of it is Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s Comedian mowing down gooks and brutally raping Carla Gugino’s Sally Jupiter...itself a vividly unpleasant scene that undoes the character’s later, seemingly straight-faced longing for the old days.

And yet, and yet...for all its flaws, Zack Snyder’s Watchmen at least aspires to art, and the sheer improbability of its existence is kinda breathtaking: a pointy-headed, existential think piece on the nature of good and evil (and the miracle of life) uneasily coupled with everything from standard CGI superhero action to naked tits, a big blue schlong and a child’s corpse being devoured by dogs....the fuck?

Compared to cynical drek like, say, The Spirit (or the atrocious Sam Hamm adaptation of Watchmen that thankfully never came to pass), Snyder’s fealty to Moore’s vision is quixotic, fascinating and (for me, at least) never boring despite its titanic running time. And unlike the misguided yet entertaining Troll 2-esque passion projects of the midnight cult movie circuit or muddle-headed misfires like Howard The Duck and The Last Action Hero, there’s plenty in Watchmen that legitimately works, from the big prison break set-piece to Jackie Earle Haley’s marrow-chewing Rorschach and the eye/brain candy of Billy Crudup’s Dr. Manhattan.

So who should watch Watchmen? Hard to say, really...I’m just glad that I did.

Related Posts:
Screengrab Review: “Watchmen”
Screengrab Review: Watchmen (Paul’s Take)

Roger Ebert Knows What’s Worth “Knowing”

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 16:30:00 GMT

The fact that Roger Ebert gave the latest Nicolas Cage vehicle Knowing a four-star review is not all that surprising. It’s not like he’s ever held his top rating in reserve for the Chinatowns and Godfathers of cinema; recent four-star reviews include Watchmen, Lakewood Terrace and Oliver Stone’s W. In addition, Ebert has always been a big fan of a previous effort from Knowing director Alex Proyas, Dark City. What’s a little more surprising and unusual is Ebert’s follow-up, published two days after his initial review, in which he expresses astonishment at the overwhelmingly negative critical reception the movie has received.

“Knowing is among the best science-fiction films I've seen -- frightening, suspenseful, intelligent and, when it needs to be, rather awesome.” That’s the first sentence of Ebert’s review. Those of us who have not been overly impressed by Nicolas Cage’s career choices of the past decade or so already have reason to be skeptical. “With expert and confident storytelling, Proyas strings together events that keep tension at a high pitch all through the film,” Ebert continues. “Even a few quiet, human moments have something coiling beneath. Pluck this movie, and it vibrates. Even something we've seen countless times, like a car pursuit, works here because of the meaning of the pursuit, and the high stakes.”

It didn’t take long for Ebert to discover that his enthusiasm was not universally shared amongst his critical brethren. “Either I'm wrong or most of the movie critics in America are mistaken,” Ebert writes in his follow-up article. “This is astonishing. Let's suppose I was completely wrong. Even if I was how bad could the possibly movie be? Half as good as the slasher film Shuttle? A third as good as Last House on the Left?” Ebert does understand how many of us feel about Cage these days. “Some readers said they avoid his movies on principle. Many found him guilty of over-acting. A critic was quoted who referred to his ‘fright wig,’ which is just mean-spirited snark.”

Ebert also says critics had problems with the Biblical parallels in this end-of-the-world thriller. I have to confess I haven’t found the time in my schedule to squeeze in a viewing of Knowing myself, but let’s see what a few of our leading luminaries had to say. Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly calls the movie “so inept that you may wish you were watching an M. Night Shyamalan version of the very same premise.” A.O. Scott of the New York Times notes: “If your intention is to make a brooding, hauntingly allegorical terror-thriller, it’s probably not a good sign when spectacles of mass death and intimations of planetary destruction are met with hoots and giggles.” Says Ty Burr of the Boston Globe, “It's a Nicolas Cage movie, so, admit it, you're expecting crazy. You have no idea.”

Ebert isn’t completely alone, though. Todd McCarthy of Variety calls Knowing a “not-bad supernatural-tinged sci-fier that has more on its mind than the run-of-the-mill effects-driven extravaganza.” What say you, Screengrab readers? The movie topped the box office this weekend, so surely somebody has seen it. Let us know what you thought in the comments.

Related:
Roger Ebert Gives Himself Thumbs Down
Abel Ferrera Would Like Werner Herzog and Nicolas Cage to Please Die in a Fire

DVD Digest for March 24, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 14:00:00 GMT

This week brings plenty of good news for both 007 fans and lovers of classic Hollywood, and plenty of other goodies besides.

This week’s DVD of the Week is Criterion’s much-awaited release of Francois Truffaut’s The Last Metro. In this 1980 film, Truffaut for the first time addressed explicitly the subject of the French Occupation during World War II, seen here through the prism of a struggling theatre whose Jewish owner is hiding in the basement, leaving his leading-lady wife (played by Catherine Deneuve) to run the day-to-day business. There’s a great deal of intrigue in the film, not only involving a cocky young actor played by Gerard Depardieu, but with any number of Nazi sympathizers, informers, double-crossers, and sneaky Occupation types. But what comes through most clearly on this DVD release (and even more so on the Blu-Ray version) is how gorgeous the film is- how handsomely Truffaut re-created the period without letting the aesthetic concerns overwhelm the narrative ones. Likewise, this may be the most gorgeous Catherine Deneuve was on film- no mean feat, that.

The week’s other major classics release is the third volume of Warner’s Forbidden Hollywood Collection, this one featuring six films from director William Wellman- Other Men’s Women, The Purchase Price, Frisco Jenny, Midnight Mary, Heroes for Sale, and Wild Boys of the Road. Other classics releases this week include: Lemmon and Matthau (but not Randall and Klugman) The Odd Couple Centennial Edition (Paramount); Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief Centennial Edition (Paramount); Lilo & Stitch 2-Disc Big Wave Edition (Disney); the unofficial 007 adventure Never Say Never Again Collector’s Edition (Fox/MGM); and the Fast and the Furious trilogy (Universal, also Blu-Ray), with standard DVDs of the films available separately.

The recent releases for this week are highlighted by: Daniel Craig’s second James Bond opus, Quantum of Solace (Fox/MGM, also Blu-Ray); the animated adjunct to the Watchmen universe, Watchmen: Tales of the Black Freighter (Warner, also Blu-Ray); John Travolta as a talking dog in Bolt (Disney); and Anne Hathaway in Passengers (Sony, also Blu-Ray).

In TV on DVD news, this week brings: The Venture Bros. Season 3 (Warner, also Blu-Ray); Star Wars: The Clone Wars- A Galaxy Divided (Warner); The Riches Season 2 (Fox); The Life and Times of Tim (Warner); and Big Stan (HBO, also Blu-Ray).

This week’s biggest Blu-Ray only release is James Bond Blu-Ray vol. 3 (Fox/MGM), which includes Goldfinger, Moonraker, and The World Is Not Enough, also available separately. If you’re still looking for more action, you can always pick up The Matrix (Warner). And on the more dramatic side of things, this week finds Paramount release three of its artier films of recent years, A Mighty Heart, The Kite Runner, and Things We Lost in the Fire. I admit I would be more enthusiastic about these releases if they were films I actually liked, but I do like the idea that studios are actually attempting to spotlight more than just loud action movies on Blu-Ray. Hey, it’s a start.

Finally, I leave you with the Synopsis of the Week, this week courtesy of the FUNimation Entertainment release Fruits Basket Box Set. Here it is:

“The Sohma family is cursed; however, this is no ordinary family curse. When a member of the family is embraced by a person of the opposite gender, they transform into an animal of the Chinese Zodiac! The Sohmas have managed to keep the curse private for generations, but when a young girl stumbles upon their secret, life in the Sohma household changes forever. Conflict erupts as zodiac rivals clash in this most unusual household. Young Tohru Honda must promise the secret will remain her own - or face the consequences!”

