Movie Madness: the 50 Greatest Opening Sequences Ever

Fantastic!  Be warned, though, that the article contains video of all 50 opening sequences, so it could potentially eat up a couple hours of your life!  I'm glad to see that the opening titles of "Watchmen" made the list.  The movie itself ultimately ended up being ambitious but flawed, but all the same, in my review I did say how awesome the opening sequence was.  Still, the opening sequence of "Iron Man" is awesome too in an entirely different way.

Friday Fun Video: Satire Alert as "South Park" Meets "Watchmen" and "Dark Knight"

The humorists at "South Park" have been busy! See Matt and Trey's recent jab at dark superheroes (plus a political zinger too). The guys are equal-opportunity satirists, and they take potshots at everybody -- which really makes them fair. Enjoy this little video clip:



Oh, and you can see the entire episode online at South Park Studios.

Kitchen Notes: a Movie Maven Bakes a Rorschach Cake

Now this creative mashup of cooking fun and movie madness is just awesome! Via Serious Eats.

Movie Humor: Wolverine, Dr. Manhattan, and Rorschach Bicker

Rorschach and Dr. Manhattan from the current "Watchmen" movie and Wolverine from the upcoming summer flick bicker about their films.  Enjoy, movie fans!  (You'll remember the creator for his hilarious Iron Man videos from last summer.)

Whoa, Canada: Mangling History in Battle Re-enactments, Plus a Rant

Mark Steyn's new column explores how some folks in the Great White North are re-writing history in the name of political correctness. (The Brits, incidentally, weren't much better not too long ago when they re-enacted the Battle of Trafalgar not as the historically accurate England versus France-and-Spain, but as Team Red and Team Blue in order not to offend the modern French and Spanish -- a ludicrous event that Steyn also rehashes. Poor Nelson! He fought and fell heroically in battle not for this blessed plot, this realm, this earth, this England, but for the Red Team! I do love me some Napoleonic-era naval battles, and this just made me crazy.)

The entire idea of altering re-enactments of historical events is not only ridiculous, but perilously stupid: it's the willful repudiation of facts in favor of embracing fantasy. It's all wishful thinking writ large. "Oh, I hate the fact that [insert actual winners here] defeated our ancestors, so when we re-enact the battle, let's make our ancestors win instead because that makes us feel better about ourselves here in 2009!"

Facts are facts. And they are even more under siege on all front by people crying that facts are hurtful or uncomfortable or divisive or whatever. (I almost feel like Rorschach from "Watchmen" -- no compromise when it comes to the truth, no faking reality no matter what the reason, even if it's cloaked in "the greater good," itself a iffy phrase.)

It's time (and past time) to learn to deal with facts, history, and objective reality. Far too many people now are projecting their modern issues onto the past -- and therefore twisting history almost beyond recognition. The study (and responsible teaching) of history has enough difficulties and uncertainties in it without meddlesome people actively trying to mangle it for their own purposes. Trust me on this.

I need a palate cleanser after that Steyn story! How about this: Say what you want about the American South, but when people re-enact Civil War battles, they never change the actual historical outcomes -- even if southerners are re-creating a catastrophic Southern defeat. Ever been to a re-enactment of the Battle of Gettysburg? You absolutely should go sometime. It's amazing. Every year the Confederates fight and lose, just as they did in those 3 days in 1863. History buffs flock out there annually to re-create the defeat that ended Lee's invasion of the North and put the South on the defensive for the rest of the conflict.

I'll tell you something else, too: Civil War history buffs are FANATICAL about accuracy in even the smallest detail. (These are people who memorize the serial numbers of different pieces of 19th-century ordnance.) The mere thought of changing any historical detail, much less the outcome of the battle, would be anathema, even if ultimately that history has winners and losers. (I wonder, though, is it only a matter of time before the PC crowd tries to interfere even here?)

OK, end of rant. Need to go run errands!

Friday Fun: What If Charles Schulz Drew "Watchmen"?

Via Slashfilm comes this hilarious mashup of Charlie Brown and "Watchmen."

I just love the Rorschach Snoopy!

RELATED POST: The "Peanuts" cartoon as Japanese manga!

Film Culture Commentary: "Watchmen" in the Light of History

Now that we've all seen "Watchmen," it's about time to think about some of its themes.  In my recent review I had mentioned its "abysmally nihilist worldview," but I decided I'd save the full content analysis for later.

Well, someone else has saved me the trouble.  Do read:

I would argue that Moore's brand of dystopian misanthropy is wrong-headed and sophomoric and belied by 5,000 years of messy, imperfect, but ultimately glorious human history. But let's leave that aside for the moment: Watchmen's brand of dystopian misanthropy has been specifically refuted by events. It's one thing to worry about the evil U.S. policies of containment and mutually-assured destruction in 1986. It's one thing to paint a particular political party as being unconstitutionally obsessed with the possession of power and recklessly in pursuit of nuclear confrontation with an enemy who probably wasn't so bad.

