The Problem with Fanboy Loyalty, and Other Regretable Things About Watchmen

Monday, March 16th, 2009

So I saw Watchmen five or six days ago.

It’s probably important to preface this review by saying this was my very first contact with the Watchmen franchise. I went into the movie more or less blind to the universe, and obviously that makes my experience and reception of the film potentially very different than that of people intimately familiar (and likely more enamoured with)  the content.

The graphic novel may be good, I don’t know, but the movie is in many ways a bit of a mess. This is supposed to be an adaptation of a graphic novel– keyword: ADAPTATION. At this, the screen writer and directer failed and failed hard.

Comics don’t translate to the screen directly. B-plots, flashbacks, and character side-stories that work so well broken down in chapters of a graphic novel create a myriad of problems in a film. The story jumped, started-and-stopped, and flash-backed all over the place, often with little warning and even less necessity. What resulted was a film that was often confusing (especially for an audience with no background knowledge of the source material to fall back on), too long, and poorly paced. I left the theatre not entirely sure what had happened or why, who had done what, or even when they might have done it. Even the names ‘Rorshach’ and ‘Ozymandias’, which are easy enough to recognize on the page, made following the story more complicated. I had to ask a Watchman-steeped friend what Adrian Veidt’s superhero name was after I walked out of the theatre, due to the bare minimum attempt made to enunciate this complicated, unfamiliar, unusual word and explicitly connect it to the character in a meaningful way. The director and screenwriter may have been intending to stay as true to the novel as possible, but the static replication they produced muddied the thematic waters much more than any creative interpretation might have; it was clear the director didn’t have any better idea of the point of this movie than I did. The screenplay badly needed to be re-written by a clever, creative problem-solver, then attacked with a red pen several times over. The direction likewise suffered, boxing the actors into disjointed stepping stones of grandiosely hollow tableaus.

In fact, the best part of the movie was the opening sequence: a series of actual tableaus with poignant (if entirely obvious) underscoring and brilliant art direction that set the mood and introduced the universe. It is a poor experience indeed that draws you in then unceremoniously kicks you back out again.

The acting was all over the board. Jackie Earle Hayley as Rorshach was intense and captivating, Billy Crudup’s Doctor Manhattan was appropriately distant despite the unconvincing CG, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Edward Blake was at least menacing enough to be going on with. Malin Akerman and Patrick Wilson as Silk Spectre and Nite Owl were one dimensional, flat, and never convinced me they were doing more than reading lines off pages. And Matthew Goode as Ozymandias seemed comically out of place in the Watchmen universe, as if a Saturday morning cartoon character had wandered onto set and been somehow trapped there.

And the makeup…! Don’t even get me started on the travesty and insult to makeup artists everywhere that was Carla Gugino — the first Silk Spectre’s — old age makeup. As far as Nixon goes, I’m not sure if they were intentionally going for caricature there or not, but either way it didn’t work. At all.

Much has been made in other places of Doctor Manhattan’s bits and the R rating this film received, and I honestly didn’t find the nudity distracting or out-of-place. In all honesty, I found the strange black underwear-thing he sometimes wore far more distracting than glowing blue genitalia, but whatever. I’m one of those strange ultra-liberal people that doesn’t understand the way western society freaks out about nudity. I much prefer the honest depiction of the male nude form to the Ken-doll that was the Silver Surfer, personally. I don’t understand what our society finds so scandalous about nudity and probably never will.

The violence in the movie was… I don’t even know. Schizophrenic, anyway. Excessively violent scenes added for shock value (Rorshach and the clever) followed honestly well-done and chilling moments (the swinging bathroom door in the prison). I was informed Doctor Manhattan was supposed to be the only character with real super powers, yet somehow everyone was able to smash marble counter tops apart, kick holes in solid stone walls, and leap up drainpipes like frogs. …eh? It ranged from overly stylized to comic-book caricature to truly grisly to ho-hum. Apparently consistency was not something anyone was too fussed about.

The musical choices were overly literal and never suited the tone of the scenes they underscored, either as compliment or foil. Theywere jolting, over-powering, and more often than not completely under-cut and made ridiculous the scenes they were paired with. In particular, Simon and Garfunkle over the funeral scene, Nina’s Red Balloons over a dinner sequence, and certainly the overused Hallelujah over the sex scene probably boil down to misguided attempts at being clever.

Speaking of the Silk Spectre/Nite Owl sex scene, I’d like to take a moment to appreciate just how utterly and completely awful it really was, with or without the underscore. It definitely falls somewhere in the top five worst sex scenes of all time. I’m hoping for a Razzie. We should start a campaign.