SXSW Review: "Pontypool"

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 20:15:00 GMT

Canadian director Bruce McDonald (Hard Core Logo) has been insisting in interviews that his new film Pontypool is not really a zombie movie, and as someone who has burnt out on zombie movies of late, I have to agree with him. It's a difficult film to categorize at all - sort of like Orson Welles' War of the Worlds in reverse, or a George Romero adaptation of Talk Radio, although neither of those descriptions quite gets at how peculiar Pontypool really is.

Set almost entirely inside a radio station and unfolding in something close to real time, McDonald's film concerns the efforts of morning DJ Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie, most recently the original Nite Owl in Watchmen) and his producer Sydney Briar (Lisa Houle) to understand and properly react to a mounting crisis in the small town of Pontypool, Ontario - a crisis that begins as a riot and escalates into an epidemic.

Isolated from the outside world, privy only to information from callers, a traffic reporter on the scene and a BBC newsman who has somehow gotten wind of the situation, Mazzy and Sydney attempt to piece together what exactly is happening. They figure out that the townspeople are indeed being transformed into..well, creatures that behave a lot like zombies. The means of the infection is one of the oddball, ingenious twists that shouldn't be revealed here, but suffice it to say that this is the only zombie movie I can think of that climaxes with a very important game of word association.

Adapted from the novel Pontypool Changes Everything by Tony Burgess (who also wrote the screenplay), McDonald's film marries the claustrophobic tension of Night of the Living Dead with a more cerebral approach. Gore is used sparingly, albeit to startling effect, and the grand finale is more of a semiotics discussion than the sort of bloodbath that gorehounds might be hoping for. It's not simply an intellectual exercise, however, and McHattie in particular keeps the movie grounded with his lived-in, world-weary performance as the increasingly frazzled DJ Mazzy. Pontypool isn't for everyone, but it just might be the zombie movie for everyone who thinks they're sick of zombie movies.

Related:
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The Screengrab Highlight Reel: March 7-13, 2009

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 21:00:00 GMT

(Pictured: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Hayden Childs and Leonard Pierce)

Sláinte! Your friends at the Screengrab are gathering this weekend in Austin for SXSW, and you know what that means! Paramedics will be on call 24/7, particularly since the festival bleeds over into St. Patrick’s Day this year. We’ve already brought you oodles of SXSW-related coverage: Ten Must-See Documentaries (Parts One and Two), Ten Must-See Narrative Films (Parts One and Two), SXSW Explosion, SXSW Reviews: Roadsworth and New World Order, and our Favorite Movies About Music: Non-Fiction Edition (Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six and Seven). And there’s plenty more coverage to come in the week ahead, assuming the local bars have wi-fi.

Meanwhile, here’s some good stuff to catch up on from the week that was:

Screengrab Reviews: Hunger, Tokyo Sonata

The Screengrab Library of Unfilmed Screenplays: Sam Hamm's "Watchmen"

The Duplicitous Charms of Tony Gilroy's "Duplicity"

Unwatchables: Another 9 1/2 Weeks, Leonard Part 6

A Screengrab Plea: Let Herbie Ride Again!

The Letdowns: Lifeforce (1985)

Thursday Poll for March 12, 2009

Paul Clark — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Despite what some box office analysts may tell you, a $55 million opening weekend in early March for an R-rated comic book adaptation is nothing to sneeze at. And while it appears that there was plenty of curiosity by the moviegoing public about the Watchmen movie, it seems that many of Screengrab’s readers didn’t share this enthusiasm. Consider that nearly half the voters in last week’s poll- 43%, to be precise- responded that they “couldn’t care less” about Watchmen. Of the other possible responses, the next highest-ranking choice was “more than a bit anxious,” which probably encompasses most of those who read (and loved) the comic. 14% of voters declared themselves “guardedly optimistic”, while the other 7% of you were downright angry about the movie- which, despite bad early buzz, wasn’t all that bad. And no voters were actually excited for Watchmen, which probably explains why it ended up at $55 million rather than a higher haul. Those who are inclined to watch box-office numbers will have their eye on Watchmen over the next few weeks to see whether it sustains its popularity with audiences.

This week, in conjunction with the DVD release of Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut Synecdoche, New York, we take a look back at his career so far. Acclaimed by many as one of the most original creative minds in Hollywood, Kaufman has made his name with his visionary screenplays, which sometimes manage to upstage the films themselves. So, we ask you- what is your favorite film based on one of Kaufman’s “original” screenplay? I’ve eliminated Confessions of a Dangerous Mind from the running since, no matter your feelings about the film, I think most people would agree that the strange stuff comes largely from its subject. On the other hand, Adaptation., despite what the Academy’s writing branch would have you believe, is all Kaufman. Anyway… which is your favorite?

Which is your favorite? | BuzzDash polls

Remember, the comments section is open. See you next week!

A Screengrab Plea: Let Herbie Ride Again!

Phil Nugent — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 17:00:00 GMT

The superhero-movie trend wasn't going to die on the vine in the unlikely event that Watchmen-the-movie bombed, and the word on the street is that it didn't bomb, so if you fancy yourself a leading man, you'd better look good in spandex. New potential franchises have already been lining up on the tarmac; a while back, we reported that the job of directing a movie about the mighty Thor has been handed to Kenneth Branagh, who I'm sure will do every bit as well by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby as he did by Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, and Rita Rudner. I can't help but feel, though, that a golden opportunity is still sitting on the shelf there, continuing to be overlooked. I think we've pretty well established that Alan Moore makes for box office, and who has Alan Moore named as his own personal favorite superhero? Herbie, that's who! Herbie, Herbie Popnecker, Herbie the Fat Fury! The scarily bearded bard of Northampton is not alone in his idolatry. There has long been a teeming, steaming cult of Herbie brewing just below the demarcation line we call common sense. But where's our movie? Every so often, lo these past several years, word has gotten out that someone in Hollywood has given the greenlight to a Herbie movie. The pattern is always the same: dancing breaks out in the streets, the good champagne is uncorked, strangers hug each other in Times Square, babies are conceived. Then the morning after arrives and it turns out that the movie is about that damned Volkswagen again.

The creation of writer "Shane O'Shea" (a pseudonym for Richard E. Hughes, editor of the independent comics publisher ACG) and artist Ogden Whitney, Herbie first appeared in the December, 1958 issue of ACG's Forbidden Worlds. A product of that patch of suburbia that would later cast its siren song at David Lynch and John Waters, he was a round little boy with a bowl haircut and a pair of eyeglasses that were the liveliest thing on his poker face. A man of few words, Herbie seldom spoke up except to wave his trademark sucker at people and threateningly inquire, "You want I should bop you with this here lollipop?", a tag line that would later be tightened up and employed by TV's Kojak. Herbie's super powers--including a mighty punch, a menacing stare that could, and did, break the devil, the ability to communicate with animals, and a knack for time travel that helped him to become recognized as a hero and savior to many different civilizations throughout history--were firmly in place from the outset, while he was just waddling about in his Sansabelt slacks. Eventually, though, feeling that he had some responsibility, as the star of a comic book, to try to fit in with the superhero community, he did create for himself the alternate identity of the caped avenger the Fat Fury, flying through the skies barefoot with a toilet plunger on his head.

Like many a pulp hero, from Zorro and the Scarlet Pimpernel down to Superman, Herbie was in a way his own rival, scorned by a love object who admired the Fat Fury without ever guessing that he and the seemingly inadequate Herbie were one and the same. In the case of Herbie, the love object in question was no fair maiden but Herbie's gruff and clueless father, whose open loathing of his offspring seemed to cause Herbie little distress. At the same time, the legions of panting women who offered themselves to our hero, none of whom showed much conern about the fact that he was theoretically too young to be dating, had no effect on him either. As you might expect of a young man who was frequently seen to cut class to make a special meeting with Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, he had his mind on weightier matters. In a recurring development that has probably inspired more than one graduate thesis in the field of Cultural Studies, women who had been spurned by Herbie often ended up running off with the livestock, as if just knowing that Herbie was out there somewhere had ruined them for the human race.

