Stuff I've Been Watching

Mini-reviews:

• Death Proof
  The easiest way to ignore a Tarantino movie these days is to complain that you were bored by the dialogue. Fair enough. But I admired the symmetry of the movie's seemingly simple structure and the way that the longing and vulnerability of the characters in the first half (an adolescent restlessness that's implicit in the horror movie set-up) is transformed into empowered kick-assery in the second (nuts and bolts film-making being Quentin's skewed version of adult professionalism). In the end, Despair becomes Joy by way of fast cars and another classic soundtrack.
  
• Kung Fu Panda
  Cute. Funny. Short.
  
• Point Break (1991)
  Keanu. Swayze. Busey. There should have been Oscars handed out for this thing, it's so genius. The FBI tracks down The Ex-Presidents, a gang of bank robbers who just happen to also be deeply spiritual surfers and adrenalin junkies. It's John from Cincinnati meets The Bourne Identity meets The Dark Knight with Dr. Perry from Scrubs. Groundbreaking in almost every way. Even the meatball sandwiches sound good. Two.
  
• Quantum of Solace
  An unwatchable blur of burned out images. What should have been the Empire Strikes Back of neo-Bond is so boring and overly stylized that it leaves almost no impression whatsoever. Even Judi Dench's M seems perplexed by the odd turn of events.
• There Will Be Blood
  It's sort of a masterpiece, possessing all of the grandeur of The Godfather and, in the character of Daniel Plainview, the tragic monomania of another Citizen Kane. But there's no joy in the movie, and nothing resembling human life in the thinness of the supporting characters. The character of the young preacher is simply no match for the ferocity of Daniel Day-Lewis's oil man.
  
• Tropic Thunder
  A movie that builds all its comedy into the ingeniousness of its many premises and set-ups, but is sometimes too knowing and self-aware to be actually funny. Robert Downey Jr. is genius. Tom Cruise is crude. It's funny to watch Matthew McConaughey play Wii Tennis, but he's no Ari Gold. The manic third act is indistinguishable from a bad Chuck Norris flick.
• Watchmen
  There is a dulling sameness to the imagery and pacing that ultimately derails the adaptation. When every image is this beautiful and every moment this grand, it leaves you with nothing to hold onto and nowhere to breathe. The movie works best when the flashbacks are able to stall the narrative and restore the episodic feel of Alan Moore's original. The comic, after all, was not just a cold-war story, but a modernist artwork that relied on the accumulation of a thousand tiny details over 12 chapters, the juxtaposition of incompatible images and ideas, and the poetic rhythms of free association.
  

A Stronger Loving World

I don't know if Watchmen is a very good movie or not -- and I'm not likely to find out until next fall when it comes out on DVD -- but I did read the comic way back in 1987 and again last summer in preparation for the movie. It's good, and if you're so inclined, you should read it. That being said, it seems to me that the media and marketing blitz surrounding the release of the movie can only do harm. The endless explaining of the who and what and when of the Watchmen, it's creation, story, and major characters does nothing to enlighten the masses. Alan Moore's great gift as a writer is to create the aura of structure and rational meaning in what is in fact a very messy, punky, angry, nihilistic, and necessarily problematic work of art. The point of the reviews on the other hand is not to engage in these themes but to domesticate the book and make it more easily digestible to a mass audience all in the name of selling tickets.

Here's Tom Shone in Slate:

Watchmen was unquestionably a landmark work, a masterpiece, even. Before Moore came along, comic books were not generally in the habit of quoting Nietzsche, or scrambling their time schemes, or berating their heroes for their crypto-fascist politics, or their readers for reading them. It was Moore's slightly self-negating triumph to have allowed it to do so. But did the comic book have to "grow up"? The last time I looked, the only ones reading Ulysses and quoting Nietzsche were teenagers. No adult has time for aesthetic "difficulty" or "self-consciousness." Life is too short. Frankly, we'd much rather be watching The Incredibles.

I'm not sure what James Joyce and Nietzsche did to deserve this sort of treatment, but I'm personally offended by the anti-intellectualism of the closing sentences, especially when paired with an unquestioned hostility toward the Gen-X teenagers who made up the bulk of the comic's original audience, and who undoubtedly today have the greatest emotional investment in the success or failure of the film.

And so, here's A.O. Scott in The New York Times:

I’m not sure that this hypothetical young man — not to be confused with the middle-aged, 21st-century moviegoer he most likely grew into, whose old copy of “Watchmen” lies in a box somewhere alongside a dog-eared Penguin Classics edition of “Thus Spake Zarathustra” — would necessarily say that Mr. Snyder’s “Watchmen” is a good movie. I wouldn’t, though it is certainly better than the same director’s “300.” But it’s possible to imagine that our imaginary student would at least have found some food for thought in Mr. Snyder’s grandiose, meticulously art-directed vision of blood, cruelty and metaphysical dread.

Again with the implied immaturity of anyone caught reading Nietzsche (and for the record both my old Watchmen and my dog-eared Penguin Classics are on the library shelf and not in a box somewhere). But things get worse:

The infliction of pain is rendered in intimate and precise aural and visual detail, from the noise of cracking bones and the gushers of blood and saliva to the splattery deconstruction of entire bodies. But brutality is not merely part of Mr. Snyder’s repertory of effects; it is more like a cause, a principle, an ideology. And his commitment to violence brings into relief the shallow nihilism that has always lurked beneath the intellectual pretensions of “Watchmen.” The only action that makes sense in this world — the only sure basis for ethics or politics, the only expression of love or loyalty or conviction — is killing. And the dramatic conflict revealed, at long last, in the film’s climactic arguments is between a wholesale, idealistic approach to mass death and one that is more cynical and individualistic.

This idea is sickening but also, finally, unpersuasive, because it is rooted in a view of human behavior that is fundamentally immature, self-pitying and sentimental. Perhaps there is some pleasure to be found in regressing into this belligerent, adolescent state of mind. But maybe it’s better to grow up.

I won't defend the violence of the movie, but in the novel violence is always unpleasant and a source of lasting physical and psychological wounds. More importantly, Alan Moore was trying to highlight the reactionary politics implicit in the super-hero archetype: it's fascistic tendency to aestheticize violence in the name of Reagan-era jingoistic neo-conservative politics. On every page the adolescent comic book tropes turn on themselves. The heroes are not heroic. They are damaged and out of their depth, struggling to connect with the larger world around them. The story is not so much about saving the world as it is about gaining awareness of what all those immature, self-pitying and sentimental impulses can lead to.

It was never Watchmen, or its initial audience that needed to grow up, it was the mass culture that accepted the apocalyptic status quo of the cold war and embraced the home-spun nonsense of Ronald Reagan's presidential persona that needed a swift kick (one alas, that it did not receive until the failed second term of G.W. Bush). The world was a broken place in 1987 and the reaction to Watchmen as something adolescent and not worth bothering with is just part of sweeping the dangers of art under the rug. The message to the audience is not to warn them against a loud, empty-headed blockbuster entertainment, but rather to warn them against the possibility that they might have to deal with the ugliness of history and angry ideas.

There's no room for Art in the so-called grown-up world. Commerce trumps poetry every time. The worst thing you could possibly do with a movie like Watchmen, is, you know, take it seriously.

Best Comic Book Movie Ever?

New Watchmen videos. The images are so perfect, it makes you wonder how there will be any room left on the screen to actually tell the story. Still, wow.

Who Will Watch the Watchmen

People are worried that the Watchmen movie won't be as good as they hope because the guy who made 300 is making it. My fear is that the movie will expose the fact that Moore's Watchmen wasn't all that great to begin with. Like most comics, it's all about the concept and the atmospherics, the characters and their wacky back-stories and attitudes, but let's face it the actual plot is pretty thin gruel. The Comedian gets thrown out a window and it takes us 12 issues to discover, what exactly? Ozymandius is going to save the world by dropping a squid on Manhattan. Awesome.

The coolness is not in the story, but in the details and the encyclopedic attempt to cram everything in. Just as in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, all the things that make it good are all the things that are almost impossible to get on a movie screen.

300 suffered from the same problem because it's overdoneness was built in. Frank Miller's whole concept was ass-backwards from the get-go and the whole thing only really existed because Miller was going through his whole kinetic all action no story phase.

"Ok, dudes, check this out. Normally what you do is take a myth or a legend like King Arthur, or Robin Hood, or Ulysses, and try to find its historical context and dramatize it as if it really happened. But what I'm going to do is take an actual historical event and present it as though it was a myth or legend. Crazy right?"

He sandelpunked Herodotus and turned it up to 11.

To be fair, this isn't what Moore did with Watchmen, and I think the movie version will be just fine. The question is will the audience for The Dark Knight be up for another round of Batman as filtered through Taxi Driver.