I have significant issues with the way rape, the victims of it, and the perpetrators of it are depicted in this story. This is so obviously written by a man who thinks of rape as something that happens to other people, and its use as a plot device is extremely offensive to me, as if it were something so casual to speak of and use and toss in as one requires it. It is irresponsible social story-telling to suggest and encourage this kind of male fantasy where the perpetrator of rape earns nothing but a slap in the face, as if sexual aggression was just a natural stepping-stone to a consensual sexual relationship. I also tire of the double-standard for costumed super heroes that puts the male characters in the protective armor necessary for the job and the women in thin, scantly-there lycra suits that would be unsuitable for a windy afternoon nevermind combat. At least Wolverine and Cyclopes were subjected to the same tight leather suits that Storm and Jean Grey were in the X-men movies.

In closing, there was very little to redeem Watchmen in my eyes, yet I left the theatre confounded by friends who seemed to think it was just brilliant in every way. I’m sorry, what? Did we just see the same film? Did you see that random purple tiger with horns? Did I just fall asleep and dream the last three hours?

So. The Twilight Movie.

Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008

Truly, it did not disappoint in either fail or lulz, except in its lack of the "do I dazzle you" line. If they could include the damn mushroom ravioli, they could’ve included the bloody "do I dazzle you" line. They even set it up with the checking-out-Cullen waitress, and then just let it sit there, completely unsaid! It would have been the marashino cherry of awesome on a hilariously lol sundae. The unbuttoned shirt "this is the skin of a MONSTERRR" line in the Meadow of Great Sparkle almost-but-not-quite made up for it, though.

WHAT was with emo Eric and his stereotypically closet gay personality emo hair? Perhaps I shouldn’t be so surprised, as it’s just another in a line of WTF from the makeup and hair department that decided to make the male vampire cast look paler by keeping them well stocked in Maybeline Saucy Mauve lipcolour. Please to be also not allowing me to get started on or go anywhere near the 100% fail that was the wardrobe department’s lame-ass attempt at period (or native) clothing in the flashbacks (anviliciously tinted sepia, just in case you missed that Flashback Voiceover DUH moment there).

I especially liked how they managed to stay true to the book in some pivotal places, like inserting Random Acts of Clumsiness throughout, just in case we all forgot the pivotal point that– wait a second…. OH RIGHT, BELLA’S CLUMSINESS IS NOT PIVOTAL AT ALL, IT’S JUST HER ENDEARING BUT CRIPPLING MARY SUE FLAW TO REMIND US SHE’S NOT SELF INSERTION TWO-DIMENSIONAL AT ALL.

As for the two leads, I have very little to say about Miss Stiffy McOne-Face and Mr Constipation Man Cullen. Seriously, Kristen Stewart made exactly one face throughout the entire film, and it was the one where it looked like she had a permanent underbite and lockjaw issues. As for Robert Pattison, I can see the vague outline of appeal, but it’s so heavily obscured by intense butterscotch stares and the Angsty Face of Great Pain (and Maybeline Saucy Mauve) that all that remains is some guy wearing heavy makeup with hair puff levels that seriously need to be reconsidered (wardrobe/makeup department current score: -5).

I don’t know if they were trying to be all Intense and Emotional or what, but I saw zero chemestry and 100% awkwardness between the two of them. Was that the point? Is that what they were trying for? Did I miss something while reading the book, or is this some sort of interpretation of Vampire/Teenage Angsty-Romance I am thus far not familiar with? Every time they were within eyesight of each other, Bella just looked like she was in some sort of underbite, jaw-pinned, robotic trance. To be fair, it might have been the only way she could deal with all that gratuitous Acting! coming from Edward.

Edward throwing up in his mouth a little when the fan wafts Bella’s scent in his general direction? I may have guffawed into my scarf. Edward, you fail at subtle.

And then the movie was all, "whoops!" and I was all "Wha– Was that… was that plot? *checks watch* But we’re only ten minutes in! WHO ARE YOU AND WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH TWILIGHT? and then the fangirls behind me were like, "SHHHHHH!". There was more surprise plot-droppings later (but not later enough like it should have been if it was really Twilight, y’know) including one whilst driving back to Forks in the Volvo of Great Justice, which thoroughly shocked me by making it so the plot didn’t, like, come from nowhere. I found the hilarity again pretty quickly, though, when Edward’s eyes just about bulged from their sockets when he *INTENSES* Carlisle in what I can only assume is some pretty hardcore mind-reading, based on the Meaningful Look Carlisle passed Edward.