Will there ever be a Herbie movie, ideally one directed a safe distance from Kenneth Branagh? Herbie fans have learned to be disappointed. ACG went under in 1967, three years after Herbie finally got his own book. In 1992, Dark Horse boldly announced that it was bringing out a 12-issue Herbie series consisting mostly of reprints from the long-gone ACG books; it crapped out after two issues were published, making it the Big Numbers of reprint series. Herbie later made a guest appearance in Bob Burden's Flaming Carrot comic, but this was after the magic had gone from both characters, and the results were sort of like those end-of-the-road appearances by the Three Stooges, where the spectacle of men in their late sixties poking each other in the eye seemed less like a cause for amusement than a desperate cry for help. The good news is that Dark Horse has finally done penance for having whiffed in 1992 by bringing out the complete ACG Herbie comics in three hardcover volumes, the last of which comes out next month. These handsome hardcover editions retail in the neighborhood of fifty dollars apiece and would cheer up anyone who needs to unwind after a long argument with the landlord about when the rent check will clear. Now that this material is readily available, maybe some Hollywood A-lister will finally see the potential that starring in a Herbie movie has to take his career to the next level. I don't mean any particular Hollywood A-lister, it could be any Hollywood A-lister, oh, any number of kaff kaff Philip Seymour Hoffman kaff Hollywood A-listers could have a triumph in the role.

The Screengrab Library of Unfilmed Screenplays: Sam Hamm's "Watchmen"

Phil Nugent — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 15:00:00 GMT

[If there's one subject that holds more fascination for film geeks than the movies they've seen or are planning to see, it may be the movies that have not been made and may never will be: the scripts that go into permanent turnaround or excite some interest, only to be abandoned. A few of these attain the status of legends, a process that in the last several years has been exacerbated by the ability to disseminate them through the Internet. Because a screenplay is a physical object but also a blueprint for something fuller and richer, which would probably end up deviating from the script at any number of key points, reviewing unfilmed scripts is a movie critic's form of cryptozoology, kind of like examining a muddy footprint and trying to sketch Bigfoot from it. This week, to kick off our new series dedicated to the unicorns, mermaids, and moderate Republicans of the movie world, the Screengrab looks back at the "Watchmen"-the-movie that might have been.]

When Warner Bros. which owns DC Comics, started looking for someone to adapt its property Watchmen to the movies, it must have seemed a natural choice to call in Sam Hamm, who had written the script for the 1989 Batman, a movie that commercially kick-started the superhero-comic-book movie genre. Hamm's Batman script, which was rushed into production without benefit of the polishing it would have received had not the 1988 Writers' Guild strike intervened, is not without its problems, and if there's a comics convention going on near you, I can introduce you to several people who'd be overjoyed at the chance to list them for you. But it also has Hamm's freshly thought-out take on its hero, which laid the psychological foundation for Michael Keaton's performance and, to a great extent, much of the batlore that's come since.

As Hamm would later write, he considered young master Wayne's having elaborately built his life around the murder of his parents and concluded "that Bruce had become Batman as a result of being spoiled. He had grown up with sufficient money and leisure to luxuriate in his own tragedy, to wallow in the false sense that it made him somehow unique. In other words, Bruce had never learned to cut his losses. For good or bad, he'd become addicted to his own pain—and he relied on the outward nobility of his mission to conceal the true perversity of his addiction. In this psychological scheme the Batman persona would function both as a symptom of, and justification for, his madness. To keep it alive, he'd have to relive the death of his parents again and again, killing them anew each night." This sort of talk must have made it seem as if Hamm would be a natural soul mate to Alan Moore, who'd made his name in the American marketplace by applying his own nasty insight to such stock characters as Swamp Thing and the Joker. In fact, Hamm's earliest involvement in the project overlapped with the days when Moore and DC Comics were still on speaking terms, and after Hamm made a pilgrimage to Northampton to sup with Rorshach's creator, Moore declared that he had "complete faith" in him. What neither of them may have grasped is that, whatever Watchmen needed to successfully navigate its way to the big screen, a sharp reading of the motivations of a fifty-year-old pop myth was not among them. Long before Zack Snyder came calling, Watchmen had a reputation for being unfilmable, and watching Hamm try to wrestle it into shape points up some of the reasons for that.

[Please note: while it may seem odd to attach a spoiler's advisory to a discussion of a script that was never filmed, it is impossible to discuss the Watchmen that didn't get made without mentioning the details it shares, and deviates from, the movie that was finally made and the comic book it started out from. Consider yourself warned.]

Moore's Watchmen is set in a specific time and place--his fantasy of an America that is a very different place from the America of the 1980s because a repressive U.S. government has had access to a superpowered figure Dr. Manhattan, who was able to keep a lid on things and shut down the cultural and political explosions of the '60s and '70s. It is also a product and reflection of a specific time and place: America in the actual mid-1980s, when it was fashionable to sneer at those explosions and even to try to pretend they hadn't happened. It was also a time when nuclear jitters, exacerbated by the last tremors of the Cold War, seemed to color everything. The first thing anyone trying to adapt Watchmen has to figure out is, what time is it set in, and what version of that time? Hamm's script opens with an action sequence set during the 1976 Bicentennial celbrations. Some terrorists inside the Statue of Liberty have taken hostages and are threatening to kill them and blow up the monument. Riding to the rescue are our heroes, Nite Owl, Rorshach, the Comedian, Silk Spectre, and Adrian Veidt--Moore's Ozymandias, who in an ominous geature is called "Captain Metropolis" here--who have a contract with the government to fight crime and who are banded together under the group moniker "The Watchmen", a name that never actually appears in the comic book. The fact that our heroes actually fight under the handle in the script is our first strong indication that Hamm has a healthy willingness to make drastic changes in the source material to make it fit the new medium. It is also our first strong indication that he kind of doesn't get it.

In Moore's Watchmen, people have been running around in homemade costumes fighting crime since World War II; it's the accidental creation of the omnipotent Dr. Manhattan, whose powers are soon put to service rendering the U.S. government beyond question, that has rendered them obsolete. Hamm eliminates most of the alternative-historical background, so that here, it seems as if Dr. Manhattan's appearance might have inspired others to turn to free-lance heroism, a career option that is shut down after things go dreadfully wrong at the Statue of Liberty. (He also deploys the revelation that Richard Nixon is still president, which Moore announced at the outset of the comic to help set its tone, as a late-inning shockeroo.) Except for Dr, Manhattan's origin story and the revelation of what pushed Rorshach over the edge, Hamm dispenses with Moore's intricate flashback structure. The predecessor versions of Nite Owl and Silk Spectre are gone, and after the murder that announces our jump to 1986, so is the Comedian; he's mentioned in passing a few times (never affectionately) but never seen again, and the news of his special connection to Silk Spectre never arrives. Hamm floorboards it to the end, which even die-hard fans of the comic have been known to concede has always been "problematic." In the original, Adrian Veidt obliterated part of Manhattan to scare the world powers into working together; in Hamm's rethinking, Veidt decides that in order to prevent an apocalyptic Cold War confrontation, he has to kill the indestructible Dr, Manhattan, a hat trick that involves producing some kind of time ripple through which he can prevent Dr. Manhattan from ever having existed, this negating the preceding couple of decades. When he succeeds, the central heroes find themselves deposited, in full costume, in the "real" New York of 1986.

Loopy as all this is--and it is sufficiently loopy to have guaranteed that any mention of the script garners howls of derision from fanboys coast to coast--it's worth keeping in mind just what Hamm was up against. The script, too, is a dated relic from a specific time and place: i.e., a Hollywood where comic book movies were now seen as potential cash cows but not prestige ventures, before Time magazine had included Watchmen on its list of the 100 best novels published since 1923. And the era in which the comic first appeared and the time in which Hamm was cobbling together his adaptation had been separated by its own time ripple: the cordial meetings between Reagan and Gorbachev had effectively killed the nuclear-clock atmosphere that the comic was a part of, even before the Berlin Wall came down. Hamm was taking an instant period piece and trying to find a way to keep it making sense, presumably with a contractually mandated running time of two hours or thereabouts.

