Superhero Filmmakers: Where's Our Watchmen?

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Ebert's awful taste is a surprise?

Alex in SF, Thursday, 5 March 2009 00:20 (fifteen years ago) link

guess the critic:

Neither political satire nor camp, it fails the unique, fantasy mix of classicism and modernism that distinguished both 300 and Vin Diesel’s The Chronicles of Riddick.

only the beginning of the firestorm (latebloomer), Thursday, 5 March 2009 00:20 (fifteen years ago) link

Rex Reed.

Thrills as Cheap as Gas (Oilyrags), Thursday, 5 March 2009 00:23 (fifteen years ago) link

Armond White

Alex in SF, Thursday, 5 March 2009 00:27 (fifteen years ago) link

you get a cookie

only the beginning of the firestorm (latebloomer), Thursday, 5 March 2009 00:28 (fifteen years ago) link

guess the critic:

oh come on give us a hard one

One of the Most High Profile Comedy Directors of the 90s (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, 5 March 2009 00:43 (fifteen years ago) link

Should I see Chronicles of Riddick?

Alex in SF, Thursday, 5 March 2009 00:47 (fifteen years ago) link

How much do you enjoy stabbing yourself in the nuts?

Thrills as Cheap as Gas (Oilyrags), Thursday, 5 March 2009 00:48 (fifteen years ago) link

don't be Riddick-ulous

only the beginning of the firestorm (latebloomer), Thursday, 5 March 2009 00:48 (fifteen years ago) link

It's low on my list of preferred activities.

Alex in SF, Thursday, 5 March 2009 00:49 (fifteen years ago) link

"Combining elements of Hamlet, Dune and Vin Diesel running in slow-motion; Riddick essentially becomes William Shakespeare's first video game."

Alex in SF, Thursday, 5 March 2009 00:50 (fifteen years ago) link

"Riddick is a loner, Dottie, a rebel. He's a simple man, like Pee-Wee Herman, who is not concerned with getting the girl. But, unlike Pee-Wee, poor Riddick doesn't even have a bicycle for companionship."

Alex in SF, Thursday, 5 March 2009 00:50 (fifteen years ago) link

"A virtuoso exercise in world creation, a plot-heavy epic that's like a breath of fresh air in a time when movie stars and high concepts pass for science-fiction."

Alex in SF, Thursday, 5 March 2009 00:51 (fifteen years ago) link

to bad they never got to make the sequel where Riddick marries a fruit salad

only the beginning of the firestorm (latebloomer), Thursday, 5 March 2009 00:52 (fifteen years ago) link

Lori Huffman http://images.rottentomatoes.com/images/author/photo/10084_icon.gif sez

"...a turbo-charged, sci-fi action flick with Vin Diesel in kick *** anti-hero form ..."

Alex in SF, Thursday, 5 March 2009 00:53 (fifteen years ago) link

I ask because I thought watching "TCoR" was a lot like genital mutilation.

Thrills as Cheap as Gas (Oilyrags), Thursday, 5 March 2009 00:53 (fifteen years ago) link

Well Lori Huffman liked it. And she looks like a woman who knows action.

Alex in SF, Thursday, 5 March 2009 00:54 (fifteen years ago) link

genital mutilation action

One of the Most High Profile Comedy Directors of the 90s (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, 5 March 2009 00:55 (fifteen years ago) link

Also possible.

Alex in SF, Thursday, 5 March 2009 00:55 (fifteen years ago) link

The problem is that Snyder, following Moore, is so insanely aroused by the look of vengeance, and by the stylized application of physical power, that the film ends up twice as fascistic as the forces it wishes to lampoon.

Is this a retardded challop? I get this feeling watching a lot of comic book movies.

Tracer Hand, Thursday, 5 March 2009 02:18 (fifteen years ago) link

I mean "action movies be about fascist viscera" cf Kael is not new shit amirite?

been HOOS, where yyyou steene!? (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Thursday, 5 March 2009 02:26 (fifteen years ago) link

Time Out New York review seemed generous.

gooder dan a mug, lol (forksclovetofu), Thursday, 5 March 2009 03:20 (fifteen years ago) link