The sparkling was exactly what I hoped it would be, which was the most ridiculous visual ever. The no-sex Meadow of Great Sparkle sex scene with the sudden killer sparkle might be the most hilarious punctuation of a scene in which nothing happens I’ve ever seen:

Camera: *360s*
Bella and Edward: *stares*
Sun: *comes out*
Edward’s Killer Skin: *sparkles*
Music: *emo-swells*

I also have to say the no-sex tree-sex scene was another piece of giggly cinematic gold.

Y’know that part where they walk up the stairs in the Cullen house and see the Graduation Hat artwork on the wall? I can’t have been the only one thinking Growing Up Cullen at that moment, I just can’t. All I could think about was Edward in all his scrapbooking glory bending over it and painstakingly trying to decided how to colour-code in the gang’s latest caps.

The baseball game and their matching uniforms was pretty much what I expected, though I’m honestly not sure what to make of Alice’s Baseball-Ballet pitcher maneover. (Also, I can’t remember what Rosalie’s vampire super power was. Based off the information gathered in this movie, I can only surmise it is the Bitch-Flounce, but can someone get back to me on that?) But then the Dramatic Guitar Solo indicated Oncoming Swaggering Plot would be Slo-Moing, and I can’t tell you how hard it was to smoother my giggles at the Sharks’n'Jets routine, especially when they all started hissing at each other. Did I miss the hissing in the book? Because there was a lot of vampire hissing going on. Maybe it’s a side effect of the sparkling.

I was left somewhat slackjawed by the Plot That Had Been Carefully Laid leading to what was the lamest slapfight of all time. It was sure a good thing the movie spent all that time carefully laying the trail for that plot, or I seriously might have missed the climax as it passed by in a stream of badly shot and unremarkable wire-choreography in, like, five seconds. If not for the hissing and the I-have-to-pee predator campfire dancing in the background, it would have even remained entirely unlulzy (though Alice snapping what’s-iz-name’s neck was pretty fucking sweet, I have to admit).

In conclusion, I paid zero dollars and received two hours of hearty lulz. I hear they’ve greenlit the second movie, so I guess this means I’ll have to go and read the second book sometime before I sneak into that one, too.

Nights in Rodanthe: Some Quick Thoughts

Friday, October 10th, 2008

Last night I went with Sister and my Mom to see Nights in Rodanthe. It was good in that predictable, formulated, romantic-drama kind of way.

Not particularly exceptional or particularly memorable, it suffered from sentimental story syndrome, glaringly artificial dialogue, and unimaginative editing that frequently drew out lineless scenes way beyond their artistic merit or usefulness. The plot, from it’s broadest structure to its smallest details, felt forced and contrived, and the characters were definitely flatter than they could be. Gere and Lane did their best with what they’d been given, but their talent wasn’t quite enough to make up for the poor writing, directing and editing of this flick.

I enjoyed it the same way shippers enjoy mediocre fanfiction about their pairing of choice; there was enough there to keep me interested and engaged until the end, but it lacked that certain professional polish and punch one expects of published works. Good enough, but not great.

The Obligatory (& Epically Long) Dark Knight Post

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008

So, after unsuccessfully trying to navigate the tumultuous waters of other people’s busy schedules, I grabbed the first available friend I could find and went on Sunday to see Dark Knight.  The unspoilery opinion is that I enjoyed it thoroughly, but not in the way I expected to.  To understand what I mean by that, you’ll have to go beyond the cut, where the spoilers live.

The Dark Knight is not a typical Batman movie.  In fact, it isn’t really structured or written or filmed like your typical comic book action movie at all.  Most telling of this is that the climax of this film isn’t an action climax — the largest and most delicious action sequence comes half way through instead of at the end.  Instead, at its centre is not the journey or character of a single man; rather, the actions, choices, and journeys of three equally main characters have been crafted into a broader thematic tapestry.  The journeys are not pivotal in and of themselves, but taken together they communicate a larger thesis.  This is the first Batman movie not to have the word Batman in the title, perhaps foreshadowing to us that it was not meant to be entirely his movie.

Batman and his counterpart Bruce Wayne disappear for stretches of time in this movie that would typically spell disaster, but I was so engrossed in the story that I never found his absence conspicuous.  In fact, if I had to pinpoint the weakest link of this strong chain, it would likely be Batman, which perhaps seems like a bad start for a Batman movie.