In between the new opening and the changed ending, he serves up a sort of Cliff's Notes of the most excitingly filmable moments from the comic, and some of the new details he adds--such as the "Vietnam War Memorial" that resulted from Dr. Manhattan's quick winning of that war, a statue of the big blue bastard cradling a fallen soldier in his arms--catch the flavor of the comic to a T. He also performed a few cosmetic changes on such scenes as Rorshach's origin nightmare, concocting a gruesome new punishment for the masked vigilante to inflict on a child killer. (This was probably a necessary touch, since in a movie, it would be harder to ignore the fact that Moore had stolen the original scene wholesale from George Miller's Mad Max.) Less to his credit, Hamm also had Rorshach making Leno-worthy wisecracks about clogged toilets and street mimes. Even the scenes he retained and did justice to don't mean as much without the background Moore provided, especially since the connective tissue between them and Hamm's altered framework is thin and flimsy. But there's a bigger problem: the changes Hamm made conventionalize Watchmen. Terry Gilliam, who produced another draft with his co-writer Charles McKeown before concluding that there was no way to accommodate all the detail necessary to make a Watchmen movie that would be meaningful and comprehensible in the space of an acceptable running time, complained that Hamm's script just seemed like a bunch of superheroes running around, and he was not wrong.

The script for the current Watchmen movie is credited to David Hayter and Alex Tse. Tse is said to have worked from a pair of efforts Hayter wrote years ago, with an eye to eventually directing the movie himself. Hayter, too, had to grapple with the same road blocks as Hamm, the time period and the ending, and he apparently discarded the former only to have the current team bring it back. The new Watchmen was made according to rules that no one could have anticipated twenty years ago, namely a director with the inclination to make a film that would be as close a physical approximation of the comic book as possible (and the muscle, after the success of 300, to get the studio to go along with him), and a new entertainment business climate full of adults who grew up thinking of the comic as a masterpiece and who'd could envision an audience who'd want it treated not just respectfully but with slavish fan-worship. Confronting Nite Owl at the climax, Adrian Veidt accuses him of "a lack of vision", and that's the problem with any movie version of Watchmen whether the would-be adapter tinkers with the source material or solemnly traces over it. Whatever the billboards insist, it's a vision that somebody else already had, more than twenty years ago.

Morning Deal Report: Julia Roberts Meets Jesus H. Christ

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 13:30:00 GMT

As it turned out, the answer to the question “Who watches the Watchmen” was just about everybody, as the superhero epic topped the weekend box office with $55.7 million. We’ll see how all those high-minded claims about never making a sequel hold up now. It’s a long way down to second place, where we find Madea Goes to Jail with an $8.8 million total, followed by Taken with $7.5 million.

Julia Roberts will star in Jesus Henry Christ for director Dennis Lee. The film is based on Lee's “Student Academy Award-winning short film of the same name, and follows Henry James Hermin, a boy conceived in a petri-dish and raised by a loving, left-wing feminist. At the age of 10, he decides his mother's love is not enough and begins to follow a trail of Post-It notes stuck around town hoping it will lead him to his biological father,” per The Hollywood Reporter.

Chris Rock is set to star in a remake of the 2007 British film Death at a Funeral. Martin Lawrence and Tracy Morgan will join him in the comedy that “revolves around a dysfunctional family that gathers for the patriarch’s funeral. When tensions rise and old conflicts are uncovered, a man arrives saying he’s the dead man’s gay lover and threatens blackmail,” Variety reports. Neil LaBute directs. That’s right, I said Neil LaBute directs.

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The Screengrab Highlight Reel: Feb. 28-March 6, 2009

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 22:00:00 GMT

Look, I get it. I do have a sense of humor, you know. If I got to choose my own superpower, it wouldn’t be freakin’ gills, that’s for sure. And I understand that there isn’t a whole hell of a lot of crime going on underwater – although did you ever stop to ask yourself why? My stats don’t lie. Besides, you wait until those polar ice caps start to melt and you’re wading hip-deep down Fifth Avenue. You’ll be wishing you had ol’ Aquaman on speed-dial then.

So, yeah, I knew I wasn’t going to see my name on Screengrab Salutes the Best & Worst Comic Book Movies of All Time (Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five and Six). And I knew I was gonna get sick of all the Watchmen hype: the Screengrab Review, the Other Screengrab Review, The Final Countdown, Saturday Morning Watchmen, Dave Gibbons on Watchmen, The Science of Watchmen and on and on it goes. But I sure as hell wasn’t expecting this. I mean, come on! Who do I have to blowfish to get a movie deal already?

While I have your attention, I’d like to point out that my underwater internet connection is spotty at times. I almost missed out on Unwatchable week, featuring Lawnmower Man 2, Laserblast, Cool as Ice, Creepshow 3, and 3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain. And I almost missed this stuff, too:

Screengrab Reviews: Sherman’s Way, Tokyo!, Everlasting Moments and Reunion

Catching Up with the Lynches, David and Jennifer

Screengrab Q&A: Mark Webber, director of Explicit Ills

Watch It For Free: Sita Sings the Blues (2008, Nina Paley)

The Continuing Political Life of Election's Tracey Flick

Faking Farts with Olivia Thirlby

Educational Video of the Day: The Science of "Watchmen"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 15:30:00 GMT

James Kakalios, physics professor at the University of Minnesota and author of The Physics of Superheroes, served as a consultant on Watchmen, and here he provides the Cliff's Notes to the scientific probability of what goes on in that bad boy. Kakalios is not the first expert invited to provide a real-world viewpoint on an elaborate sci-fi fantasy world; we can't help expecting that, a lot of the time, the analysis boils down to something like, "Sure, what the hell. Your check cleared." Kakalios, who was hip to the classic comic before the filmmakers called, seems to have about the right balance of attitudes towards his place in the process when he describes the abilities of Dr. Manhattan and sums up, "Not strictly correct from a physic point of view, but very cool nonetheless." As the clips here show, Dr. Manhattan has "amazing super powers", as well as a girlfriend who looks like Jennifer Tilly, as a result of having had his "intrinsic field" removed. The prof shrugs, "There's no such thing as an intrinisc field. But if there were..."

Screengrab Salutes The Best & Worst Comic Book Movies Of All Time! (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 21:00:00 GMT

It’s Watchmen Week here at The Screengrab as the greater Geek-iverse (and the studio executives who love it) await the opening of Zack Snyder’s much-anticipated, much low-expectations-generating adaptation of Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons’ beloved, game-changing graphic novel about a bunch of asshole “super” “heroes” fighting crime, mental illness and erectile dysfunction in a scary alternate reality where Richard Nixon never went away. (And by the way, does everyone out there already know Silk Spectre II: Electric Boogaloo is portrayed by the same actress who played Valerie Cherish’s little blonde protégé on The Comeback? I just found that out, like, yesterday and was momentarily confused because I thought all the Watchmen were supposed to be kinda middle-aged -- but then I checked the Internet Movie Database and, much to my surprise, Malin Akerman’s actually 31, which is somewhat middle-aged, I suppose)...

Anyway, our own Scott Von Doviak and Paul Clark have already weighed in with their reviews of Hollywood’s latest attempt to wring a little KA-CHING! out of the POW! ZAP! BAM! of the funny book aisle, a strategy that’s been serving the Suits pretty well in recent years. I could pontificate here on the way America’s fascination with caped crusaders panders to infantile, imperialist empowerment fantasies, crowding more intelligent, adult material from the multiplex...but not only would that be annoying, it would also be hypocritical, since (A) I like a good funny book movie as much the next geek, (B) another movie about masked superheroes battling supervillains is a helluva lot better than another movie about masked sadists chopping up teenagers and (C) I keep hoping they’ll someday finally make that Wonder Woman movie I’ve been waiting for since I was 12. Mmm...magic lasso...

In the meantime, though, please enjoy the following list from Nerve.com’s very own Legion of Doom as we salute truth, justice, the American way and THE BEST AND WORST COMIC BOOK MOVIES OF ALL TIME!

The Best:

IRON MAN (2008)

True, it’s only been a few weeks since I wrote about Jon Favreau’s rock ‘em sock ‘em revival of the venerable Marvel Comics rust magnet for my Best of 2008 list...but (unlike certain awards-distributing Academies I could mention), I wanted to make sure this excellent film was recognized among the best of the best!

V FOR VENDETTA (2006)

Don't tell Alan Moore, who has never seen it but took the trouble to bad-mouth it anyway, but this adaptation of his Thatcher-era anarchists' fable, directed by Wachowski brothers proxy James McTeigue, does better than pretty good by its source material. The most important changes the filmmakers made from the original text, notably the transformation of Eve's (Natalie Portman) blokey boyfriend into a sardonic gay TV host played by Stephen Fry, actually work well: Fry's performance gives the film some heart, and film is clearly better suited than the printed page when it comes to paying gratuitous tribute to Benny Hill. The movie even inspired David Denby to apoplexy by seeming to present a terrorist as a political hero. Annoying David Denby is always a public service.

HULK (2003)

Remember how last year’s Edward Norton re-boot of The Incredible Hulk was going to prove that the relatively disappointing box office take of the 2003 Hulk was all Ang Lee’s fault? That audiences would embrace a louder, faster, dumber Hulk movie in a way they never did Lee’s artsy-fartsy one? How’s that working out for ya? The 2008 edition racked up almost exactly the same box office total as the 2003, so maybe it’s just that nobody likes poor ol’ Hulk. Or maybe the 2003 version wasn’t so bad after all, which is what I’ve been saying all along. Yes, it has its flaws; Eric Bana doesn’t exactly light up the screen, the CGI star isn’t quite up to snuff in some scenes, and things do take a little longer to get percolating than was perhaps necessary. But Lee brings a lyrical, haunting tone to the picture that may seem at odds with the whole “HULK SMASH!” ethos, but actually taps into a vein of melancholy the character has always possessed. The innovative editing scheme, with its cascade of digital wipes and split screens, is a far more clever and entertaining cinematic analog to reading a comic than anything Zack Snyder does in Watchmen, and the CGI effects do mesmerize at times. Hell, I could have watched this Hulk bouncing his way across the desert for hours.

X-MEN 2 (2003)

Ushering in the modern age of Marvel superhero films, Bryan Singer’s X-Men helped prove that the sight of men in tights – or, in this case, men and women in leather body suits – didn’t have to doom a comic adaptation to cartoonishness. It was Singer’s 2003 sequel, however, that truly elevated the genre by cannily marrying romantic drama, vigorous action and social-intolerance subtexts (here reconfigured from the source material to address sexuality more than race). Aside from Halle Berry’s still-awful wig and Alan Cumming’s grating Nightcrawler, X2 is sharper, smarter and more exhilarating than its predecessor, remaining true to the spirit of its heroes, villains and Dark Phoenix-ish storyline, buoyed by Brian Cox’s superbly villainous William Stryker, and smartly placing as high a premium on character as on spectacle. Which isn’t, however, to say that the spectacle itself isn’t reason enough to check out Singer’s sequel, since an early Stryker-led attack on Professor Xavier’s school, as well as Wolverine’s climactic throwdown with Lady Deathstrike, more than ably deliver the super-skirmish goods.

BATMAN (1989)

A genuine pop culture behemoth in the summer of '89, Tim Burton's blockbuster comic book movie probably did more than any other to make comics adaptations an accepted Hollywood genre, if only for proving that the success of the first couple of Superman movies hadn't been a fluke. This is not one of those accomplishments that nobody can see a downside to, and despite its hellacious popularity, the movie has always had enough attackers to count as controversial, including those who think it's a clumsy piece of storytelling to comics geeks (including Kevin Smith) who think it blasphemed its source material in any number of ways. But Burton's graphic sense and gothic sense of humor always made it a striking, strikingly funny piece of work, and facts are facts: no actor has ever been more compelling or convincingly haunted in a superhero role than Michael Keaton. The passage of twenty years and umpteen sequels and reboots (including Burton and Keaton's deeply flawed but often lovely Batman Returns) has thrown its defects and pluses into sharp relief: it's hard to remember that, in 1989, when Christopher Nolan was all of nineteen years old, many critics were appalled because they thought this picture was too dark.

SUPERMAN II (1980)

The 1978 Christopher Reeve Superman was an outlier, and probably the earliest example of filmmakers at least trying to make a genuinely good superhero movie. But it wasn’t entirely successful, and one sticking point for a lot of fans was the performance as Lex Luthor by Gene Hackman. The role has as many passionate defenders as detractors, but many thought that it was overly campy and unserious, and a superhero movie is generally only as good as its villain. The 1980 sequel would change all that. Introducing three Kryptonian supervillains escaped from the Phantom Zone – the hulking Non, the ice-cold Ursa, and best of all, the fantastic Terence Stamp as the megalomaniacal General Zod – Superman II gave us villains for the ages, and culminated in one of the most exciting fight scenes we’d seen to date. But it still wasn’t a great movie, and longstanding rumor placed the blame on the firing, when production was nearly complete, of Superman director Richard Donner and his replacement with Richard Lester. Lester, while a talented director, didn’t much care about the job and had little affection for the material, and the results are right there on screen. A few years ago, however, the Richard Donner cut was released commercially, and it finally became clear how good Superman II could have been if its original director had been allowed to pursue his vision all along.

Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four, Five & Six

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Scott Von Doviak, Nick Schager, Leonard Pierce

Video of the Day: Saturday Morning Watchmen

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 20:30:00 GMT

Can your heart stand one more Watchmen-related post? Not so much? I feel your pain, but this one is too good to resist if you haven't seen it already. "Happy Harry" has assembled the opening credits to a nonexistent Saturday morning Watchmen cartoon from the '80s, and if it doesn't make you happy, you are probably already dead. Hit the jump for the link.

Here's your Saturday Morning Watchmen!

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.

Ed Brubaker: From Comic Book Lowlife to Hollywood Player

Phil Nugent — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 16:30:00 GMT

All the excitement over movies like Watchmen is likely to create an opening for younger writers working in comics; after all, somebody's got to provide the raw materials that Hollywood will pounce on after it runs out of classic comics series to turn into movies. At least, that's the hope of people like Ed Brubaker, who recently shared his hopes and dreams with Los Angeles Times blogger Greg Braxton. "Last summer changed everything, you could feel it," says Brubaker, who had no credit on The Dark Knight but ended up getting a payday out of it anyway: "I even got money for the Batman movie because DC felt like there were fingerprints of stories I had written in the movie." In a comics universe where "mainstream" superhero creators and "alternative" creators are generally assumed to have limited interest in each other's work and, in their grumpier moments, to wish each other dead, Brubaker is unusual in having started out in the grungiest of "alternative" circles and wound up writing about costumed crimefighters. In the early '90s, Brubaker was part of the autobiographical comics scene with his Lowlife series, which featured thrilling, two-fisted tales of ripping off his employer, having his artwork compared unfavorably to that of Chester Brown, and needed a haircut. (He also edited the superb, single-issue comics anthology Monkey Wrench.) Brubaker began to edge towards the mainstream, and away from illustrating his own scripts, with the story An Accidental Death, which was drawn by Eric Shanower (Age of Bronze) and serialized in Dark Horse Presents in 1992, before being reprinted as a stand-alone volume by Fantagraphics. (That must have been sweet, given that it was the rejection by Fantagraphics' Kim Thompson that inspired the Lowlife story "You're a Good Man, Chester Brown.")