But as it turns out, that entire worldview was vitiated by events. In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War ended. Reagan's strategic policy decisions vis-a-vis the Soviet Union were completely vindicated. MAD proved to be an effective deterrent. The conflict between the East and West was settled without a shot being fired. And, perhaps most importantly, the Truman/Kennedy/Reagan view of communism as an insidious ideology which led to violent, repressive authoritarianism was borne out.

So Moore was wrong. His fears were wrong. His warnings were wrong. His fundamental view of the world was wrong. And 'Watchmen,' in particular, is left as a bizarre cultural artifact. A pretentious piece of commentary masquerading as philosophy.

Yes.  

Movie Review: "Watchmen"

Blue Man Group:

Left to right: Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Malin Akerman, 

Billy Crudup (and CGI), Matthew Goode, and Patrick Wilson

"Who watches the Watchmen"?  An interesting idea that the movie never really develops, but in terms of the box office, who's watching "Watchmen"?  Plenty of folks, as the flick just raked in almost $56 million on its opening weekend.

Let me preface my review by saying that this movie is NOT for everyone.  Ludicrous violence, explicit sexual situations, foul language, and an abysmally nihilistic worldview underpin this film from beginning to end.   If you're offended by moviemakers and CGI artists taking extreme and excessive liberties with the human body in nearly every sense of the word, then you'd best stay home and watch "The Incredibles."  In a nutshell, if you couldn't handle the sex and violence in 2007's  "300," director Zack Snyder's previous work (which I did like -- a lot, actually), I can almost guarantee you won't like "Watchmen." 

If you can see past the shredded bodies and plentiful blood splatter, though, "Watchmen" is a dense movie that provokes comment and debate.  That in itself is a good thing.  As for the radically mixed reviews (people have called this film everything from unmitigated garbage to transcendent glory), I took that as a good sign that we've got something different and interesting at the cinema.  And boy, is that the understatement of the year.

"Watchmen" is a film that pulls no punches in its unrelentingly fanatical -- no, flat-out obsessive -- effort to tell the story immortalized in the graphic novel that has taunted Hollywood for 20 years,  daring it to make a film version that would (a) do even remote justice to the story, and (b) not result in riots by enraged fanboys.  So did Zack Snyder's "Watchmen" succeed?  Yes and no.  All the hype and expectations weigh this movie down.  I didn't think it lived up to the hype.  In a way, it couldn't possibly do so.  At the same time, it had its good points.  The technical artistry is spectacular.  The acting is desultory and the story's pacing problematic.  In the end, though, "Watchmen" is a flawed (at times deeply flawed) but remarkable achievement.

My preface: yes, I have read the graphic novel, thanks to La Parisienne, so I was familiar with the story and characters.  I did go to the theater trying to be as objective as possible and trying to judge the movie as a movie.

The film kicks off with an instantly arresting action scene and the most stunning confection of opening credits that I've ever seen.  I had wondered how Snyder could effectively give enough context and backstory without bogging down the entire flick, but the opening credits do this with aplomb, carried by Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'."  Think of the excellent use of opening credits-as-condensed backstory in last summer's "The Incredible Hulk," and you get the idea.  I was absolutely floored.  "Watchmen" could not begin with a more auspicious and gloriously promising start; unfortunately this was a promise that the rest of the movie could not quite keep. 

The film runs for nearly 3 hours; at 163 minutes, it sometimes trips and drags.  Paradoxically, sometimes it has a great deal of violence but no real action.  The thing is hampered by its own gigantic scope and even more gigantic ambition.  It does, though, painstakingly re-create the world of the graphic novel, even to the point of consistently copying individual frames of the comic onto the movie screen.  The storyline itself is harder to accommodate.  It's set in a decaying, crime-ridden, pre-Giuliani New York in an alternate history's 1985, where Nixon is still president, nuclear war with the USSR looms, and an act of Congress has banned masked adventurers (an idea that has unfortunately lost its novelty after "X-Men" and "The Incredibles") and forced superheroes into retirement, where they carry on as civilians with varying degrees of success.

The brutal murder of the one of these old heroes, the Comedian, prompts the troubled masked vigilante Rorschach to brood on the possibility that someone is purposefully killing ex-heroes.  He then seeks out those who are left -- Laurie Jupiter (aka the Silk Spectre), Dan Dreiberg (Nite Owl), and Adrian Veidt (Ozymandias), along with Dr. Manhattan, the only person who possesses actual superpowers, thanks to a dreadful laboratory accident that transformed physicist Dr. Jon Osterman into a glowing blue being with near-godlike powers.  As these damaged heroes come out of retirement, their search for the Comedian's murderer culminates in a terrifying discovery.