Upshot: skip Watchmen, torrent Pitch Black

butt-rock miyagi (rogermexico.), Thursday, 5 March 2009 03:45 (fifteen years ago) link

if only someone had an opinion about fascism and super-heroes

i like to fart and i am crazy (gbx), Thursday, 5 March 2009 04:22 (fifteen years ago) link

that they could share

i like to fart and i am crazy (gbx), Thursday, 5 March 2009 04:22 (fifteen years ago) link

perhaps they could make some point about a Super Man

been HOOS, where yyyou steene!? (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Thursday, 5 March 2009 05:03 (fifteen years ago) link

getting butthurt about anthony lanes review misses the point of anthony lane i think

homie bhabha (max), Thursday, 5 March 2009 13:16 (fifteen years ago) link

ppl do like getting angry abt anthony lane, see also when he reviewed sex + the city

just sayin, Thursday, 5 March 2009 13:19 (fifteen years ago) link

you miss good stuffy british zings like

One lord of the genre is a glowering, hairy Englishman named Alan Moore, the coauthor of “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” and “V for Vendetta.” Both of these have been turned into motion pictures; the first was merely an egregious waste of money, time, and talent, whereas the second was not quite as enjoyable as tripping over barbed wire and falling nose first into a nettle patch.

and

There is Laurie, who goes by the sobriquet of Silk Spectre, as if hoping to become a top-class shampoo; she is played by Malin Akerman, whose line readings suggest that she is slightly defeated by the pressure of pretending to be one person, let alone two.

homie bhabha (max), Thursday, 5 March 2009 13:38 (fifteen years ago) link

Jim Emerson, who really disliked "The Dark Night," loves Watchmen.

Despite superficial affinities (masked marvels, super-hype), "The Dark Knight" and "Watchmen" could not be further apart in style, ambition, or their approach to storytelling. One is set in a photorealistic Gotham City, shot on location in Chicago; the other in a sprawling fantasy universe that encompasses places called "New York," "Antarctica" and "Mars," but that exists only in the imagination. One takes place in a specific window of time; the other in a distorted, alternative 1985 (Richard Nixon is serving his fifth term as President of the United States) that re-invents the past and the future so as to turn the very concept of "time" inside-out. One is a mechanical, plot-driven action movie, edited in a woodchipper; the other is a dystopian science-fiction satire that doesn't so much spin an intricately tangled web of interwoven stories as create an environment in which its various elements are set bouncing off one another in perpetuity. ("Nothing ends...")

. . . So, you may find yourself wondering what the hell is happening during "Watchmen," but that's built into the very nature of the experience -- and it should elicit an appreciative smiley-smile rather than a frustrated frown. You don't feel (as I sometimes did in "TDK") that you're in the hands of a movie that just isn't very competently made. There's no question this picture knows exactly what it's doing and that it respects your ability to put the parts together. You do not, as in "TDK," have to wonder what the hell is going on between shots (why is that over there now?) because the seams are showing.

Some are saying "Watchmen" has been storyboarded within a micrometer of its life, that it's "too reverent" in its attempt to re-create the comics on the screen and therefore feels like it's been "embalmed" (clever Egyptian reference, that). OK, if that's the way you see it. Not me, though. I was, for the most part, entertained and provoked and amused by a work that stimulated my eyes and my mind, not just my reflexes. I think both Marshall Fine and Roger Ebert make excellent points in what they say above. "Watchmen" is conceived and crafted as an immersive experience, not merely a script that has been illustrated-by-cinema almost as an afterthought.

Let me put it this way: There's a shot of a swinging bathroom door in "Watchmen" (one of countless images that is not taken from the comics), that is imbued with a visual wit, a love of movies, that makes you laugh with delight even as you cringe. I watched "Watchmen" with a big smiley face on the front of my head almost all the way through. It's consistently funny, though not necessarily in a guffaw-out-loud way. Think "Dr. Strangelove," subject of humorous references that, like many things you'll recall from the movie, feel like they had to have been in the comics, but aren't.

lolling through my bagel (Pancakes Hackman), Thursday, 5 March 2009 14:10 (fifteen years ago) link

There is Laurie, who goes by the sobriquet of Silk Spectre, as if hoping to become a top-class shampoo; she is played by Malin Akerman, whose line readings suggest that she is slightly defeated by the pressure of pretending to be one person, let alone two.

This seems to be one of the few common links I'm seeing in reviews, that Akerman is absolutely atrocious. Michael Phillips, writing in the Chicago Tribune, calls her "possibly the worst actress in Hollywood at the moment".

Thnks fr th mammries (jon /via/ chi 2.0), Thursday, 5 March 2009 14:23 (fifteen years ago) link

what are chance this is going to do huge opening-weekend numbers and then fall off pretty radically immediately afterward

homie bhabha (max), Thursday, 5 March 2009 14:31 (fifteen years ago) link

high

i like to fart and i am crazy (gbx), Thursday, 5 March 2009 14:32 (fifteen years ago) link

I think thats pretty much a given. Ebert's going to see it again though, says him.

Thnks fr th mammries (jon /via/ chi 2.0), Thursday, 5 March 2009 14:34 (fifteen years ago) link

lol he so fat he fills enough seats to keep the numbers up?

ledge, Thursday, 5 March 2009 14:46 (fifteen years ago) link

I don't know, I was just struck by how odd it was that he spent a paragraph of his review talking about how he was going to see it again.

Thnks fr th mammries (jon /via/ chi 2.0), Thursday, 5 March 2009 14:48 (fifteen years ago) link

I'm prob. gonna see this at the weekend with my gf. I'm expecting very little (I didn't enjoy Dark Knight after it was hyped to fuck) so I may be alright.

NotEnough, Thursday, 5 March 2009 15:07 (fifteen years ago) link

I'd say it does great opening week and then barrels downward, but makes back its money in theatrical release and becomes a serious cashcow in dvd

not like i know what the fuck I'm talking about tho, I suppose

gooder dan a mug, lol (forksclovetofu), Thursday, 5 March 2009 15:10 (fifteen years ago) link

im done being mad at zach snyder and alan moore and have moved on to being mad at the idiots at WB or whoever is making this retarded movie for thinking that blowing a bazillion dollars or an extended fanboy jackoff sesh is a good financial desizsh

homie bhabha (max), Thursday, 5 March 2009 15:19 (fifteen years ago) link

* on an extended fanboy jackoff sesh

homie bhabha (max), Thursday, 5 March 2009 15:19 (fifteen years ago) link

new poll

blowing a bazillion dollars

or

an extended fanboy jackoff sesh

abebe¿abebe (and what), Thursday, 5 March 2009 15:51 (fifteen years ago) link

http://www.slate.com/id/2212884/

Here's a review that doesn't piss me off. The guy actually seems to know what's good about the book, for one thing.

Thrills as Cheap as Gas (Oilyrags), Thursday, 5 March 2009 16:06 (fifteen years ago) link

Hmmm, I'd argue that Watchmen had more of a positive influence on comics than that guy reckons, it's just that it took a decade or more for that influence to properly assert itself on the mainstream.

chap, Thursday, 5 March 2009 16:22 (fifteen years ago) link

I like the Ebert review. He gets the strangeness and the "fearsome beauty" and understands what the book and film are really about: "the dilemma of functioning in a world losing hope."

Slate guy's right, too, but only because Watchmen couldn't really be followed. How many books about impotent, confused, in-the-way superheroes do you need? Re: focusing on ordinary people in a superhero world, there was a great, beautifully painted series in the 90s (I forget its name) which viewed all these major events in the Marvel Universe through the eyes of ordinary New Yorkers sick of their relatives getting crushed by debris knocked loose by the Fantastic Four fighting Galactus or whatever, and their insurance premiums going up, and a general sense that the fate of the world was being decided by well-meaning but arrogant and clumsy beings they had no control over. [Insert satirical zing here]

I can see Watchmen becoming a cult film in the same way as Fight Club - a big, weird, failed blockbuster which attracts some fanatical followers. (Not that it's like Fight Club in any other respect.)

Dorian (Dorianlynskey), Thursday, 5 March 2009 16:57 (fifteen years ago) link

Actually I've misread the argument of that Slate piece - he's calling for comics that only feature real people. But then you've got Ghost World, Fun Home, Persepolis, etc, which do exactly that, so I don't really get his point.

Dorian (Dorianlynskey), Thursday, 5 March 2009 17:08 (fifteen years ago) link

I think he's saying that the key storytelling innovation of Watchmen was it featured regular people alongside the capes (which is debatable but not unreasonable), and that the film has failed to pick up on that. He doesn't really apply his argument to the world of comics on the whole.

chap, Thursday, 5 March 2009 17:16 (fifteen years ago) link

Have you guys all seen this film already?

gooder dan a mug, lol (forksclovetofu), Thursday, 5 March 2009 17:27 (fifteen years ago) link

there was a great, beautifully painted series in the 90s

Busiek. Marvels.

One of the Most High Profile Comedy Directors of the 90s (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, 5 March 2009 17:31 (fifteen years ago) link

wasn't that ross?

i like to fart and i am crazy (gbx), Thursday, 5 March 2009 17:33 (fifteen years ago) link


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