Brubaker had done work for DC Comics starting in the mid-90s, but he didn't start writing superhero comics until 2000, when he first started writing Batman. He's currently writing both Captain America and Daredevil for Marvel. But his real interest, from An Accidental Death to his Marvel Icon series Criminal, is in crime fiction, and much of his most interesting work, including his series Sleeper and the new Incognito (which is about a super-powered villain in the Witness Protection Program) has one foot in the world of superheroes and the other in hard-boiled fiction. Sam Raimi and Tom Cruise are reportedly interested in making a movie version of Sleeper, but in the meantime, Brubaker is testing the waters of live action with Angel of Death, a new web series he's created for Crackle.com, Sony's bid for your on-line entertainment fix. The series, which premieres this week and will consist of ten weekly installments, stars stunt woman and Death Proof star Zoe Bell as a hired killer who turns on her employers after suffering a traumatic head injury. (The cast also includes Doug Jones and Lucy Lawless, which must have made for quite an on-set reunion; Bell used to work as Lawless's stunt double on Xena: Warrior Princess. Brubaker says that Sony "green-lit it before I even wrote it, and they started filming two weeks after the final draft. I guess that's the world we're living in right now." You can watch episode one below:

From Crackle: Angel of Death Ep 1 "Edge" starring Zoe Bell

Morning Deal Report: Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Watchmen is still hours away from opening in theaters, but its visionary director (oh, how I’ll never tire of calling him that) has already lined up the cast for his next picture. “Amanda Seyfried in negotiations to topline the project, while Vanessa Hudgens, Abbie Cornish, Evan Rachel Wood and Emma Stone are in talks to star in the action fantasy” Sucker Punch, per The Hollywood Reporter. “Set in the 1950s, Punch follows a girl who is confined to a mental institution by her stepfather, who intends to have her lobotomized in five days. While there, she imagines an alternative reality to hide her from the pain, and in that world, she begins planning her escape, needing to steal five objects to help get her out before she is deflowered by a vile man. Snyder, who co-wrote the script with Steve Shibuya, has described the fantasy world as Alice in Wonderland with machine guns.” Oooh…visionary!

Dakota Fanning has joined the Runaways. That is, the Coraline star is “negotiating to play lead singer Cheri Currie in The Runaways, the biopic of the '70s all-girl band that already has Twilight star Kristen Stewart playing Joan Jett,” Variety reports. “At 15, Fanning is the same age Currie was when she made her debut with the Runaways as the lead singer who belted out hard-edged tunes like Cherry Bomb. Currie became caught up in drugs and a hard-partying lifestyle.” Screengrab instant poll: how many months before Fanning turns up in rehab?

Steve Carell is set to produce and star in Hi-T, which “revolves around a man dealing with uncontrollable mood swings after an injury forces him to take testosterone injections.” Yes, it is a comedy.

Related:
Screengrab Review: "Watchmen"
Steve Carell is Despicable

Screengrab Review: “Watchmen”

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 20:00:00 GMT

There are a million reasons a Watchmen movie should never have been made and no good reason it should have, aside from the obvious one: superheroes are big box office, and Watchmen was one of the most tantalizing untouched superhero properties available. It’s also an incredibly dense, multi-layered work, deriving much of its power from its subversion of five decades worth of comic book conventions. Having read the script Sam Hamm penned for Terry Gilliam’s aborted attempt at mounting Watchmen for the screen back in the early ‘90s, I know the new adaptation of the acclaimed graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons from “visionary director” Zack Snyder isn’t the worst case scenario. Nor does it exceed expectations. It’s just sort of pointless, which is what most fans of the classic comic have probably been expecting all along.

So can we separate the movie from its source material and judge it on its own merits? We can try, but Snyder doesn’t make it easy. It’s not a good sign when the movie kicks off with the image of an aging Richard Nixon portrayed by an actor wearing a ridiculous putty ski-slope nose and tons of awful aging makeup, quickly followed by a “Pat Buchanan” who looks and sounds exactly nothing like Pat Buchanan. The set-up here, should you be completely unfamiliar with the world of Watchmen: it’s 1985, and Richard Nixon has been re-elected to an unprecedented fifth term as President. Tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union are at an all-time high, and nuclear war appears to be inevitable.

The events of this alternate timeline have been aided and abetted by costumed heroes, among them The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), who helped lead the U.S. to quick victory in Vietnam. As Watchmen opens, the aging Comedian is murdered in his own apartment, leading masked vigilante Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley) to believe that someone is picking off the Watchmen, a superhero group whose members also include dumpy Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson), sultry Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman), and superhuman Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup, boasting a pendulous blue schlong that may disturb and frighten younger viewers – or any viewers, really).

In the comics, Moore and Gibbons amplify the major plotlines concerning the hunt for the mask-killer and the quest to avert global armageddon with flashbacks to the heroes’ origins (some of which date back to a superhero team of the 1940s called the Minutemen), along with various subplots including a love triangle among Silk Spectre, Nite Owl and Dr. Manhattan and a prison detour for Rorschach. To their credit, Snyder and screenwriters David Hayter and Alex Tse include as much of this material as possible (the Watchmen comic-within-the-comic Tales from the Black Freighter is getting a separate DVD release)…so why does the 168-minute running time still seem bloated beyond all necessity?

Part of it comes down to your definition of what constitutes a “faithful” adaptation. Great swaths of dialogue are lifted intact from the graphic novel, and the major visual set-pieces are painstakingly recreated (with at least one notable exception), and that may be enough to satisfy a segment of the audience. But the pacing is often leaden, the plotting lumpy and disjointed, the storytelling single-layered at best. The connective tissue between the big moments is thin to nonexistent; for instance, viewers coming to the movie cold may be forgiven for wondering how a sketchy character like Ozymandias (Matthew Goode and his dreadful wandering accent) turns out to be so crucial to the proceedings. Snyder seems most fully engaged when the action is at its most conventional, as when Nite Owl and Silk Spectre rescue kids from a burning building or Rorschach fends off assailants in prison.

Watchmen does have its moments. The closest it comes to capturing the texture of the graphic novel is the lyrical sequence in which Dr. Manhattan, having exiled himself to Mars, relives the events that led to his transformation into a godlike being. There’s visual razzle-dazzle to spare: an arctic fortress, a demolished city, a massive clockwork gizmo floating above the surface of Mars. And Jackie Earle Haley is terrific – he knows he’s playing a Clint Eastwood character times five, and he brings the appropriate psycho gusto to lines like “I’m not locked in here with you – you’re locked in here with me!”

I’ll even give Snyder some credit for improving the ending slightly, which wasn’t difficult (blasphemy, I know, but I re-read the last two Watchmen issues last night just to refresh my memory and that is not good stuff). But I can’t think of too many “visionary” directors who would use so many obvious, overplayed music cues (the love scene set to Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” is snicker-out-loud embarrassing) or cast so many nonentities in major roles (the listless Akerman is the worst offender). His approach is depressingly literal, and none of the scenes build on what has come before – they’re just meticulously reconstructed Scenes From Watchmen. It took more than 20 years to bring his most famous work to the big screen, and now Alan Moore isn’t the only one wondering why anybody bothered.

Dave Gibbons on "Watchmen-the-Movie": "Far Better Than Anyone Could Have Reasonably Imagined."