The plot is convoluted, with each character possessing a backstory and a present-day assortment of emotional baggage, and this is where the movie begins to have problems.  There's simply too much going on for any of it to be developed in any real depth.  The quality of the cast is pivotal, but it is also inconsistent.  I had liked the fact that there were no bona fide Hollywood "stars" in the cast, that the cast consisted of character actors; this prevented any one of them from overshadowing the rest by dint of "star power."  Even so, the individuals chosen for the roles turned in a mixed bag of performances.  

I'll start with the good.  Jackie Earle Haley's Rorschach basically IS the movie.  Hidden behind his ever-shifting, uncanny black-and-white mask, he is a faceless and uncompromising vigilante  who sees the world in absolute terms of right and wrong; unmasked, he is even more chillingly intense.  Whether Rorschach is an Objectivist hero is up for debate, but Haley depicts him with a fierce intensity that is this movie's best attempt to embody one of the source comic's characters.  His disgust for the sordid side of life is almost palpable, and his voiceover narration is eerily exactly like what I thought he should sound like.

The Comedian, whose murder opens the movie, barely qualifies as a "hero."  A violent, sadistic brute who sees life as a cruel and sick joke, a sometime-assassin and near-rapist, he emerges from the graphic novel as a figure that evokes more revulsion than empathy.  In spite of all that, somehow Jeffrey Dean Morgan manages to give the swaggering, stogie-chomping Comedian a soul -- or at least, a glimpse of one -- and a perverse charisma.  (Maybe it's the dimples.)  Morgan has an undeniable presence, and when he's not on screen, his absence is clearly felt.  It is to his credit that he, against the odds really, portrays the Comedian as a human being -- flawed beyond belief, but a human being all the same who in the end grasps some understanding of his own behavior... and his own mortality.  Even a Comedian weeps.

Matthew Goode plays Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias, who now runs a corporate empire, while Billy Crudup plays Dr. Jon Osterman and provides the voice for Osterman's alter ego, Dr. Manhattan.  The blue post-human Dr. Manhattan is arguably the most intriguing figure of all -- he is in many ways beyond humanity now and has begun to lose all connection with it -- though the movie never fully delves into this or his actual nature (or why he's wearing Captain Jack Sparrow's eye makeup).

Patrick Wilson turns in a surprisingly sympathetic performance as the one-time Nite Owl who is living a lonely little life as the bespectacled, rumpled, but well-meaning Dan Dreiberg -- as nerdy and nebbishy a figure as you can imagine, and all too human, down to a certain moment of cringing embarrassment.  In the end, he may be, out of all the costumed adventurers, the one who is the quiet hero.

The weakest member of the cast is, I'm sorry to say, the Swedish-Canadian actress Malin Akerman, whose performance as Laurie Jupiter/Silk Spectre is disappointingly flat.  OK, I appreciate the fact that she's also there in part to swish her hair around and look good in her costume (spiked heels and garters and all), but a pretty face is not enough.  Akerman can't seem to do more than memorize her lines; the idea of actually delivering those lines in character seems to be a foreign concept.  As for emoting as the troubled yet fiery Laurie, well, fuhgeddaboutit.  Still, it could be worse.  As La Parisienne said when she and I were having our big post-movie discussion, however lacking Akerman's performance was, it could have been worse; it could have been Katie Holmes in "Batman Begins"!  I laughed and told the mademoiselle I was going to steal her comment and put it in my review.  So yes, Akerman at least isn't Katie Holmes.

In retrospect, I suppose it's no surprise that the worst scene in the movie has Akerman in it.  Don't read any farther in this paragraph if you don't want more spoilers . . . but the scene is so terrible that I can't help but slam it publicly.  I'm talking about the love scene between Nite Owl and Silk Spectre in the airship.  Somehow, despite showing so much skin and so many contortions that it was practically pornographic, it managed to be simultaneously boring and ridiculous.  Heck, both lovers looked uncomfortably as if they were phoning in their performances, and the soundtrack bursting into "Hallelujah" (I'm not making this up) turned the whole thing into a silly, cheesy farce.  (I couldn't decide whether I should roll my eyes or snort with derision, so I did both.)  As for the flamethrower bit at the end -- oh, please.  It was so wretched I found myself thinking almost nostalgically of the upside-down, half-masked kiss in "Spider-Man."  At least that had a touch of charm and emotional connection in it.

Other low notes included Carla Gugino's applied-with-a-trowel old-lady makeup, Nixon's Cyrano-like nose (a prosthetic even sillier than Nicole Kidman's in "The Hours"), and the casting of Matthew Goode as Adrian Veidt.  He seemed too slight (and too much like an effete rich kid escaped from his prep school), and I simply couldn't take him seriously in his role -- especially when he sashayed on camera with his flippy blond hairdo and a fey purple suit complete with a leafy gold pin in the lapel.  And while the soundtrack was mostly on-target, the use of Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" during one scene made me laugh -- and not in a good way.  