Don’t get me wrong, Christian Bale’s performance was as good this time as it was last time around, but in Dark Knight he’s given only a third of the storytelling meat to play with instead of the full plate he had to sink his teeth into for Batman Begins, and if anything it’s the smallest of the three portions.  He is largely reactive, and his character rarely propels the story forward; rather, he spends most of the film being swept along by other forces, nearly always a step too far behind to change the trajectory.

Whereas Batman Begins was largely a story charted by the actions and choice of Bruce Wayne and their affect on his life, The Dark Knight is more a story of the fallout of that original, and the larger impact of one man’s decisions to “let the joker out of the box”.  Though Harvey Dent directs this line at Maroni, it’s clear that Nolan is directing it at Bruce Wayne; if one man creates a mythic hero such as Batman, what sort of larger than life villains does he dare to come out from the shadows to meet him by doing so?

I love that Nolan has continued to portray the man as much as the myth, and has given Bruce Wayne as much (if not more) screen time as his alter ego, taking great effort to ensure we are constantly reminded that the vigilante is just a man in a mask, as human, mortal, and fallible as the people he fights for and against.  We are given a Batman that is fully realized from Gordon’s perspective, appearing and disappearing at the turn of a head, but we also see the figure half-transformed and uncowled.  It is just as jarring to see the face of Bruce Wayne perched on a narrow window ledge at the top of a tower as it is to see Batman sitting and brooding in the sunlight Wayne penthouse, and it better connects the two figures into one character that blurs and blends together rather than as two opposing personalities that can be switched on and off at will.  Nolan’s Batman continues to be the most complex and fascinating comic-book anti-heroes as yet realized in film, and I feel again in The Dark Knight as I felt in Batman Begins that Nolan is more preoccupied with the story of Bruce Wayne than he is with Batman.  It’s certainly always been the story that’s intrigued me the most, and I’m pleased as paint to find out someone agrees with me.

My only true complaint with Bale’s performance is that I feel he pushed his Batman voice too far in this film, and that it became at times distracting and almost comic, like a man trying too hard.  I like the idea of it, that Wayne is actively distorting his voice to be unrecognizable and more menacing, but it worked in the previous film better than this one, perhaps because there were fewer over all lines of dialogue given to Batman. 

I also think Nolan and Bale missed a key place, where they could have once again broken down the division of the two personas, in the interrogation room when Batman is attempting to get Rachel’s location from the Joker.  I would liked to have heard more Bruce at the point where Batman rages, since the motivation at that point in time are less driven by Batman and more driven by Bruce Wayne’s concern and love for Rachel.

Killing Rachel Dawes (I warned you about spoilers!) and the method of her murder was very carefully thought out by both Nolan and the Joker, the message tied to it unmistakable.  Bruce reveals his major weakness when he dives out his penthouse window to save Rachel, thoughtlessly leaving a roomful of other people at the Joker’s mercy.  His selfish decision to again attempt to save Rachel at the expense of a possible broader good is ultimately what kills her; punishment for choosing his own happiness over the higher morality he’s professed to subscribe to.

Aaron Eckhart’s Harvey Dent is in many ways the more central character, and his journey from light to dark is one of the more deliberate foils in the film (sometimes anviliciously so).  From a man who uses a two-headed coin to consciously control luck to one that cedes every action to the 50/50 chance of a legitimate coin toss, Dent falls without ever becoming truly mad or truly criminal.  He retains an amoral honour of sorts even at his lowest; dealing out death not by whether or not he perceives it is deserved, but where chance determines it so.

Some people have noted in their reviews that this movie has two villains, but I would argue it has two heroes.  Two-Face doesn’t surface long enough to become truly villainous — again, he foils against Batman as the vigilante, taking justice into his own hands and perverting it with a need for vengeance and closure that echoes Bruce’s own journey quite closely.

Yet, though Dent’s heroic rise and tragic fall as Gotham’s White Knight clearly illustrates the Joker’s point that every man can be corrupted, Nolan counterbalances the lesson with another that is played out simultaneously between the two ships, taking care to point out that we are not always as susceptible to corruption as seems obvious. 

Others might argue this point (and feel free to in the comments, I like honest debate) but there is both bravery and cowardice in the actions of the two men highlighted on the ferries.  Blow up one ship and one will be saved, or do nothing and both will be destroyed.  Is it braver to die unsullied, or braver to bloody your hands to save hundreds of lives?  Is it more cowardly to send twice as many people to their deaths to avoid a guilty conscience, or more cowardly to kill half to save yourself and hundreds of others?  Neither solution is an absolute right nor wrong, a point Nolan punctuates effectively by having the convicted felon come off as more idealistically noble than the law-abiding business man, who seems the more selfish and weak-willed; though they come to the same conclusion, their journeys to that decision are very different ones, and it affects the way we see them.