Phil Nugent — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 17:30:00 GMT

As you may have heard, Alan Moore, the writer of the 1986-1987 comic book series Watchmen, is so disenchanted with both Hollywood and DC Comics (the company that published the comic back when Moore was their official house genius) that he wants nothing to do with promoting Zack Snyder's movie version. It turns out that (as Michael Ordoña reports in the San Francisco Chronicle) Dave Gibbons, the other half of the comic's creative team, isn't so bashful. Gibbons says, "people say, 'Did you do any drawings for the Watchmen movie?' And I say, 'Thousands of them ... 20 years ago.' " Snyder has made a lot of noise about this being a faithful adaptation, and since movies and comics are both visual story-telling media, for Snyder that means duplicating the look of what was on the printed page, transferring it to the big screen, and setting it in motion. (That was basically his strategy with his movie version of Frank Miller and Lynn Varley's 300, too.) Gibbons, who calls the movie "far better than anyone could have reasonably imagined," says that "when you draw a comic book, you kind of have a movie in your head. You try to focus in and isolate one frame of what you're seeing. This is a bit like seeing that movie, but in the real world. You're going, 'That's that picture you drew; that's another picture you drew.' " Looking forward to watching it on DVD, he adds, "you can go back though and pause and look at the background because there's a lot of resonance in there. What Alan says about the graphic novel is, 'Everything in it means something. There's nothing put in there just to put it in.' And that's so with the movie as well. Even down to quite obscure background dressing, it all has some connection."

For his part, Snyder, who seems to have a healthy mutual-admiration thing going in with the cartoonist, says that Gibbons has "been a strong ally in bridging the gap" between the comic and the movie. Having Gibbons on hand as a consultant helped embolden Snyder in those decisions where he felt he had to deviate from the sacred text a bit. Gibbons says that "There's one scene in the film that isn't in the graphic novel that Zack wanted to see how I'd visualize. So I actually drew three new pages, which I got the original colorist, John Higgins, to color, so they looked absolutely authentic." Snyder and his production designer Alex McDowell also wanted to improve on the image of Dr. Manhattan's glass palace on the moon, so, the director says, "We hired this guy, he was like some atomic scientist, to design the original clockwork - it got modified from there, but it had this crazy scientific backing. There's a lot happening in that thing if you actually look at it. It's got this kind of corkscrew down the center - and in the director's cut you see it better, but when Manhattan and Laurie are walking up the stairs, there's no stairs in front of them. They come in under their feet, and as soon as they step off, they fold back into the machine." But for the most part, the chance to see Watchman come to life, looking much as Gibbons drew it, seems to have reduced the director to pure fanboy. One thing the production has given him has been the chance to have Gibbons at his ear, "from a creative standpoint, saying, 'Yeah. That's Watchmen. ' It's been really cool."

Related Stories: Alan Moore's Stealth Watchman Campaign

Watchmen: The Final Countdown

Watchmen: The Final Countdown

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 21:30:00 GMT

The reviews have progressed from a trickle to a deluge (look for ours tomorrow), so what do you say we conduct our final pre-release roundup of all things Watchmania?

At Hollywood and Fine, Marshall Fine ponders the big questions. “What is Watchmen but yet another distraction – a bit of apocalyptic storytelling meant to take our minds off the apocalypse now? That’s what I hate about this moment in time: There’s no such thing as simply seeing a movie like this and enjoying it on its merits. The hype machine has been pumping since before Snyder rolled the first camera. It’s been building to a deafening roar since the first of the year. You can’t escape it – it’s impossible not to get burned out on it, whether you’re interested in the subject or not.”

The Moviefile offers 10 Unlikely Movies You Should Watch Before Watchmen. Would you believe Purple Rain? “Adrian Veidt wasn't the only one who liked a nice purple suit. It was the '80s! See for yourself how much people of the era liked to wear purple. Well, some people.”

The “visionary director” Zack Snyder talks to the L.A. Times about filming the unfilmable. “We're killing the comic-book movie, we're ending it," Snyder said. "This movie is the last comic-book movie, for good or bad.” Hmm. How is he going to break this news to Samuel L. Jackson?

Here’s an MTV piece on Watchmen Easter Eggs, which you should probably save until after seeing the movie. Here’s a hint: “For 46 years, the world has wondered who really shot JFK. Thanks to Watchmen, we finally have photographic evidence of the man on the grassy knoll.”

As Paul Clark reported earlier today, the Watchmen Motion Comic is now available on DVD. Watch the trailer below – and consult Leonard Pierce’s review before you consider a purchase.

DVD Digest for March 3, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 15:00:00 GMT

I’ll be reviewing this week’s most notable DVD in a separate post later this morning, but for now here’s a list of this week’s other major releases.

This week’s list of recent releases coming to DVD is looking pretty paltry, with the highest-profile new arrivals being Baz Luhrmann’s Australia (Fox, also Blu-Ray) and (ugh) Beverly Hills Chihuahua (Disney, also Blu-Ray). Also this week is Kristin Scott Thomas in I’ve Loved You So Long (Sony, also Blu-Ray) and Bertrand Tavernier’s long-delayed In the Electric Mist (Image, also Blu-Ray). And, just in time to be tied in with the release of the big-screen blockbuster, Watchmen: The Complete Motion Comic (Warner, also Blu-Ray), which got reviewed here by former Screengrabber Kent Beeson.

Aside from the subject of my DVD review later on, this week’s most notable classic release is Wong Kar-wai’s Ashes of Time Redux (Sony). Likewise, not much in the way of TV on DVD, with the biggest-ticket item being ER Season 10 (Warner).

Finally, in Blu-Ray only releases, this week brings Brokeback Mountain (Universal) and The Silence of the Lambs (MGM).

Precursors: The Incredibles (2004)

Nick Schager — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 18:00:00 GMT

There are plenty of superhero comics (and cinematic translations of them) which would ably prepare moviegoers for this weekend’s immensely anticipated Watchmen. Yet those itching for an inkling of what director Zack Snyder’s adaptation holds in store would be well served to first check out Brad Bird’s 2004 Pixar gem The Incredibles, which borrows quite a few elements from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ landmark 1986-1987 graphic novel. While Bird’s film is less an elaborate, self-conscious deconstruction of superhero fiction than a high-flying celebration of family, it nonetheless grounds its tale in a contemporary world where – as in Watchmen – do-gooders (here with bona fide paranormal powers) have been forced by an ungrateful public into retirement, and where they now attempt to live mundane lives while suppressing their urges to don tights and fight crime. Furthermore, Bird’s story features ordinary citizens driven to copy their costumed idols and a villain created, in part, from the decisions made by the righteous Mr. Incredible – similarities which clearly reveal this superlative kids film’s debt to Moore and Gibbons’ work. Whether Watchmen will be as fully realized as The Incredibles is a question soon to be answered, but there’s little doubt that Bird’s first CG-animated effort (following 1999’s The Iron Giant), equal parts heart, humor and exhilarating action, puts most of its superhero-movie brethren to shame.

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: Feb. 21-27, 2009

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 22:00:00 GMT

It’s a beautiful day for a Screengrab post, a beautiful day in the Screengrab!

Hello, boys are girls! How are you today? I am fine! Today we’re going to visit the marvelous land of make-believe! First we’re going to explore the Screengrab’s Ultimate Exploitation Films (Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five and Six)! You younger boys and girls will need a note from your parents.

Next we’ll enjoy a magical Unwatchable Recap (Parts One, Two, Three, Four and Five)! All of you boys and girls will need a note from your psychiatric counselors.

Are you still with me, boys and girls? Hold on tight!

Screengrab Review: The Trouble with Romance

Alan Moore’s Stealth Watchmen Campaign

Screengrab Flashback, 1987: Crispin Glover, Kicking Against the Prick

Precursors: Street Fighter

CineKink Film Festival: The Auteur

Where Are You Filming the Rest of Your Life?

Alan Moore’s Stealth “Watchmen” Campaign

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 16:00:00 GMT

You may have noticed that Alan Moore isn’t doing a lot of press in support of the Watchmen movie. If you’re familiar at all with Moore and his usual m.o., this doesn’t surprise you. Moore has distanced himself from pretty much all the previous adaptations of his work, including From Hell, V for Vendetta and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, so why should Watchmen be any different? But maybe we’re looking at this all wrong. Maybe Moore is actually employing some reverse psychology, some of the mind-bending trickeration that makes his comic book work so compelling, in order to convince us all to see the Watchmen movie. Let’s examine this new Wired interview with Moore for clues.

“I think that adaptation is largely a waste of time in almost any circumstances,” says Moore. “There probably are the odd things that would prove me wrong. But I think they'd be very much the exception. If a thing works well in one medium, in the medium that it has been designed to work in, then the only possible point for wanting to realize it on ‘multiple platforms,’ as they say these days, is to make a lot of money out of it. There is no consideration for the integrity of the work, which is rather the only thing as far as I'm concerned. I've got enough money to be comfortable. I live comfortably, I can pay the bills at the end of every month. I don't want a huge amount of money by diluting something that I happen to be rather proud of at its outset. That pretty much describes my attitude toward the idea of any of my works being realized in another form, really.”

OK, so maybe he’s building his way up to telling us that Watchmen is one of the rare exceptions? “With a comic book you can dart your eyes back to a previous panel, or you can flip back a couple of pages to check whether there is some reference in the dialog to a scene that happened earlier. You can also spend as much time as you want absorbing every image. This is especially true of something like Watchmen, where I was trying to take advantage of Dave Gibbons' brilliant capacity as a former surveyor for including incredible amounts of detail in every tiny panel, so we could choreograph every little thing. The little symbols and signs appearing in the background, every little touch could be choreographed to the last detail, and we knew that the audience—because they'd be reading at their own pace—would be able to study each panel and to take in these almost subliminal details. Even the best director in the world, even a person as talented as Terry Gilliam, could not possibly get that amount of information into a few frames of a movie.”

Surely the twist is coming now. He’s about to tell us how it could actually be done. “When we did meet—which was mainly just because I thought it would be really good fun to meet Terry Gilliam, and so it proved—Mr. Gilliam did ask me how I would go about translating Watchmen into a film, and I said to him, ‘If anybody had asked me, Terry, I would have advised them not to.’ I think Terry is an intelligent man and came to that conclusion himself. And I think he said something to that effect, that he thought it was something probably best left as a comic and shouldn't be made into a film.”

Oh, well. So much for that theory. If you want to read more from Moore, including some tidbits on his upcoming novel Jerusalem, check out the Wired interview.

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: Feb. 14-20, 2009

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 22:00:00 GMT

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. You look marvelous. I must confess I was touched, as am I every year, when the good people at AMPAS called once again to ask me to host the Oscars. Although they begged and pleaded and cajoled and nearly stooped to bribery, as they always do, I simply could not work the telecast into my very busy schedule. I’m currently touring with my very touching one-man show about going to Yankee Stadium with my dad, watching Mickey Mantle gracefully prancing through the lush green outfield of the House That Ruth Built, sharing the laughs and the tears that only a father and son can truly know. So I don’t have time to do all the research, such as reading Up the Academy: The Screengrab Salutes the All-Time Best & Worst Best Picture Winners (Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six and Seven). Truly I wish I could squeeze Phil Nugent’s Oscar Predictions, In Other Blogs: Oscar Overload, Harvey Weinstein Predicts Another Great Oscar Year for Harvey Weinstein, Oscar Prospectus and Academy Awards Show Cuts Best Song Nominee "Down to Earth" Down to 65 Seconds; Peter Gabriel Vows Silent Protest into my busy schedule. But I cannot.

Nor can I read any of the following:

If It's Tuesday, It Must Be Time for Another Post About "The Godfather"

Screengrab Review: "Must Read After My Death" and "Eleven Minutes"

Mike White’s Amazing Race

Counting Down to “Watchmen”

Reviews By Request: How Green Was My Valley (1941, John Ford)

Unwatchable #51: “Simon Sez”

Steve Spielberg's Recession-Era "Lincoln" Biopic: Brother, Can You Spare $50 Million?

Counting Down to “Watchmen”

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Can you feel the excitement building? Yeah, me neither, but there’s nothing we can do about it: Watchmen will be arriving in theaters two weeks from Friday and we’ll just have to ride out the hype together. It’s already proven too much for our regular Watchmen correspondent Leonard Pierce, who is currently receiving treatment in an undisclosed location, so I’m filling in for him today with the latest in Watchmania.

British tabloid The Sun has an exclusive clip from the film, which runs approximately 90 seconds and appears to have been chosen completely at random. “Superheroes battle to save men, women and children from a burning building in our explosive exclusive from Watchmen. Nite Owl II (PATRICK WILSON) and Silk Spectre II (MALIN AKERMAN) fly to the rescue in the hottest Superhero movie of the year.” It’s hard to believe they could have picked a more generic scene, but I’m sure they have their reasons.

“There is a press blackout on reviewing the Watchmen movie until March 6,” writes Matt Selman of Time.com magazine before going on to review the movie. Or as he puts it: “Don't worry, I'm not going to write a review of Watchmen. What I am going to write about is the emotional experience of seeing a piece of literature with which I have an intense personal connection LITERALLY COME TO LIFE. It's a serious freak-out… I'm not allowed to talk details, but let's just say it is astounding how much of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' graphic novel is in this movie… Sitting in that screening room and watching the visual world of the Watchmen movie unfold was one of the most powerful experiences I've ever had.” So we’ve got the pull-quote: “Astounding! Powerful! A serious freak-out!” But don’t worry, it’s not a review.

Here’s the trailer for Tales from the Black Freighter, the adaptation of the comic-within-the-comic that will be released on March 24:

Finally, if you’re just trying to kill time before the movie opens on March 6, why not play the online videogame? It’s supposedly replicating a 1977 arcade game, but it looks suspiciously 1983 to me.

Related:
We Ain't Watching THIS "Watchmen"
Watchmen 2?

Nine-Point Plans

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 18:15:00 GMT

It ain't Thanksgiving, but everyone wants a slice of the turkey. Most people have already made their New Year's resolutions (some of us have already broken them, for that matter), but up north, in Edmonton's Vue Weekly newspaper, critic Brian Gibson is asking not what he can do for Hollywood, but what Hollywood can do for him.

Shocked into a wishful reverie by a chance viewing of Clint Eastwood's embarrassing end-of-life project Gran Torino, Gibson delivers a nine-item wish list for what he hopes the movies will deliver in 2009. On his checklist are more realistic films about class and race, big comebacks from fading Hollywood actresses (including Screengrab favorite Debra Winger), more films by female directors, and "a damn good Canadian movie from a director other than Cronenberg, Egoyan or Maddin".

Never ones to miss out on the chance to jump someone else's train, we'd like to echo several of Gibson's wishes -- especially his desire to see serious film criticism make a comeback, and a better distribution system that ensures that people in locations like, oh, say Edmonton and San Antonio get a chance to see something other than blockbusters on the big screen a couple of times a year. And, to round out his list to an even dozen, here's three more things we'd like to see from the film world in 2009:

1. The emergence of a new and exciting national cinema. The last several years have seen the emergence of exciting and vibrant film scenes in places like South Korea, Spain, Thailand, and even Iran. But how about a new national cinema taking center stage? Enough great films have come out of Africa in the last few years to suggest they're due for a major renaissance; Arab cinema might finally bloom in the unlikely event that a prolonged period of politcal and economic stability settles in the Gulf; and Italian cinema has been in the doldrums for a number of decades.

2. Directors breaking out of their boxes. While there's something to be said for finding what you're good at and sticking with it, the emergence of several major talents in recent years who have confined themselves to the dreary and limited world of torture-porn horror movies gives one pause. Rob Zombie's movies are made by a man with a careful and crafty eye for visuals and a keen grasp of mood, and the first half The Strangers proved that young Bryan Bertino is a master of timing and a guy who knows how to wring tension out of a dramatic scene or a simple framing shot. We'd like to stop imaging what it would be like if these guys turned their obvious skills towards something a little bit more mature, and actually see it.

3. Watchmen being worth watching. It doesn't seem like so goddamn much to ask.

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