Still, these are small complaints.  My biggest criticisms remain: the bloated length of the flick is symptomatic of a fundamental problem: how to tell the story.  I felt that the flick either should have been shorter or longer.  (Or that it might have been better as an HBO miniseries.)  The narrative is so dense and detailed that the moviemakers found themselves caught between two competing desires: re-creating the visuals of the graphic novel and telling the essentials of the story.  In the end, Snyder and company seem to have fallen between two stools.  The film as it is now does not really consistently connect with the audience on a visceral, emotional level.  Somewhere along the way, amid all the pretty pixels of CGI and all the worshipful frames and all the blood (mistaking violence for profundity?), the ability to grab the audience's soul has disappeared.  Somewhere, the emotional punch to the gut is gone, maybe because we never really develop deep attachments to the characters.  Maybe it was worn away by the sheer length of the flick too. By the time I got to the climax, I felt more battered than anything else.  I was worn out.

I have to say, though, that for all its narrative flaws, "Watchmen" is a work of visual, artistic brilliance.  The flick is packed with arresting, memorable images, some of which are eye-poppingly spectacular.  Rank it right up there with "The Matrix" and "300" for delivering the next level of visual effects.  The CGI creation of Dr. Manhattan is Peter Jackson's Gollum taken to the next generation, and the glowing result is quite stunning (though, as I said before, I started wishing that someone would CGI some pants for the guy).

In the end, though, I was glad I went, and I will almost certainly see it again.  The upshot:  This is a comic hero movie for thinking adults who are not afraid either of graphic violence or difficult ideas and debates.  You don't have to like something or agree with it in order to appreciate it.  Go see this movie with some thoughtful friends and then sit and talk for hours.  Do I recommend this film?  Yes, with reservations -- and a warning that you might be completely lost if you're not a little conversant with the graphic novel.  And in the final analysis?  "Watchmen" is daringly ambitious, but by trying to do too much, in the end it doesn't do quite enough.  Even so, there is no other recent film that comes close to its overwhelming complexity.  If its reach exceeds its grasp, I can't bring myself to fault it for trying.  (Plus, we all can't be "The Dark Knight.")

Mad Minerva gives this film a grade of B.   Maybe later I'll post something on the ideas in the flick, but the hearty B is for the flick itself.  

"Watchmen" runs 163 minutes and is rated R for extreme graphic violence, explicit sexual situations, nudity (real and CGI), and language.

Rotten Tomatoes gives "Watchmen" a "fresh" rating of 65%.

(And writing all this has made me hungry.  I think I'll end with some calamari.)

UPDATE:  Related thoughts here.

Nerd Journal: Going to See "Watchmen"

That does it. I've been trying all morning to work on a paper, and I just can't focus. Footnotes, shmootnotes. I'm going to go see a matinee of "Watchmen."

This naturally makes me "probably a moron and a vapid, indecent human being" according to one Debbie Schlussel. But I think you all already knew that!

I'll be back with a movie review tomorrow maybe.

I'm expecting obscene amounts of violence, kowtowing to fanboys, great CGI, and inevitable comparisons to "The Dark Knight."

Also, a random thought: has Jeffrey Dean Morgan ever been in a role in which he isn't dead? Just askin'.

UPDATE:  Just got back.  First impressions include this thought:  could Dr. Manhattan PLEASE put on some pants?!?!?!?!

Movie Preview: "Watchmen"

This post is for La Parisienne, who wickedly sent me a copy of Watchmen as a deadly distraction from my nerdwork! (No, I'd never read it before. I'm just not really into comic books -- er, I mean, graphic novels.)

Anyway, that evil minx Parisienne is also headed to a midnight showing of the flick tonight. I'm going to try to go tomorrow or Saturday. The Cinema-Mad Sibling, on the other side of the country, will be heading to the movie theater too. We're not crazed "Watchmen fans," but we ARE inveterate pop culture mavens. (Besides, I'm going to scream if I write another footnote for my latest nerd-paper. I need a break!)

Actually, this post is for the Cine-Sib too, since I asked him if he preferred the older or younger Silk Spectre, and he just laughed.

Here's hoping the movie is good! (At least Kyle Smith seems to think so.) Here is the official movie website.

So! For my peeps and for every grad student peon in the world who's been awake and working at all hours of the night, here is a sentiment we can all identify with:

UPDATE: La Parisienne sent her movie review via text message (time-stamped 4 AM): it's a good flick! Yep, she was out at 3 AM . . . though going to the movies isn't (arguably) something stupid.