I wonder about which bombs those detonators were really linked to.  The Joker lied about the locations of Harvey Dent and Rachel Dawes, and I wonder whether or not he might have done the same to the people on the ferries, if perhaps they had their own detonators all along and if in choosing their own lives over the others they might have been punished the same way Batman and Dent were.  Neither would have surprised me, and either would have been fitting to the story, I think, which makes it all the more possible that either could have been the case, and suits the unpredictability of the Joker’s character.

In a film that has been constructed to portray every moral shade of gray imaginable except white and black, the most interesting and captivating of those shades is the one that painted this version of the Joker.  All Oscar buzz aside, Heath Ledger performance as the Joker underpinned by Nolan’s deliberate writing and directorial choices for the character combine to make this one of the most memorable villains I’ve seen on screen to date.  Whatever else can be said about Ledger, it is true that he completely disappears into this thing he and Nolan created to the point that I regularly forgot I was watching an actor at all, and had difficulty picking out Ledger’s familiar face even though it was only just barely disguised with a thin layer of makeup.

Elsewhere,

cleolinda

and others have described The Dark Knight’s Joker as less a character or person than a force of nature, and I honestly think they’ve hit the nail on the head there.  He sweeps in fully-formed and then vanishes the same way, having neither won nor lost but having simply been.  Nolan lends to this defining characteristic by having resisted the temptation to give us an origin story for the Joker; he is, in Nolan’s words, an “absolute”.  You can’t call him quite human in the same way that you can’t call him quite mad.  There’s a method there, underneath the green hair and purple suit — a carefully calculating and deliberate Xanatosian intelligence that is motivated by something just beyond what reason and logic allow us mere mortals to understand.  A force of nature, or perhaps a trickster god — a personification of anarchy and chaos — come to Gotham to dissect the darkest level of the human psyche for his own amusement. 

He is, right to the very end of the film, one step ahead of the protagonists and never beaten back or truly captured.  Everything is on his terms, on his time, and according to his grand plan.  He seems at times as innocently wicked as a child stirring up the ant hill, just to see what happens.  He gains nothing, but also loses nothing; in most comic-book action movies, this might play as anti-climactic, and here some people might think it holds true, but for me it couldn’t have gone any other way, because the story was never really about Batman versus the Joker.  It’s telling that the very final confrontation in the film isn’t between them, but rather between Wayne, Dent and Gordon.

Somehow, I feel like the origin story for the Joker is a more organic affair, like perhaps he just came into existence after Batman did, as a natural balancer of some kind, fulfilling the law that every action has an equal and opposite reaction.  I think Nolan very clearly conveys his idea that it was Batman who raised the stakes, and the larger than life villains that will haunt him have come into being because he upped the ante in the first place.  Bruce Wayne dared the corrupt and the darkness, and it answered back, which ultimately leads us to ask whether Batman does more good or bad by being.  Certainly in this story there are grounds to argue the latter, Gordon being the only one spared tragedy.

I felt after watching The Dark Knight less like I’d seen a movie and more like I’d just finished a particularly thought-provoking Faulkner or Ellison novel, and I want to go back and read it again.  Then I want to go and sit with my high school English class or my university comparative literature class and talk about it for hours.  Then I want to write a paper on it.  Then maybe read papers written by other people, and then talk about it some more.  I mean, I’ve written over 2,000 words on it here already, and I haven’t even started to talk about Gordon, Rachel, Alfred or Fox.  I could probably go for another 2,000 on the Joker alone if I set my mind to it.  I liked this movie, not because it was a Batman movie, but because it made me think about things I hadn’t thought of before, and I like that.  A lot.

Crushing All Over Narnia

Wednesday, May 28th, 2008

True to my word, I did see Prince Caspian last night.

Now before I get my ramble on, I thought it might be good to let y’all know that I’ve never actually read this book, or any other book in the Narnia series besides The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, so I can’t compare it to the original source material.  Why haven’t I read it?  No good reason, really… just never got around to it, and I’ll admit that the Narnia universe never quite captured my imagination as a kid to the same extent other things did.

The Spoil-Me-Not version is that I thought it was smashing, and in a lot of ways I liked it even more than The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe.